Introduction to Marketing: Social Robots - Pros, Cons, and Impact

This report delves into the application of social robots in marketing, evaluating their advantages and disadvantages. It explores how social robots enhance customer engagement by providing personalized interactions and collecting valuable feedback. The report highlights cost savings, efficiency gains, and the ability to gather real-time customer data as key benefits. However, it also acknowledges potential drawbacks, such as customer discomfort with robotic interactions and the limitations of AI in creative decision-making. The report also discusses the importance of human oversight in marketing strategies. The analysis covers the integration of social robots in various sectors, including retail, healthcare, and education, as well as their role in data collection and personalized marketing. The report concludes by emphasizing the need for a balanced approach that leverages the strengths of both social robots and human expertise to foster strong customer relationships.

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Introduction to Marketing

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Social robot uses in marketing efforts: Pros and Cons
It is true that maintaining the good relationship with customers has become quite
essential in today’s time in order to sustain in the competitive advantage of the firm. It is also
one reason various big organization are successful by maintain good relations with the
customers. By making strategies for customer satisfaction, customer also feels that
organization is worried about them and want to give them best. Therefore, market share of
organizations increases automatically and it starts attracting more customers toward the
brand.
In recent time, digitalization has taken its wings in the organization successful. It is
also changing the method or way of companies for interacting with the customers. Therefore,
proper use of marketing and technology by considering the strategic marketing mix tends to
help the organization in its growth and customer engagement. Social Robot is also one
technology that is used in recent times by the firm. These social robots are becoming popular
because it also helps in gaining the feedback from customers by taking their responses. IN
this way, it not only used for development of the customer engagement.
Liu, Glas, Kanda & Ishiguro, (2018) has also described the social robot as
autonomous robot that helps in communicating as well as interacting with the physical agents
as well as human. It tends to done interacting by following the rules and social behaviour that
are attached to its role. In this way, a social robot is based on the cognitive computing model
that helps the organizations in stimulating the human processes. It can also be said as the
artificial intelligence system like android that tends to make the interaction with human
beings as well as with the other robots. There are several reasons behind the increasing use of
social robot in organization. The one significant behind using social robot is helps in
interacting with human that are the essential part of any organization (Khaksar, Khosla, Chu
& Shahmehr, 2016).
It is also found that marketers can also make use of social robots in several ways for
serving, attracting as well as satisfying the huge number of customers. Taking into
consideration the retail operations, robot can find out and recognise the customers as well as
address the people by helping them in connecting with the best associates who are available
in the concerned store. In addition to this, social robots are increasingly being sued in the

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health & social work, information & communication, education, health care, food services,
accommodation services, and art field. It can also be sued in the companies to survey the
feedback, reviews, and suggestions of the customers. As a result, it helps the marketer in
gaining the better understanding of the perception of customers. The biggest advantage of
social robot is that marketer can easily come to know the recent event that happened in the
real time. According to this, it is also feasible to bring the possible changes as per the
problem (Pino, Boulay, Jouen & Rigaud, 2015).
Social robots are also having the capacity to enhance the experience of customer and
assist the all sectors whether it is health or education sector. A social robot also tends to
provide the one on one physical interaction with the customers. Besides this, it can also map
the new environment that can discover the faces and objects. It is true that engagement of
customer is directly linked with the perception about the product or brand. Most of the time,
perception is also influenced by the several entertainment strategies as robot is the most
effective companion in playing the games. Using this, marketer can also collect the
information regarding the perception when they play the game. Besides his, it also helps in
enhancing the experience as well as raising the sales. Therefore, social robot is of great help
(Doering, Glas & Ishiguro, 2019).
Social robot has several pros as well as cons as the marketing tool. The biggest
advantage is that it leads to the cost savings. As per the report of business insider, it is
estimated that around 85% of the customer interaction will tend to happen without taking the
assistance of human. Besides this, it also helps the computers to effectively and accurately
identifying that which segment will likely to demand by the customers (Charalampous,
Kostavelis & Gasteratos, 2017). Programs can also help in providing the special information
regarding what leads are likely to convert and allow the marketer to target their efforts even
without wasting the time on the less probable leads. Besides these advantages, it also assist in
tracking the customer data with the product. For example- Under Armour has currently used
the IBM’s Watson in order to syndicate the personal customer data with the third party. It is
done for creating the personalized fitness and health-tracking app that is known as “Record.”
It is also seen that customer do not always like the chatbots. Sometimes, people do not
like that there is no human on the other end. This sometimes makes the people uncomfortable
about these things. For instance, if a person has dialled the 8000 number of customer service
and pressed only 1, 2, 3, or 4 just to speak to robot, it can know how frustrating this can be.

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There are various scenarios where technologies have eliminated most of the human jobs and
robots have took over the whole world. However, human always be essential when it comes
to any of the marketing job. It is true that computers cannot make the innovative decisions,
change their mind-sets or use their imagination. Therefore, cultural references as well as
creativity will always lack when company will only use the social robot for creating the
content. Social robot therefore can offer the certain efficiencies and creative solutions but
human will always be required in the world of marketing. It will be hard to accept that how
computers can be wrong. Formulaically and mathematically, computers can be right but
human are even more comprised of the statistics and formulas. Human beings have more
taste or preferences regarding the formulas. In this regard, Elon Musk, an entrepreneur has
also suggested this social robots should be regulated due to the several threats (Deublein,
Pfeifer, Merbach, Bruckner, Mengelkamp & Lugrin, 2018).
As customer engagement has become the essential part in today’s business world, it is
the time for social robot in order to serve as the tool for human augmentation rather than
seeing it as the automated replacement. Social robots therefore have the capability to make
the customer engagement and human connection that is the key to make strong connection on
personal level. Employees on several organizations are also becoming innovative and creative
by taking the support of social robot. Social robot is capable of the administrative as well as
organizational tasks. They effectively help in interacting with the employees in order to make
the workplace conductive. Using this, it also becomes easy for the employees in interacting.
In this way, it also helps in increasing the flexibility of the last message that required to be
conveyed to the customer related with marketing of products. Social robots also tend to
increase the efficiency in stores. Due to emerging changes and trends, consumer also not
expect the traditional marketing approach in advertising rather than it, they prefer to interact
and participate with all such brands for which they want to make the decision (Patrizio,
2016). Due to such benefits only, most of the organization is working toward interacting with
the various creative approaches for customer interacting by using robotic technologies. This
leads to keep the engagement of customer with brand easily. Insecurity and fear among the
current employees also tends to resist toward these supporting such robots for engaging the
customers.
In the limelight of above discussion, it can be concluded that social robots helps in
great way for interacting with the customers. However, the effective and interacting
marketing requires to put emphasis on the consume in just one talk. Besides this, it is also

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found that recent firms of the human interaction technology are not developed and many of
the social robots re trying to discover the more effective ways of managing the conversation
(Stock & Merkle, 2017). It is also possible for the marketer to get the several advantages
from the automation. For this, robots play an essential role in interacting as well as enhancing
the interaction with the customers. Besides this, the future adoption of such social robots also
highly depends on the how organizations are effectively able to such platform. At last, it can
said that interaction with customer is about meeting or connecting with them at the personal
level. In recent time, social robots are more able to make the human connection (Wood,
2017).

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References
Charalampous, K., Kostavelis, I., & Gasteratos, A. (2017). Recent trends in social aware
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Deublein, A., Pfeifer, A., Merbach, K., Bruckner, K., Mengelkamp, C., & Lugrin, B. (2018).
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Education, 125, 182-190.
Doering, M., Glas, D. F., & Ishiguro, H. (2019). Modeling Interaction Structure for Robot
Imitation Learning of Human Social Behavior. IEEE Transactions on Human-
Machine Systems.
Khaksar, S. M. S., Khosla, R., Chu, M. T., & Shahmehr, F. S. (2016). Service innovation
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interactive social robots. Autonomous Robots, 1-19.
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https://www.datamation.com/applications/pros-and-cons-of-artificial-
intelligence.html
Pino, M., Boulay, M., Jouen, F., & Rigaud, A. S. (2015). “Are we ready for robots that care
for us?” Attitudes and opinions of older adults toward socially assistive
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Robotics, 10(5), 643-668.

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Wood, C. (2017). Barriers to Innovation Diffusion for Social Robotics Start-ups And
Methods of Crossing the Chasm.