Trending
Is everything you read starting to sound the same?
Similar language, tone and positioning appear across websites, product descriptions, sales materials, thought leadership and marketing campaigns. As more and more companies use AI tools to create content, they are tending to draw from the same source material and language patterns. So now there’s a growing amount of content that feels oddly familiar and uniform every time you look at it.
As Stanford recently reported, “Today’s large language models are trained on the aggregate writing of millions of authors. But that also means that LLMs like ChatGPT converge on a narrow, agreeable, mildly positive voice that flattens the variation between one human writer and another. Users experience this as homogeneous output — ‘language from nobody.’”
Say your financial brand is launching a new credit card, investment platform, retirement solution, payments product or banking service. Similar claims and category language developed by generative AI can make competing offerings appear just alike. And you need to be sure your positioning and messaging are creating meaningful differentiation and are actually captivating your audience rather than causing them to feel deja vu — or nothing at all.
Market research can help evaluate how to make your offering pop. While AI can be a useful generation tool to generate potential positioning statements, messages and even names, the research to test these can help create the differentiation that is going to resonate with your target market.
Position statement testing: Is your positioning actually different?
AI can generate multiple positioning approaches with the right prompts. But if you’re relying on AI-generated language to create a final positioning statement for your financial brand or product, it can become difficult to determine whether that statement is creating differentiation (it probably isn’t) or reinforcing the same themes as competing offerings (it likely is). Position statement testing helps identify where language overlap exists, which aspects of the statement are most closely associated with your offering and how prospective customers respond to different positioning approaches. Those findings can be incorporated before positioning is rolled out across your website, sales materials and launch campaigns.
Message testing: Which messages are cutting through?
AI can generate an endless number of headlines, messages and proof points. That doesn’t mean that content is communicating what you think it is, especially when people have the feeling they’ve seen the same thing before. It is good to use message testing research to help you identify which messages truly resonate and which messages are getting lost, and which ideas people associate most closely with your financial product.
Testing can also uncover gaps between what internal teams believe is differentiated messaging and what prospective customers are actually going to notice and remember. The findings from these studies can be incorporated before messaging is rolled out so that you can stand out in the crowd.
Naming research: Does your name stand apart?
It only takes a few seconds for AI to spit out hundreds of potential names based on specific prompts, categories and brand characteristics. But it is challenging to determine whether those names are actually distinctive or simply variations of what already exists in the category. Naming research helps evaluate which names people remember, which ones communicate the right associations and which ones may create confusion with competing products or services.
This can be particularly important in financial services, where many products rely on similar language around growth, rewards, security, flexibility or innovation. A name that feels fresh internally may sound familiar to prospective customers who are already seeing similar terminology out in the market.
Naming research can provide the input needed to make sure the chosen name supports the positioning and messaging you are trying to communicate.
How differentiation supports GEO and AEO
Another thing to remember when you are building content, is that AI-powered search is becoming a larger part of how people evaluate products, services and providers and differentiation matters. The positioning, messaging and naming choices you make can influence how your financial company and offerings show up in generative search results.
Position statement testing, message testing and naming research can all be used to be sure you are communicating distinctions that customers recognize and remember. Those same distinctions can also support GEO and AEO efforts by giving AI systems clearer signals about what makes your offering different.
Related: Want More Media Coverage, Clients, and Credibility? Start With Thought Leadership Research