Your Best Marketing Strategy Starts Where AI’s Advice Ends
By Lisa Peyton and her team of AI super heroes
I’m teaching an AI for social media class right now to a group of working digital marketing professionals. For each step of the strategy process, we’re leveraging the latest AI tools together. I’m showing them how to meta-prompt, how to verify their work, and how to use AI to actually improve campaign outcomes.
A few weeks in, we hit SMART objectives. My learning materials were clear: keep your objectives free of strategies and tactics. Define what success looks like before you decide how to get there. Basic strategy discipline.
They came back with the opposite.
Objective after objective included specific channels like TikTok and Instagram, paired with content formats like UGC and influencer partnerships. These weren’t strategies. They were tactics dressed up as goals, and AI had written every single one of them.
What happened? The AI tools filled in the blanks with what a “typical” social media objective should look like based on what’s popular right now. And the students who didn’t question the output, who didn’t push back, got roped into specific tactics before their research had even begun.
This is the death knell of strategy work. And it turns out, there’s now a name for it.
Researchers Gave It a Name: Trendslop
A new study published in Harvard Business Review tested seven leading LLMs, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and others, across seven core business tensions that require strategic trade-offs. Think differentiation vs. cost leadership, automation vs. augmentation, short-term vs. long-term focus.
The results were striking. Across thousands of simulations, the models almost universally recommended the same trendy strategies regardless of the business context. The researchers coined a term for this: trendslop, the tendency for AI to default to buzzy, popular ideas over context-specific strategic reasoning.
Every model favored differentiation over cost leadership, augmentation over automation, and long-term thinking over short-term execution. Even when the researchers added rich, detailed organizational context (tech startups, construction companies, nonprofits, investment banks), the biases barely moved. On average, adding context shifted the AI’s recommendations by just 11%.
Here’s the part that should make every content marketer sit up: better prompting didn’t fix it either. Across 15,000 trials, manipulating prompts only shifted responses by about 22%, and much of that shift came from simply reordering the options presented, not from the AI actually reasoning differently.
Why Content Marketers Should Care (A Lot)
This research focused on executive strategy, but the implications for content marketing are enormous. If you’re using AI to help shape your content strategy, your editorial calendar, your audience positioning, or your campaign planning, you’re getting the same bias. You’re getting the answer that sounds right based on what’s trending, not the answer that is right for your brand.
AI will always nudge you toward differentiation, innovation, and collaboration because those words carry positive weight in the training data. But what if your brand actually needs operational discipline? What if doubling down on the boring thing that already works is the smarter play? What if competing aggressively is the right call instead of collaborating?
The researchers compared LLMs to a freshly minted MBA who parrots what’s popular rather than what’s right for a particular situation. I’ve seen this firsthand in my classroom. The AI didn’t analyze my students’ target audiences or competitive landscapes before recommending TikTok and influencer content. It just predicted what a social media objective usually looks like based on patterns in its training data.
Watch Out for the Hybrid Trap
There’s another finding from the research that content marketers need to hear. When the researchers gave AI the option to recommend both sides of a strategic trade-off, it almost always did. The researchers call this the “hybrid trap.”
For content marketers, this looks familiar. It’s AI telling you that you need a podcast AND a YouTube strategy AND TikTok AND long-form blogs AND short-form video AND email AND a community. Sound like any content plan you’ve seen lately?
Strategy is about making hard choices. It’s about deciding what not to do. As I wrote in a recent post, the marketers who think with AI will outperform the ones who think like AI. Accepting every recommendation without questioning it is thinking like AI. Pushing back is thinking with it.
Your Playbook: How to Outsmart Trendslop
The good news? Now that you know about this bias, you can work around it. Here’s how:
Use AI to expand your options, not make your decisions. AI is excellent at generating alternatives, surfacing blind spots, and laying out pros and cons. Let it do that work. But keep the final strategic call firmly in your hands. Your job is to evaluate, not just execute what the AI suggests.
Deliberately prompt for the opposite. If AI recommends a differentiation play, ask it to make the strongest possible case for a cost-leadership approach. If it suggests you need to be on every platform, ask it to build a strategy around doing fewer things better. Force the AI to engage with the full landscape instead of defaulting to what’s trendy.
Treat “do both” as a red flag. When AI recommends a hybrid strategy that covers all the bases, don’t mistake that for sophistication. It’s usually a sign the AI is hedging instead of reasoning. Run separate prompts for each strategic option, then use your own judgment to decide.
Be the human checkpoint. This is the lesson from my classroom. If my students had questioned the AI’s output against the guidance they’d been given, they would have caught the problem instantly. The marketers who build a habit of verifying, pushing back, and asking “is this actually right for my situation?” will consistently outperform those who accept the first draft.
As I’ve written about before, AI is a team sport. No single tool gets you all the way there. The real skill is knowing how to coordinate multiple tools, and knowing when to override all of them.
Your Strategic Instinct Is the Edge
Here’s what I want you to take away from this. The research confirms what many of us have felt working with these tools: AI gives you the popular answer, not the strategic one. It reflects the internet’s collective conventional wisdom, not the nuanced reality of your brand, your audience, or your competitive position.
That’s not a reason to stop using AI. It’s a reason to use it better. The marketers who thrive in this landscape won’t be the ones who use AI the most. They’ll be the ones who know when to push back, when to verify, and when their own experience and instinct should override the algorithm.
Your strategy beats the trendslop. Trust it.
Lisa Peyton is an AI practitioner, professor, and pioneer helping marketers navigate the evolving AI landscape. Find more resources at lisapeyton.com/ai-marketing-resources or connect with her at linktr.ee/lisapeyton.
