Can AI Replace Humans for Market Research? This Firm Is Doing It

Most of the buzz around AI is about creative disruption: faster ads, automated campaigns, generative content. But for B2B marketers, the bigger opportunity and the bigger disruption isn’t creative. It’s diagnosis: understanding the customer. Market research has always been slow, expensive, and painfully limited. AI changes that. Suddenly, B2B brands can tap into the world’s largest panel - the internet itself - and get insights faster, cheaper, and at scale.

Lead generation marketers have dominated the B2B marketing landscape over the last decade, in large part, by focusing on generating short-term results – sales leads —and positioning marketing as a precise science where all waste can be eliminated and all actions can be tied to a dollar outcome. By positioning brand marketers as wasteful, lead generation marketers have wrestled away control of marketing budgets and wrestled away credit for sales growth. However, we’d argue that lead generation is much less the science it claims to be and, instead, is much more the art it claims to replace. In particular, we bristle at the idea that lead generation produces more sales for companies than brand marketing. The marketing science makes clear that lead generation captures demand but doesn’t really create demand.

Data shows B2B brands, like B2C, generally serve the same customers, which demonstrates the wisdom of marketing to every buyer in your category. Hyper-targeting might be the single most destructive idea in B2B marketing. This one bad idea has cost companies billions of dollars in lost revenue. According to hyper-targeting apologists, B2B brands grow best by targeting very specific customer segments with very specific creative. For example, hyper-targeters believe it’s wasteful to target all the IT professionals in Europe when instead, you could hyper-target IT directors in the pharmaceutical industry at companies with 10,000 employees in the UK.