Articles Archives

Expert Mode: Turning the Trillion-Dollar Returns Problem into a Revenue Engine

Agile Brand Guide on January 18, 2026

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.

Expert Mode: The Architecture of Enduring Brand Loyalty

Agile Brand Guide on January 17, 2026

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.

MarTech: When AI agents become the customer

Greg Kihlström on January 15, 2026

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.

Expert Mode: Beyond the Prompt — Building the Augmented Marketing Team

Agile Brand Guide on January 15, 2026

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.

Why Your Marketing Budget is Bleeding: The Critical Step Most Brands Skip

Agile Brand Guide on January 13, 2026

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.

Expert Mode: From Cost Center to Experience Engine: The AI-Powered Contact Center

Agile Brand Guide on January 13, 2026

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.

2025’s Top-Performing Ads Showcase The Agility of Authenticity

Agile Brand Guide on January 11, 2026

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.

Expert Mode: Why Your Design System Is Failing and How to Fix It

Agile Brand Guide on January 10, 2026

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.

Confident Nonsense: Garbage In, Polished Garbage Out

Greg Kihlström on January 9, 2026

AI doesn’t correct bad data. It does produce confident output built on
whatever you feed it. Because of this, most “AI failures” are actually
upstream data governance failures hiding behind polished outputs. Leaders
should treat data readiness as a product, with clear owners, thresholds,
and controls that prevent confident nonsense from scaling.

Bloomreach’s AI-Powered Marketing Automation And Ecommerce Search Now Available on AWS Marketplace

Agile Brand Guide on January 8, 2026

Bloomreach, the AI company for personalization, today announced its AI-powered marketing and search solutions are now available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace. Bloomreach’s inclusion on AWS Marketplace will offer seamless integration of its tools with technology stacks built on Amazon Web Services, allowing more businesses around the world to recognize the impact of marketing and search powered by the company’s proprietary Loomi AI.