Beyond metrics: The rise of vibe marketing

In a landscape in which privacy regulations like the GDPR and evolving consumer expectations are fundamentally changing traditional data-driven marketing playbooks, a counterintuitive strategy emerges: vibe marketing.

Defined by its focus on emotional resonance over click-through rates and qualitative cultural intuition over quantitative dashboards, this new approach leverages AI to amplify creativity and interpret unstructured human feedback.

For privacy-conscious brands, vibe marketing offers a lifeline, a way to build connections through tone, aesthetics, and shared values rather than behavioral tracking and data mining.

It’s not a rejection of data, but a refinement, a way to use technology to listen more deeply to audiences who guard their privacy but crave authenticity.

Our conversation with Jamie Bulman, Senior Solutions Consultant at Brandwatch, explores this evolving challenge, focusing on the rise of vibe marketing and the need to move beyond traditional, sometimes flawed, metrics.

What is vibe marketing?

Brunni Corsato: I’ve heard the term before but, what is your definition of vibe marketing?

Jamie Bulman: Vibe marketing is a way of talking about marketing that goes beyond numbers and long approval flows.

It tries to be more dynamic and get past flawed metrics, and also leverages AI tools to help with that process. Particularly on the content side, but also in terms of analysing and measuring performance. That would be my definition.

Brunni Corsato: You mentioned AI right off the bat. Do you find that this type of marketing is a direct result of AI or was it just accelerated by it?

Jamie Bulman: That’s a trend that predates the latest boom in AI, in the sense that there’s been a growing awareness that a lot of the metrics used by communications and marketing professionals are quite flawed inherently.

Let’s take something like sentiment analysis. It is something that gets used often as a way of measuring the impact of the campaign on brand equity and things like that.

But due to the limitations of that metric, there’s been a decline in trust and in absolute quantitative metrics that are attempting to measure something that is inherently chaotic and messy, like social media.

Another example would be something like reach or ad value, things like that, which are just kind of debunked, really, as absolute metrics.

They’re an indicator of performance, but they’re not an absolute value that you can use to measure the impact of the campaign or marketing initiative.

Measurement impact

Brunni Corsato: Do you see marketers trying to pull away from chasing numbers? Because there can be friction between wanting more data and it not being the most helpful in some cases, as you said.

Jamie Bulman: You need to know what a number tells you compared to a more custom indicator or metric that you define internally that aligns with your goals.

For example, people from a particular audience reposting or engaging with our content. Is traditional media picking up on the key messages? Not only are we being mentioned, but how are we being mentioned?

What kind of words and language are journalists, the audience, or whoever, our stakeholders, using to discuss our brand rather than just a mention of our brand?

How to get “vibe” data

Brunni Corsato: How do you suggest that marketers go about this? What else is there to assess the vibe?

Jamie Bulman: I work with a lot of brands and organisations on various projects involving social media and also traditional media.

And the more sophisticated marketers and PR professionals that I work with tend to have more custom metrics, which are specific to their brand and company’s objectives, rather than looking at top level numbers.

So that might be devising metrics such as shareability. Looking at how often on social media people are proactively sharing their content rather than looking at how much reach it is driving.

You know, actually looking at how keen people are to share this content and be open to the kind of inherent messiness of taking a more qualitative approach to measuring impact.

For instance, for a fashion brand. Do people talk about the fact that we spend 12 pence more per T-shirt to get that kind of quality whatever? Is that something that cuts through?

It’s much more focused on what you might describe as kind of loosey-goosey qualitative metrics rather than sort of absolute.

Brunni Corsato: This approach is also related to being open-minded in how to measure marketing efforts?

Jamie Bulman: Yeah, I think it’s being open to messiness. It’s accepting and acknowledging that the Internet is a really messy place.

Brunni Corsato: I mean, human behavior, too, is super messy.

Jamie Bulman: Yeah.

The role of AI

Brunni Corsato: How do you see the impact of AI in the vibe-first approach?

Jamie Bulman: There’s two sides to it. The first one is, obviously, content ideation just got a lot easier. Producing content, too.

In the past, it made numbers and justifying spending much more important. You had to use quantitative metrics and decks to convince managers and leadership to invest in particular campaigns, etc. You needed to justify ideas before you actually even tried them.

So you’re trying to prove something hypothetical, which is inherently flawed, but also there was no better way of doing it because campaigns were inherently expensive.

AI has massively changed that in the sense that it’s just way easier to just produce high quality content for less money, right? Which means that you have a lot more room to try things out, to be creative and to iterate based on experience and performance.

On the analytics side, it’s just gotten much easier to derive more qualitative-type insights. You can feed thousands of social media posts into large language models and understand what the key themes are without having to actually read through them.

That makes it easier to pull out narratives from social media posts. In the past that was really labor intensive to do and something that was only available to the Unilevers of this world, who have teams of analysts that can do this work.

Whereas now, that’s something that is available to more marketers from smaller organizations.

The future of vibe marketing

Brunni Corsato: Where do you see vibe marketing going? Do you see this evolving?

Jamie Bulman: We’ll see more and more content that is AI-generated — we’re already seeing that. It’s going to be harder to distinguish that from the real thing.

It does have risks, but as long as it is done safely and responsibly by brands who have an interest in protecting their reputation, I don’t see any inherent risks in that.

On the measurement side, AI is driving an increased awareness of the other approaches to success metrics. It’s becoming easier to have more complex strategies, rather than taking a one size fits all approach and just giving big numbers to the people above you.