Bringing empathy through metaphor

Amongst all the bubble and squeak about AI, a lot has been claimed about what AI cannot do as well as what it can. Most discussion is more or less overtly drawing a direct comparison with human intelligence, with human and machine lined up as imaginary adversaries. Since we started over six years ago, our focus at discover.ai has always been and still is on what our beady-eyed and bendy-brained strategists can do when working hand in hand with our proprietary AI-powered platform, enabling us to navigate vast universes of content from online conversations to discover revelatory and yet at the same time recognizable and relatable human insights with the power to bring the empathy to connect brands more closely to their consumers.

Sophie Wright from discover.ai and Grietje de Wit from Nestlé Coffee Innovation will share an example of work done together. We explored the language people spontaneously use to describe their coffee experiences. Everyday expressions can reveal subconscious meaning, pointing to the powerful roles that brands and products can play in consumers’ everyday lives. While our work began with U&A-style data defining a range of coffee usage scenarios, this project took us to a range of resonant and revealing metaphors for coffee that became powerful insights to drive idea and concept development for the Nestlé team.

Key takeaways:

1. How you can use AI capability to enrich and humanize data rapidly and cost effectively.
2. How natural language and expressions (for example, metaphor) used in spontaneous conversation can reveal telling truths about how people rely on everyday brands and products.
3. How you can access these truths and insights by gathering spontaneous conversation from online conversations and social media chat in a curated way.