{"id":11205,"date":"2026-07-21T08:03:22","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T14:03:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/?p=11205"},"modified":"2026-07-21T08:03:22","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T14:03:22","slug":"your-best-practices-may-already-be-outdated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/?p=11205","title":{"rendered":"Your best practices may already be outdated"},"content":{"rendered":"
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AI is forcing marketers to question decades of accepted best practices because the assumptions those practices were built on are changing, according to new research.<\/p>\n

A paper by Prof. Rajan Varadarajan of the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University, published in \u201cMarketing Strategy Journal,\u201d says AI is changing how decisions are made on both sides of the marketplace. Companies are delegating marketing decisions to AI systems, while buyers are using AI to research vendors, compare products, and make purchase recommendations. Decisions once made solely by humans are more likely to be human-AI collaborations.<\/p>\n

This is \u201cknowledge decay.\u201d That\u2019s when marketing knowledge becomes less useful because the environment it was designed for no longer works the same way. AI accelerates that by changing how information is created, evaluated, and used throughout the buying process.<\/p>\n

Your strategy isn\u2019t expiring. Your playbook is.<\/h2>\n

The paper draws an important distinction between marketing principles and marketing tactics.<\/p>\n

Some ideas survive major technological shifts because they\u2019re rooted in human behavior. Customers still want solutions to problems. Brands still need to differentiate themselves. Trust still matters.<\/p>\n

The tactics built on those principles are another story.<\/p>\n

Take SEO. For years, marketers optimized pages around how people searched Google. Now they also have to think about how AI systems retrieve, interpret, and summarize information. Or consider the traditional B2B buying journey, where marketers assumed prospects would visit a website, download content, attend a webinar, and eventually talk with sales. If AI agents increasingly research products before a human ever reaches a vendor\u2019s site, that familiar journey starts to look less universal.<\/p>\n

The paper describes those enduring ideas as conceptual knowledge and the playbooks built on them as instrumental knowledge. The first often survives technological change. The second has a shorter shelf life because it depends on how markets function at a given moment.<\/p>\n

Four questions for marketers<\/h2>\n

The report says marketers need to be asking these four questions:<\/p>\n