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

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.

Not just high-tech marketing, relationship marketing
“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.

Innovation forges stronger connections
“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.

“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.

Every word and minute matters

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.”

It’s all about keeping it real
“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.

Minds and hearts over data
“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”
“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.