AcademicIEEE International Conference on e-Business Engineering (ICEBE 2025), 20 Oct 2025

An LLM agent simulation can be used to pre-test marketing strategies, with early studies reproducing effects already known from real cases

Strategy review & optimization

Reader Note:: Eleven LLM agents in a ten-location virtual town over one simulated week, run on DeepSeek-V3. There are no real consumers anywhere in this study. The authors establish validity by noting that the simulation reproduced a substitution pattern already documented in the discount literature, not by comparing it against a fresh real-world dataset, so the simulated figures — revenue up 51% from Day 2 to Day 3, share moving from 30% to 41% while a competitor fell from 62% to 48% — describe the model and not a market. The paper also records that agents sometimes chose locations that did not exist in the town, and that the personas were least realistic for children and older adults.
Evidence:: Modelled / projected
Vendor interest:: None
Sample:: 11 LLM-based generative agents with assigned personas, budgets, needs, and social ties operating in a virtual town with 10 locations; not real human participants.

Good for

Planning with a rough expectation, and sanity-checking your own assumptions.

Not for

Reporting as what happened. This is what a model expects, not what anyone counted.
Nobody counted this directly — it's a calculation. The publisher worked it out itself, or took the ad platform's word for what its ads achieved.

More than half of brands said economic volatility pushed them to focus harder on ROI

How Economic Volatility Has Affected Marketing Strategy, Overall vs Enterprise Brands
Response	Brands overall (%)	Enterprise brands (%)
Increased focus on ROI	51%	56%
Seeking cost saving measures	46%	49%
Budget restrictions	44%	43%
Reallocation of resources to proven channels	38%	43%
Job or role uncertainty	29%	39%

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Planning questions suggested by Gartner: objectives and goals, primary strategies and execution, direction of product lines or services, success measures, long-term success factors, and major obstacles

Template: Strategic Alignment Discussion Guide for Business Partner Conversations
Questions about that business partner's domain	Notes of your business partner's answer
What are your key business objectives and resultant goals for the next two to five years?	—
What are your primary strategies? How do you plan to execute on these strategies?	—
What is the direction of the key product line, supply chain, service offerings, etc.?	—
How will you know if your unit is successful? What will you measure?	—
What are the key success factors that will make or break your unit's success in the long term?	—

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48% of B2B SaaS leaders say aligning affiliate partnerships with sales and marketing shortens sales cycles

Revenue impacts reported from strong alignment between partnerships and other go-to-market teams
Revenue impact	Share of respondents (%)
Shortens sales cycles	48%
Partnerships open doors to customers	31%
Land bigger deals	23%
Drive pipeline growth	12%
Help lower churn	10%

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Our Substack turns the data behind these cards into full breakdowns: what changed, why, and what to do about it.

Fixing your influencer marketing campaign: How to get into the top 10% of advertisers

Lead quality and MQLs are the top KPI marketers track overall

Top KPIs marketers prioritize overall (2026)
KPI	Share of marketers prioritizing it (%)
Lead quality and MQLs	39%
Lead-to-customer conversion rates	34%
Return on marketing investment	31%
Customer acquisition cost	30%
Lead generation volume	29%

34%

of CEOs and CFOs are aligned with their CMOs about how marketing supports growth

1.5x

more likely CMOs who plan 18 months or more ahead are to report high marketing and business performance than those who do not

An LLM agent simulation can be used to pre-test marketing strategies, with early studies reproducing effects already known from real cases

Good for

Not for

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