Dear marketer friend.

Let me guess.

You have been doing marketing the same way for years. You are targeting demographics like it’s still 1995, with your Total Avaiable Markets, Serviceable Available Market and your Serviceable Obtainable Market for which you are running campaigns that sound like they were written by robots for robots.

And lately something is keeping you up at night.

You are wondering why your perfectly logical ads get ignored while some random brand selling overpriced water in cans becomes a cult phenomenon.

Welcome to the party my friend.

You are late but finally you’re here, and we’re gonna have a brawl.

Here’s what happened while you were busy optimizing click-through rates.

The entire game changed.

Demographics died.

Cookie-cutter campaigns got buried six feet under, and something called Vibe Marketing took over the playground. Now, if you don’t know what that means yet don’t worry because most people are still figuring it out anyway, but the ones who get it first are eating everyone else’s lunch.

Ok, let’s do a little gedankenexperiment.

Just think about the last thing you bought that wasn’t absolutely necessary.

Go ahead.

I’ll wait.

Waaaaiiiting.

Now ask yourself why you bought it.

Was it because the specs were better, or because the price was lower, or maybe cause some ad told you it would solve all your problems?

I’m guessing, probably not.

I’m thinking that you bought it though because it felt right.

Because it matched who you are or who you want to be. Because it gave you good vibes. That’s not an accident. That’s the new rules of the game.

‘Traditional’ marketing thinks that people are spreadsheets and ‘personas’ walking around making rational decisions, but Vibe Marketing knows better. People are emotional creatures who buy feelings and justify with logic later.

They don’t want products, they want to belong to something.

They don’t want features, because they want identity.

They don’t want to be sold to, cause they want to be understood.

And if you’re still trying to convince them with bullet points and spreadsheets you’re basically trying to seduce someone by reading them your outdated resume.

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Yeah, it’s father is Vibe Coding

This whole vibe thing didn’t come out of nowhere.

It all started with some AI guy named Andrej Karpathy who created the term “Vibe Coding” which is all the rage in software development country nowadays. So what’s the deal with vibe coding anyway?

Think of it this way.

You are not going to following rigid programming rules you trust your gut and let intuition guide the process. You feel your way through the code instead of obsessing over perfect documentation and formal procedures. It’s like jazz for programmers. Less structure more flow. The language is also different. Programming language feels like it’s from an alien civilization, but in Vibe Coding, you can use your native language.

Yes, indeed. Using your own language to code an application.

It has been around for some time now, and more and more people are on to it, and the technology is progressing rapidly.

And now, smart marketing people saw this approach and had a lightbulb moment. They thought “holy shit what if we applied this intuitive approach to brands instead of our boring demographic spreadsheets?”

So they did.

And it worked. Really fucking well.

Here’s how this plays out in the real world. Old school marketing would target “urban female professionals aged 25 to 34 with household incomes above $75K”.

Vibe marketing says screw that noise.

What if a 22-year-old college student and a 65-year-old retiree both love the same aesthetic, and both want to feel creative and free, and both hate corporate bullshit?

Traditional targeting would never connect these people. Vibe marketing puts them in the same tribe because they share the same emotional DNA.

The brands killing it right now figured this out. Liquid Death didn’t become a billion-dollar company by explaining why canned water is superior to bottled water. They became a billion-dollar company by making water feel punk rock. By creating a vibe that said “we’re not like other beverage companies”.

People literally tattoo their logo on their bodies. Ok, dumb fucks, but hey, when was the last time someone got a Coca-Cola tattoo? Exactly.

Where it starts to become interesting is that AI is making this whole vibe thing possible at scale.

Before AI you could have brilliant creative ideas but you’d need months and massive budgets to execute them. Now you can generate dozens of different emotional directions in minutes. Test twenty different vibes instead of two different headlines. Iterate in hours instead of weeks. The machines do the work, and the hoomans focus on the feelings.

Smart marketers are becoming what some people call “centaur marketers”. Half human intuition. Half machine intelligence.

Tony Stark had Jarvis.

Luke had R2-D2.

I, unfortunately have to work with. . . Martin.

And modern marketers have AI assistants that can execute their emotional vision at superhuman speed. Now small challenger brands can compete with companies that have budgets ten times bigger.

It is happening on biblical proportions. David doesn’t have a slingshot anymore. David has a fucking rocket launcher.

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The VIBE marketing framework

The secret sauce is something called the 80/20 rule of feelings. You don’t need to make every single touchpoint emotionally charged. That would be exhausting for everyone involved, but instead you focus on the moments that matter most. First impressions. Moments of achievement. Points of friction. Identity touchpoints. Advocacy opportunities.

Get those right and people will forgive a lot of other stuff. Screw those up and it doesn’t matter how perfect everything else is.

There’s a framework for this if you like frameworks.

It’s called VIBE. . . duh.

And it is an acronym.

Duh.

Velocity means moving at the speed of culture instead of the speed of corporate bureaucracy. Identity means designing for who your customers want to become not just what they need right now. Boundaryless means your (girl/boy-friend, just kidding) vibe should feel consistent whether someone sees your TikTok or opens your package. Emotion means starting with how you want people to feel and working backward from there.

Different platforms need different expressions of your core vibe but the feeling should stay consistent.

TikTok rewards authentic emotional content that hits cultural moments. Community spaces like Discord let you co-create the vibe with your audience. Physical experiences let people actually live your brand instead of just consuming it. The medium changes but the emotional message stays the same.

But hold your horses, cause there’s a dark side nobody talks about. Vibe marketing is powerful as hell. Maybe too powerful. When you can generate emotionally targeted experiences at scale using AI the line between persuasion and manipulation gets pretty blurry. Some brands are going to use this stuff to exploit people’s emotional vulnerabilities. Others are going to use it to create genuine value and connection. And I know for a fact that a lot of corporates tend to lean towards the manipulative side.

Guess which ones will survive long term when people figure out the difference.

If you want to get started with Vibe Marketing, there’s a seven-day sprint that can get you moving.

Day one audit your current emotional landscape. Day two define your core vibe. Day three map the moments that matter most. Day four build your tech stack. Day five create rapid prototypes. Day six test with real humans. Day seven iterate and scale what works. It’s not rocket science but it does require giving a shit about how people feel instead of just what they buy.

The future belongs to brands that make people feel something real, and not the brands that shout the loudest, not the brands with the biggest budgets, and certainly not the brands with the most features. Brands that understand emotions are the only sustainable competitive advantage in a world where AI can make any product functional and any message clear. Everything else can be copied or automated.

Feelings can’t.

And feelings win every fucking time.

Signing off

Marco

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I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Let’s keep smashing delusions with truth. We are the chaos. We are the firewall. We are Big Tech’s PR nightmare.

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