The Impact of Artificial Intelligence Adoption on Marketing Effectiveness, Customer Engagement, and Marketing Personalization: Perceptions of Pakistani Marketing Professionals

Abstract

The present study focused on measuring the perceptions of marketing professionals about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on marketing practices specifically AI adoption, customers engagement, marketing personalization and campaign effectiveness. A quantitative survey research design was used.  The data was collected from 166 purposively selected marketing professionals from Lahore, Pakistan.  A structured questionnaire was used to measure the perception of participants of the study.  Depending on the categorical and ordinal nature of the variables, descriptive statistics, association measures based on non-parametric tests and ordinal logistic regression were used. The results revealed that the exposure to AI was moderate to high for most of the respondents and the extent of the adoption by the organisations was mostly moderate to high. In general, AI was seen to be effective in boosting customer engagement and optimisation of campaigns.  The strongest statistical result was for personalisation, where the likelihood of achieving better personalised marketing experiences was greatly predicted by the higher level of AI usage with an odds ratio of 4.78 (p < .001). The perceived marketing effectiveness was not statistically significantly predicted by the use of AI. Key concerns during implementation included the issues of data privacy, adapting to a workforce, transparency and algorithmic bias. In addition, personalisation, targeting, automation, predictive decision making and AI agents emerged as the biggest present and future effects of AI on marketing through the thematic analysis of the open-ended answers.

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