Expert Advice for Marketing Leaders on MarTech, AI, & CX
Expert mode marketing technology, AI, and customer experience articles for marketers and other professionals from The Agile Brand Guide®.
This article was written by Greg Kihlström for CustomerThink. If your
customer stays with you in a downturn, is it because they love your brand?
Or is it because they just don’t have the energy to try someone else again?
The difference between tools that assist and systems that actually execute work
We, as marketing leaders, spend fortunes crafting seamless pre-purchase journeys, optimizing every click and impression, only to have the entire relationship tested in the often-clunky, anxiety-inducing post-purchase phase. The return is where brand promises meet operational reality, and too often, reality falls short. It’s a trillion-dollar problem globally, a figure so large it can feel more like an unavoidable cost of doing business than a strategic challenge to be solved.
In the relentless pursuit of customer loyalty, we marketing leaders are often caught in a familiar cycle. We build intricate points-based programs, optimize our funnels for retention, and pour resources into personalized communications, all in an effort to keep customers from straying. We treat loyalty as an outcome to be engineered, a line item on a P&L to be maximized.
This article was written by Greg Kihlström for MarTech. Agentic AI is
intermediating the consumer-brand relationship, changing how products are discovered, evaluated and purchased.
The relevant question isn’t if AI will fundamentally change our function, but how we, as leaders, will architect that change within our organizations. The most forward-thinking are looking past the simple automation of tasks and toward the augmentation of talent, judgment, and creativity.
In the boardroom, the debate often plays out like a zero-sum game: “Should we put the budget into PR or Marketing?” The CFO wants measurable ROI immediately, pointing toward the granular tracking of digital advertising. The CMO argues for brand sentiment and long-term positioning. They are both asking the wrong question.
For decades, the contact center has occupied a specific, and often siloed, space in the enterprise org chart. It was the necessary, if not always beloved, cost center—a reactive function designed to triage problems and, hopefully, mitigate customer frustration. As marketing leaders, we’ve often viewed it as a parallel, but separate, track to our proactive brand-building and demand-generation efforts. We build the brand promise; they deal with the operational reality when things don’t go exactly as planned. This entire paradigm, however, is being dismantled and reassembled at a startling pace, and the catalyst is, unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence.
With generative AI accelerating production cycles to near-instantaneous speeds, the industry-wide obsession shifted toward how much we could produce and how fast we could ship it. Yet, as we look back at the creative that actually moved the needle, a different story emerges: speed without soul is merely noise.
For many organizations, the design system has become a gilded cage—a beautifully crafted set of constraints that now stifles innovation, slows down digital transformation, and creates more friction than it removes. It’s the digital equivalent of paving a cow path; it makes the existing route smoother but does little to help you get to a new destination faster.
