Faheem Ahamed, Group Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, G42Let’s be honest, marketing has a definition problem. The industry that prides itself on shaping perceptions and narratives has failed to fix its own. For decades, marketing has borrowed from the language of warfare.
We ‘target’ audiences, ‘launch’ campaigns, ‘penetrate’ markets as if we are generals plotting strikes. This model that was born in an era of broadcast dominance is embarrassingly out of touch with how influence works today.
Audiences aren’t just passive ‘consumers’ anymore. They are the medium, the message, the critic, the curator and, increasingly, the competitor. They create, amplify, remix and even redefine brand narratives in ways no marketer can fully control.
Meanwhile, AI is emerging not as a tool for marketers to wield, but as an independent participant in the influence economy, augmenting human behaviour, shaping decision pathways and, soon, negotiating on behalf of users.
Marketing is facing an identity crisis. And if it doesn’t redefine itself urgently, AI and evolving consumer ecosystems will do it instead.
False comfort of brand versus performance
For years, marketing debates have revolved around brand-building versus performance marketing. Should we invest in emotional resonance or transactional conversion? In today’s context, both models are built on outdated assumptions that humans are the primary decision-makers.
Today, influence is nonlinear, distributed and accelerated by both human creativity and machine intelligence. Brand equity and performance metrics are still valuable, but no longer sufficient measures of success. A strong brand in the human mind may no longer be enough to sustain if AI systems, acting as gatekeepers, prioritise other factors such as functional utility, contextual relevance or algorithmic trust.
In this emerging landscape, brands must compete not just for hearts and wallets, but also for favourable interpretation by autonomous agents. Marketing must evolve from consumer attention to the orchestration of
entire ecosystems of human and machine interplay.
Marketing must start engaging dynamic ecosystems. It must move from trying to persuade individuals to also include partnering with complex networks of decision-makers, both human and machine.
Redefining marketing’s identity: A crowdsourced, living framework
Marketing doesn’t need cosmetic change. It needs a systemic reboot of its definitions. We must redefine marketing not as the art of persuasion, but perhaps a new consideration as the science of value orchestration across hybrid networks of human and augmented intelligence.
This redefinition must be living, decentralised and constantly evolving, shaped by global practitioners, researchers, behavioural scientists, psychoanalysts, ethicists, academics and intelligent agents. Imagine a blockchain-validated, crowdsourced framework for marketing, one that adapts as technology, society and cognition evolve.
Success will no longer be measured by impressions, clicks, or even brand recall alone. It will be measured by new influence metrics of how effectively a brand is interpreted and prioritised by an ecosystem or perhaps on how meaningfully it is co-opted and amplified by augmented human networks.
Lead the redefinition of your identity or be redefined
This isn’t a theoretical future. It’s already unfolding. Influence no longer belongs solely to brands or agencies, or media, it belongs to networks of users, creators, algorithms and intelligent systems.
If marketing doesn’t redefine itself intentionally, it will be redefined by autonomous agents, decentralised creators and emergent systems that have little regard for outdated definitions.
We have a choice. Lead the transformation with creativity, courage and collaboration. Or watch marketing fade into irrelevance, another relic of a human-centred past.
The world of influence has changed. It’s time marketing changed with it.
By Faheem Ahamed, Group Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, G42
