Artificial intelligence is redefining the boundaries of marketing and widening the gap between leaders and laggards.
Companies that effectively adopt AI generate, on average, six times greater revenue growth than their competitors—while spending only 1.5 times more on marketing, according to a new global study conducted by Bain.
Leading companies are distancing themselves from their competitors by adopting data-driven strategies, continuous testing, and modular AI-based technologies. In practice, they are ten times more likely to consider artificial intelligence a core capability. This is reflected in the breadth of use: they are six times more likely to have 25 or more AI applications in production.
While the majority of companies—leaders and laggards—claim to believe in innovation (57% and 48%, respectively), the real difference lies in execution. Leading organizations are eight times more likely to conduct one hundred or more experiments per month, turning intention into action. They are also twice as effective at scaling learnings from these experiments across different areas of the company.
Scenario
Bain points to a conceptual break with the traditional “4 Cs” of Marketing—Customer, Cost, Convenience, and Communication—and proposes a new framework based on four pillars that reflect the contemporary demands of agility, personalization, and scale:
1. Comprehensive AI: They are also much more advanced in practical application: they are six times more likely to operate with 25 or more AI use cases in production, including generative AI applied to customer journeys, media, campaigns, and creative testing.
2. Customer Obsession: Market leaders enrich their first-party data with third-party data four times more often than others and use AI to process this information, achieving more than double the average sales growth.
3. Continuous experimentation: Top-performing companies conduct more than 100 monthly marketing experiments eight times more frequently than others and are twice as likely to scale these learnings internally. AI, by reducing the marginal cost of content production, favors this agile cycle of testing and iteration.
4. Market prominence: Leaders stand out for balancing branding with automated technologies. They are 2.5 times more likely to operate with mature marketing infrastructures across four fronts: data collection and enrichment, measurement, automation, and workflow management. They are also eight times more likely to use customizable AI in multiple business contexts.
