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®.
For B2B marketers looking to serve the SMB market, understanding their reality is not just beneficial—it’s paramount. The current landscape presents a fascinating paradox. While SMBs are increasing their marketing budgets, their confidence in the effectiveness of those dollars is simultaneously plummeting.
nuVizz, a leading provider of last-mile transportation management solutions, today announced it has been named a Representative Vendor in the 2025 Gartner® Market Guide for Last-Mile Delivery Technology Solutions¹.
For many of us in the marketing leadership trenches, the holiday season represents the culmination of a year’s worth of planning, strategy, and budget allocation. It’s our Super Bowl, where a single campaign can define brand perception and drive a significant portion of annual revenue.
By 2024, active voice assistants topped 8.4 billion worldwide—yes, that’s more assistants than humans. Voice-driven purchases now account for $3.3 billion in consumer spending, with projections reaching $45 billion by 2028. Adoption is meaningful, too: as many as 43% of people with voice-enabled devices use them for shopping activities. Of those, 51% use voice to research products, 22% buy directly, and 17% use it to reorder.
OOH is no longer limited to what people see. Brands are increasingly layering in sound, scent, and interactive elements to catch attention and hold it. Excite OOH notes that multisensory campaigns tend to drive stronger engagement, longer dwell times, and more social sharing than standard displays.
There’s a narrative in tech that construction, manufacturing, and energy companies are resistant to change. I’ve spent 26 years in this space, and I think that narrative is backwards.
The real problem? Technology companies are slow to understand physical industries. That realization shaped everything about how we built Briq. Here’s what we learned.
Brand is often relegated to the “nice-to-have” column, a luxury to be indulged in during boom times and the first thing on the chopping block when belts tighten. Yet, this perspective misses the most critical point: a strong brand is not an expense, but the ultimate economic engine. It’s the invisible hand that lowers acquisition costs, commands pricing power, shortens sales cycles, and fosters the kind of loyalty that no loyalty program can truly buy.
We are entering an era where the brand is less defined by its advertising and more by its operational excellence. The consumer, now accustomed to near-instant gratification, has little patience for supply chain disruptions, delayed orders, or poor communication. The paradox we face is that as AI potentially atomizes the customer journey across infinite touchpoints, it also provides the tools for unprecedented levels of personalization and proactive service.
As we enter 2026, the omnipresence of artificial intelligence will continue to transform it from a cutting-edge advantage into a mere operational baseline. As every competitor integrates the same autonomous agents, generative tools, and optimization engines, the race for the “fastest algorithm” will become irrelevant. Industry leaders agree: the brands poised to win in this saturated environment will bypass the technology arms race entirely.
For years, we’ve relied on the comforting, if slightly misleading, glow of a healthy click-through rate to justify spend and demonstrate momentum. But we also know, with the certainty that comes from experience, that this is an incomplete story. The B2B buyer’s journey has never been a straight line from ad to click to form-fill. It’s a winding, complex path of discovery, influence, and consideration that mostly happens out of sight.
