The beginning of a new year is what behavioral scientists call a temporal landmark, a date that is more meaningful than others. Temporal landmarks often prompt us to make significant life changes or commit to pursuing new goals.
If you doubt the power of temporal landmarks, just consider how often we make “New Year’s resolutions” to lose weight or begin a regular exercise program.
Like many marketers, I used the final few weeks of 2024 to reflect on what happened during the year and plan for 2025. My objective for this blog has always been to provide information and insights that are timely, thought-provoking, and useful. To achieve this goal, the content of this blog needs to evolve to account for the always-changing landscape of B2B marketing.
Another Year Dominated By AI
Artificial intelligence, specifically generative AI, was the hottest topic in marketing in 2024, as it had been in 2023. OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in November 2022 triggered an arm’s race among technology companies to develop generative AI capabilities.
Spending on AI exploded in 2023 and continued at a blistering pace last year. In a November Forbes article, Beth Kindig, the CEO and Lead Tech Analyst of I/O Fund, wrote that AI-driven capital spending by four tech industry behemoths – Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon – will total about $240 billion in 2024, an increase of more than 50% compared to 2023.
Ms. Kindig’s article also noted that AI-related capital spending will likely continue at these nosebleed levels into 2025 as the big tech companies build out AI infrastructure to meet demand that currently exceeds supply.
The capabilities of the large language models that power generative AI also improved exponentially in 2024. For a great overview of these technological advances, I recommend you watch this video by Christopher Penn, the Chief Data Scientist of Trust Insights.
Generative AI is already having an impact on many aspects of business including marketing, even though we are still in the fairly early stages of AI adoption. AI will have an even greater impact on marketing this year as more AI-enabled software applications become available, the adoption of AI increases, and marketers become more adept at leveraging AI’s capabilities.
How This Blog Will Change in 2025
I plan to make a few changes in my approach to this blog in 2025. Most of these changes are based on my decision to apply greater selectivity to the content I publish here. This means I will probably publish fewer posts in 2025 than in previous years.
Since 2023, I’ve published three types of posts here – research round-ups, book reviews, and general information/opinion posts. Here’s what I’m planning for each of these types of posts in 2025.
Research Round-Ups
These posts typically include brief descriptions of two to four research studies. In 2024, my three most popular posts were research round-ups.
Most of the generally available research about B2B marketing consists of surveys of marketers. While this kind of research can be useful, research that focuses on the thinking and behaviors of business buyers is even more valuable.
This year, I’ll be looking for surveys of business buyers, and I’ll also be looking for studies based on research methodologies other than surveys, such as the study I discussed in my most popular post of 2024.
Book Reviews
I published eight book reviews in 2024, and while no book reviews made the 2024 “top 10” list, I believe books remain an important knowledge resource for marketers. I’ll continue to publish book reviews this year, but I plan to be more selective when choosing books to review. Therefore, I’ll probably publish fewer book reviews in 2025 than in 2024.
General Information/Opinion Posts
In January 2023, I published a post that made the following argument:
“Marketing success in 2023 and beyond will depend on marketers’ ability to leverage the capabilities of technology and data science and to effectively apply the principles of behavioral science that describe how people make decisions. These two distinct, but complementary, abilities now constitute the yin and yang of high-performance marketing.”
This argument is even more true today than it was two years ago. The smart use of artificial intelligence has the potential to drive remarkable gains in marketing productivity, but those gains won’t be realized unless marketers also design and implement strategies that reflect how business buyers actually make purchase decisions.
I’ve published several posts discussing the cognitive aspects of B2B buying over the past few years, and I’ll continue to address those topics in 2025.
Leveraging behavioral science principles in marketing is necessary, but some marketers believe more is needed. A relatively small but growing cadre of B2B marketers are arguing that the current paradigm of B2B marketing is out-of-step with how most B2B buying decisions are actually made.
These marketers contend that we need a fundamentally different approach to B2B marketing, one that is grounded in an accurate understanding of real-world market dynamics and buyer decision-making.
I largely agree with this point of view so I’ll be discussing this topic in several posts over the next few months.
Here’s to a year of successful marketing in 2025!
