Marketing to a dual audience: The human and the machine
Algorithms, recommendation engines, and search systems increasingly mediate the path to purchase. What does that mean for marketers who are still largely designing strategies for human audiences? Andrew Slot of 5D explores.
We live in a technologically driven world, something which is both a blessing and a curse. Marketers obsess over audience personas, customer journeys and funnels, as though every choice still sits squarely in the hands of the consumer. But it doesn’t. We are no longer just marketing to buyers; increasingly, we are also marketing to technology.
Technology has crept so deeply into the mechanics of decision-making that it now shapes the very way people think. New research from 5D shows technology induced declines in conscientious behaviour, self-efficacy and even optimism, but showed increases in apathy, anxiety and over-reliance on external systems to make decisions for us. That means when buyers feel overwhelmed or uncertain, they turn to shortcuts. Those shortcuts are rarely human; they are digital. AI recommendation engines, social feeds and search algorithms now act like gatekeepers between intent and action.
That jumper you never meant to buy? The one that appeared in your Instagram feed just after you’d clicked on a similar brand’s website? That wasn’t you simply making a choice; that was an algorithm reframing your options and nudging you toward a click. This same process plays out in more serious contexts as well. Mortgages, insurance, health providers – buyers search, compare, evaluate and increasingly surrender their final decision to technology, whether through a ranking system, a chatbot or an LLM. The research shows that the higher the personal risk of the choice, the greater the reliance on technology to validate it.
Andrew Slot
The traditional marketing funnel was built on the idea that awareness drives preference, which eventually drives action. Spend at the top, and you’ll capture more at the bottom. But technology has blown a hole through the middle of the funnel. Five years ago, two Google researchers coined the term “the messy middle”, which captured something that marketers had long sensed but struggled to articulate: that the space between the initial trigger and the final purchase decision had, because of technology, become chaotic. Many consumers no longer trust themselves to make decisions unaided, so they use technology to check, compare and often outsource the decision entirely.
In such a world, marketers need to better understand how consumers make choices. Every decision starts with the way a person frames the choice in their mind. Is it about fulfilling a need or a want? Does it carry risk? Will it shape my identity? Will it barely matter tomorrow? These mental frames dictate how much effort people will expend, what information they will seek, and whether they will lean on emotion, reason or technology to help them decide. In a world where digital systems sit between people and their choices, understanding these frames is critical.
So, if a choice is low-risk and emotional (grabbing a snack on the way home) buyers rely on familiarity. Technology might play a small role, yes, but brand cues like logos or packaging do most of the work. But for high-stakes, rational decisions (like choosing a financial provider), technology steps in as a co-pilot. It’s here that buyers expect to research, compare and be reassured. Going beyond the information they are seeking, they want validation from the systems they trust. If your brand isn’t built to be “findable” and “recommendable” in these systems, you’re not even in the game.
We’ve entered an era where marketers must design not just for human memory and motivation, but for machine mediation. It’s not enough for people to know who you are; the algorithm needs to know as well. The danger here is that this can quickly become manipulative. If buyers are distracted and therefore increasingly outsourcing their decisions, the temptation is to exploit that. Instead, marketers need to build strategies that align with both human psychology and the digital architectures mediating it. Put another way, brands need to work with a dual audience: the human and the machine.
In many cases, the most important conversation about your brand isn’t happening in a boardroom or even in a buyer’s head. It’s happening in the black box of an algorithm.
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