Interview
The Gist
- Growth focus. Marketing must drive revenue, profit and share, emphasizing outcomes over metrics like likes or downloads.
- Omnichannel strategy. Effective omnichannel marketing requires synchronization of communication and distribution across all customer touchpoints.
- AI utilization. Marketers need to embrace AI not just for automating tasks but also for enhancing strategic decision-making and personalization.
Jim Lecinski, Clinical Professor of Marketing at Northwestern University and former Google executive, shares his expertise on the evolving marketing landscape in this episode of CMSWire's The CMO Circle.
Lecinski brings over three decades of expertise, breaking down five key areas marketers must prioritize in 2025, from building a customer listening engine to mastering AI-driven personalization. He explores how to balance short-term growth with long-term strategy, the shift from SEO to generative engine optimization, and why understanding Gen Alpha is critical for future brand success.
Table of Contents
- Episode Transcript
- How Marketers Can Stay Ahead of Changes
- Tapping Into the Wants of B2B Customers
- Keeping Omnichannel Consistent — Without Losing Personalization
- What AI Knowledge Should Be Top of Mind
- Where AI Tech Is Still Falling Short
- Marketing to the Next Generation: Alpha
- Gen Alpha's Outlook on Values-Based Marketing
- The Difference Between SEO and GEO
- How AI Tools Will Shape Future SEO Strategies
Episode Transcript
Michelle Hawley: Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of the CMO Circle. I'm your host, Michelle Hawley, editorial director at CMSWire. Today, I'll be talking with Jim Lecinski. He is the Clinical Professor of Marketing at Northwestern University and has over 30 years of experience in the marketing industry. He spent 12 years at Google, where he wrote his book, "Winning the Zero Moment of Truth." He's also the author of "The AI Marketing Canvas."
Hi, Jim, how's it going?
Jim Lecinski: Hi Michelle, great to be with you. All's well.
Michelle: It's great to have you with us today, and I'm really excited to talk about these five important areas of marketing that you say marketers really need to keep in mind for 2025. So, I think we get started with a topic that's top of mind for most marketers, which is strategy and growth. So I want to start with, you know, consumer behavior is changing really quickly. It's hard to stay on top of what people want and what they don't want. How can marketers make sure that they're staying ahead of the curve?
How Marketers Can Stay Ahead of Changes
Jim: Yeah, so I'm glad that you started with growth. I mean, marketing really needs to be a growth engine and drive revenue, profit, and share. I think sometimes marketers get a little tripped up and confuse the means and the ends, like likes, friends, fans, downloads, engagement. Those are good things, but those are means to the end of growth. You know, growth is all about the users, right? The customers, the consumers, whether you're in B2B or B2C.
And so, staying on top of consumer trends really means being close to your customers, which is a critical function of marketing. Marketers, I truly believe, should be the closest group within the firm to the customer and be able to bring the voice of the customer back into manufacturing, R&D, sales teams, etc., and represent the customer's interest internally.
So how do you do that? Well, I mean, there are secondary and tertiary sources and resources, like attending conferences, listening to presentations, watching YouTube videos, reading syndicated research studies. These are all super helpful ways to stay on top of the pulse of the customer. But Michelle, I'm a big proponent of really, in addition to those kind of third-party resources, you need to have your own customer listening engine set up and built. And that should ideally be both qualitative and quantitative.
Quantitative would be sort of a quarterly or ongoing tracking survey. Sometimes we call that an attitude and usage survey. We look at our best customers, our heavy users, our light, our lapsed users, maybe competitive users and non-category users. What do they think about the category? What do they think about us? Then that's great, but then you need to add some depth to those numbers. And that's typically done with a research technique like customer ethnography.
Go deep and get the opportunity to spend an hour, two hours in-home, on-site, in location with your customers and literally sit at their kitchen table, talk to them, understand what makes them tick, what are their dreams and their hopes and their fears broadly in life. And then of course, specific to your category and your product. So the best marketers are really well set up with a customer listening engine like that.
And that's how they're staying on top of the rapidly changing pulse of customers.
Tapping Into the Wants of B2B Customers
Michelle: With B2B companies, and they still have a customer, but it's maybe not as clear-cut, do you see them having more of a challenge trying to tap into what they want?
Jim: Well, certainly B2B is different in many respects. I mean, honestly, every industry has its own unique idiosyncrasies. Financial services are different from automotive, which is different from tech, which is different from CPG, B2B, B2C, B2G for companies that market or sell to government entities, municipalities. So, while you need to understand some of the unique nuances in sort of your own industry or your own vertical, there are definitely some commonalities.
So again, those things that I just talked about all apply to B2B, right? They should certainly have an ongoing attitude and usage tracker. Now, who you poll or who you survey or who you include, right? Now we're talking about buying committees, procurement in many cases, in addition to the kind of actual user on the business side of things, the business in addition to, you know, who's signing your B2B contract.
But by the way, the same thing, listening to, you know, trends at conferences, there are great B2B conferences all over the world. You have your own attitude and usage survey running. And guess what? You can also interview customers on-site or in a factory or where your product is actually used. Often different suppliers or different vendors or partners are specialized in B2B listening versus B2C, but 100% B2B should be doing those same kinds of things.
Look, marketing should be a growth engine. It should be a profit engine whereby marketers and a strong marketing function are actually delivering a marketing return on investment, MROI, right? Which is the incremental profit driven above and beyond the sort of natural demand or natural run rate. I mean, McDonald's will sell hamburgers today with or without the McDonald's marketing team, right? IBM will sell software and services with or without the marketing team. So we can't take credit for the base level demand. We only can take credit for the incremental lift relative to the costs of sales marketing and customer service, fully loaded costs. So that's kind of our ultimate goal.
Now, in order to drive that, as you point out, there are near-term targets. Many companies have daily weekly, monthly, quarterly targets, as well as annual targets and three to five-year plans. And so, you know, we need to typically balance the short term versus the long term. We'll call it the core versus the adjacent versus the moonshots with a 70, 2010 model whereby 70% of your focus, your resources, your budget, your energy is focused on kind of delivering the immediacy of the business here and now.
Whereas 20% are thinking about adjacent things, adjacent markets, adjacent customers, adjacent products, and services. And 10% are some sort of full diversification, kind of 10x moonshots that make sure that, you know, we're future-proofing ourselves and the business as the landscape will be rapidly changing. Cause obviously if we were just sort of, you know, head down on the hamster wheel, focusing only on the here and now, you might miss some of these bigger trends that take a while to learn about and take advantage of moving forward.
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Keeping Omnichannel Consistent — Without Losing Personalization
Michelle: Switching gears a little bit, I kind of want to move into omnichannel marketing. Companies are trying to capture customer attention, lots of different channels, email, website interactions, social media, there's so many more. How can marketers make sure that they're keeping their messaging consistent without kind of losing that personalization?
Jim: Yeah, so omnichannel, obviously a hot topic. And omnichannel has sort of two flavors or two meanings. You referenced one of them, which is sort of the Omnichannel communication. And is it an email channel versus a text channel versus a web channel versus an offline channel? And the other meaning that marketers think a lot about when it comes to omnichannel is omnichannel distribution and sales. Are we available online? Are we available in-store?
Where can you research, find, and buy? So marketers are challenged with trying to synchronize or orchestrate, I guess we sometimes would say, both the communication as well as the path to purchase and the purchase channel itself. And of course, for a long time, multi-channel was the way to go. Marketers would say, well, for this segment of customer, we think that either for cost reasons or preference reasons or both, we're going to sort of isolate or firewall them. This group of customers maybe is low value so they can only buy from us online and we'll only send digital messaging because it's more cost-effective.
Whereas you referenced B2B earlier, Michelle, maybe for our best B2B customers, well, we'll have in-person sales meetings and dedicate human resources or physical resources, more expensive, but the return might be there. Well, of course, what happens now is all of us, whether we're B2B or B2C, we want to sort of surf across these channels, right? Like with my bank, well, sometimes I might want to, you know, handle something in the app or something on the website, but for complicated matters, I might want to walk into my bank. And when I walk into the bank, I expect that the bank officer or personnel knows what I was doing on the app last night. And I don't want to have to start this conversation all over again.
So how do you sort of orchestrate or synchronize both the communication and the distribution? Well, it takes some technology to do that. And, you know, I'm a big believer that, you know, just buying some software or buying some tech doesn't solve all problems. But just given the sort of the complexity, if you start thinking about, you know, a couple of thousand SKUs and a couple of hundred thousand customers or consumers and multiple channels, the permutations become overwhelming to handle manually anymore.
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So, you know, this is why customer data platforms were originally invented. The sort of CDPs that burst onto the scene in sort of 2016 to 2020. But obviously, those have reached some limitations and we now start to think about composable CDPs or zero copy CDPs that are, you know, cloud-native as more and more companies are storing all their customer records and company information in places like Databricks and Snowflake.
We now move to these sorts of cloud-native solutions and that's where a lot of AI is being employed in order to orchestrate that journey and predict the next best product, the next best communication channel, email versus text versus phone and so on, and the right best product recommendation for each one of us on a personalized basis. So it's I think increasingly important for marketers to be on top of that rapidly emerging technology to orchestrate that omnichannel experience.
What AI Knowledge Should Be Top of Mind
Michelle: Well, speaking of AI, I mean, that's a really hot topic. People are talking all about it. I don't think that's going to end anytime soon. For marketing leaders, what knowledge would you recommend that they need to impart on their teams?
Jim: Yeah, look, the hype cycle is up to 11, loosely quoting "Spinal Tap," turn it up to 11. And how this goes, right? With any new tectonic technology that's really changing fundamentals in the world, we tend to kind of overestimate its immediacy, its immediate impact, and underestimate its long-term impact. And I think that's kind of where we are in 2025 with AI.
You know, ChatGPT, now about two years old. Of course, AI dates back all the way to, you know, Alan Turing's famous white paper in 1950. But, you know, commercially for many of us, it's burst onto the scene in the last two years with much hype and much fanfare. So, you know, as a marketer, what does that mean? Well, first of all, it means you need to understand, we need to understand some basics of how this technology actually works. It's a different type of computer science.
It's used in probabilistic applications and not deterministic applications because it's not a database. It's making a prediction about how to complete a sentence, about how to produce an image for you, about how to analyze some text based on learning patterns, of course, the famous machine learning. And so I think it's important for marketers to understand some of the kind of basic technology. And then once you understand how it works, the next step is to understand
What are some of the solution spaces? How can AI, machine learning, help solve business problems? And we were talking a moment ago, Michelle, about the end results, not the means like friends and fans and likes and downloads, but top line or bottom line, revenue or profit. And so AI certainly can be applied to get us to the same outcomes, but increased productivity, right?
If we were writing creative briefs before as marketers, if we were summarizing meetings, well, AI can do those things. Getting us to the same summary or the same kind of initial draft of a creative brief that might've taken humans days or weeks gets us to that same point, potentially improving profitability and margin. At the same time, you know, that's the so-called faster horse, right? No different, it just gets us there faster.
At the same time, it can, these AI tools can radically do very different things that were never possible before economically or for time reasons. you know, boy, I would love to send a personalized message. I would love to have a personalized interior designer. If I'm Ikea, consult with and advise every single one of my customers. Well, you know, there wasn't enough time in the day and there wasn't enough money in our budget to give a free designer to every single Ikea customer.
Well, that's the kind of transformational big growth thing that AI definitely can do. You know, marketers need to know productivity versus growth applications. And then I am a marketing professor. So of course, we go to a famous two by two, everything's a two by two. On the other axis is are we applying AI internally for just things that our team does behind our company walls, like write creative briefs and write meeting summaries? Or are we applying the AI externally to things that our customers or users see like design assistance for our customers? So we have sort of productivity versus growth, internal versus external, and those are the four solution spaces.
So, you know, if you understand the technology, you understand the solution spaces, I think that will give you a leg up on, you know, many marketers who are still trying to sort all this out. And then we say, okay, which of those four quadrants do we want to focus on? And that's the starting point.
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Where AI Tech Is Still Falling Short
Michelle: With all this hype and you have all these companies with AI platforms, they're promising everything under the sun. Are there any use cases that you think maybe AI isn't quite there yet, but it shows promise for the near future?
Jim: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there's obviously a race happening here between, you know, some of the legacy big platforms, whether those are folks like Adobe or Salesforce, you know, who, you know, are already in use in most companies, most marketing organizations, I'd put Oracle in there, SAP and others. Companies use them, but they were not born as AI native. So they're sort of very rapidly trying to AI-ify their products and services.
I'd put HubSpot in there as well. And at the same time, then there are AI-native startups who are from scratch, like AI-ifying from zero what their products are and what they're trying to solve and what they do. But of course, they don't have the reach or the installed base. They're not already being used by every marketing department and every user. CIOs and CTOs maybe look with a little critical eye because how secure, how compliant, how safe are these products?
And plus, of course, most CIOs don't want to have 5,000 partners and providers, right? They'd rather consolidate around a few big services. And so I think that what we're starting to see is AI doing a pretty good job for targeting, for image and message generation, for customer segmentation. I think these are applications where Bain and others have measured marketers leaning in and already using these solutions. I think those will only continue to get better.
I think, you know, one area that, you know, we're starting to see some promise, but it's still early days is in terms of, you know, more strategic assistance for marketers, like what business problem I'm trying to solve, how am I going to get more growth? Where will incremental margin come from? I do think it's dangerous. You know, people like to say, AI can do this or AI will never do that.
We don't know yet, right? I mean, we'll see where this goes. But for now, I think people have settled in maybe too comfortably, Michelle, into saying AI can do tactics and implementation, but it can't do big picture and strategy. Well, I've seen some demos and some ideas from startups where it actually is starting to do some of those things. Again, human in the loop, AI plus human. But I think we'll see more of that kind of thing, not just tactics.
Marketing to the Next Generation: Alpha
Michelle: We're switching gears a little bit and moving on to a topic that you'd mentioned a lot of people aren't really talking about, which is marketing to gen alpha. So there are generations, they grew up with technology, smartphones, tablets from a very, very young age. And like you had said, a lot of their lives were spent during a global pandemic. So with that context in mind, how do their behaviors as consumers differ from say, Gen Z or millennials?
Jim: Yeah, I think 2025 would be a good homework assignment, a good year for marketers to really start to understand who is Gen Alpha, what they're all about, what makes them tick. As you said, think about Gen X, then Gen Y, then Gen Z, and many brands starting to think about how do I appeal to Gen Z, how do I appeal to millennials.
Very quietly, I think it's snuck up on many of us that Gen Alpha is the oldest of them will be turning 16 in 2025. Right. So if you think about like 2010 beyond so, you know, I mean, even if you're not marketing to tweens or teens, I mean, they're reach starting to reach, you know, college age, spending power, buying power, independent decision making. And so to really start to understand what makes these folks tick, I think is super important.
So yeah, you put your finger on it, Michelle. You know, if you're 12 and you spent three, four years of your life during the global pandemic in lockdown, maybe remote schooling, remote friending, those kinds of things, a third of your life was experienced that way. I mean, for many of us, was a challenging couple of years, but it was just that, a couple of years and a longer life well lived. But for these folks, it's sort of an early defining feature of their lives.
And so what does that mean? That means that they're comfortable with technology, of course, they're not the first generation to do so, but they are comfortable making human connections through technology, right? Because out of necessity, Lack of alternative, many of them said, well, this is the only way I can connect with my friends. So they're actually building human connections through technology, through chats, through gaming.
And of course, they're not the first generation to be heavy into gaming, but it's not about them versus the computer or them trying to just get a higher score. It's them making friends. It's them socializing through collaborative gaming. So technology plays a different role for them. I think the other thing that I would say is that they are certainly more brand savvy. We have this notion of kidfluencers, where you've got eight-year-olds on YouTube, 10-year-olds on Instagram, now saying, hey guys, I just experienced Drunk Elephant cosmetics. Let me tell you why I think this is the great feature, blah, blah, which is something, you know, that we might normally expect a millennial blogger or influencer to be talking about.
But now we've got this notion of kid influencers who are very tech savvy and very brand savvy. They are also very social and world savvy because they have, you know, on their smartphones, access to all the news and information. So, you know, all the conflicts and all the things happening around the world are very sensitive to this. And, you know, at least early on seemed to be more socially active than some of the previous generations. Some are saying too early to tell, but some are predicting that this might be the most socially active generation as they age and mature, you know, since the folks in the, 1965 to 1970 kind of revolution times then that we saw around.
And then the last thing is their approach to learning is very different. For them, learning is fun. So, Character AI, Duolingo, Crunch Labs, which of course Mark Rober's company, you know, he's a YouTube superstar, former NASA propulsion lab. You know, this idea of gamified learning is a way that they learn. so, grade school teachers, high school teachers are learning this and brands will very quickly need to learn. If I need to engage with these people, teach them something about my brand, you know.
It needs to be in a similar way where there's some rewards and some engagement and some fun like Crunch Labs and Duolingo.
Gen Alpha's Outlook on Values-Based Marketing
Michelle: With the past few years, I mean, I've seen a lot of brands that are focusing on values-based marketing, especially for millennials and more so Gen Z. How are we focusing on sustainability, inclusivity? How is that, is it the same with Gen Alpha? Are they having different expectations?
Jim: Yeah, so I would say it's those expectations amplified. So certainly, you know, some of the brands that previous generations leaned into like Patagonia, you know, certified B Corps, etc., are well known to this group, again, at eight years old, right? So let that sink in for a minute. And so, you know, I think that the bar is going to continue to be raised in terms of, you know, how sustainable, how eco-friendly is your supply chain.
Are your suppliers being paid a living wage? you know, where are these coffee beans coming from? And you might say, wait, coffee? But yes, Starbucks is one of the favorite brands of Gen Alphas. And, I'd encourage, you know, all your viewers, all your listeners, next time you go into Starbucks, just look around and look who's in the Starbucks that's under 15 years old. And there's a, you know, large cohort, certainly at my Starbucks that way. You know, they're thinking a lot about, you know, farm to table, supply chain, living wage, suppliers, etc. And I think that will become a lens through which they, more so than previous generations, use to choose and evaluate brands.
The Difference Between SEO and GEO
Michelle: So moving on to our last topic, so I think it's an important one. It's one that I'm really focused on, which is generative engine optimization, GEO versus SEO. So I'm curious for marketers, content creators, how should they be changing their content strategies to make sure they're better aligning with this AI search and then also the way people are searching for information?
Jim: Yeah, so for a long time, I mean, Google's now 25, 26, 27 years old, we all learned how to use Google language in order to find information about brands or products or things happening in the world. So, you know, sort of Air Jordan, Air Force Sevens, Near Me Now sale, right? Like that sort of chipper shredder language that we would all put into Google. We adapted to the technology.
Well, now obviously all of these AI-powered and Google, of course, and others are now AI-powered engines allow us to engage in natural language. So I can say, can you recommend great shore excursions in Honolulu for a family under four? And we can have a conversation about this in an AI-driven way. And again, whether that's through Google, which is now fully AI-powered, whether it's through Bing, which right with their partnership with OpenAI has this capability as well as ChatGPT, search GPT version, perplexity, and others.
Although again, those are promising to have sort of smaller distribution and smaller uptake at the moment, but we'll see where this goes. Early signs are that users really like having to be the ability to have a natural dialogue back and forth. Well, that's great, except how these generative engines return answers is different than what we all learn for how to make sure our brands show up in sort of both paid versus organic search, SEO and SEM, as you called it, Michelle.
The good news is some of the same things, still to be determined, this is a work in progress, but it looks like many of the same things that we had learned as an industry in order to be good at SEO and SEM will also carry over into GEO or GEM. Yet at the same time, there appears to be some new things that we'll all need to know how to do. These engines seem to work somewhat like the human brain. They look to conserve energy and not work too hard. So this means if somebody's asking a question, What's the best EV electric lawnmower? The engine is going to return results from a site, a page, a source that pretty much has that exact question and pretty much provides the answer as opposed to trying to connect dots and breadcrumbs and pieces on your website to conclude that, you have an EV lawnmower and it's pretty darn good.
So it appears, and again, early days, but it appears that brands will need to start making sure that they have kind of a Q&A format on their site as well, and not just, you know, header tags and links and all of the usual things that we've been doing up until now. So I think that's what brands will need to be investigating. As a near-term step, you should start looking in your Google Analytics, your GA4, to start seeing how much traffic and what kind of traffic is coming from these engines.
And there are a number of startups out there that are starting to be able to do reporting to show how many times or what percentage of the prompts that are put in for brands, your brand is returning as a result. So I would say measure it. I would say look for the traffic that's coming and then start to make sure that you're offering clear answers so that when the engine crawls your site, it can find the Q&A and return that when a user puts in that prompt.
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How AI Tools Will Shape Future SEO Strategies
Michelle: We have time for one more question, so I'd love to know if you have any predictions for how you think AI tools are going to shape SEO strategies in the future.
Jim: Well, look, I mean, I think we're already seeing AI tools, you know, as Google has moved to automated bidding and all of its kind of tools like this. You know, I think we're starting to see less marketer hands on keyboard, less search advertiser hands on keyboard and more goal setting. You know, I'd like to drive twice as much traffic to my site. I'd like to take as many new customers as I can below a CAC of this.
So I think there'll be more strategic role for marketers here and let the tools then, you know, do the optimization on the way as opposed to, you know, we're so used to as an industry for so many years, setting dials and turning parameters and setting up accounts and campaigns and features in order to, you know, get the engines to optimize to the way we think it needs to optimize to.
In the future, I think we're going to see a whole lot more of, you know, I'd like to double my customer count of high-value customers and then just let the AI figure out through its testing and learning what ads to show again with my approval, you know, on brand, brand appropriate on brand safe sites and with brand safe advertising, but sort of let the engines constantly be testing, creating, doing not just A/B testing, but now multi-armed bandit multivariate testing to optimize while we're sleeping instead of we come in every Monday and you know, look at our search results for the previous week and then turn some dials and see what happens next week.
So I think that's exciting on the one hand. I recognize it's a little scary on the other hand, like what are these things going to optimize to? But again, it's always human in the loop and you know, not acting fully autonomously, but this is a type of task that AI is quite good at. And so, you know, leading marketers are experimenting with this and leaning into this, and we'll see more of that in 2025, I'm sure.
Michelle: Well, that's all we have for today. Some great lessons to keep in mind for 2025 and what marketers can't afford to ignore. Thank you so much, Jim, for being here today.
Jim: My pleasure, Michelle. Thanks for having me.
Michelle: Thank you to our listeners for tuning in. We're excited to be back for another season. Check back next month for an all-new episode of the CMO Circle. And you can also check out our other CMSWire TV shows, Beyond the Call and The Digital Experience.
