Marketing, Misplaced: How Our AI Obsession Made Us Forget the Fundamentals of Marketing

Introduction — The Founder and the Funnel

Last month a technical founder bragged to me that his new AI “growth stack” wrote copy, bought search ads, and forecast churn—automatically. Yet MRR was flat. When I asked who the product was for and why they’d care, he blinked. The smartest builders I know are repeating that mistake: shipping ever-cleverer algorithms while skipping the human homework. Let’s fix that.

What Marketing Really Means (and Always Has)

• Authoritative definitions
  • “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large.” (American Marketing Association)
  • Wikipedia shortens it to “the act of satisfying and retaining customers.” (Wikipedia)
  • Investopedia reminds us it covers product, price, place, and promotion—the Four Ps. (Investopedia)
• Why that matters
  Marketing is not campaigns or channels; it’s the end-to-end system of value exchange. Forget that, and every AI tool you bolt on will optimize noise.
• A quick sanity check
  If your team can’t articulate who you serve, what you promise, and how you’ll reach them, you’re doing tactics, not marketing.

The AI Gold Rush: Tool-First, Strategy-Later

“When all you have is a language model, every problem looks like copy.” —a growth hacker, probably

• Stat reality check
  64.7 % of businesses used AI in marketing last year—but almost half of marketers still classify themselves as beginners. (Loopex Digital)
  26 % of companies already see hard performance lifts from AI, yet 45 % are still just exploring the tech. (Loopex Digital)
• Common traps
  1. Shiny-object syndrome — buying another AI-powered SaaS before validating the ICP.
  2. Dashboard blindness — focusing on proxy metrics the model spits out instead of revenue.
  3. Vanishing insight — trusting black-box predictions and skipping real customer conversations.
• Real-world example
  A built-in.com roundup shows dozens of firms automating copy and segmentation, but only a fraction talk about positioning or customer discovery. (Built In)

First-Principle Marketing: A Quick Reboot

“Do things that don’t scale” isn’t anti-tech—it means learn by hand before you automate. —paraphrasing Paul Graham

1. Diagnose the market

• Do the qualitative interviews before feeding transcripts to ChatGPT.
• Use AMA’s definition of marketing research as your checklist: collect, analyze, then decide. (American Marketing Association)

2. Define and segment

• SBA’s template says a plan starts with target market, competitive advantage, and goals. (Small Business Administration)
• SmallBusiness WA’s “8 steps” walk you through research → USP → brand → channels. (Small Business Development Corporation)

3. Craft the offer

• Nutshell’s expert panel reminds us the 4 Ps still run the show—even in SaaS. (Nutshell)

4. Communicate, then automate

• Content Marketing Institute points out content is the connective tissue of all marketing, not a silo. (Content Marketing Institute)

Bullet-proof checklist

1. Customer problem statement
2. Unique insight/angle
3. Promise/value prop
4. Proof (case, data, testimonials)
5. Clear next action

If you can’t fill those five boxes without AI, you have no business letting AI fill them for you.

Re-wiring AI to Serve Fundamentals

(Adapted from SBA and AMA templates plus founder field notes.) (Small Business Administration, American Marketing Association)

Case Study: Airbnb’s Hand-Written Emails > Any Bot

Early Airbnb founders personally photographed apartments and emailed hosts one by one—work no AI could do then. That unscalable hustle produced insights that later were automated (dynamic listings, algorithmic pricing). The sequence matters: human insight → repeatable playbook → automated system. Ignore that order and your tech stack becomes technical debt.

Statistic That Hurts (and Helps)

87 % of organizations now use AI to enhance email marketing, yet only 35 % tie it directly to ROI. (Loopex Digital)
That gap is your opportunity: pair fundamentals with selective automation and you leapfrog competitors who treat AI like a magic wand.

Conclusion—Return to the Craft

The best founders wield AI the way great carpenters wield power tools: as leverage, not a substitute for skill. Recapture the core—problem, promise, customer—then let algorithms do the heavy lifting. Marketing stops being noise and starts compounding again.

Ready to reconnect your marketing to real-market resonance and plug AI in where it actually moves revenue?

P.S. Want the unfiltered chatter of 600k+ marketers wrestling with the same issues? Lurk or ask in r/marketing to see what resonates before you ship. (reddit.com)