AI is forcing marketers to question decades of accepted best practices because the assumptions those practices were built on are changing, according to new research.
The paper of Prof. Rajan Varadarajan of the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University, published in the “Marketing Strategy Journal,” says AI is changing the way decisions are made on both sides of the market. Companies are outsourcing marketing decisions to AI systems, while consumers are using AI to research sellers, compare products, and make purchase recommendations. Decisions that were once only made by humans may be human-AI interactions.
This is “the decay of knowledge.” This is when the marketing experience becomes weak because the environment it was built for is no longer working in the same way. AI accelerates that by changing the way information is created, evaluated, and used throughout the buying process.
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The paper makes an important distinction between marketing principles and marketing tactics.
Some theories survive major technological change because they focus on human behavior. Customers are still looking for solutions to problems. Brands still need to differentiate themselves. Trust is still important.
Tactics built on those principles are another matter.
Take SEO. For years, advertisers have been optimizing pages for the way people search Google. Now they must also think about how AI systems acquire, interpret, and summarize information. Or think about a typical B2B buying journey, where marketers think they might visit a website, download content, attend a webinar, and finally talk to sales. If AI agents continue to research products before a person arrives at a merchant’s site, that typical journey starts to look less ubiquitous.
The paper describes those enduring ideas as conceptual knowledge and the playbooks built upon them as substantive knowledge. The former often survives technological change. Second, it has a short shelf life because it depends on how the markets work at a particular time.
Four questions for marketers
The report says marketers need to ask these four questions:
- “Who is your customer?”
- “What is your customer?”
- “Who makes marketing decisions?”
- “What is a marketing decision maker?”
This is a stress test of marketing assumptions. They allow you to check whether what you think is still the same as how customers buy.
Consider an SEO strategy built around getting clicks to your website. If a consumer receives an AI-generated comparison before visiting your site, is that strategy still measuring success correctly? For B2B lead generation, if an AI agent is researching vendors, creating a shortlist, and recommending products before a person enters the buying process, is the buyer’s journey still the one your funnel is taking?
The same function applies to all marketing. The entire framework depends on the assumptions of who gathers information, who evaluates options, and who makes decisions. As AI takes over many of those roles, marketers need to ask if those concepts still fit the market they’re trying to reach.
If a strategy takes prospects to research products, compare vendors, or test marketing messages themselves, it may no longer reflect reality. Likewise, if campaign planning is assumed that marketers make all targeting, budgeting, or creative decisions, it may overlook the growing role of AI in operations.
The point is not that people disappear from the system. It’s that AI is influencing decisions that marketing agencies traditionally consider entirely human. The report suggests revising those ideas before revising the strategies built on them.
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A new competitive advantage
This paper compares AI to earlier shifts such as the Internet, ecommerce, and social media, each of which forced marketers to rethink accepted practices. The difference is that AI is changing both marketing and buying behavior at the same time, shortening what the authors call the “lifetime of information relevance” of many accepted practices.
For marketers, the lesson is not to throw away everything they’ve learned. It is to be more skeptical of thoughts that once seemed eternal. The next competitive advantage may come partially from adopting the newest AI tool from seeing when yesterday’s practice no longer defines when customers actually buy.
“Dawn of the AI era in marketing strategy and twilight of the conglomerates era in corporate strategy: Information corruption, information correlation and the creation of new information.,” by Prof. Rajan Varadarajan, Distinguished University Professor and Regents Professor of the Mays Business School, Texas A&M University, can be downloaded here. (No registration required)
