The Application of Artificial Intelligence to Automate Sensory Assessments Combining Pretrained Transformers with Word Embedding Based on the Online Sensory Marketing Index

Abstract

We present how artificial intelligence (AI)-based technologies create new opportunities to capture and assess sensory marketing elements. Based on the Online Sensory Marketing Index (OSMI), a sensory assessment framework designed to evaluate e-commerce websites manually, the goal is to offer an alternative procedure to assess sensory elements such as text and images automatically. This approach aims to provide marketing managers with valuable insights and potential for sensory marketing improvements. To accomplish the task, we initially reviewed 469 related peer-reviewed scientific publications. In this process, manual reading is complemented by a validated AI methodology. We identify relevant topics and check if they exhibit a comprehensible distribution over the last years. We recognize and discuss similar approaches from machine learning and the big data environment. We apply state-of-the-art methods from the natural language processing domain for the principal analysis, such as word embedding techniques GloVe and Word2Vec, and leverage transformers such as BERT. To validate the performance of our newly developed AI approach, we compare results with manually collected parameters from previous studies and observe similar findings in both procedures. Our results reveal a functional and scalable AI approach for determining the OSMI for industries, companies, or even individual (sub-) websites. In addition, the new AI selection and assessment procedures are extremely fast, with only a small loss in performance compared to a manual evaluation. It resembles an efficient way to evaluate sensory marketing efforts.