According to Ipsos, two-thirds of American marketers would fail a basic marketing test. The market research company’s study found that most marketers couldn’t answer even basic questions about the fundamentals of their own profession. Fully 40% didn’t know what “positioning” meant, 54% didn’t know what “above the line” meant, and half didn’t know what “penetration” meant.

Not surprisingly, the study sparked panic in the form of dozens of articles and Linkedin thought pieces blaming the decline in marketing fundamentals for everything from bad advertising to the discipline’s waning influence within the corporate hierarchy.

Rather than add to the fearmongering, I’d like to posit another perspective on the erosion of basic marketing skills. My question is this: In the age of artificial intelligence, does it really matter?

I ask this mostly facetiously, but also as someone who reluctantly must concede that the strategic output of tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and the like are actually . . . well . . . pretty damn good. If you take the time to properly prompt any of these tools on your market conditions and objectives, the recommendations it brings back are typically quite sound. Perhaps even better than what your average human marketer might come up with on their own—particularly if it’s one of the marketers who didn’t know what “positioning” meant. In fact, with this vast knowledge base at the fingertips of every marketer, there is no longer any excuse for having a genuinely “bad” strategy.

But as AI slowly eliminates bad strategy, it is also accelerating strategy’s homogenization.

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