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®.
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.
In enterprise marketing, there are few forces as powerful, or as potentially misguided, as the “great idea” that emerges from a senior leadership meeting. It often arrives with conviction, a sense of urgency, and a complete lack of supporting user data. We’ve all been there.
The integration of artificial intelligence into business operations is no longer a futuristic vision but a present reality. However, the true potential of AI lies not just in its adoption, but in its democratization within an organization. Empowering every employee, regardless of their technical expertise, to leverage AI can unlock unprecedented levels of innovation and efficiency.
For any enterprise marketing leader, the tension between global brand consistency and local market relevance is a familiar, and often fraught, balancing act. On one hand, the power of a global brand lies in its recognizable standards, its operational efficiencies, and the trust it has built at scale. On the other hand, we know that true customer connection—the kind that drives loyalty and lifetime value—is forged in the fires of local nuance, cultural understanding, and personalized relevance.
While consumers demand authenticity and emotion in 2026, the engine room of the enterprise is undergoing a ruthless architectural overhaul. The old Silicon Valley mandate to “move fast and break things” is being replaced by an urgent need for disciplined integration, modular infrastructure, and the complete demolition of operational silos.
