Simply Speaking: Will AI prove that marketing doesn’t matter?

Every few years, marketing is put on trial. The charge is familiar. It is accused of being correlated and not causal to business success.

Demand existed anyway, the argument goes. Marketing simply creates noise and claims the outcome. Further, when a business decides it has a winning chance, it does everything to support the endeavour. That includes marketing. Hence it’s a consequence not a cause.

Now that I’ve stated the accusation, let me ask the burning question too : Will AI and its impact on analytics finally and conclusively prove whether or not Marketing matters?

Let me tell you what I know.

Marketing matters not because it always works.

It matters because nothing else in the firm can do what Marketing does when it works well.

Operations optimise once demand exists.

Pricing monetises the willingness already formed.

Sales converts the intent that is largely pre decided.

Marketing is the only effort that operates upstream of choice. It happens before preferences solidify, before trust is assigned, before categories are mentally organised.

Marketing’s job is not to close transactions but to shape the conditions under which transactions become easier, cheaper, and more repeatable.

This is where AI will not weaken the case for marketing, but rather solidify it.

As attribution models grow more sophisticated, AI will indeed rubbish a great deal of marketing mythology.

It will show that many campaigns celebrated for “driving growth” merely mirrored momentum created elsewhere whether in distribution expansion, pricing power, or cultural timing.

But, the profound truth it will expose is that when brands go silent, everything else has to work harder.

Without marketing :

-Price sensitivity increases.

-Sales cycles lengthen.

-Retention weakens.

The absence of marketing creates decline more reliably than its presence creates spikes.

Marketing, in this sense, is not persuasion but ‘probability engineering’.

It does not guarantee outcomes but it alters the odds at population scale.

Its most valuable output is memory.

Consumers do not choose from full information sets. They choose from what is available under pressure.

Brands that are easier to recall, emotionally tagged, and socially legitimised are chosen not because they are objectively superior, but because they are cognitively efficient.

AI will make this visible by mapping recall speed, emotional encoding, and retrieval bias and showing why superior products still lose when they lack mental availability.

Marketing also converts time into advantage.

Features can be copied.

Prices can be matched.

Distribution can be replicated.

However accumulated meaning is unique.

Brands that invest consistently in how they are understood enjoy lower volatility, faster recovery from error, and cheaper future demand creation.

These are compounding effects long dismissed because they were slow, indirect, and hard to isolate.

AI will not make them faster, but it will make them undeniable.

Most importantly, marketing works indirectly. It removes friction. It lowers perceived risk. It makes choosing feel sensible rather than effortful. These effects rarely show up in campaign dashboards, but they appear clearly in long-horizon behavioural data.

The real reckoning, then, is not whether marketing matters but whether marketers have been honest about how it matters.

AI will not kill marketing. It will end gaseous storytelling about marketing and leave behind a leaner, stricter discipline that earns its place not through attribution theatre, but via sustained behavioural advantage.

Shaping behaviour is not a weaker case for marketing.

It is a far more serious one.

Shubhranshu Singh is a marketer, business leader and columnist. He was honoured as one of the 50 most influential global CMOs for 2025 by Forbes and serves on the global board of the Effie LIONS foundation.