For decades, marketers have fought for attention, crafting ads, optimising SEO, and battling for shelf space. Now a new threat has emerged: the zombie shopper.
People are outsourcing decisions to AI agents. They no longer browse, compare, or choose. They simply type a prompt and let the agent decide. The person is alive, but the decision-making is gone. The agent is the puppet master, the shopper, the zombie.
This isn’t a distant future; it’s already here. Salesforce research reports that one in five people, and nearly a third of Gen Z, are comfortable letting an AI agent shop for them. That’s not fringe behaviour; that’s mass zombification.
For brands, this shift is profound. For the first time, decisions are being made not by shoppers, but by systems. The battleground for influence has moved from the supermarket shelf and search results page to the prompt box. Marketing today isn’t just about grabbing attention; it’s about shaping intent.
If your brand isn’t in the prompt, you’re invisible. Winning now means shaping both the person’s query and the machine’s shortlist. People may seem passive, but they still define their preferences through exclusion.
Advertising’s role is being rewritten: brand names must become prompts in their own right. Lurpak beats ‘butter’. ‘Nike running shoes’ beats ‘cheap trainers’. The goal now isn’t just to persuade people to buy, but to preload their minds with the language and shortcuts they’ll give their agents. Awareness fuels prompts and prompts control consideration.
How do brands survive the zombie economy?
Two routes remain.
The first is behavioural economics. Use defaults, framing, and social proof to plant shortcuts in the person’s head that flow straight into the agent’s query. Behavioural economics is no longer theory; it’s how you write the prompt itself. Fail to shape those heuristics and your brand simply shuffles along with the herd, indistinguishable from the rest of the undead.
The second route is to stand out. Agents seek difference. They want to present meaningful, varied options, not clones. Brands with a strong USP, whether that’s superior value, quality, innovation, emotional attachment or vibrancy, are more likely to be chosen as the “different one” in the shortlist. That’s why brand building and cultural resonance matter more than ever. Difference is survival; conformity is extinction.
Walmart is already proving how this plays out. Its partnership with OpenAI lets ChatGPT users shop seamlessly through the platform, turning prompts into instant purchases. Almost one in five referral clicks to Walmart now comes from AI agents. They’re not waiting to be chosen; they’re redesigning the agent’s world so Walmart is the inevitable answer to a shopping query.
So how can marketers actively build memorability and shape prompts? By investing in cues of difference, visuals, tone, rituals, and assets that become mental shortcuts (heuristics). By balancing long-term brand building with short-term activation to stay both memorable and searchable, and by ensuring your brand consistently teaches AI who you are through consistent storytelling, different voices and recognisable patterns.
To thrive, brands must reject black and white thinking and embrace the full colour complexity of how people and AI interact. The future belongs to those who understand that brands are not funnels, but patterns. Brands that live in full colour will teach AI difference; those that default to the mean will become bland.
There has never been a stronger case for creativity with conviction. In the age of zombie shoppers, bland brands get eaten first. This is the moment to be bold, to build authority, create difference, and frame the prompts that shape the marketplace. Engineer the prompt, stand out with difference, and stand against bland – or disappear.
Source: warc.com