Generative artificial intelligence: marketing’s death knell or ringing in a new era?

The paper addresses the dual narrative of opportunity and threat surrounding generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in marketing, asking whether this rapidly advancing technology will undermine or revitalize the discipline. The authors note that GenAI has already demonstrated strong performance across tasks like copywriting, design, and content creation, with marketers reporting a 59% increase in daily usage within six months, now accounting for over 11% of activities. Yet, this progress is accompanied by widespread anxiety, fueled by media speculation that GenAI could shrink marketing departments, eliminate jobs, reduce budgets, and even prompt universities to curtail marketing programs. Drawing on the historical example of marketing’s effort to prove its financial relevance by integrating concepts such as cash flows, cumulative abnormal returns, and the Fama-French model into its scholarship, the authors argue that the field must once again redefine its boundaries to avoid Levitt’s classic “marketing myopia.” Rather than confining itself to communications or superficial adoption of AI, marketing must embrace a broader mandate: to educate itself deeply on GenAI and to educate others about marketing’s continued relevance. Educating ourselves entails moving beyond the role of mere end-users of computer science outputs to actively engaging with AI research, understanding its biases, optimization challenges, and model design, and leveraging marketing’s expertise in consumer behavior and survey methods to influence GenAI’s development. Educating others requires countering the persistent perception that marketing is only about persuasion or advertising by highlighting the discipline’s role in addressing societal challenges such as sustainability, climate change, and wellbeing, and by demonstrating how it can shape, not just adopt, emerging technologies. The authors conclude that while marketing’s decline has often been predicted, the field has endured by adapting to disruption, and GenAI should be viewed not as a death knell but as an inflection point: a chance to expand the scope of marketing scholarship, modernize practices, and reaffirm the discipline’s relevance to business and society. In this view, GenAI is not an existential threat but a clarion call for marketing scholars to take a leadership role in shaping the future of both the technology and the discipline itself.