This study aims to investigate the perceptions of marketing concepts, strategic thinking abilities, and assessments of artificial intelligence (AI) impacts on marketing from both human experts and AI applications. Specifically, it compares the insights of marketing academics with those generated by AI systems, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and DeepSeek. The primary objective is to explore how human expertise and AI approaches converge or diverge in understanding and applying fundamental marketing principles. A qualitative methodology was employed, involving semi-structured interviews with ten marketing academics from ten universities in Türkiye, as well as structured interactions with the selected AI applications. Data were analyzed using the MAXQDA software. The study was conducted in three stages: first, participants provided single-word associations for ten key marketing concepts (needs, brand, innovation, consumer, strategy, loyalty, trust, experience, pleasure, and competition); second, they developed strategies based on a sample marketing problem; third, they shared their evaluations of AI’s influence on marketing. Results indicate that AI-generated responses were generally more consistent and limited, whereas academic responses were more diverse and contextually nuanced. Academics focused on marketing strategies, target audience analysis, sustainability, and brand perception, while AI emphasized personalization, emotional value creation, community building, and behavioral economics. Both groups concurred that AI contributes significantly to data analysis, strategic decision-making, and personalization. At the same time, they emphasized potential drawbacks, particularly ethical dilemmas, risks related to data security, the diminishing of human interaction, and constraints on consumer autonomy.
Öniz et al. (Thu,) studied this question.