Building the Wings and Flying Too Close to the Sun? A Daedalus–Icarus Framework for GenAI, Trust, and Sustainable Marketing

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is reshaping digital marketing by expanding opportunities for personalization, content generation, automation, and consumer interaction, while simultaneously raising concerns about intrusion, manipulation, authenticity, autonomy, and trust. This conceptual study examines how GenAI-enabled marketing can create value without undermining the relational conditions required for sustainable consumer–brand relationships. Drawing on the Daedalus–Icarus myth as a theoretical lens for technological ambivalence, the study conceptually integrates research on GenAI marketing, responsible AI, responsible communication, and consumer trust to develop the Daedalus–Icarus Framework for Sustainable AI-Driven Marketing. The resulting framework explains how the same technological capabilities may follow a Daedalian trajectory of responsible technological empowerment or an Icarian trajectory toward perceived technological overreach. It distinguishes the organization-defined Responsible AI Boundary from the consumer-perceived Icarus Threshold and identifies Boundary–Threshold Alignment as the central mechanism connecting responsible GenAI use with consumer acceptability. Responsible communication is positioned as supporting this alignment, while consumer trust functions as a relational sustainability mechanism. The study concludes that sustainable AI-driven marketing depends not on maximizing technological capability, but on continuously calibrating GenAI use across technological possibilities, organizational responsibility, and consumer-perceived acceptability.