According to Ipsos, two-thirds of American marketers would fail a basic marketing test. The market research company’s study found that most marketers couldn’t answer even basic questions about the fundamentals of their own profession. Fully 40% didn’t know what “positioning” meant, 54% didn’t know what “above the line” meant, and half didn’t know what “penetration” meant.
Not surprisingly, the study sparked panic in the form of dozens of articles and Linkedin thought pieces blaming the decline in marketing fundamentals for everything from bad advertising to the discipline’s waning influence within the corporate hierarchy.
Rather than add to the fearmongering, I’d like to posit another perspective on the erosion of basic marketing skills. My question is this: In the age of artificial intelligence, does it really matter?
I ask this mostly facetiously, but also as someone who reluctantly must concede that the strategic output of tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and the like are actually . . . well . . . pretty damn good. If you take the time to properly prompt any of these tools on your market conditions and objectives, the recommendations it brings back are typically quite sound. Perhaps even better than what your average human marketer might come up with on their own—particularly if it’s one of the marketers who didn’t know what “positioning” meant. In fact, with this vast knowledge base at the fingertips of every marketer, there is no longer any excuse for having a genuinely “bad” strategy.
AI has flattened marketing strategy
But as AI slowly eliminates bad strategy, it is also accelerating strategy’s homogenization. Now that everyone is using AI to help them write their strategies, two things are happening. The floor is being raised, and simultaneously the ceiling is being lowered. Everyone is relying on the same tools to write their strategies. As a result, over time everyone will be running the same playbook.
I recently spoke to a pitch consultant who told me that it’s harder than ever for clients to evaluate the strategic output of prospective agency partners. The reason: They all use AI to write their strategies and everyone comes in and presents slightly different versions of the same thing. And it’s not just pitch teams leaning on AI for their strategies; it’s everyone. On both the agency and marketing sides I regularly encounter strategies that I’m confident are heavily indebted to large language models.
So, in a world where not just our products, but also our strategies, are commoditized, how do marketers create a competitive advantage?
Execution matters more than ever
The first answer to that question is simple in theory, but hard in practice—execution. It’s easy to have ChatGPT spit out a strategy to drive distinction, accelerate demand, and grow your business. But it’s as hard as it’s ever been to turn that strategy into a reality.
Words in a deck are easy enough; galvanizing an organization and transforming them into action is hard. If two football teams are working with the same playbook, it’s the one who can execute that playbook more effectively who will win the game.
Break the rules
“I want to do my best to execute theoretically sound strategies, while always paying close attention and constantly looking for reasons to deviate and play an exploitative strategy.”—Justin Saliba, two-time World Series of Poker winner
In poker there’s something called “playing by the book.” It’s when a player makes the mathematically correct choices in a given situation. “The book” basically breaks down every poker scenario into a mathematical percentage of your likelihood to win the hand. Over time, someone who consistently plays by the book will beat someone who always plays by their gut. But the best players are the ones who play by the book most of the time—and also know when to strategically throw it away.
ChatGPT is the book. It’s an aggregation of all the data out there distilled into what you should do. But if everyone is playing by the book, your competitive advantage comes from knowing when to deviate from that.
Bravery now more than ever
It’s true that the marketing discipline has been pushed to the sidelines in many organizations. One reason is that marketers have become overly reliant on data. If ChatGPT is writing our strategies, research is dictating our creative choices, and media platform algorithms are taking care of the rest, then it’s not surprising that perceived value is diminished.
We are entering an era where, more than ever, brave choices that deviate from the data will be rewarded. This is not a call to arms to be reckless. But the truth is, sometimes the data gets it wrong. And sometimes people don’t know what they want. And sometimes, AI can’t tell you what to do next because all its data is based on everything that’s already been done.
For decades we’ve been using strategy to outperform commoditized categories. Now is the time to use execution and intuition to outperform commoditized strategies.
