Vibe Check Part 1: A Vibe Marketing Strategy Guide

Vibes aren't just for coding anymore—marketers are starting to hop on the Gen AI vibe train to get more done faster. AI tools promise to help marketers ideate campaigns, create mountains of content, summarize customer research, and automate outreach with just a couple of LLM chat prompts. And, well, vibes.

However, there’s another important marketing vibe that may not mesh with Gen AI: the customer vibe. Good customer vibes are the emotional connections that create not just conversion, but lasting loyalty. They’re what brands are built on. And infusing those good vibes into customer touchpoints is a process that historically takes hands-on time and effort—exactly what vibe marketing is trying to shortcut.

So while Gen AI vibing can make a marketer’s work faster and easier, could its hands-off nature also make it harder to cultivate the precious customer vibe? Not necessarily. I think vibe marketers just need an extra process step to make sure the vibe train isn’t going off the rails—what I call a vibe check. To understand that, let’s dig into vibe marketing and how it can work in sync with branding.

What is vibe marketing?

Vibe marketing is when marketers use Gen AI tools and workflows to fast-track ideation, creation, research, and automation. All you need is a “vibe” of what you want, spelled out in a chat prompt, to get an AI output that’s surprisingly close to human-created marketing work.

Some of the AI tools vibe marketers use are general-purpose, while more and more are being built specifically for marketing needs. You’ve probably already encountered some of these recently:

• Writing: Claude or ChatGPT for drafting email copy, social media posts, and blogs (we even used a bit of ChatGPT for this)
• Visuals: MidJourney and other image generators for professional-looking concept art, Gamma for pitch decks, and new video capabilities in tools like Google Gemini
• Landing pages: App-building tools like Lovable double as website creators, while workflow tools like AirOps can help you optimize for SEO and AEO
• Research: LLMs can search and cite their sources, but other AI tools like Kraftful (recently acquired by Amplitude) can collect and summarize huge quantities of customer feedback data
• Workflows: Gumloop, n8n, Relay, Writer, and more for automated marketing workflows and AI agents that can handle multichannel messaging launches, activate personalized nurture campaigns, or turn scraped profiles into CRM info

And while that may seem like a big list of things to try, it’s honestly just scratching the surface of AI tools out there. (With even more on the way from Amplitude soon!)

How is vibe marketing different from traditional marketing?

You know that this isn't the first time new marketing technology came along that promised—and some even delivered—productivity gains. What makes vibe marketing tools different, and seems to take them a step beyond traditional marketing, is their:

• Extreme speed: Gen AI tools are extremely fast, and those speed gains cascade through your workflow. You can understand thousands of customer feedback points in minutes, use that learning to generate hundreds of ad concepts in an afternoon, and deploy personalized versions of the winning idea before you hit the middle of the week.
• Extremely low barrier to entry: With natural language input, Gen AI tools let you do incredibly technical marketing work without specialized technical learning. You don’t have to be an expert in Photoshop, Marketo, or SQL to launch the campaign above. You yourself can do more, and your team can do more together.
• Increased ability to iterate: Vibe marketing’s speed and power work in sync to supercharge iteration cycles. Just as quickly as you can generate a single pitch deck or landing page, you can also generate variants to test, learn, and adapt to any customer or cohort.

When realized effectively, the gains from vibe marketing can be a huge competitive advantage over traditional marketing timelines and learning curves. And by getting more work done and consolidating your toolsets, you’ll be saving budget too—as long as you can keep your per-token costs down.

What about the customer vibe?

How the customer feels about your company is the essence of your brand. Brand is what makes a pair of Air Force Ones feel not just comfortable, but imbued with the confidence of “Just Do It.” It’s what turns an iPhone from a widely used handheld computer into the antithesis of generic technology. Getting your customer vibe right can be the sole differentiator for a successful launch or taking over an industry.

But creating that vibe takes more than just a brand manifesto, a color palette, or a catchy slogan. Your brand needs to tie together into a cohesive feeling that resonates with your customers—and you have to make that felt at every touch point. That means for any experience, from a billboard campaign to an individual outreach email, you have to put yourself in the customer’s shoes or engage with them directly to confirm they're catching the vibes you want. And if they aren’t, figure out how to close that gap.

This is where things get tricky with vibe marketing. Gen AI makes it easier to create output, but it doesn’t necessarily make that output fit your brand’s customer vibe. You can add your guidelines to an LLM knowledge base or feed visual asset examples to Gemini, but the feeling you want your customers to get is a lot harder to communicate to AI—and harder to reproduce synthetically.

Plenty of marketers will see the time and effort of infusing brand as incompatible with the speed and remove of vibe marketing. How can you stay in control of the customer vibe for those hundred emails you’re auto-generating every hour? The productivity gains from an LLM won’t matter if it turns your brand into, to put it frankly, AI slop.

Vibe check to the rescue

Vibe marketing doesn’t have to be a non-starter for the customer vibe, though. Vibe marketers just need to add an extra step in their workflows to review the customer vibe: a vibe check.

A vibe check is a purposeful review point to compare your vibed output to the brand feeling you’re going for. It can be as simple as just taking a moment to read over what you have (or a sample of it) and asking yourself:

• What feeling do I think someone would get from this experience?
• Does that feeling match my brand vibe?
• Could there be a better way to match the vibe?

Answering questions like these does take a little more specialization than you need to start vibe marketing, but not too much more—after all, the vibe should be clear to your everyday customers too. And if you don’t know what your brand vibe is, you absolutely should nail that down before vibing any further.

A vibe check also doesn’t have to take long. With the time you save by vibing, you can afford to spend a couple of minutes on it. And if the Gen AI output doesn’t pass the vibe check, the speed of vibing means you can iterate faster to get something that does.

You also may already have vibe checks in your traditional marketing workflow. If you have a new contractor or junior team member producing content, you'd review their work for grammar, accuracy, and brand—and you can think of your vibe marketing in the same way. You just have to be purposeful about it, and not lose the vibe check with the speed and seeming expertise of your AI tools.

Full steam ahead on the vibe train

Because vibe marketing is so new, there are a lot of unknowns that come with it. So far, it does seem to be a very powerful tool for increasing the speed of marketing work and lowering barriers to entry. But it also has the potential to wreck the vibes for your customers. Even just the appearance of AI in some places (looking at you, em dashes) can turn customers off.

That’s why a vibe check is such a critical tool for successful vibe marketing. With minimal interference, it can help you avoid accidentally killing the vibe for your customers, and it can let you keep your Gen AI vibe humming along.

And although we only touched on manual vibe checks in this post, we’re going to get into ways to automate your vibe checks with Amplitude in the next installment. Join us then to keep the vibe train running!