Rethinking AI.
Overview.
As the festive season approaches, we will discover more and more how the Ai / ChatGPT repetitive lexical field of vocabulary is spoken in human encounter. Words like "clarity, precision, resonate" appear constantly in conversation, yet AI-driven campaigns, relying on predictive targeting and automated content, consistently miss the essence of the human heart, anthropological nature and lived experiences. The following article reflects on how brands and marketers may honour the dignity of human experience, relational depth and ethical engagement to sustain trust, create meaningful and authentic campaigns. Human empathy remains Irreplaceable.
#AIandMarketing #HumanExperience #BrandTrust #MarketingEthics #AIConversations
Background.
Festive Imperative. As the holiday season approaches, brands are presented with a distinctive opportunity to nurture genuine relational presence. People are inherently embodied and relational, seeking depth and meaning in their experiences. Christmas naturally amplifies the desire for shared joy, generosity and communal celebration. In this period, intersubjectivity and sensing another’s perspectives becomes intelligible to build warmth, togetherness and authentic social engagement.
AI Mediation. Modern marketing increasingly relies on artificial intelligence for predictive analytics, offering efficiency, scalability, and insight into emerging trends. Yet these systems function as computational approximations, unable to inhabit or perceive another’s lived experience. During emotionally rich periods, such as Christmas, this gap can reduce marketing to pattern recognition, distancing campaigns from the depth of genuine human relational engagement.
Limits of Simulation. AI can recognise patterns and mimic responses, yet it cannot inhabit the inner life of others or engage in communal relational exchange. Genuine understanding emerges through layered, embodied awareness of another’s perspectives, emotions, and intentions. Systems that simulate empathy risk missing subtle social and emotional cues, potentially undermining trust, relational loyalty, and the deeper bonds that sustain meaningful festive engagement.
Managerial Tension. Seasonal campaigns require careful stewardship, and the increasing role of AI introduces significant complexities reducing the human experience to mechanistic outputs. Maintaining attention to the embodied, relational realities of audiences ensures campaigns preserve the depth and vitality of festive engagement. AI marketing campaign developers while advise experientially just how poor predictive targeting, automated segmentation and algorithmically optimised content produced outputs miss the mark.
Strategic Reflection. AI-driven marketing can inadvertently erode relational richness. By grounding campaigns in intersubjective, lived experience, brands can cultivate communal joy, generosity, and shared celebration.
Intentional human presence reinforces enduring audience relationships and ensures festive messaging communicates authenticity, vitality and the fullness of innate relational life.
Relational Presence. The holiday period amplifies opportunities to deepen human engagement. Personhood is expressed through lived, relational participation in experiences of shared joy, generosity, and communal celebration.
Campaigns that recognise and reflect the lived realities of audiences foster participation, strengthen communal bonds, and create meaningful moments where individuals feel fully acknowledged within the life of the brand.
Algorithmic Mediation. Predictive AI systems and processes can provide efficiency but these tools remain external to human experience. They detect patterns without inhabiting the truths of human experience relative to the situational experience and embodied emotion. Campaign teams are invited to consider the richness of human engagement, particularly during moments of collective celebration.
Simulated Empathy. Interpersonal relationship and presence unfold in layered ways, where conscious experiences intersect with another. True engagement arises when one can inhabit another’s perspective in their subjective experience. Computational tools may approximate behaviour and mimic responses, but they cannot participate in the nuanced currents of joy, attention or shared anticipation that define festive communal life. Brands can maintain pre-planned strategies while intentionally creating moments that honour lived experience, fostering genuine participation and relational vitality.
Key Issues.
AI and the Erosion of Engagement.
AI’s inherently risks losing the complex human gestures and indicators that show how people really feel or behave. Empathy involves a transcendence of the self, entering the experience of another objectively. AI cannot engage with lived intersubjectivity.
For marketers, campaigns may appear precisely targeted yet fail to reflect the embodied, emotional depth of the human experience. Personhood and engagement is the encounter with unique, lived experience which cannot be erased by statistical approximation, risking erosion of trust and relational depth.
Commodification of Persons and Social Groups.
AI’s data-centric approach reduces the human person and communities to mere points of analysis. Persons have intrinsic value, with lives constituted through the unity of body, mind and spirit. Over-reliance on AI can lead brands to treat audiences as predictable data, ignoring ethical considerations, layered motivations, and emotional variations and underlying mood causes.
AI Campaigns may inadvertently commodify relationships, prioritising efficiency over authenticity. For marketing managers, this threatens not only brand trust but also long-term loyalty, particularly in periods such as the festive season, where relationality, generosity, and communal joy are paramount.
Flattening of Human Experience.
AI works from broad models that can’t grasp what makes each person truly unique, their feelings, intentions or the meaning they bring to experiences. Real human engagement comes from recognising the richness of consciousness, embodied joy or concern, and the ways people shape each other’s experiences. Relying on automated decisions and pattern recognition, AI often produces interactions that feel flat and superficial. Marketers can miss subtle emotional responses, which risks campaigns that get clicks but fail to spark the warmth, love, and joy audiences truly expect.
Simulation of Empathy Without Embodiment.
AI can simulate empathy through pattern recognition or predictive modelling, but it lacks the living body and interior “I” necessary for true apperception. Intuitive empathy differs from these mere representations. While the human person senses the other’s experiences as theirs in an asymmetrical, relational act, AI only produces synthetic empathy.
For brand managers, campaigns may seem relational but are essentially shallow. Emotions and reactions are predicted and not genuinely perceived. This is especially important over the festive season, when audiences expect genuine experiences, subtle emotional cues, and a sense of generosity to guide meaningful engagement.
Psychic Contagion and Algorithmic Influence.
When AI spreads trends, emotions or behaviours automatically, people are more likely to absorb these signals passively instead of actively thinking about or feeling them for themselves.
It’s like the algorithm nudges audiences to follow pre-set patterns rather than engaging in genuine, thoughtful or self-aware emotional responses. By relying on pattern recognition without real emotional insight, campaigns may boost short-term engagement but weaken trust, person human agency and transcendence.
Over the festive season, this risks replacing authentic celebration, empathy and communal joy with superficial, pre-packaged experiences that miss the human heart of brand relationships.
Mass Audiences.
AI often treats audiences as broad, uniform groups rather than living, interdependent communities. Genuine engagement comes from openness, shared experience and mutual care. Automated systems reduce the human person to segments, flattening the relational richness that makes human transcendence and progression memorable. Marketing may miss the warmth, shared joy and human relevance that build lasting loyalty.
Human Depth.
AI can produce interactions that are emotionally thin. True engagement requires understanding multiple perspectives, reflecting on experiences and responding to lived human differentiators.
Predictive models cannot replicate the depth of human life activity and experience. Campaigns may unintentionally manipulate rather than inspire, generating short-term metrics while missing the joy, generosity, and communal passion central to Christmas celebrations.
Strategic Recommendations.
Keep Personhood at the Centre.
Using AI must keep humans in charge of storytelling, experience design, and decision-making. Seasonal campaigns should emphasise direct engagement: personal messages, in-store interactions and content that reflects the joy and generosity of the festive period.
Build Empathy into Campaigns.
Teams focusing on understanding lived human experiences and emotional perspectives may benefit from audience realisation and purpose dialogue. Use storytelling, interactive experiences, and narrative design to invite audiences to participate and share meaning. AI cannot replace human insight or the ability to appreciate another’s perspective.
Strengthen Community Bonds.
Campaigns may build and develop shared experiences, collaboration, and peer recognition. AI emotional and relational content must remain human-led. This ensures genuine warmth, solidarity and relational audience learning.
Check for Relational Authenticity.
Teams might ensure campaigns respect audiences, reflect brand intentionality, brand architecture and preserve personal human dignity. Reflection processes help prevent superficial interactions and reinforce authentic engagement.
AI Cannot Replace Quality.
AI cannot replicate the dynamics of human relationships. Interpretation, creativity and relational storytelling are integral to the human narrative and the unfolding brand journey.
These elements bring meaning, shared experience and emotional depth that technology cannot reproduce. The richness of human engagement, the ability to sense, respond, and participate in lived experiences; remains central to brand campaigns that are memorable, reflective and genuinely passionate of the human story.
Respect the Season.
Christmas time evokes personhood joy, generosity and shared celebration. Messages should reflect human experiences, local culture, and communal norms. AI significantly struggles in achieve meaningful core narratives above the instrumentalisation consumer level of engagement.
Learn and Grow.
Teams should continuously evaluate how campaigns affect relationships and community. Regular reflection will uncover how AI erodes audience relationships. Teams are encouraged to discover how brands build trust and genuine Christmas Joy.
Closing Perspectives. Reflective Realism.
Genuine intersubjectivity, empathy and the lived experience of Personhood cannot be algorithmically reproduced. The festive season demonstrates that brands are called to honour embodied joy, relational solidarity, and communal love.
These life propositions form the affective core of human experience. Acknowledging the dual reality of technological capability and human uniqueness requires marketers to adopt a reflective approach. Relational depth, embodied insight and ethical accountability are considerations of effective brand and marketing campaigning.
Brands can harness technology without sacrificing the festive, intersubjective dimensions of experience that create enduring trust and loyalty.
Over-reliance on AI risks producing the illusion of engagement while eroding the very qualities that make marketing meaningful: love, joy and authentic human connection.
By contrast, a reflective, human focused approach honours the intricate layering of consciousness, the ethical significance of personal and communal life, and the affective depth that defines memorable personal experiences.
Brands that preserve the primacy of human relationality even amidst the technocratic paradigm position themselves to cultivate enduring relational and emotional resonance.
As marketers enter the holiday period, the imperative is clear: honour human intersubjectivity, nurture joy, and develop campaigns that recognise people as conscious agents who are aware of their responsibility and fully living, thinking, feeling, perceiving and experiencing in a richly embodied way.
AI cannot replace the lived, ethical and relational dimensions of festive engagement. In embracing this vision, brands can navigate the tension between technological reduction and human depth, ensuring that their strategies are but deeply and humanly Joyous.
Let’s Work Together
And Achieve Collective Chemistry