WTF is Vibe Marketing?

Hiya,

Marketers are getting lost in the sauce again.

This time, the buzzword du jour is Vibe Marketing.

Apparently it’s the new marketing. It's going to flip the entire industry on its head. Whatever these vibes are, they're inescapable.

When I hear the term, I picture a tech bro in a Baja Hoodie at an ayahuasca offsite with his startup buddies. This is gonna be a total vibe, dude.

A bit of this, too.

It feels a lot like a few years ago, when everyone was looking for Growth Hackers—someone who could grow a brand 20x without a team, making things happen quickly without much attention to detail. At Growclass, we’ve never been fans of that term. It’s fluff. And we believe in building real growth—sustainable, strategic, and rooted in skill.

Vibe Marketing and Growth Hacking live in the same universe: buzzy, vague, and usually tossed around on LinkedIn by people who want to sound like they’re ahead of the curve. The problem is that these terms are usually so poorly defined—or are constantly being redefined—that they confuse more than they clarify. It's almost as if they're created specifically to confuse and exclude people.

Gatekeeping happens to be my biggest marketing pet peeve, so in the spirit of de-fluffing, I pulled together every definition of Vibe Marketing I could find. Here’s the TL;DR:

It’s AI-powered marketing.

More specifically, it:

Uses AI to speed up content creation, testing, and optimization, with the goal of launching campaigns within days or hours

• Focuses on creating emotional connection and trust, not just listing product features
• Builds a distinct vibe—a mood, aesthetic, or sense of belonging that resonates with your audience
• Delivers content that educates, entertains, or inspires—not just sells

There is a real need for speed in marketing right now, and that’s a big shift from how many of us learned the ropes: quarterly planning, big campaigns planned months in advance through meticulous processes of briefing, creative production, layers of approval, execution, measurement, and post-mortems. AI has placed a brick on the gas pedal.

The idea itself isn't wrong: marketing should make people feel something. It should build trust, create emotional resonance, and reflect culture back authentically. But when you use AI to fast-track campaigns without truly understanding your customer, your “vibe" is actually just noise.

But here’s the thing:

Speed can't replace strategy. AI's best use is making you more efficient—automating the boring bits that eat away at your time so you have more time to use that big human brain of yours to be more strategic and creative.

Real brand building still demands clarity, consistency, positioning, and deep customer insight. AI can help support that work, but it can’t do that work.

That’s still ours.

And that’s a good thing.

Talk soon, friend.

Ines

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