Why AI makes strategy-level marketing more important, not less
Over the past two years, one question has dominated almost every conversation about marketing:
“What is the best AI prompt?”
Given that AI can now write articles, generate social posts, draft emails and create marketing content in seconds, it’s an understandable question. However, having seen marketing evolve through multiple phases of best-practice execution over the past three decades, I believe a more important question is:
“What strategic marketing framework exists before the prompt is ever written?”
AI doesn’t replace marketing strategy – it accelerates it and makes the execution more efficient. The quality of what AI produces is determined less by the sophistication of the prompt than by the quality of the thinking that sits behind it.
If an organisation hasn’t clearly defined its customer value proposition, target audiences, messaging, brand positioning and supporting knowledge, AI has very little meaningful context on which to build.
It may be able to produce content quickly, however it won’t necessarily produce the right content and in many ways, AI has made traditional marketing fundamentals even more important.
Every successful marketing programme still begins with understanding why customers choose you over the alternatives. From there, you define the audiences you’re trying to reach, understand their motivations, map their customer journey and develop messaging that reflects both your brand and their needs.
Only once those foundations exist does AI become truly powerful.
That’s what we mean by “Marketing Before the Prompt”. The prompt is important – but only after the marketing thinking has already been done.
Our strategic frameworks – developed over decades of working with hundreds of clients – provide the direction, with our AI-curated workflows accelerating the execution, and human expertise providing a layer of quality, judgement and commercial relevance.
It is our view that these three components need to come together in tandem for optimal marketing outcomes.
Take something as straightforward as developing an SEO content strategy – traditionally, this involves research, planning, topic development and content creation. While AI can dramatically reduce the time spent writing, relying on AI alone often produces content that lacks consistency, strategic focus and differentiation.
At Big Wheel, our in-house tools establish the strategic foundations – defining the value proposition, developing audience personas, organising content categories and identifying priority topics.
Only then do our curated AI workflows come into play, generating article structures, adapting tone of voice, producing first drafts and supporting SEO optimisation. Combined with human oversight, this results in a repeatable system for producing strategically aligned, high-quality marketing at scale.
And SEO is only one example.
The same methodology can be applied to defining a brand positioning, building audience personas, mapping customer journeys, developing social media strategies, creating CRM campaigns or measuring marketing performance.
The biggest lesson we’ve learned from working extensively with AI is that while marketing challenges change, the underlying methodology doesn’t. The future of marketing isn’t about replacing strategic thinking with technology. It’s about combining best-practice marketing with AI to execute faster, more consistently and at greater scale.
The prompt matters, but what comes before the prompt matters even more.
STEVEN RICE is a tourism, sport and leisure consultant who has worked with national tourism bodies, giga-projects, and private sector leaders across the Middle East and internationally. A former CEO of Ras Al Khaimah Tourism Development Authority, he has advised various government, corporate and private entities in the Middle East and Europe regions. He is Founder and CEO of Big Wheel Marketing, with offices in Ireland and the UAE.
Contact – steven@bigwheel.org ; Tel: + 353 86 381 1563