The established discipline still does the work
Every new technology produces a wave of claims that the old rules no longer apply. In marketing the claim arrives each decade, and each time the tools change while the core questions stay. Who is the customer? What do they value? Why should they choose us? How will we reach them, and how will we know whether it worked?
Why the fundamentals matter more
Artificial intelligence makes execution cheap. Content, targeting and testing that once required large teams can now be produced quickly and in quantity. When execution is cheap, the scarce resource is judgement about what to execute. A team with a weak strategy and powerful tools simply reaches the wrong people faster.
Segmentation is a good example. Algorithms can find clusters in data that no analyst would spot. They cannot tell a manager which clusters are worth serving, whether the firm can serve them profitably, or whether serving them is fair. Those are strategic choices, and the discipline of marketing management exists to make them well.
A curriculum for this period
Teaching for this period means keeping the established structure and extending it honestly. Students still need research methods, consumer understanding, brand strategy, pricing, channels and communications. They also need to understand how AI systems work, where they fail, and what changes when some decisions are delegated to them. They need to understand new generations of customers, including Generation Z and Generation Alpha, and the question of digital well-being. And they need the law: competition, privacy, anti-spam rules, protections for children and the rules of regulated industries.
Marketing Management in the Agentic Era is written for Canadian students and accredited institutions on exactly that plan. Its chapters combine concept checks, cases, industry snapshots of real organisations, research perspectives and hands-on labs with computed worked examples and planning worksheets, so that the discipline is practised as well as read.
Further reading: Marketing Management in the Agentic Era: Strategy, Customers, and Value in a World of Intelligent Machines
Drafted with AI assistance for the Y Academy Press editors, in line with the Press's Generative AI policy.