Alisa Miller and Rick Byrne, Founders of Pluralytics, Discuss AI and Your Brand Voice

Alisa Miller and Rick Byrne drew on their careers as public media executives when they designed Pluralytics to connect with people in their own language, including people with different worldviews and connect with them. The platform links brands to the audience they’re trying to attract while helping those companies develop their own “brand voice.”

Pluralytics uses artificial intelligence to identify specific words and phrases widely used by the precise audience they brand is trying to connect with. The use of language and behavioral science has wide ranging potential especially now that consumers are looking to connect with brands that align with their social and political views.

Pluralytics, which is compatible with email and social media sites, has the potential to bring people together. We asked the founders to explain how the platform operates, and what it can achieve for the brands that use it.

Grit Daily: Please give us 5-10 sentences about what makes Pluralytic’s value proposition like none other in the space.

Pluralytics: Pluralytics ValuesFinder platform was created for enterprise-level marketers and communicators, who deeply understand their target audiences and have significant expertise in creating messaging that connects. Our users are great writers in marketing and HR communications, and our system helps them become even better communicators by understanding how language is likely to resonate with a specific target audience while remaining true to their idea brand voice. Unlike other language intelligence solutions, Pluralytics’ superpower is values. Values are a significant driver of consumer decision-making and being able to predict, in advance of publication, what language is likely to connect with those values sets has enormous power. There is no other solution offering this capability, which operates at a strategic level by providing an analytical rationale for creative choices and at a tactical level by using AI to provide optimized copy that is targeted to custom personas. It is like having a computational linguist, a behavioral scientist, and a team of expert copywriters at the click of a button—there’s nothing else like it.

Grit Daily: What is the user experience like for a Pluralytics customer? how does your team’s expertise play a role in it?

Pluralytics: Pluralytics has a low-friction onboarding process that leverages the power of AI to deliver deep and meaningful insights at the start of an engagement. Our system tells our customers something about the language they use to successfully engage their customers and their employees that they simply could not otherwise see. The lexical patterns of their “best voice” is set in our ValuesFinder platform as a benchmark or multiple benchmarks, and content creators can log-in to score their copy against this ideal while they are in their workflow. The system delivers a proximity score that looks at how close the language is to their ideal, taking into account three key elements of messaging: values, tone of voice, and readability. Users can make adjustments to their copy themselves, use our instant natural language generation engine, or submit content for optimization by our team of language analysts that use our AI-powered language suggestions to level up the language and return a high-quality alternative version back to them that is more likely to resonate with their target audience.

Grit Daily: Tell our readers why they should use your tech as opposed to any competitors in your space?

Pluralytics: We tell our potential customers that our ValuesFinder SaaS platform is for them if they are interested in “the why” behind their engagement metrics. Our system is deeply rooted in behavioral science and our systems works particularly well with persona-based communications approach. Our solution is a cost-efficient way to take the deep audience research that is part of the persona-building and quickly operationalize it in a content-creation context to improve performance. Our customers see upticks in engagement KPIs when they use our platform to improve messaging and they also get the kind of audience insights that was once only the realm of high-priced consultants and long-term audience research. It is a powerful combination.

Grit Daily: What is the #1 challenge you are solving?

Pluralytics: Being consistently in the ideal voice—brand voice, employer brand, targeted messaging—with a high-volume cadence across platforms is a huge challenge for marketers and communications. We take the gut instinct and guesswork out of message creation to help deliver high performing content that connects in an ideal voice for the target audience – at scale.

Grit Daily: What is the future of Pluralytics?

Pluralytics: In the short term, we are in growth mode and expect to quickly become a significant player in the language intelligence space. In the long term, our technology will fundamentally improve how organizations communicate in a way that can be extraordinarily positive. We envision a world where the intended message is always received and where the words we chose don’t inadvertently get in the way. We are working on ways that language can deepen human connection and it makes Pluralytics future extraordinarily exciting.