July - 2023MARTECHOUTLOOK.COM8IN MY OPI N IONCustomers are eagerly awaiting new advances in marketing technology that will streamline their encounters with companies by allowing them to interact with automated representatives instead of flesh-and-blood salespeople. Or are they? Recently a hitchhiking robot was beheaded in my city of Philadelphia (I'm so proud!), while a security bot in San Francisco was covered in a tarp and smeared with barbecue sauce. Clearly, we're seeing a lot of ambivalence about the rise of the machines. On the one hand, we enjoy TV shows and movies like Blade Runner, Westworld, and Humans that focus on the civil rights of synths, replicants and androids. And Alexa and Siri are our new guardian angels. Worldwide sales of consumer robots passed $5 billion in 2018, according to a new forecast. More than 74 million consumer robots are expected to be shipped in 2024. In Japan, SoftBank already sells Pepper, a full-scale humanoid home assistant.On the other hand, lots of people just don't like to deal with machines. First and foremost is the widespread anxiety about losing jobs to automated truck drivers, cashiers, or perhaps even CMOs. And, we know that even relatively simple technology (at least in retrospect) like ATMs is a challenge for some customers to accept. Over time, consumers (most anyway) will accept tech innovations so long as they believe they provide incremental value. We clearly saw this during the COVID lockdown. A lot of shoppers who used to be leery of automated retail processes changed their tune as they searched for ways to avoid the human contact they had so recently cherished. There's little doubt that the use of MarTech will continue to mushroom. Already, more than half of companies report that they use it, and we're just seeing the calm before the storm. You're either on the train or under it. But does that enthusiasm in the C-suite means that customers will happily adopt these innovations? Can marketers anticipate the objections they will surely encounter from consumers who are creeped out when they're forced to interact with non-humans? By Michael R. Solomon, Ph.D., Professor of Marketing & Director of the Center for Consumer Research, Saint Joseph's University "I'M ONLY HUMAN ­ OR AT LEAST HUMANOID." WILL CONSUMERS ACCEPT DIGITAL OR METALLIC SALESPEOPLE? As shoppers increasingly interact with machines instead of people, there are huge ramifications for the way we think about sales interactions (in stores, call centers, etc.) and communications strategies. Consumers (Luddites aside) at least so far seem eager to embrace these smart agents. One survey reported that about half of the women it sampled want to use them when they shop for beauty products. Is it just the novelty factor that's driving this? Perhaps, although many of us enthusiastically follow automated recommendations from Amazon and other vendors long after the newness has worn off.Of course, it's still early days, and we need to learn a lot more about the factors that will attract or dissuade customers from seeking a machine's advice ­ and actually following it. Certainly, there are consumer variables such as gender, social class/education, and experience with a product category that will make some of us more likely than others to embrace robotic decision making. There are many important questions that marketers need to address before they fall all over one another in the race to deploy robots or other forms of sophisticated MarTech that will replace human service providers and salespeople. For one, we need to question our assumptions Michael R. Solomon
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