For years, many businesses treated marketing as an accepted cost of growth. Budgets were agreed, campaigns were launched and leaders trusted that increased visibility would eventually translate into increased sales.
That model is becoming increasingly difficult to defend.
Customer behaviour has changed, buying journeys have become more complex and artificial intelligence is reshaping how people discover, compare and choose brands. For CEOs and business leaders pursuing high growth, marketing can no longer be managed using assumptions built for a simpler marketplace.
The opportunity is significant. But so is the need to rethink how marketing creates value.
The customer journey has become dramatically more complex
A decade ago, a customer might encounter a brand through a handful of channels before making a purchase. Today, that journey can involve social media, search engines, online reviews, influencers, marketplaces, physical stores and increasingly AI platforms.
BCG research suggests that consumers may now experience more than 15 touchpoints before buying, compared with around five a decade ago.
That creates a fundamental challenge for growing businesses: every additional touchpoint needs relevant content, consistent positioning and a clear reason for the customer to keep moving forward.
Simply increasing marketing spend is unlikely to solve the problem.
Businesses need to become better at allocating resources, understanding customer behaviour and producing useful content at scale.
AI is changing both sides of marketing
Artificial intelligence is not simply another marketing tool. It is beginning to change both how businesses market and how customers buy.
Internally, AI can help teams create content faster, personalise communications, analyse customer data, optimise campaigns and identify opportunities that might previously have taken weeks to uncover.
Externally, customers are using AI to research products, compare alternatives and make purchasing decisions.
That distinction matters.
Marketing has traditionally focused heavily on influencing human attention. Increasingly, businesses must also consider whether their products, expertise and reputation are understandable to AI systems that may influence what customers see.
Search engine optimisation is therefore being joined by disciplines such as answer engine optimisation and generative engine optimisation.
For high growth businesses, visibility increasingly means being discoverable by both people and machines.
More content does not have to mean dramatically more cost
The volume of content required to support modern customer journeys is expanding rapidly.
According to the source research, a large consumer business that might once have produced around 500 marketing assets annually could now require millions of variations to engage customers across different channels, audiences and situations.
Without AI, that level of personalisation would be economically unrealistic.
With AI, the unit cost of producing content can fall significantly.
However, cheaper content does not automatically mean better marketing.
When everyone can produce more content, quality of thinking becomes more important. Strategy, positioning, customer insight, creativity and judgement become differentiators.
AI should therefore move people away from repetitive production work and towards higher-value decision making.
Marketing measurement needs to become a leadership discipline
One of the biggest changes AI can bring is greater visibility over marketing performance.
Instead of asking simply, “How much should we spend?”, CEOs can begin asking a more valuable question:
Where will the next pound of marketing investment generate the greatest return?
That requires stronger measurement.
Businesses should understand how marketing affects awareness, consideration, conversion, customer acquisition, retention and revenue. These measures will never provide perfect certainty, particularly around brand-building activity, but they can dramatically improve decision making.
The objective is not more dashboards.
The objective is better choices.
Marketing data should help leaders shift investment while campaigns are running rather than simply explain performance months afterwards.
Human judgement becomes more valuable, not less
There is understandable concern that AI will replace significant parts of marketing.
In reality, the more interesting change is likely to be how work is divided.
AI agents can increasingly support research, content creation, campaign activation, optimisation and reporting. Human expertise can then concentrate on positioning, commercial decisions, creative direction and the difficult strategic trade-offs that require judgement.
Businesses should therefore be deliberate about which decisions technology can make and which decisions remain human.
This is particularly important when protecting the intellectual property, market knowledge and customer insight that make a company distinctive.
The strongest AI strategy will not simply automate what competitors already do. It will combine technology with knowledge competitors cannot easily copy.
Five questions leaders should be asking now
CEOs do not need to become marketing technologists. They do, however, need to understand enough about the changing economics of marketing to challenge outdated assumptions.
Five questions can sharpen that conversation:
Are we using AI simply to reduce marketing costs, or are we using it to create new growth?
Can we reliably measure which marketing activities contribute to commercial performance?
Which end-to-end marketing processes should be redesigned rather than simply automated?
What proprietary knowledge, customer insight or expertise can we combine with AI to create an advantage competitors cannot easily reproduce?
Are we investing in the customer journey that is emerging, or continuing to optimise the customer journey of the past?
For a business targeting high growth, these are strategic questions rather than marketing questions. They influence investment, capability, customer experience and ultimately the organisation’s ability to turn technological change into sustainable commercial performance.