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 embracerobotic 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 MarTechthat will replace human service providers and salespeople. For one, we need to question our assumptions about what makes an attractive robot (if there is such a thing). How does the physical appearance of a robot or avatar sales advisor affect the likelihood that customers will trust and follow its recommendations about what to buy?As some companies scramble to create “lifelike” robots to interface with customers, they should bear in mind the “uncanny valley” phenomenon; the closer an artificial face comes to looking human, the more people like it – but this affection turns to revulsion when it is almost indistinguishable from a human’s.

We know that the characteristics of a communications source are a huge determinant of whether or not the receiver accepts the message. Two essential attributes that drive persuasion are a communicator’s perceived warmth and competence.There’s no question (based on over fifty years of solid research on the subject) that the exact same message delivered by two different sources can and will be interpreted quite differently. That’s why marketers spend millions on celebrity endorsers, and why successful fashion models command huge sums.Why do we think these factors won’t matter if the communicator is made of metal or silicon instead of flesh-and-blood?

There are many factors to consider before a company deputizes a robot to represent it.A basic but profoundly important one for example is the robot’s gender – and the customer’s gender as well.One study reported that women responded equally to requests from male or female robots, but men are much more responsive to a mechanical female (hold the snide comments please.)

And this is just the tip of the marketing iceberg.We know from decades of research on interpersonal persuasion that factors such as gesturing, voice and even height exert a profound impact on consumers’ willingness to change their minds.My own research shows that under different conditions customers prefer to interact with various kinds of characters – and sometimes they actually prefer an artificial character to a human!Indeed, already we know of a few recorded cases where humans have actually married robots (yes, you read that correctly)

There are several dimensions to consider when you design a MarTech interface, including:

• The realism of the character (see the uncanny valley)

• Whether the provider should take human form or that of an anthropomorphized animal or fantasy character

• The amount of movement and gestures the character makes

• The extent to which the character’s appearance is similar to the customer’s

• Whether the character’s voice inflections should match the emotional content of the customer’s

The moral:Sure, embrace the tsunami of automation that’s about to engulf us.But don’t do so without a life raft:Be as careful and rigorous about designing robot and avatar interfaces as traditional advertisers are when they select spokespeople.

Not all robots are created equal.