Everything’s gotta be faster. Easier. And now, done for you by your personal army of Agentic AI Bots.

No doubt, generative AI has hammered out some truly amazing tools, many in the last 24 months. But it’s also accelerated the constant bombardment about faster, faster, faster. 

Now, with 100% More Faster
than the Faster we were pressured into before!

For many tech and AI advances, it seems the end goal is only achieving more in less time. 

But let’s take a breath and challenge this notion by revisiting the idea of “slow marketing.” It got some traction a while back when digital marketing was growing up and is based on the idea that sometimes the best way to achieve our goals is to slow down and take our time.

Slow marketing is pitched as a more thoughtful and deliberate approach. It’s about focusing on quality over quantity and building relationships with customers over time. About creating marketing campaigns that are not just effective but also meaningful and memorable.

There are many benefits to taking the long road in marketing. For example, slow marketing can help you:

• • Develop a deeper understanding of your customers
  • Build stronger customer loyalty
  • Create more effective marketing campaigns

And maybe even

• • Reduce stress and improve your overall well-being

However, I believe the biggest benefit comes from the actual process of doing the work. Which is where we may discover that AI will be counterproductive.

By using our squishy grey matter and building personal experience, we can ask more in-depth and better questions, create better ideas, and implement more effective marketing campaigns that actually connect with the human audiences we seek to honestly engage. 

The pressure for speed over personal growth may create an overreliance on letting AI do ALL your thinking (or writing), which might be akin to how using Waze and Google Maps is eroding our sense of finding our own way. You, too, find it harder to remember directions WITHOUT an app, right? Archaic, I know.

Therefore, I’ll preach that The Process of developing marketing ideas can be just as important as the ideas themselves. When you take the time to brainstorm, research, and test your ideas, you increase your chances of coming up with winning concepts. 

Developing personas is a prime example. Since the public launch of ChatGPT, many have lauded generative AI’s ability to quickly create them. I’ve done it, too. Type in a reasonably good prompt and, wham-o, you get a plausably good view of your 35-yo father of two and his addiction to potato chips. But do you really know this customer? Do you, really? How certain are you that he watches SportsCenter? Maybe he binges cat & cucumber videos. You don’t really KNOW-KNOW unless you ask him. 

And that’s the value of slow marketing. KNOW-KNOWing what your customers think (and hopefully feel) so that you can create effective, targeted marketing that treats your customer like a real individual. Not an AI persona.

Hands down, the best way to create user personas is still through 1:1 customer research. This means taking the time to interview your customers and learn about their needs, wants, and pain points. For a good resource on this, check out “Talking to Humans” by Giff Constable. Also learn about “The Five Whys” … you can incorporate this tactic in LOTS of work and personal situations.

Through 1:1 customer research, you can be confident that your personas are accurate and complete, and your marketing will be more efficient from the start (shorter iterations for optimizing messaging). And you might even uncover needs for entirely new features or whole new products/services. It’s the only way to discover that elusive third third-level of customer desires – the ones they don’t yet know/can’t articulate themselves.

This philosophy of slow marketing also aligns beautifully with Greg McKeown’s concept of “Essentialism.” In his book, McKeown argues that we should focus our energy on the things that truly matter and eliminate everything else. We should be applying this principle to marketing as well. (Thank you, Caroline Malouf, for posting/recommending this one.)

Instead of trying to do everything and relying on AI to cram in more, focus on the essential tasks that will have the biggest impact. Identify the channels and strategies that resonate most with your ideal customer and ruthlessly cut out the rest. This approach not only allows you to create more effective marketing campaigns but also frees up time and resources to invest in building deeper relationships with your customers. 

So while everyone is racing to automate as much as possible, Zig when they Zag. To stay relevant and earn trust through deeper understanding and better segmentation, we still need to get our hands dirty (with brains engaged) and do the work.