ChatGPT has marketers worried about their jobs. Should it? Yes indeed, but not for the reasons they think. Let's explore the existential question, "will ChatGPT take over my job?"
Will ChatGPT Take Over My Marketing Job? Yes. Or - No.
Today, I pretended I was a product marketing manager for Del Monte canned green beans. I asked ChatGPT to write some marketing copy for me and got the result below:
Green Beans Packed in Syrup?
I saw one factual and one grammatical error in the ChatGPT copy. Not bad! I'll probably make more than that in this blog. But, if you were to cut-and-paste this copy without reading it you'd make a pretty silly mistake, in print, about your own product: ChatGPT talks about the green beans being "packed in water, never syrup." Yuck, in more ways than one.
ChatGPT: the Lowest Bar for Marketing Competence
Long before ChatGPT, marketers who were focused on quantity and not quality were cutting corners to save time, often with the same embarrassing results as the aforementioned syrup-beans. I once had a client who admitted they'd copied their website text from a competitor's site. They didn't need to tell me - their automated search-and-replace efforts hadn't caught all the occurrences of the competitor's company and product names. As a result, they were literally marketing their competitor's product on their website. Not a good look.
"ChatGPT will write correct, comprehensive marketing copy, but that's the lowest bar for communication."
My prediction is that ChatGPT will rapidly “learn” its way out of such errors: grammatical first, factual second. It will write grammatically correct, largely factual and comprehensive marketing copy very, very soon. But that's the very lowest bar for any communication, and I'm glad to see all the tools, including ChatGPT, emerging to help us with it.
If all you do is create gray-space copy, ChatGPT WILL take your job.
If this is all you're doing today, ChatGPT will take your job. That's because you're not really talking to anyone in the market anyway. You're just creating gray-space copy - text to fill a spot on a page. ChatGPT can do that. Generating gray copy isn't the value you bring to a marketing role, and your value isn't something ChatGPT can replace.
What is the value you bring that ChatGPT doesn't? More on that next time...
About the Author
Diane Pierson is the Founder and Principal Market Strategist of Innovate on Purpose, a consultancy enabling successful product innovation for tech companies through strategic focus and powerful go-to-market strategies. Diane is also a visiting instructor at Pragmatic Institute. Contact Diane at dpierson@innovateonpurpose.com.
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