Marketing's missing heart: Are brands losing the plot in the age of AI?

Mint

15 hours ago

Late last year, a 'leaked" HR email from wellness platform Yes Madam showed the company firing two employees for reporting high stress. The mail was a marketing stunt to promote stress relief services, but the backlash was instant and brutal—It was criticized as tone-deaf and insensitive for trivializing job loss and mental health, dealing a reputational blow to the company.
This wasn't an isolated incident. Increasingly, Indian advertising is stumbling through an identity crisis—hyper-targeted and AI-optimized on the surface, emotionally hollow at the core. From ads served next to tragic news stories to brands defaulting to generic performance content, the industry seems stuck in a loop: efficient, but forgettable.
'Retail is moving towards intelligent, not just personalized. That includes empathy, not just efficiency," said Isabelle Allen, global head of consumer and retail at KPMG International. 'Consumers today expect brands not only to understand their habits but to reflect their values."
And yet, in a rush to optimize everything, emotional intelligence, the very thing that creates memorable brands, is becoming endangered.
Sandeep Walunj, group chief marketing officer at Motilal Oswal, argues that financial marketing is one of the worst offenders. 'We're not just speaking to portfolios. We're speaking to fear, ambition, even guilt. But BFSI marketing has long buried that truth under numbers and charts. It needs to be more human."
Even consumer brands that once built emotional moats are under pressure. 'The CMO's role today is no longer just creative. It's a business mandate," said Nikhil Rao, CMO of Mars Wrigley India. 'You're expected to understand every lever—sales, trade, R&D. That's important, but we also need to remember what builds long-term love for a brand."
Rao's team is trying to balance that tension: 'Even our ₹1 Boomer gum carries our brand story. We don't chase scale at the cost of quality or trust."
But many marketers aren't walking that line well. Asparsh Sinha, managing partner at an independent brand design and transformation consultancy Open Strategy & Design, puts it bluntly: 'When everything becomes a performance dashboard, brands risk becoming utilities instead of cultural actors. Data must be interpreted, not just applied."
Sinha believes the anxiety is visible in client briefs. 'They're not more functional, they're just more nervous. Nervous about justifying spend. About defending quarterly outcomes. That fear pushes brands to play it safe—and safe is forgettable."
Vishesh Sahni, chief executive officer of White, a brand experience company, says cultural fluency is the new metric. 'We worked on H&M's 'Sound of Style' activation at Lollapalooza India 2025. It wasn't built for virality, it was built for resonance. Gen Z doesn't reward attention-seeking, they reward authenticity."
He adds that building emotional equity is still non-negotiable for serious brands. 'Some of our most memorable briefs are the ones focused on building brand words, co-creating culture with audiences, and forging a sense of trust and intimacy. The challenge is meeting emotional resonance with rapid results and this is where data helps sharpen the storytelling."
Saheb Singh, strategy director at independent advertising firm Agency09, warns that performance marketing is making all brand voices sound the same. 'Optimizing for clicks has come at the cost of emotional nuance. The soul is being traded for speed."
He adds, 'We treat even a six-second short as a brand moment. Short-form doesn't have to be short-lived. But it can't be soulless." Singh also believes that younger marketers sometimes over-index on tools rather than people. 'Great marketing begins with empathy. Tools are powerful, but empathy is irreplaceable."
A Deloitte whitepaper on the evolving CMO mindset highlights that brands are under pressure to deliver immediate value, but long-term relevance comes from human-centric design. 'More than 80% of leading CMOs are embedding emotional, cultural and societal relevance into brand decisions," the report notes. 'Human-centricity isn't just a talking point—it's a measurable growth driver."
The paper also warns against 'signal overload", where an over-reliance on data leads to chasing micro-metrics rather than macro impact. As one section notes, 'True brand leadership in the AI age will come from using automation to inform action, not dictate it."
But as automation deepens, so does the risk of 'context collapse", a term used to describe ads appearing next to inappropriate content, or messaging that completely misreads the cultural moment. Programmatic ads placed next to videos about war, terror, or tragedy are a grim example. 'The machine didn't know better," one agency executive admitted.
This is where the consequences become cultural. For Gen Z and younger millennials, tone-deafness isn't just cringe, but a dealbreaker. 'Empathy is a superpower," said one strategist. 'And right now, most brand playbooks feel like they've forgotten how to use it."
Some brands are trying to evolve. They're building diverse creative review teams. They're testing tone frameworks and running sentiment analysis pre-launch. But there's no AI tool for common sense. Or timing. Or taste.
Equally concerning is the blurring line between transactional experiences and emotional cues. QR codes, shoppable videos and personalized coupon drops have their place, but when the creative layer vanishes, what's left is commerce without character. And that rarely builds long-term memory.
AI can tell you who to talk to, when to talk to them and where to reach them. But it can't tell you how to make them care. That still takes emotional intelligence and a little bit of soul.
In the age of full-funnel metrics, maybe it's time to ask: What's the one thing your brand will be remembered for: its CPM, or how it made someone feel?
Because at the end of the day, reach without resonance is noise. And in advertising, noise doesn't convert. Emotion does.