Vibe Marketing is a structural shift, not a social trend

Marketing has always been emotional, even when it pretended not to be. Long before dashboards and attribution models, brands were built on feelings. What has changed today is not whether emotion matters, but how quickly it can now be produced, tested, and amplified.

In recent months, a new phrase has begun circulating in marketing and technology circles: vibe marketing. It sounds casual, even flippant, but it points to a serious shift underway in how creative work is being done.

To understand vibe marketing, it helps to start elsewhere, specifically, in software development. Earlier this year, AI researcher Andrej Karpathy popularised the term “vibe coding” to describe a hands-off way of building software. Instead of writing code line by line, developers give high-level instructions and feedback while artificial intelligence handles execution. The human sets direction; the machine does the work.

It was only a matter of time before marketers asked a familiar question: if developers can vibe code, can marketers vibe market?

At its simplest, vibe marketing shifts the marketer’s role from execution to intent. Rather than painstakingly crafting every headline, banner, visual or post, the marketer defines the vibe, the mood, tone, aesthetic and cultural context, and lets generative AI produce the assets.The analogy is not a junior copywriter, but a creative director with an impossibly fast team. AI generates variations at scale; the human guides, selects and refines. The “vibe” becomes brief.

This shift has been accelerated by recent advances in generative AI, particularly multimodal systems that can produce high-quality images and design concepts through simple prompts. What followed was not just experimentation, but rapid adoption. Marketers began creating moodboards in seconds, testing dozens of creative directions overnight, and spinning up entire campaigns with teams that would once have needed an agency.The immediate effect is a dramatic compression of marketing timelines.

Vibe marketing is gaining attention not because it is fashionable, but because it addresses long-standing frictions in modern marketing. Traditional campaigns move through multiple layers like strategy, creative, design, analytics with each adding delay. AI collapses these handoffs;one marketer can now ideate, generate and test content in days, sometimes hours.

Further, instead of A/B testing two versions, marketers can test dozens or hundreds of variations simultaneously, learning in real time which emotional cues resonate. Capabilities once reserved for large agencies are now available to startups and solo operators. This matters in markets like India, where ambition often outpaces resources. Additionally, internet culture moves at a different rhythm where memes, aesthetics and moods rise and fall quickly. AI enables brands to respond while the moment is still alive.

In this sense, vibe marketing reflects a broader shift away from rigid demographic targeting toward cultural and emotional alignment. It is less about age brackets and more about shared sensibilities.

But this is also where caution is required. From observation, AI is excellent at reproducing style. It is far less reliable at understanding strategy. Without a clear point of view, it generates volume without meaning.The real risk is not bad content, but too much average content.

When production becomes effortless, irrelevance scales just as quickly. A stream of on-trend visuals without a grounding insight may entertain briefly, but it does not build brands.This is why human judgement becomes more important, not less. If everyone has access to the same tools, advantage will not come from output, but from clarity. Brands with a sharp sense of who they are will use AI to express that more effectively. Those without it will simply generate noise faster.Vibe marketing, in this sense, exposes weak strategy rather than compensating for it.

There is also the matter of authenticity. Emotion cannot be automated indefinitely. Audiences are quick to sense when a “vibe” feels manufactured rather than lived. AI can generate 10 ads as easily as one, but it cannot tell which ones feel true to a brand’s character. That responsibility remains human. The marketer’s role increasingly resembles that of an editor where they are constantly curating, refining and discarding with discipline. Vibes, in other words, are not a replacement for thinking.

For Indian marketers, this moment is particularly significant. India’s digital culture is fragmented, expressive and deeply contextual. If used thoughtfully, Vibe-led marketing can allow brands to speak more natively to communities and subcultures.But the temptation to chase novelty is real. Visual cleverness without strategic coherence will not translate into long-term brand equity. Speed is an advantage only when direction is clear.

Vibe marketing is not a passing trend. It reflects a deeper reorganisation of creative labour where execution will increasingly be automated but direction will remain human.The real differentiator will be taste, judgment and insight.For marketers willing to engage seriously with this shift, the opportunity is real as barriers are lower and experimentation is cheaper.

Creativity can be playful again. But only if we remember a simple truth: vibes amplify intent, they do not create it.

(Kumar and Malhan are associate professors, marketing, XLRI Jamshedpur. Views are personal.)