Marketing departments juggle more moving parts than ever before: content publishing, data analysis, lead generation, sales support, social media, SEO, brand, advertising, conferences and trade shows, and on and on. In short, marketers are being asked to do more even as team sizes remain the same or, in many cases, are shrinking.
In that environment, the natural human response is to focus on doing the next thing, jumping through the next hoop to get a piece of content posted, pushing out the next Instagram, etc. The bias is “doing” over “thinking” because there is a never-ending list of things to be done.
Strategic planning can become an afterthought – until someone asks for the plan. Then it’s another fire that needs to be extinguished. And AI may seem the fastest route to putting that fire out. Load some thoughts into ChatGPT and see what it spits out. You can hack it together from there, pass it to the boss and get back to posting content.
AI is a useful tool. But, putting it in charge of your marketing plan – or the content plan, or the next campaign – can undermine your ability to create differentiation and sustainable competitive advantage. Human beings still need to do the heavy lifting on strategy.
Imagine a winning strategy
Anyone who has used AI to generate a rough draft of a specific piece of content knows that you get back something competent with a somewhat generic tone of voice unless you have extensively trained the AI on your personal voice. That’s not the type of output you want in your strategic plan. All of the AI tools out there were trained on the same Internet and operate in similar fashions. If lots of CMOs and other marketeers are doing this the results will average together over time.
Where is the sustainable competitive advantage? It necessarily comes from what you do beyond the AI.
Thought Leadership is a good example where AI simply can’t do what the human mind can. Big Ideas – the wisdom that your audience wants from you – need to be supported by data and trends and AI can play a role here. However, the boldest claims that will get the most attention come from an imaginative leap between that data to your insight. Your own logic and thought processes fill the gap between the Big Idea and the underlying data. That logic is part of the value Thought Leadership offers your customers, employees, investors and other stakeholders. That logical leap is something that AI currently cannot do, unless you include its well-documented habit of “hallucinating” or just making things up and you don’t want your reputation tarnished with those glitches. If you’re relying on AI to supply those Big Ideas, by definition the ideas might not be that big and you are doing something that any competitor can do. Where’s the competitive advantage?
It’s also not clear that AI is geared toward dealing with the incredible uncertainty of today’s world. Can ChatGPT give you a strategic plan that lets you pivot when a pandemic occurs, or when tariffs are levied and withdrawn repeatedly, or when a shooting war breaks out altering supply chains? Your marketing plan needs to exist in the real world as it comes at you day by day.
So, what’s a marketer to do? Often you have some basic ideas that need developing. We work with CMOs and their staffs to take their ideas and run with them. We interview SMEs, the C suite, survey available market research and check out competitors. We supply the initial plan and work with the marketing team to evolve it from there. We synthesize the Big Ideas and target places and ways to capitalize on them. If there’s a campaign involved, we supply the message map that guides it. We map all that to the calendar and find opportunities to leverage the plan.
Let’s get going on your next strategy.