Your AI Marketing Strategist Gives Everyone the Same Advice
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO
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Ask an LLM for strategic advice about your business, and you’ll get a confident, well-structured answer that sounds like it was written specifically for you.
It wasn’t.
A new study published in HBR tested seven leading LLMs—including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and others—across seven fundamental business tensions where leaders must pick a side: differentiation vs. cost leadership, long-term vs. short-term, exploration vs. exploitation, and so on. They ran over 30,000 simulations.
Guess what? Across nearly every tension, every model clustered toward the same trendy option. Differentiate, don’t commoditize. Augment, don’t automate. Think long-term, always. The researchers coined a term for this: “trendslop”—the tendency for AI to recommend what’s buzzy over what’s right for a specific situation.
The obvious fix of writing better prompts or providing richer context didn’t work. The researchers tried everything: reversing option order, changing framing, demanding a pros-and-cons analysis, and even offering rewards. Across 15,000 additional trials on ChatGPT alone, the biases barely moved. The LLM sounded perfectly tailored to each situation while quietly steering each toward the same cluster of fashionable ideas.
As the researchers put it, LLMs are like the person in the room who can articulate every buzzword from TED Talks and conference seminars but has never analyzed how these ideas play out in the messy realities of a specific market.
It’s not hard to see the marketing parallels.
Should we invest in brand or performance? Go premium or compete on value? Build something new or optimize what’s working? An LLM will almost always nudge you toward the sexier option: the brand play, the premium positioning, the innovative new channel. It will rarely tell you that your best move is to grind on operational efficiency or double down on what’s already converting. But Walmart, Costco, and many others have built empires on exactly this. Sometimes boring is the strategy.
This doesn’t mean you should stop using LLMs for strategic thinking, but it does mean you should use them differently. They’re excellent at generating alternatives, surfacing blind spots, and stress-testing a direction you’ve already chosen. They’re terrible at making the hard trade-offs that strategy actually requires.
Strategy isn’t about finding the most inspiring option—it’s about deciding what you will not do. That part stays human.
Next time an LLM gives you a recommendation that sounds smart and feels right, ask yourself: would it give this same advice to my competitor? The answer is almost certainly yes.
— Torsten and Peter
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