South Korean retailers are increasingly leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to facilitate efficient marketing and customer engagement, moving beyond their conventional use for simple review management or product filtering. AI technologies are employed to create original content for regular sales promotions and to analyze customer preferences through tracking individual customers‘ time spent on specific product pages.

According to industry sources on Sunday, Hyundai Department Store Co.’s in-house AI copywriting system has been generating an average of 400 titles and text bodies per day since its launch in March.

The department store developed the AI copywriter program specifically for marketing purposes. The phrases created by its AI copywriter are being used at its branches nationwide for both online and offline marketing.

In June, dashboard functionality was introduced to this AI copywriting program, which has proven to be effective. The dashboard feature allows searches for specific periods, such as seasons or occasions, and provides a list of marketing phrases generated by the AI copywriter.

For instance, if the period is set as “August 10-17 2023,” keywords like “autumn,” “hiking,” “fall foliage,” and “outing” emerge as trending keywords for the upcoming autumn season, along with marketing phrases created by the AI copywriter, offering suggestions.

The department store’s AI copywriter uses Naver Corp.‘s AI language model, HyperCLOVA X, as its core engine. HyperCLOVA X predicts the next word based on probabilities to complete sentences.

Over the past three years, Hyundai Department Store has focused on training its AI copywriter with data, including advertisements, promotional events, and other texts that have previously received positive customer responses. The department store states that it has reduced the task time to three to four hours from the usual two weeks.

Lotte Duty Free under Lotte Group is also using AI technologies for personalized marketing through its marketing automation solution (MAS).

Previously, Lotte Duty Free informed customers about events based on basic customer information, such as membership levels and departure schedules.

However, with the MAS, the company can now comprehensively analyze detailed customer data, including customers’ product preferences and time spent on specific pages, as well as event response rates.

E-commerce platform Gmarket Inc. also introduced AI this year to construct mobile homepages based on customers‘ recent behavioral patterns.

By Hong Sung-yong and Chang Iou-chung

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