In June 2024, Charli XCX dropped her Brat album and gave the cultural zeitgeist its color for the summer: an unmistakable shade of “brat green.”
Brat summer was officially upon us, and within weeks, the trend spread from billboards to our inboxes, with marketing teams racing to answer the same question: how can we fit our product into brat summer?
While many brands had something live and lime green before brat summer was over, others were stuck tweaking copy and waiting on approvals well into fall. According to Klaviyo's 2026 Match Day Ready Report, 66% of marketing teams missed at least one significant revenue opportunity last year because they couldn’t move fast enough on a cultural moment.
This time-to-market bottleneck isn’t unique to cultural moments. It also slows down seasonal activations, product launches, and how quickly you can turn real-time customer data into revenue-driving assets.
But the report also found that 74% of marketers attribute >10% of total marketing revenue to cultural moment activations. Moving fast on them is worth it.
“Vibe marketing” helps you do that. You lead on the ideas, strategy, and creative direction, while AI quickly creates the assets you need.
What can you actually create with a vibe marketing workflow?
According to Klaviyo’s 2026 Match Day Ready Report and the survey behind it:
- 42% of teams already use AI for content generation in cultural moment activations.
- 54% feel positive that vibe marketing could help them move faster.
- 25% are already using vibe marketing or actively exploring it.
But a vibe marketing workflow can do a lot more than generate content. With an AI marketing agent handling production, here’s what a vibe marketing workflow can create from a single prompt:
- Email marketing campaigns with subject lines, preview text, body copy, images, and CTAs, all generated in one output and ready to send
- Text message campaigns that match the tone and format of the channel and coordinate with email content, so the messaging feels consistent no matter where someone encounters it
- Audience segment recommendations based on the ideal audience you described in the prompt and your live customer data
- Automated flows that run as multi-step sequences, including welcome series, abandoned cart, post-purchase follow-ups, and win-backs
The 5 steps in the AI vibe marketing workflow
Whatever your goal, the steps in the vibe marketing process are consistent. Here’s how to build a vibe marketing workflow from start to finish:
1. Define your brand, content, and compliance guardrails
In vibe marketing, agentic AI operates within the guardrails you define to keep outputs aligned with your brand from the start. These guidelines are stored in a central knowledge base, and AI references them before generating anything.
Here are the evergreen guardrails you need to define before you ask your AI marketing agent to create anything:
- Brand voice, tone, and style: Explain how your brand should sound. This includes guidelines around the type of language you use, rules for copy style, and direction on brand voice, so outputs always feel like you, regardless of the channel or occasion. A wellness brand might specify that messaging should be "warm and empowering, never clinical." A streetwear brand might say, "We’re direct and confident, no corporate speak." A food brand might say, “Avoid phrases like 'guilty pleasure' or ‘cheat snack,’ and instead use simple, everyday language that focuses on taste, ingredients, and enjoyment.”
- Content guardrails: Set rules around how your brand talks about its products. A children's toy brand might specify, "Always reference the recommended age range and the developmental skill the product supports. Never make safety claims without citing the relevant certification." A coffee subscription brand might say, "Always describe each roast by origin and processing method. Never use generic descriptors like 'premium' or 'artisanal.'"
- Compliance rules: Capture the legal disclaimers, regional requirements, and opt-out language that need to be present or absent in every message. If you operate across multiple regions, getting this right upfront will save you a lot of time during the approval stage.
- Discount and offer rules: Set the caps and constraints to keep your launches commercially sound. If your brand never discounts more than 20% or never runs a sale in Q4, define that so those issues don’t appear in an output for you to edit out.
- Deliverability parameters: Define the audience rules that protect your sender reputation and customer experience. You might want to exclude customers with an open support ticket or customers in regions where a product isn’t available, for example.
2. Describe what you want to create
Open a chat with your AI marketing agent and explain what you want to achieve in natural, plain language. Since agentic AI built into your CRM already has access to your customer data, product catalog, and past performance, it recommends the right mix of channels, timing, and sequencing to help you reach those goals.
A strong, plain-language prompt covers 5 things:
- Outcome: Describe what you want to achieve and why. Are you trying to win back lapsed buyers or drive repeat purchases from recent customers? The clearer the goal, the more targeted the output.
- Activation type: Outline the type of marketing activation you want to run, whether it’s a one-off send, a multi-message campaign or flow, or a coordinated push across email and text messages. If you have a specific format in mind, say so.
- Audience: Describe who you want to reach and how to define them. Whether it’s recent buyers, lapsed customers, or VIPs, the more specific you are, the more precise the AI can be when it pulls or builds the segment.
- Tone: Clarify how you want the messaging to feel. Your brand voice guardrails set the default, so only include a tone direction if a particular activation calls for something different.
- Guardrails: Highlight any activation-specific constraints that go beyond your evergreen brand rules. That might be a tighter discount cap, a channel preference, or a message you want to avoid for this particular activation.
The more specific your prompt, the closer the first output will be to approval-ready. Here’s an example of a good prompt:
We want to drive repeat purchases from customers who bought sportswear in the last 90 days, while the 2026 FIFA World CupTM is live. Create messages across emails and text messages targeting each customer's preferred channel, timed to send the day after the first US match result. Prepare two versions: one for a US win, leading with fan and lifestyle products in a celebratory tone that references the result, no discount needed. One for if the US doesn’t advance, leading with training gear in a motivating tone with a 15% off code. Exclude customers in states where we do not yet ship the new collection. |
3. Review and refine the outputs
What comes back from a single prompt in a vibe marketing workflow is a complete set of assets, including copy, visuals and design, audience segments, channel selection, and timing.
The review stage is where your human judgment matters most. The AI has used your data and guardrails to produce the asset, but only you have the background and instinct to know whether the copy feels right, whether the audience makes sense, and whether the timing works for this particular moment.
You can give the AI agent as much feedback as you like, and the conversation goes both ways: the agent can ask clarifying questions to sharpen the output, and you can push back, redirect, or add context at any point.
Want a punchier subject line, a shorter text message, or a shift in tone? The AI agent works in iterations and carries full context forward, so you can refine your asset without starting over again from scratch.
4. Approve AI’s creations
The activation reaches the approval stage when you’re satisfied with the output and ready to move it forward. At that point, follow your team's usual QA and approval process.
Prior to returning anything for your review, the AI marketing agent ideally performs its own quality checks based on your brand guardrails. But your human team should always give the green light on every piece of content before it goes live.
At this stage, you have 3 options: send as is, request further edits, or reject and start a new direction entirely. Whatever you decide, your assets don’t go live until you say they do.
When you’re ready to move forward, if you’re using an AI marketing agent that’s part of your CRM, you can simply approve, and it will schedule the campaign or activate the flow.
5. Launch and learn
Once you approve the campaign or flow, AI launches it across channels in a coordinated send. Messages are timed and sequenced based on your direction or the AI suggestion you approved. For reactive moments like a cultural activation or a time-sensitive offer, this can happen within hours of spotting the opportunity.
The launch is just the beginning. Your AI marketing agent monitors your activations in real time, so you get:
- Real-time performance tracking: AI tracks who opens, engages, converts, and unsubscribes, as well as behaviors you didn’t anticipate.
- Reporting and insights: AI surfaces findings on previous marketing efforts automatically, and flags trends, anomalies, and recommendations as they emerge.
- Account audit: AI performs a full account audit to surface opportunities for improvement, including underperforming flows, missing segments, and untapped channels.
You can also ask your AI marketing agent questions about campaign and flow performance and get answers based on your actual data, without building a single report. Here are a few ideas:
- Which of my active flows is leaving the most revenue on the table?
- What campaigns should I prioritize this month?
- Audit my flows and make suggestions for improvements that will drive more engagement.
- Update my abandoned cart flow with a goal of generating more sales.
4 examples of what successful vibe marketing launches look like
What makes vibe marketing successful isn’t speed alone. It’s the combination of being able to move fast, stay on brand, and reach the right customers at the right moment. The brands that do it consistently have a repeatable process that quickly takes them from brief to send.
Here’s what success looks like across 4 different goals:
1. Driving revenue from a trend before it passes
A streetwear brand spots a cultural moment, like a well-known pro surfer wearing their sunglasses, that aligns perfectly with their new product drop.
One prompt builds an audience of past surfwear buyers, drafts an email that features a picture of the surfer with a link to the exact style, and writes a follow-up text for anyone who hasn’t opened it by the following afternoon. The marketer sharpens the subject line in one follow-up and approves.
The activation is live within an hour, while the trend is still fresh.
2. Developing a full sale sequence with 4 days left until launch
A homeware brand has a winter sale in 4 days and a full activation still to build.
First, they create themed images based on existing product visuals using an AI photo editor. Then, one prompt builds the complete marketing sequence incorporating the winter-themed images: teaser email, launch day email and text message, and a last-chance SMS follow-up for subscribers who opened but did not convert.
The whole activation is ready for approval within minutes, with plenty of time to go.
3. Winning back high-value customers before they churn
A beauty brand’s predictive AI flags a segment of high-value customers whose order frequency has dropped off.
One prompt builds a win-back flow that triggers when churn risk crosses a threshold, drafts messages built around what each customer has bought before, and spaces them out at 30, 45, and 60 days of inactivity, with the final send including an incentive to bring them back.
The marketer adjusts the offer and approves, and the flow goes live before the next customer churns.
4. Acting on a purchase cycle signal before the window closes
A supplements brand knows their bestselling protein powder runs out around 60 days after purchase. But not every customer’s buying patterns align with the average. Some may be sharing with roommates. Others may not use it every day.
One prompt builds a segment of recent purchasers whose personal predicted date of next order is coming up soon, and drafts a replenishment flow. The flow reminds customers that they might be running low, follows up with a small incentive for anyone who has not yet reordered, and sends a text on the predicted run-out date with a direct reorder link, all sequenced based on the timing that's worked in the past, across emails and text messages.
The marketer reviews, refines the tone, and approves. The messages reach customers at the exact moment they’re likely ready to reorder.
How to get started with vibe marketing
The fastest vibe marketers plan before the opportunity strikes, and you can do the same. No matter your goal, with the right framework in place, you can create assets in minutes, without a bigger team, a bigger budget, or a brief that takes a week to get approved.
Before writing your first prompt, here’s your mini vibe marketing playbook that makes activations faster to run:
- Map out the next 90 days. Identify the seasonal pushes, product launches, customer lifecycle moments, and data signals already sitting in your CRM. The clearer your future picture, the faster you can act when it matters.
- Gather your brand assets. Create a folder of your brand photography, or update your images using an AI photo editor, so you have materials for your AI marketing agent to pull from.
- Set your guardrails. Define your brand voice, compliance rules, and content boundaries once, so that every subsequent activation benefits from them.
Speed is no longer a limit. Composer, Klaviyo's AI marketing agent powered by your data and guardrails, turns a single prompt into complete, coordinated campaigns and flows across channels. The creative direction stays yours throughout the process. What changes is how long it takes to go from a creative spark to live messages in your customers' inboxes and phones.
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