Resourceful Marketing Wasn’t Outsourced To Successive Innovations… Shouldn’t Be With AI

Some marketers prefer full automation of their workflow with zilch human input into what artificial intelligence does. They are therefore willing to hand over control without checking the content going out, verifying statistics that are cited, vetting customer data being used in prompts, and allowing AI to run campaigns without humans in the loop for budgets and refunds.

That is a strange disposition to the principle and praxis of marketing, which has always been in the driver’s seat throughout its iterations. There must be a clear line between what AI does and what a human still owns. While artificial intelligence helps marketers improve research, production and personalisation, it should not replace the brand’s identity, judgement or creativity. As AI delivers faster than can be fact-checked, the gap between speed and scrutiny is where trust breaks. This highlights the need for someone who understands the brand, the audience and the context to decide what actually goes out. Sales cannot be sequestered from psychology, credibility, brand and human judgement.

When an organisation knows when AI creates leverage, improves workflow, or when a resonating message is required, it would be able to intelligently architect the integration of human judgment, AI capabilities, decision rights, and business outcomes. This is towards curating value for customers, building competitive advantage, and driving sustainable business growth without surrendering sovereignty to AI.

De-escalating the tension between extraction and value creation in this AI era requires looking back at how marketing burst onto the scene and held the fort across its six retrospective orientations starting from the 1900s. These epochs had a dominant technology that drove economic activities at the time, just as AI has become the order of the day.

Marketing’s arduous journey from product and people to digital

From the 1900s to 1920s, marketing became a phenomenon with a production orientation. This was when businesses like Henry Ford’s automobile prioritised producing more at lower cost to meet soaring demand. This followed Ford’s policy of vertical integration combined with the $5-a-day pay, which simultaneously cut costs and created workers who could afford the product. Availability was so critical in this era that production had to be ramped up. The rub was, however, the 1929 crash, which threw up the maxim “You could build it, but they wouldn’t necessarily buy it.”

Second was the Product Orientation era of the 1920s to 1950s, where superior products were believed to be self-selling. It was an epoch often referred to as “marketing myopia” (a term Theodore Levitt coined in his landmark 1960 Harvard Business Review essay). While Coca-Cola’s consistent quality shaped this era in the West, the real driver was engineering culture — especially in Germany and Japan post-WWII. This was when the German Ingenieur (engineer) tradition and Japan’s monozukuri (craftsmanship) philosophy produced genuinely excellent products. Companies under this Orientation believe that quality alone would attract customers and win markets.

Enter the Selling Orientation of the 1950s-1970s, where Persuasion was the name of the game. The consumer boom that greeted the Second World War created genuine overcapacity. The problem shifted from “Can we make it?” to “Can we move it?” As production capacity caught up with and exceeded demand, companies could no longer rely on people buying products naturally (production phase). They resorted to scorched-earth tactics that treated the customer as an obstacle to overcome rather than a partner.

In this era, car dealerships became notorious for high-pressure sales techniques, commissions, and aggressive closing tactics. During this Selling Orientation, the modern advertising industry – Madison Peak’s golden age – began to take shape. Also, television started gaining ascendancy as a mass medium, even as there was the professionalisation of sales forces.

The fourth phase is the Marketing Orientation of the 1970s to 1990s. This was when companies started making deliberate efforts to understand and satisfy the customer’s needs and wants. They did this through market research and segmentation. Through research, companies could finally see what customers did, not just what they said. Segmentation became the operative tool that enabled businesses to divide the market, pick their target, and position deliberately.

This Orientation, which made marketing a discipline rather than a function, was inspired by the 1954 assertion of Peter Drucker that, “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.” The era was also defined by the work of Philip Kotler in 1967, which systematised marketing as a management discipline with the 4Ps framework.

Next is the Relationship & Value Orientation (1990s–2010s): This marked the beginning of building lasting relationships and creating long-term value. For marketers, the question shifted from “How do we acquire customers?” to “How do we keep them and grow their lifetime value?” This was the era when companies started executing customer loyalty initiatives. However, there were criticisms that true relationship marketing requires organisational transformation — not doling out loyalty card.

Database technology and the collapse of storage costs facilitated this Orientation. Airlines, through booking data, could pioneer loyalty programmes such as the American Airlines’ AAdvantage in 1981. Retailers followed suit with loyalty cards (Tesco Clubcard, 1995 — created by Clancy, Martin & Smith, affirmed that data was worth more than the discounts).

Bringing up the rear is the MarTech Era (2010s to present day): This is the age where marketing sits at the intersection of creativity, data and technology – using digital tools, analytics and Al to deliver personalised, measurable and meaningful experiences. Marketing Technology (MarTech) has to do with the convergence of three forces, namely:

How marketing is reinventing itself to survive the AI zeitgeist