How Mondelez Humanizes AI with Empathy

Mondelez combines AI with human empathy to build authentic customer connections and drive brand loyalty.

Oct 09, 2024

As a global leader in the snack and confectionery industry, Mondelez, maker of brands like Oreo, Cadbury, and Ritz, understands the importance of connecting with customers personally.

But in a digital world dominated by artificial intelligence, the company faces a new challenge: How to use AI to foster genuine emotional connections with consumers.

Let’s explore the role of empathy in AI-driven marketing, the ethical implications, and how Mondelez integrates empathy into its AI marketing strategies to create more meaningful and engaging customer experiences.

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The Role of Empathy in AI-Driven Marketing

Empathetic AI refers to the ability of algorithms to understand and respond to human emotions. This translates to tailoring content and messaging that resonates emotionally with target audiences in marketing. For brands like Mondelez, empathy is crucial to building trust, creating memorable interactions, and fostering brand loyalty.

However, AI risks disconnecting consumers without a careful approach. Lacking empathy can lead to missteps like inappropriate content recommendations or generic messaging that fails to address consumer needs and emotions.

“The key is to move beyond the numbers and truly cultivate an ‘empathy culture’ …This isn’t just about understanding your consumers, it’s about building a deep connection with your audiences.” ~ “The Empathy Revolution,” Human8

Empathy and AI Marketing Ethics

The relationship between empathy and ethics in AI marketing becomes evident when considering consumer trust.

Empathy without ethics could lead to manipulative practices using insights into consumer emotions to drive actions that benefit the brand at the expense of the consumer. For example, exploiting emotional vulnerabilities to increase sales crosses an ethical line.
Ethical AI without empathy might result in compliant but impersonal interactions, failing to engage customers meaningfully. Mondelez has focused on incorporating empathetic elements into its AI models to avoid these pitfalls, ensuring that its marketing efforts do not feel automated or impersonal.

When implemented ethically, empathetic AI allows marketers to deliver personalized and relevant content that enhances consumer relationships while ensuring that these practices are fair, transparent, and non-intrusive.

Mondelez's Approach to Humanizing AI

Mondelez has taken several strategic steps to infuse empathy into its AI marketing. By forming partnerships with organizations like Accenture and Publicis, Mondelez leverages cutting-edge technologies that help its AI understand and respond to the nuances of human emotions. This approach involves analyzing consumer data beyond demographics to understand emotional responses, preferences, and cultural contexts.

“Partnering with Accenture and Publicis Groupe, our new platform embraces responsible use of gen AI to create highly personalized, empathetic consumer experiences,” said Dirk Van de Put, chairman and chief executive officer of Mondelez, in a LinkedIn post on the AI marketing collaboration.

Mondelez has also emphasized the importance of empathetic data collection. The company uses advanced AI tools and human expertise to identify emotional signals that can help create more engaging and emotionally resonant content. This compassionate approach ensures that each campaign is finely tuned to consumer preferences and cultural sensitivities.

Through these collaborations and tools, Mondelez aims to create AI-driven campaigns that reflect consumers’ experiences and values. Using AI to interpret data meaningfully, the brand ensures that each interaction feels personalized, emotionally relevant, and culturally sensitive.

Practical Examples of Empathetic AI in Action

Mondelez’s recent campaigns highlight how empathetic AI can enhance consumer experiences. According to the Generative AI Gazette, Mondelez used AI-driven insights to understand how different communities celebrate shared moments, such as holidays or family gatherings.

Keep Stories Alive

In one example, Mondelez spearheaded the Keep Stories Alive campaign, which aimed to connect the past with the future.
Leveraging the Kinh Do mooncakes — a brand synonymous with the “Trung Thu” festival in Vietnam, sought to revive and celebrate cherished family memories. By doing so, it engaged users in a deep narrative that intertwined personal stories with traditional Vietnamese culture during a significant festive period.
Central to the campaign’s success was the innovative use of deep learning artificial intelligence, provided by D-ID, a tech firm based in the UK and Israel.
The Kinh Do Trung Thu platform invited users to upload photos of their ancestors, which were then animated, fostering a unique and interactive celebration of the mid-autumn festival.
The technology brought old family photographs to life, enabling ancestors to smile, blink, and turn their heads. Such animations created a bridge to the past, allowing users to interact with their heritage in a profoundly emotional way.

Another example is Mondelez’s use of AI to personalize messaging at scale. The AI system analyzes real-time consumer data—such as mood indicators from social media or feedback on product experiences—and adapts the brand's messages to reflect that emotional context.

This approach ensures that Mondelez communicates with customers in a way that acknowledges their current emotions, making interactions more meaningful and impactful.

Challenges and Ethical Considerations

While Mondelez has made significant strides in creating empathetic AI, the journey is not without challenges. Integrating empathy into AI presents ethical dilemmas concerning privacy and emotional manipulation. Mondelez recognizes the delicate balance between using data to deliver a personalized experience and respecting consumer privacy.

To address these challenges, Mondelez adheres to responsible AI practices by maintaining transparency in data collection and using data only in ways that align with consumer expectations. This ethical approach ensures that their AI remains a tool for positive engagement rather than a means of exploiting consumer emotions.

The company also understands that empathetic AI must be inclusive. To that end, Mondelez actively works to minimize biases in its algorithms by ensuring that its training data reflects a wide array of cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. This allows the AI to interact with diverse audiences sensitively and appropriately.

Insights for Marketing Professionals

Mondelez’s empathetic AI journey offers valuable lessons for marketing professionals looking to humanize their digital strategies. Here are a few key takeaways:

Leverage Diverse Data Sources. Empathy requires a deep understanding of cultural and emotional contexts. Use diverse data sources to train AI models and ensure they capture the full spectrum of human experiences.
Human Oversight Is Key. You cannot fully automate empathy. Ensure that a human is in the loop in your AI-driven marketing processes to verify that the AI’s outputs align with your brand values.
Focus on Emotional Relevance. Use AI to identify your audience's emotional needs. Marketing messages should not just inform; they should connect emotionally, reflecting consumers' experiences and feelings.

Takeaway

Mondelez’s integration of empathy into AI-driven marketing strategies illustrates the power of combining technological innovation with human understanding. By leveraging empathetic AI, Mondelez has successfully created campaigns that resonate with consumers on a deeper level, enhancing brand loyalty and marketing effectiveness.

As AI becomes an increasingly integral part of marketing, the ability to make these technologies feel human will set brands apart. Mondelez’s approach inspires other marketers: AI may be a tool, but empathy is what makes it powerful.

What do you think about using AI to foster empathy in marketing? We’d love to hear from you.