Market Killers: Has Marketing finally met its Nemesis?
Marketers used to dream of being a category killer. A level of retail market domination that rendered the competition helpless to compete, either on price or product selection. Home Depot, B&Q, Ikea, Walmart, Costco. They are all category killers. Dominant and all powerful in their sector of the market, few small-scale competitors, and enviable market share.
Category killing was big business in the 80s and 90s. For some successful operators it still is. Fast forward to 2026 and we have a much bigger threat on the marketing horizon.
The Market Killer.
Not a company that kills a category, but a technology revolution that kills the market itself.
This is existential for marketers, and if you are not talking about it forcefully at board level, you should be.
We’re hearing more and more every day that AI might be stealing your job. AI efficiencies and cost savings are becoming more apparent. Businesses are already cutting staff whose toil and skill is no longer needed.
In 2026 an estimated 100,000 people have lost their jobs in the first 11 weeks of the year. That’s an average of 9000 people every week since the turn of the year. Oracle, Amazon, Meta, Atlassian are just some of the growth companies laying off thousands of people and replacing them with AI. The World Economic Forum estimated in 2025 that AI could replace 92 million jobs by 2030.
This is only the beginning.
Efficiency is great and humans are costly. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to run a business without them?
Undoubtedly. Except for one pesky, tiny, tricky little detail that all the clever tech idiots appear to be overlooking: customers are people too.
And without customers, there is no business.
Even if you are a B2B operator, if your customers don’t have customers, you are still goosed.
Tell me, once we reach the height of this automation utopia having sacked all the humans, who’s going to buy your products? And what will they be buying them with? Will it be the fruit of the magic money tree? And where does the magic money tree get its fruit from?
It’s all very well throwing out theories about concepts like Universal Basic Incomes, but where’s the income coming from for the UBI in the first place? Taxes? Yep, there won’t be much in the way of those if nobody is working.
It’s the weirdest thing to witness, and I guess not everyone may have experienced it, but there’s a pattern to desolation. In any city or town in Scotland (where I live) when the dominant local industry has no longer needed the residents to do the work (coal mining, ship building, whisky production, oil production), and the unemployment rates suddenly shoot up, these towns and cities fail to function.
Shops close. Crime soars. Businesses collapse. Poverty moves in. And many are still trying to recover DECADES later. Do you know why? No one has any spare money to buy stuff.
It’s such an obvious outcome of AI efficiency work that you’d think the AI billionaire boffins might have thought this through, beginning to end. And put a solution in place first. Lest we fall off the edge of the Earth as we move ever closer to this event horizon. It’s kind of looking scarily like they haven’t.
Why would any company think it’s a clever strategy to kill its own customer base? To start this process by stripping people of their income, and their potential to buy. It’s utterly bonkers.
To do it in the same breath while also talking about sustainability policies just smacks of dim-witted stupidity. Sustainable business practice starts with not shooting yourself in the foot and heart first.
The survival of an economy needs humans who consume goods and services.
At some point, the dog will bite its own tail. Then it might realise that this circularity serves no-one. Humans, after all, knew how to barter long before they had economies to do it for them.
There’s more where this came from. I share more of my thinking on Cunningly Good Marketer on Substack. Subscribe to get my opinions, experience and real-world lessons straight to your inbox.
