Are Elephants Secret Marketing Geniuses? Groundbreaking Study Reveals Unexpected Talent

Ever wonder what happens when the animal kingdom gets bitten by the corporate bug? Or maybe you’ve caught a herd of elephants, wide-eared and stately, working furiously through Excel spreadsheets in the savannah while their trunks fly across the keyboard. Honestly, if you’ve been convinced that only humans know how to juggle buzzwords like “cross-vertical optimization” without spraining an ankle, I hate to break it to you—nature’s got a surprise. In what might be the only time you’d want to attend a brand strategy meeting led by matriarchal megafauna, researchers at Cornell have apparently caught elephants outdoing half the marketing managers on LinkedIn—project managing, ideating asynchronously, and quietly mourning the loss of quarterly profits beneath a baobab tree. I read this and wasn’t sure whether to laugh, cry, or start hiring elephants for my next B2B campaign . If you suspect I’m kidding—oh, just you wait. LEARN MORE

ITHACA, NY—In a groundbreaking study published in the journal Animal Behaviour, researchers at Cornell University revealed Monday that elephants are the only known nonhuman species capable of leveraging synergies across a diversified brand portfolio. “Conventional wisdom has long held that leveraging omnibrand fluidity to unlock cross-platform capital efficiencies was a behavior unique to humans, but in the wild we have observed multiple African elephant groups with a highly evolved capacity for optimizing cross-vertical integration through holistic brand harmonization at scale,” said Professor Mia Sherin, who noted that elephant corporate structures are matriarchal, and females consistently serve as project managers across multiplatform activations, seamlessly executing cross-functional touchpoints and asynchronous ideation cycles. “This marks one of the most advanced examples of nonhuman tool use ever recorded. We’ve observed elephants utilizing Microsoft Excel for longitudinal KPI tracking, assembling low-fidelity mood boards to map brand essence, and creating rudimentary LinkedIn profiles to strengthen B2B positioning. In one case, a juvenile even led a rapid-fire ideation sprint that resulted in a fully actualized multichannel activation plan. This study brings us one step closer to the dream of true interspecies communication, should we ever manage to put some time down on their calendars to connect over a coffee.” At press time, Sherin’s team traveled back to Tanzania to study how different elephant groups mourn, as they are thought to be the only other animals known to grieve their profit losses.