 Awesome photo by Grok—an instance where AI, and good prompts, rock. This is a true story. As usual, we’ll blur the details for privacy, but you’ll get the important take-aways for your business.
We were on a Zoom call recently with a client, brainstorming ideas for updating their tagline. The tagline was basically a message to prospects, saying, “Use this service, and you’ll be better at doing XYZ.” During the call, the client asked, “Hey, why don’t we use the word ‘turbocharge’?” “Sure. Try it.” And so: “Use this service to turbocharge your ability to XYZ.” Hmmm. Here’s the thing. This service has nothing to do with turbocharging. It’s a B2B play, not an automotive one. In the land of taglines, where you typically only have less than a dozen words to get your point across, you can’t be off one bit. And now comes the lesson of this article. Ready? At this point, our instinct was to start brainstorming other ways to update this tagline. Starting with the customers’ needs, and layering in what this company really specialized at, and how they did it. That should seem straightforward to you, especially if you’ve ever read any of our other articles here at Copel Communications. But remember: We were on a Zoom call with the client at the time. And so that client said, “Let’s ask ChatGPT.” And they brought up a screen-share, and plugged the “turbocharge” tagline into it, asking ChatGPT for other versions. (If you see where this story is going already, give yourself some extra points.) And so ChatGPT dutifully delivered. It spat out a bunch of other options, all with variations on the word “turbocharge.” Things like “energize.” “Electrify.” “Invigorate.” “Supercharge.” Et cetera, et cetera. Guess what? None of these was any better than the original version. Of course you know why. Although it wasn’t immediately apparent to our client during the call. It was a classic case of GIGO: the old software programmers’ acronym for “garbage in, garbage out.” ChatGPT assumed that “turbocharge” was a perfectly good prompt, so it ran with it. Client: “Let’s try ‘amplify.’” They did. And ChatGPT spat out more of the same. Having waited patiently during this exercise, we then asked the client specifically what we’d mentioned, in this article, just a few paragraphs ago: Why don’t we take a different tack? Why don’t we start with the target customers’ needs, and layer in what your company specializes at, and how it does it? Guess what? And, no—it’s not a case of “Ta-dah! We got something brilliant, instantly.” The “Guess what?” answer is this then took a lot of work. ChatGPT is easy. But in cases like this, it’s just a GIGO vacuum. At least our client could see that it wasn’t delivering useful output. And so we worked on answering those questions above, because we both knew the answers. At that point, it was a matter of narrowing it down to just a few bullet points and words, and assembling them into a tagline-like sequence that would have a strong cadence and impact. It went something like this: Master the art—and science—of performing XYZ to achieve ABC benefit. Look! “Mastery”! And the subtle art-like touch that comes with this company’s services… not to mention the grounded-in-science methodology. Plus specific business benefits that the company delivers to its clients! Honestly. Do you think that ChatGPT would have figured out any of that on its own? Of course it couldn’t. That’s not fair to ChatGPT. Now you can (in fact, we did) feed “Master the art—and science—of performing XYZ to achieve ABC benefit” into ChatGPT and let it try and polish that. But again, it just didn’t come through as well as good old-fashioned elbow grease. Don’t get us wrong. ChatGPT is a cool tool, and it can be quite useful. But you need to apply it appropriately, and recognize its limitations. It’s like that old adage that if you’re a hammer, you tend to perceive everything in your world as a nail. Need help with a creative challenge that AI can’t handle? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.
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