What Modern Marketing Has Been Missing All Along

How AI has Finally Made Modern Marketing Make Sense to Me 

Marketing strategy has had a few rebrands over the years. The old 4 P’s — Product, Price, Place, Promotion — gave people like me a neat little box to play in. It worked. For a time. 

But then digital happened, and us consumers got ideas of our own about what brands are! And the 4P's felt increasingly old-fashioned. So, people kept adding P's. I think it was the 7P's last time I looked.

In 2009, Brian Fetherstonhaugh of Ogilvy & Mather introduced the 4 E’s — Experience, Exchange, Everyplace, Evangelism — a more modern model for an increasingly brand-savvy world. 

It was clever. More human. But if I'm honest, it felt like just more aspirational fluff. Strategic candy floss. The execution gap was just too wide. (For me anyway, I know there are a lot of very clever people that executed expertly) 

Until now. 

AI is the bit I was missing. It doesn’t just make the 4 E’s seem possible. It makes them practical. Scalable. Operational. What used to be a 'north star' is now a map I can actually follow. AI brings automation, insight, and agility to each E — and gives brands the tools to act on what they’ve known/suspected all along. 

Let me explain what I mean on each E. 

Experience Over Product

Traditionally, marketers focused on the product itself — its features, benefits, and uniqueness. Now it’s about feelings. The emphasis has shifted to the overall experience a brand provides. Consumers want more than function — they want a story, a vibe, a consistent emotional tone. 

That’s easy to say. But tricky to deliver. 

AI changes the scale. Think Netflix's recommendation engine or Spotify’s Discover Weekly. These aren’t just features — they’re AI-crafted experiences. The machine watches, learns, adjusts, and repeats. 

And it’s not just for the giants anymore. Platforms like Adobe Sensei and Dynamic Yield offer personalisation engines that let smaller brands build adaptive, responsive experiences — without an army of devs. 

Real-time content, behavioural targeting, and predictive support now come baked into everyday tools. AI removes the operational drag and lets marketers focus on the emotional logic of the experience, not just the mechanics. 

📌 Further reading: This Accenture report explores how AI augments brand experience.  

Exchange Over Price

While price will always remain an important factor, the concept of Exchange takes a broader view of value. 

Price is static. Exchange is dynamic. It asks: what’s the real value here — emotionally, functionally, socially? 

AI is the ultimate tool for understanding and optimising this exchange.  It listens better than any team ever could. By analysing thousands of data points from reviews, social media, and customer behaviour, AI can quantify what customers truly value beyond the price tag.  

And that is very useful. This allows brands to move beyond competitive pricing and focus on enhancing the benefits that matter most. 

Dynamic pricing engines — like those used by Amazon, Uber, and even airlines — adjust prices in real-time based on loyalty, urgency, or inferred intent. But that’s just the start. 

AI helps brands test and shape value perception, not just cost. It can suggest bundles, highlight features a customer might care about, or personalise the very way value is communicated. 

📌 Case in point: Airbnb’s dynamic‑pricing engine is a great example: machine learning models analyse demand, local events, listing quality, seasonal trends and more — optimising price in real time — for hosts and guests alike.

Everyplace Over Place

The traditional notion of 'place' focused on the physical locations where products were sold. Today, 'Everyplace' recognises that consumers interact with brands across a vast and fragmented landscape of channels and platforms. A brand must be seamlessly present wherever its customers are. 

The customer journey is a mess. Channels overlap. Devices blur. No one moves in straight lines. 

‘Everyplace’ isn’t about omnipresence. It’s about coherence. 

AI stitches the narrative and acts as the central nervous system for a true omnichannel strategy. From programmatic ads that follow intent, to CRM systems that adapt messaging based on behaviour, it ensures the brand is fluent — not just present — across platforms. 

Predictive analytics can be used to anticipate where a customer will go next. Tools like Segment, Klaviyo or Salesforce Einstein connect dots in real-time. Starbucks, for example, uses AI to link loyalty, location, and context to push offers at just the right moment. 

📌 Solid stat: Globally, 64% of consumers prefer to buy from companies that tailor [their] experience to [their] wants and needs. This preference is strongest in India, where 82% of consumers agree with this statement, and weakest in Japan, where just 37% agree.

Evangelism Over Promotion

Promotion has always been about pushing/broadcasting messages to consumers. Evangelism, on the other hand, is about creating brand advocates who willingly spread the word on behalf of the brand. This shift recognises the immense power of word-of-mouth and social proof in today’s marketing environment. 

AI helps brands spot the signal. Sentiment analysis and social listening tools like Brandwatch or Sprinklr identify potential advocates based on tone, influence, and engagement patterns. 

Once found, AI can nurture these relationships — serving exclusive content, early access, or rewards. Then it turns their output (testimonials, reviews, stories) into fuel. With minimal input. 

Tesla didn’t pay for traditional ads for years. Their customers did the talking. Nike lets sneakerheads generate and share their own designs. This isn’t ‘earned media’. It’s orchestrated, optimised, and amplified by machine. 

Human Strategy, Machine Execution

Marketing will always change. AI won’t slow that down — it will accelerate it.

But that doesn’t mean abandoning our human intuition. It means pairing it with a new level of precision. 

The 4 E’s gave us the right lens. It's held up for over a decade. But, AI has provided the power and precision to execute on Experience, Exchange, Everyplace, and Evangelism at a scale previously out of reach. 

What's around the corner for marketing is not about choosing between human insight and machine intelligence, but about leveraging both.

By pairing the empathetic, brand-oriented strategy of the 4 E's with the powerful execution of AI, we can build deeper, more meaningful relationships with our customers and deliver value at every single touchpoint, even the edge cases! 

Let AI do the heavy lifting. And let humans focus on resonance, not logistics.

Written whilst letting AI write smarter sentences than I was managing, while sipping a lukewarm americano and muttering something about “augmented creativity”.