People Powered: The Need to Think Human in Today’s High-tech Marketing World

People Powered: The Need to Think Human in Today’s High-tech Marketing World
Artificial intelligence. Pixels and programmatic ads. Virtual and augmented reality. Micro-influencers, reels, and stories. There is no question: the way brands connect with consumers has changed forever.
Person smiling while taking a selfie with a red phone against a blue background.

People Powered: The Need to Think Human in Today’s High-tech Marketing World

People Powered: The Need to Think Human in Today’s High-tech Marketing World
Artificial intelligence. Pixels and programmatic ads. Virtual and augmented reality. Micro-influencers, reels, and stories. There is no question: the way brands connect with consumers has changed forever.
Driven by a veritable explosion in marketing technology, consumers’ resulting love for all things digital, and a growing demographic as concerned with what a brand stands for as with what the brand sells, marketers face greater challenges and opportunities than ever before.

For all marketing has changed, though, it is still fundamentally about people meeting the unmet needs, goals, and desires of other people. So, despite the plethora of recent innovations—or, perhaps, because of them—one thing is clear: we still need to think human in this high-tech marketing age.

A hamburger with a crown held by a silhouetted hand on a pink background.

Not just high-tech marketing, relationship marketing

Humanizing brands—giving them characteristics that are like personality traits—forges the strong consumer-brand connections so important for engendering loyalty in today’s competitive environment, according to Dawn Lerman, Ph.D., a marketing professor and executive director of the Center for Positive Marketing at the Gabelli School of Business, and co-author of The Language of Branding: Theory, Strategy and Tactics.

“Many Americans are questioning—and testing—their brand loyalty. All else being equal, brands that have developed strong relationships with consumers based on emotional connections tied to some fundamental human need will be in a better position to survive those kinds of tests.” In her book, Lerman points to Olay as an example of a brand that emotionally connects to women, recognizing that they worry about the impact of stress on their skin and have a strong desire to combat the signs of aging.

A surreal collage of a reclining person with a tablet, zebras, plants, and a large red sun.

Innovation forges stronger connections

Technology is revolutionizing how marketers can form that connection, enabling them to personalize a brand’s offerings and strengthen customer relationships. But some technological innovations have had greater impact on that revolution than others.

“We can view artificial intelligence and machine learning as a revolutionizing force in the marketing landscape in the same way that digitization, and then social media, revolutionized the marketplace,” said Assistant Professor Hoori Rafieian, Ph.D., who sees the impact of these innovations in the graduate-level New Product Development course she teaches at the Gabelli School.

In this hands-on class, students are tasked with creating a product from start to finish, taking it from ideation and concept testing, through refining the product based on that research, and coming up with monetization and distribution strategies.

“In the past few semesters, virtually all student projects have focused on developing a new app to address a consumer need or want; they’re proposing very few physical products, if any. Last year, the majority of application ideas had an AI component,” noted Rafieian. The project voted the best by the class in the spring 2023 semester, for example, was an app to help incoming Fordham graduate students residing outside of New York City to find housing without having to travel here; another was an app that used AI to create a semester study plan based on the student’s syllabi and exam and assignment schedule.

Illustration of hands interacting with a smartphone displaying a robot face, with sound waves and a wireframe globe in the background.
Consumers are increasingly using their voice and detailed AI search requests, resulting in more personalized and positive user experiences.
But what led Rafieian, who researches consumer judgement and decision-making, to dub digitization, social media, and now AI “technological revolutions” is how much they’ve changed the way individuals interact with brands. Social media motivates people to set personal goals as they strive to keep up with peers and look to influencers for help in, and validation of, their purchase decisions. AI-driven apps, particularly wearable ones, are another source of motivation as consumers rely on their metrics and encouragement to do everything from eating less and exercising more to achieving their financial goals.

“These innovations have not only impacted consumer motivation, behavior, and decision-making, they’ve also given consumers more power: They give individuals access to more transparent information and a bigger voice—they can share their experiences—good and bad—so brands really must listen,” she said.

Consumers also are increasingly using their voice and AI search to initiate those experiences, and research shows, achieving greater satisfaction because of it.

“Because voice technology is still relatively new to most users, they tend to be more descriptive in their search request than when they’re typing it into a search bar, so they’re getting better results using voice search for a more positive user experience,” explained Rafieian.

Graffiti-style "Online Sale" and "Hot Deal" designs with a smartphone displaying "-50% off."

Every word and minute matters

While consumers may be finding and using their voice in the marketing landscape, a brand must fine-tune theirs to ensure it connects to, and resonates with, their consumer targets.
A hand points at a smartphone with a five-star rating and a "thumbs down 99" icon.
“Developing a strong connection requires that the brand speaks the consumer’s language—literally and figuratively,” added Lerman, who teaches Marketing with Cultural Intelligence to Gabelli School graduate students. Initiated during COVID when traveling abroad for global immersions was off the table, Lerman’s curriculum makes New York City the students’ classroom so they can better understand the cultural, social, historical, and political personalities of diverse communities and their impact on consumer behavior. During this experiential course, students take field trips to such communities as Little Senegal in West Harlem and Little Bangladesh in Queens to develop their cultural intelligence.

Such firsthand experience, Lerman said, helps students “step out of themselves and into the hearts and minds of others so they can be great marketers.” But understanding diverse targets isn’t the only communications challenge marketers face in the current environment.

“The time and space marketers have to leverage and play with language is dramatically shortened now. While words always mattered in traditional advertising, individual words matter even more now because in digital media, there aren’t very many of them,” she explained.

“The other challenge is speed. It’s one thing when a customer calls an 800 number to complain and the representative responds to that one customer. It’s quite another when the complaint is posted online for all to see, and the brand chooses to respond publicly.”

A hand holds a magnifying glass over newspaper clippings with the word "FAKE" magnified.

It’s all about keeping it real

Whether or not a brand responds—and what it says—needs to be the result of a well-thought-out strategy, one that’s authentic to the company and to its target audience, counseled Aniko Nakazawa Delaney, a lecturer in marketing at the Gabelli School and former chief marketing officer and global head of corporate marketing for BNY Mellon.

“People respect when individuals and brands have a defined persona,” she explained. “A brand needs to say, ‘This is us. This is how we live our lives.’ Trying to be something for everybody or leveraging what’s popular in the moment is a sure way to lose brand trust and weaken your relationships with your loyal customer base.” And that risk is greater today as more consumers, particularly younger ones, hold brands to higher standards than ever before. In a recent Forbes survey, respondents ranked a brand’s integrity as the most important factor in their purchase decision. Gen Zers take it a step further: 82% said they’re more likely to purchase from brands that share their commitment to social responsibility and environmental sustainability. And they’re likely to push back when that commitment is broken or misrepresented.

Nakazawa Delaney points to what were well-intentioned initiatives but became major missteps by Bud Light (the Dylan Mulvaney controversy) and Apple (the “Crush!” campaign) as examples of brands losing sight of their customers and then botching their response when those customers called them on it. Bud Light’s partnership with transgender influencer Mulvaney during March Madness and Anheuser-Busch’s confusing response resulted in a backlash from several conservative leaders, which then prompted conservative groups to call for a nationwide boycott. Apple had to pull its ad depicting technology “crushing” creativity when it was met with an immediate and very public backlash. Conversely, Chick-fil-A continues to hold true to its Christian values, despite pushback and boycotts by customers who see its stance as being anti-LGBTQ, which only serves to bolster the loyalty of its like-minded target market. More recently, however, the company hired a VP for DEI, which actually made it a target for the right. So, it is critical for marketers to continuously focus on their audiences and understand how their brand sentiment evolves over time and what drives this.

“As we’ve seen time and again, a perceived lack of authenticity in a moment of questioning or crisis can be disastrous,” Nakazawa Delaney commented. “Even if a brand is wrong, a swift, honest, and authentic response is very powerful.” Using digital marketing tools such as social media and artificial intelligence makes such responses possible, but she cautioned that today’s marketers must know how to “maximize and optimize” the potential of those tools.

Two hands reaching toward a red speech bubble with a white heart on a pink background.

Minds and hearts over data

Despite all the bells and whistles, marketing technology platforms are just tools—like the calculator and computer before them—and their value is nonexistent without the intellectual, emotional, and experiential power of the humans behind them.

“Human intervention is still key; you simply can’t give control over to AI,” commented Associate Professor of Marketing and Area Chair Mohammad G. Nejad, Ph.D. “The person behind the model needs to possess the analytical and critical- thinking skills to not only ask the right questions in the right ways, but also to see the ‘big picture’ and translate the resulting data into storytelling that connects to the brand’s targets.”

Gabelli School of Business undergraduate and graduate students learn those skills in the Marketing Technology and Innovation courses Nejad co-teaches with Associate Professor Luke Kachersky, Ph.D. “We began teaching AI in marketing in the spring 2022 semester; we saw this coming long before generative AI captured the industry’s attention,” Nejad explained. “We’ve revised the course every year since, as the technology has evolved.”

The Gabelli School also added a Customer Experience Management course that focuses on giving students the skills to address brands’ growing need to improve their customer journeys across physical and digital touchpoints. This course is taught by Ahir Gopaldas, Ph.D., an associate professor of marketing.

Beyond such in-demand professional skills, there are more traditional personal characteristics that make for a successful marketer. “I tell my students, ’you have to be passionate about what you do, you have to be relentlessly curious, and you have to be persistent—and willing to do what it takes to get the job done,’” Nejad said.

Pivot for a piece of a “smaller pie”

It’s this combination of professional skills and personal “stick-to-itiveness” that will help keep marketing graduates employed, even if those positions look very different than they did just a few years ago. Then again, that’s nothing new.

“When we look at the job market, a large percentage of the positions that exist today didn’t exist or were done significantly differently 20 or even 10 years ago,” Nejad said. “In the next 10 years, we will likely find ourselves in a similar situation. Any job that entails more repetitive tasks is more at risk to be modified and certain tasks—such as creative concepting or prototyping—can be done in a fraction of the time using AI and other technologies. Companies will need fewer people to perform these tasks so the ‘pie’ will get smaller, and the job market more competitive.”

Conversely, these technological advances as well as societal changes have led to a growing number of career opportunities for marketers, according to the second edition of the Marketing Careers report published this fall by the Gabelli School.

“Our research showed that career paths in business intelligence, data science/analytics, and digital marketing have evolved significantly in the three years since we published our initial findings,” said Nejad, who led the research team that monitored online job postings nationwide from September 2023 to June 2024.

“We also identified two new career domains where jobs are proliferating—in sustainability and artificial intelligence, especially generative-AI—based on the number of different positions available, as well as the volume of job postings.”

What does all this mean to today’s marketers and the marketers of tomorrow? It means learning how to position themselves in the new environment. For some, it means a pivot here and a shift there. For others, wholescale upskilling and reskilling may be in order.

But the bottom line is this: There are things humans bring to the table that machines simply can’t. The more marketers—and all of us—lean into that, the better.

—Barbara Esposito is a freelance writer.