Much of marketing is premised on companies delivering messages to customers to influence their purchases and consumption. Indeed, the largest advertisers in the world are companies such as Procter & Gamble, Nestlé, and Unilever, which sell branded low-involvement products that are routinely purchased and consumed at a regular pace. The purpose of much of the tens of billions of dollars they spend on advertising is to remind consumers to pick up their laundry detergent, soup, coffee, yogurt, or pet food on their next shopping trip. But within a few years, this model of marketing, advertising, and shopping will become obsolete. The beginnings of this are already evident in Amazon’s Dash buttons, which are making routine purchases simpler and even more routine.

Pretty soon Amazon and other retailers will know customers’ habits well enough to mail (or drone) them the 200 or so products they regularly consume, based on when the retailers’ algorithms believe they require replenishment. Not long after that, smart closets and refrigerators in the home will place orders directly with the retailers’ algorithms, sparing the consumer the need to prepare shopping lists, remember which products to buy, and go to the trouble of doing routine shopping. Products will flow to the household like a utility, as electricity and water do. For many products, the shopper will be a bot, leaving customers with the sole task of consumption.

What does marketing look like in a world where your machines talk to their machines?

First, in a connected world, spending billions to remind consumers to buy your brand will seem inordinately wasteful. Instead, advertising dollars will be redeployed to building relationships, challenging incumbents, increasing rates of consumption, and influencing algorithm designers and owners. Influencing algorithms — for example, by becoming a native or default brand in the pre-installed software choices — will be prized. We already know that 90% of smartphones and PCs buyers do not change most default settings, providing a large advantage to those that become the default. As a result, incumbents will benefit from raised barriers to entry, and challengers, at least in routinely consumed product categories, will have to break through the inertia not just of consumers but also of programmed bots — a much tougher inertia to overcome.

Second, brand loyalty will be redefined, forcing marketers to differentiate much more clearly between mere repurchase and actual loyalty. Marketers of incumbent brands will need to ask whether the algorithm is “loyal” or the consumer is. For challengers, the critical question will be what they need to do to compel consumers to change the algorithm’s default settings.

Insight Center The Automation Age Sponsored by KPMG How robotics and machine learning are changing business.

Third, much of marketing strategy today rests on the idea that consumers are imperfect interpreters of advertising and marketplace information. They are subject to cognitive biases such as selective attention and retention of information. So advertising research, for example, is focused on improving the odds that consumers will do what ads tell them to. They aim to make ads more efficient by increasing conversion rates (the ratio of those who buy to those who have seen the ad). But if routine decisions are made by bots, not humans, marketers need to speak to the bots — and bots tend to do what they are told, without cognitive biases. So research will be focused on understanding the points of influence of bots: What are their sources of data? Which criteria are they programmed to optimize? And what are their learning algorithms? Research on consumers will focus on strategic issues such as understanding consumption patterns and maintaining brand loyalty.

Finally, the effects of connected machines will not be limited to routine purchases. Many of the interactions between the company and the customer will occur directly between the company and the product. For example, cars that are recalled for safety or nonroutine repairs will make their way to the dealership on their own when not in use, increasing compliance rates from approximately 30% today to close to 100%. Dishwashers and vacuum cleaners will get their software updates over the air, and pharmaceutical pill bottles will not open past their expiration date. Unpleasant interactions will be handed to the bots; for example, consumers tired of speaking to a bot when they call their telephone company will instead ask their bot to call your bot.

The robotization of shopping and marketing changes how marketers and consumers interact and how brands compete. Taking the imperfections of consumer behavior out of the marketing equation will certainly make marketing more efficient (the savings on advertising alone will amount to billions of dollars), but the real opportunity resides in redefining the customer relationship rather than in cost-cutting. Have your machines think about that.