In this new world of marketing, being reshaped by Artificial Intelligence, how should those concerned with the longevity and salience of their brands respond?

Innovate.

AI is really good at looking at what has happened in the past, but has yet to develop a crystal ball to tell the future. Marketers key responsibility is to tell the future, then shape the resource allocation decisions their enterprises make to best leverage what they think will happen. No future comes in a linear fashion, but AI can only reflect in a linear way, in response to the algorithms on which it was trained.

Strategise.

Strategy is a game of choice, where what you will not do is at least as important and often more so than what you will do. Again, these choices are based on what you think might happen, and as noted, these are never linear choices. Strategy in a world being homogenised by access to data will be more fundamentally important than ever.

Manage Communication structures.

Yesterday’s world was dominated by silos. The simple fact is that customers do not care about your silos, only how you deliver value to them. Enterprises have evolved hierarchical silo structures as the most efficient way to allocate and manage resources. That remained true until the mid-nineties, and most enterprises still have not got the memo. Today, even any hint of silos and barriers to communication internally, and more importantly with customers, will lead to a rapid and fiery death at the hands of data and its scribe, AI.

Remove marketing complexity.

The last 20 years have seen a multiplication and fragmentation of communication channels to customers and consumers, along with the inevitable silent middlemen and rent seekers who just siphon off dollars with little or no value add. The complexity of the choices and channels has created a situation where the analysis of the value of marketing expenditure is little short of a children’s guessing game. This is despite and partly because of because of the plethora of options and tools. The only way to address this complexity is to cut the gordian know and simplify, simplify, and then simplify some more. In other words, marketing focus driven by strategy. Easy to say, hard to do.

Generate attention.

The main game of being relevant in a huge homogeneous crowd is to first generate attention. You do that by being different, and being different with a big dose of energy being injected into the differences that are relevant to customers and consumers because they solve real problems, delivering them real value.

If you do all that, while leveraging the capabilities of AI, and digital systems generally, it will be your competitors that struggle, while you are ahead of the game.

Header cartoon credit: Tom Gauld