Commentary
Journal of Marketing
Commentary: Artificial Intelligence:
The Marketer’s Dilemma
Robert V. Kozinets and Ulrike Gretzel
Editor’s Note: This commentary is a companion piece to “Consumers and Artificial Intelligence: An Experiential
Perspective,” part of the JM-MSI Special Issue on “From Marketing Priorities to Research Agendas,” edited by John A.
Deighton, Carl F. Mela, and Christine Moorman. A list of articles and commentaries appearing in the Special Issue can be found
at http://www.ama.org/JM-MSI-2020.
Puntoni et al. (2021; hereinafter Puntoni et al.) have written a
useful, interesting, and comprehensive summation of many of
the promises and potential pitfalls of artificial intelligence (AI)
for consumers. In this short commentary, we extend their con-
tributions by focusing on the hidden challenges, and thus the
dilemma, that marketers face when they utilize AI. It seemed
to us that Puntoni et al. suggest in several places that companies
and organizations have a degree of control over AI or its algo-
rithms which might be unrealistic. For example, the authors
write that companies could “strive to develop AI that is less,
rather than more, humanlike” (p. 175) and that managers should
“design both debiased and antibias AI experiences” (p. 170). We
found a similar perspective in De Bruyn et al. (2020). For exam-
ple, their idea that “marketing managers” need to “specify valid
objective functions” (pp. 91–92) may overstate the amount of
control that most marketers have over AI. It is fair to say that a
firm can customize an AI offering or its outputs without altering
its core algorithms, in the same way that the passenger on an
Uber ride can adjust their seat, listen to their own music, and
open the window. However, most marketers in the world today
are consumers, not creators, of AI technology. Creating and
maintaining algorithms and AI is a complicated, expensive pro-
cess that requires skilled personnel and continual monitoring and
adjustment. Although AI is extremely useful to marketers, most
do not produce or control it.
Although it offers a sense of the degrees of freedom market-
ers may have to address consumer-facing challenges, Puntoni
et al.’s experience design conception and advice may unhelp-
fully blur the line between what most marketers are and are not
able to control about AI. Their article also obscures the power
shifts and practical alterations accompanying the implementa-
tion of AI in organizations today. In the larger trend, which we
might term “the technologizing of marketing,” marketers have
largely become the users of technology rather than its masters,
2021, Vol. 85(1) 156-159
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increasingly dependent on technology and its keepers—both
those inside and outside their organizations—to do their job.
This status is not new. Since computerized sales reports,
customer relationship management (CRM), e-commerce, and
web pages became important parts of the marketer’s toolkit,
influence over the implementation of marketing has been shift-
ing to organizational information technology departments and
the types who populate them. Platforms and AI further accel-
erate this technologizing shift of influence and power over the
customer interface. Just as with prior changes, marketers may
set the goals, but they are increasingly subordinate to technol-
ogists for development, implementation, and interpretation.
Even the goals of marketing may ultimately be informed by AI.
We build on Puntoni et al. by describing three important
challenges that marketers face when they apply AI. After nam-
ing and explaining each of these challenges, we offer some
recommendations on how marketers can face the important
dilemma these challenges present.
Challenge 1: Incomprehensibility
Artificial intelligence gives marketers unprecedented knowledge
about large-scale consumer patterns, but it also obscures funda-
mental insights about consumer behavior.
The kind of understanding that AI offers is qualitatively differ-
ent from the kind of understanding that traditional marketing is
based on. Artificial intelligence brilliantly and rapidly
Robert V. Kozinets is Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair of Strategic Public
Relations and Business Communication, University of Southern California,
USA (email: rkozinets@usc.edu). Ulrike Gretzel is Senior Fellow, Center for
Public Relations, University of Southern California, USA (email: gretzel@usc.
edu).
Kozinets and Gretzel
recognizes patterns in huge amounts of customer data, allowing
sophisticated market prediction of user attention, traffic, sales,
or engagement. As Puntoni et al. explain, it even facilitates
many types of consumer nudging (or manipulation, depending
on your view). But although AI recognizes patterns, it does not
and cannot interpret them to give them meaning. Lindebaum,
Vesa, and Den Hond (2020, p. 248) refer to AI-based algo-
rithms as “supercarriers of formal rationality” in contrast to the
human capacity for contextualized, value-related rational
reflection and action or “substantive rationality.” Applied to
understand a variety of marketing problems, AI replaces sub-
stantive with “formal rationality.” It recognizes patterns, but it
does not understand people, their motivations, and their
intentions.
Artificial intelligence provides marketers with powerful tac-
tical tools that are bound by particular contexts, but, without
adequate critical attention and caution, marketers risk offload-
ing their own market “understanding” to the algorithms, keep-
ing marketers out of the loop, and losing the ability to manage
the marketing process. Because of the “black box” model of AI,
even its creators lose control of it (Knight 2017). Recently, one
of the heads of digital marketing from Netflix was speaking to a
small group of professors and students at the University of
Southern California, which included the first author. He
described how Netflix had enjoyed unprecedented success pro-
moting one of its television shows using Facebook’s machine
learning combinations of rapid-fire A/B testing and program-
matic advertising buys. When speaking with his advertising
contacts at Facebook, however, he found that they could not
explain how the AI had achieved these results. Moreover, the
same type of AI-based advertising buys for other television
shows yielded uneven results, none of which approached the
first one. This lack of success by the AI was impossible to
explain.
The Netflix example is valuable because, although the AI
system “learned” and was able to achieve impressive results for
a single campaign, it did not contribute to any organizational or
managerial marketing knowledge. No one gained any insight
into why a particular desired marketing action was or was not
achieved. No one could describe the receptive target markets in
a comprehensible or relatable manner. None of the people
involved could explain why the system worked well at one
point in time, for one show, in one context, but not in others.
Using AI for marketing campaigns may result in gains in
revenue and sales. A sophisticated AI working across a large
platform may be a “better” marketer than any human being
ever could be. However, the employment of that AI may result
in a loss of learning as well as a lack of transferability across
marketing domains. The Netflix example shows how AI led to
a lost opportunity to gain a general understanding about cus-
tomers. The subtle differences between local markets are like-
wise obscured. Like a muscle that atrophies from lack of use,
over time, AI-dependent marketers might lose the ability to
build generalized and local understanding of customers, and
to use that knowledge to market to them.
157
Marketers may be failing to perceive or question this atro-
phy because of a type of learned helplessness that Lindebaum,
Vesa, and Den Hond (2020, p. 257) say accompanies AI use
due to the high status and legitimacy associated with the pre-
sumed rationality and objectivity of algorithmic procedures.
But without recognizing that there are different—and equally
valid—ways to understand consumers than those offered by AI,
marketers risk losing their valuably nuanced and institutionally
informed perspective. Absent an appreciation for different
types of customer understanding, the incomprehensible black
boxes of AI marketing—as useful and profitable as they may
be—may impede the ability of organizations to build a market-
ing orientation (Kohli and Jaworski 1990) and could adversely
affect the learning and human capital development of effective
marketing organizations (Moorman and Day 2016).
Challenge 2: Disconnection
Artificial intelligence multiplies marketing efficiency, automation,
and digital touchpoints, but it also removes valuable opportunities
for marketer–customer contact and relationship-building.
Artificial intelligence fundamentally alters the opportunities
for relationship building and customer contact. Du Bruyn
et al. (2020, p. 100) invoke the “paradox of automation” to
suggest that automating the mundane and repetitive tasks of
marketing will deny “customer service agents, sales represen-
tatives, content marketing editors, CRM specialists, or target
marketing experts” of valuable chances to initiate, develop, and
hone their marketing skills. But what might be lost pertains to
more than knowledge or skills—it is also about the mutual care,
trust, relationships, and loyalty that come with meaningful and
continued connection between marketers and customers.
Artificial intelligence imposes a layer between marketers
and customers that may lead to disconnection as well as dis-
traction. Systems such as Google’s PageRank, which is vital for
online marketing, are not single algorithms or formulas.
Instead, they involve many thousands of calculations, measure-
ments, and optimizations happening with extreme rapidity and
working in coordination with many inputs. Because of this
complexity and indeterminacy, many contemporary marketers
engage in sophisticated guesswork about the various elements
of the platform algorithms that are going to affect their search
rankings on Google’s PageRank or, as another example, how
they can tilt Facebook’s programmatic advertising auctions to
their advantage. Gordon et al. (2021) note that online advertis-
ing similarly involves a game of cat and mouse between AI and
the ad fraud perpetrators who try to guess its algorithms.
Marketers are consequently spending increasing amounts of
their time trying to decipher these complex puzzles so that they
can “beat the system” of AI, albeit usually temporarily. Their
efforts, though necessary in the short term, may lead them to
miss the point of marketing. Marketers (who are consumers of
AI) and their customers (also AI consumers) may each be
building stronger relationships with technology platforms than
158
they traditionally did with each other. This is not the
“disintermediation” promised by Nicolas Negroponte (1996)
but, rather, a platform-led AI intermediation.
Without a doubt, the automation of business contact through
AI and the aggregation of people’s attention onto online plat-
forms allow for vast increases in marketing efficiency. Market-
ing AI and the platforms it operates on provide multiple new
touchpoints with customers and provide them at scale. How-
ever, those touchpoints connect to the platforms. The opportu-
nities for brand and organizational contact on which sales,
service, communication, and other marketing functions have
been traditionally based may become diminished and oversha-
dowed. Brand loyalty could also decrease as, over time, mar-
keting grows less personal and personable. When an AI such as
Alexa recommends a brand to a consumer and takes the order
for the brand, it stands between the brand and the consumer.
Who, in this case, does the consumer trust and build the rela-
tionship with? This divided trust is not a new problem for
brands, and it is not unique to AI, but it may be amplified by
the embedded, everyday presence of an AI application such as
Alexa. Without additional types and forms of contact to sup-
plement fading direct connections, marketers risk losing not
only skills but also the most valuable thing they possess: mean-
ingful customer relationships.
Challenge 3: Vulnerability
Marketers’ increasing use of AI drives power imbalances and
makes them more vulnerable to changes in algorithms.
Marketing organizations are increasingly drawn to large tech-
nology companies’ platforms and AI, but, by relying on them,
they may be trading off short-term gains for long-term control
over their fate. Artificial intelligence benefits from the same
network effects that encourage the growth of massive commu-
nication and marketing platforms such as Facebook and Ama-
zon. It works well for marketers on these large platforms
precisely because algorithms do not work as well at a smaller
scale. Algorithms and AI are hungry for data, and, because they
function best with massive amounts of data, they push market-
ers toward engaging with the large platforms. The more data
points, the clearer the patterns, and the better the prediction
models. For instance, a small or medium-sized enterprise will
likely find only limited and diminishing success mining its own
customer data from its CRM or corporate website, but the
potential gains from pattern matching with Facebook or Ama-
zon’s massive data sets are far greater. Yet this network effect
creates powerful inequities that advantage large platforms.
Money flows toward these massive platforms and their AI, and
they invest enormous amounts in platform expansion and
building more algorithms. Without antitrust intervention or
practical regulation of any kind, companies such as Facebook,
Google, and Amazon have become the new railroad barons of
online commerce and advertising.
Journal of Marketing 85(1)
As platforms and AI extend their technological capacities,
they offer more marketing services to businesses. As these
investments yield results for marketers both large and
small—which are the platforms’ business-to-business custom-
ers—across industries and around the world, their use grows.
Core elements of the marketing profession have already
become outsourced to large technology platforms and their
AI. Businesses are increasingly relying on platforms to make
sales, report results, gather customer information, provide ser-
vice, and even communicate with customers. Marketing is
becoming more automated by these features—and often, it
must be said, more efficient and effective. But therein lies the
problem, as these benefits may not last.
The more a business relies on large technology companies’
platforms, AI, and algorithms, the more vulnerable it becomes
to changes in them that could affect it adversely. For example,
in 2018, the women’s lifestyle publisher Little Things was hit
by a change to Facebook’s algorithm that was intended to
prioritize content from friends and family in users’ news feeds.
The changes cut Little Things’ influencer and organic traffic by
75%. Blaming the change on the new Facebook algorithm, the
company shut down. Consider next a hypothetical example of a
sportswear marketer that becomes highly dependent on Ama-
zon as its retail channel. The more that the marketer relies on
Amazon for its sales, the more likely it is that changes in
Amazon’s search algorithms (e.g., to favor a new Amazon
sportswear brand), will affect the marketer. In these examples,
the marketers who rely more on AI are also made more vul-
nerable. He who lives by the algorithm, dies by the algorithm.
Algorithms can change at any time, they remain hidden from
marketers’ view, and marketers have no ability to control them.
Ultimately, technology companies are building and tweaking
those algorithms to look out for their own need to make profits
and reward their shareholders. Often their purposes are the
same as their marketer clients, but not always. Yet those goals
will always supersede the needs of the increasingly vulnerable
marketers who depend on AI.
Facing the Challenges
Mick and Fournier (1998) identified a paradox of enslavement
and empowerment inherent in all technology consumption.
Because most marketers are consumers and not producers of
AI, they seem to be subject to this selfsame paradox. In this
short commentary on Puntoni et al., we discuss AI’s usefulness
and value to marketers. But we add to this praise the consid-
eration that it can lead to interrelated challenges of incompre-
hensibility, disconnection, and vulnerability that present
contemporary marketers with a genuine dilemma. This
dilemma, centered on what we called the technologizing of
marketing, asks marketers to consider what marketing becomes
when it is increasingly performed by technologies and their
keepers. If we conceive of marketing as an act of understanding
and fulfilling customer needs, what happens when that under-
standing pertains to increasingly formal and automated, rather
than substantive, matters? Rather than serving as an
Kozinets and Gretzel
augmentation to marketing, will AI preside over the eventual
decline of marketing into an automated computational
exercise?
We don’t think so. Many of these challenges can be met, at
least partially, through the deliberate pursuit and use of supple-
mental alternatives to (proprietary) AI—and with better over-
sight. First, even as marketers use AI to understand large
patterns in customer behavior, they should continue to use and
develop techniques that emphasize empathic understanding,
human insight, and substantive rationality. These skills may
be assisted by machine learning but never replaced by it. Sec-
ond, marketers need additional conduits for customer
relationship-building that take them beyond the big technology
platforms and their AI. These channels might include owned
media, expanded customer service contacts, deliberate out-
reach (e.g., mailing lists, email) with a more personal touch,
and even platforms based on open AI standards. Diversifying
marketing channels will also ensure that businesses are less
vulnerable to unwanted changes in algorithms. Third, the
already-established battle between marketers and technologists
(Workman 1993) must proceed, inside and outside organiza-
tions, and it has higher stakes today than ever before. Marketers
demonstrate their value to an organization when they contrib-
ute discernment and understanding that technologists never
could, such as about cultural contexts, customer journeys, moti-
vations, fantasies, and a myriad of other meaningfully multi-
dimensional concepts that are difficult to determine through
decontextualized data mapping.
By diversifying their perspectives on understanding, their
links to customers, and their use of platforms—and by advo-
cating for smart oversight of technology companies—market-
ers can avoid AI’s technology paradox pitfall of enslavement
and still enjoy many of the remarkable gifts of its
empowerment.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to
the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
159
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.
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