This is not an article about AI—it’s about marketing. But have you tried using it yet? While its full impact is still unfolding, there is no doubt it’s already making waves. Forbes found that two-thirds of business owners believe AI will positively impact customer relationships, with a third already using it for marketing. McKinsey (2023) reported that 24% of C-suite execs regularly used AI, and Gartner identified over 140 AI platforms in use earlier this year, with usage continuing to grow exponentially.
Today, marketers can’t ignore AI’s influence on how people consume information, make decisions and engage with the world. AI is evolving so fast that marketers must consider the impacts in planning for 2025 and beyond.
How ChatGPT changed the game
ChatGPT—the first publicly available AI platform—is less than two years old. It’s still just a toddler, walking around precariously, knocking stuff off tables. While still in its infancy, it’s already having an undeniable impact. What first seemed like a glorified search engine now presents a bigger impact, particularly in education. Soon after its launch in 2022, students began using it to write papers.
For years, students have been reluctant to read books, emails, or even instructions, so I made my quizzes and exams open book to get them to read a little bit. But if students could just upload their quiz to ChatGPT for answers, I’d have to go back to pen and paper!
Worried about students cheating, I uploaded my questions into AI to see the results. It was good but not impressive. However, by spring 2023, the responses were as good as those from seasoned professionals. By fall 2023, students were buying software to disguise the fact they were using AI, and the quality had risen to near-graduate level. Now, the technology is advancing faster than detection tools can keep up.
High-quality answers
The marketing connection? AI can now answer questions better than humans, excelling in comprehension, image recognition, and language understanding. Marketing is largely about delivering information—words, images, knowledge—to influence potential buyers. But if AI can provide higher-quality answers with perhaps less bias, what will we need to do as marketers to stay relevant?
Technology is a double-edged sword. It often simplifies life but can also add complexity. Helping buyers navigate increasingly sophisticated products requires more than just general information. With the right data that is relevant to the individual, sales and marketing can help buyers navigate this complexity more efficiently. I suspect this means buyers will ignore generic content they don’t find personally relevant—something we’re already seeing with the shift from network news to niche outlets. Human capacity to consume information is limited, while available information grows exponentially, making relevant content harder to find. AI tools that help filter relevant information will become increasingly valuable.
Learning from customers
The four Ps of marketing—product, price, promotion, and place—are still relevant, but how we apply them may change. Marketing has traditionally focused on customer segmentation, but in the future, we may need to spend more time understanding buyers as individuals, not groups. Instead of communicating to customers, we may need to invest in learning from them.
We’ll explore these shifts and ways the four Ps provide a useful framework for understanding real-world challenges with (and without) AI at our Strategic Agri-Marketing workshop from October 15-17, 2024, at Purdue. To learn more and register, click here. I hope you can join us!
