I started in marketing at General Mills in 1988 with a terminal on my desk that connected to a new barcode-scanning database. We thought we’d solved marketing forever.
We were tracking sales by store, by week. Real data.
Except it wasn’t the leap we thought. The data made us faster. But the good decisions still came from people who already understood how to make them.
35 years later, I’ve watched the internet rewire everything. Social media. Search. Analytics. Automation.
Now AI can research markets, generate content, and personalize at scale in minutes. And companies still struggle with the exact same problems they did in 1988.
The core truth
Marketing is still the same thing it’s always been: changing people’s behavior. Customer behavior. Consumer behavior. That’s it.
The tools have changed. The job hasn’t.
Speed and reach have shifted. The fundamental work (understanding why someone buys, what actually moves them, what makes them choose you over the next option) hasn’t moved an inch. Most companies skip that work entirely now because the tools are so powerful they’ve convinced themselves understanding the human is optional.
Why this matters
Every technology wave has convinced marketers that fundamentals no longer apply.
With databases, companies thought: “Now we have data, we don’t need strategy.”
With the internet: “Now we have reach, we don’t need positioning.”
With social: “Now we can talk to customers directly, we don’t need brand.”
With AI: “Now we have automation, we don’t need judgment.”
Each time, the companies that won were the ones using the tool in service of a real marketing strategy. The ones who still did the homework. The ones who still understood their customer.
The gap
Younger marketers know platforms inside and out. They can work AI tools, run complex campaigns, manage analytics. But they often skip the step that comes before all that.
Understanding the market. Knowing your customer deeply enough to predict what they’ll care about next.
Building a real differentiation story (not a logo tweak). Figuring out why your business exists beyond “we want to make money.”
That’s the homework. It’s unglamorous and takes time, so people skip it. They jump straight to the tools.
What’s actually changed
The speed. You can now test, learn, and iterate in days instead of months.
But if you skip the fundamentals and move fast in the wrong direction, you just fail faster.
AI can help you reach an answer. Without understanding the basic principles of marketing (why people buy, what builds trust, how differentiation works), you’ll reach an answer. Probably the wrong one.
The bottom line
If you’re using AI to do more of the wrong thing faster, you’re wasting money. The tool amplifies whatever strategy you feed it, good or bad.
The companies winning right now are combining AI speed with the kind of judgment and understanding that only comes from actually doing this work long enough to know what matters.