What Do Marketers Do? Part I

What do marketers do? The word marketer is thrown around a lot and sadly it seems in a more negative than positive way. I take so much pride in what I do: making meaningful things, relationships, experiences and stories for people. It seems weird that the word to describe that would have so much baggage. Hmmm.

The word market emerged around 1154 defined as a "meeting at a fixed time for buying and selling livestock and provisions." The word marketer then meant someone who "trades, deals, or buys at the market." Over the years, it evolved to "someone who promotes or exchanges goods for money" and unfortunately, at the turn of the 19th century, had associations with shilling and quackery (using false claims to promote something beyond its actual effectiveness). Marketing seems negatively perceived as a word that lives between the Mad Men basking in $50MM media buys and the analytical deceivers tricking and promoting their way into getting people to click more ads or buy more things.  It is as if marketers are described as conjurers trying to get as many people as possible to buy things they don't need or want. Yuck.

And today's marketers have certainly played a role in this declining reputation: using words like target, penetrate, segment and generate demand then referring to people as wallets, users and mass consumers. Look at marketers' job titles: Head of Most Valuable Customer Acquisition. VP of  Sales Optimization. Masters of Business Administration. Manager of High Potential Customers. Who's potential? The customer's or the company's?  I often say that marketers should always speak with respect and as if the customer were sitting right next to them. How you speak and humanize people often translates into how you act. Seems somewhere along the way we forgot that.

It feels like marketing itself needs a rebranding. I'm not tackling that here. But I do fear in the midst of the confusion and negative associations that the role of the marketer is getting lost. The best marketers are a vital voice for customers. They are authentic. They care. Marketing is a noble profession when it is at its best meaning: serving customers in a way that they value enough to pay for it and in return growing a company that creates jobs and the fascinating, useful, and meaningful products to keep that cycle going sustainably. As idealized as it sounds, in the markets of 1154, that trade nurtured the community and the people who were part of it. It feels like that should be possible today.

So here I am going to decode what a marketer actually does.

I focused on how I believe the best marketers would describe their roles. The role of a marketer has two parts: leader and executor. Art and science. Spiritual and functional. Part I of this post is about leadership.

Leadership Roles (and Skills) of a Marketer:
Inspirer
Simplifier
Customer Voice
Silo Jumper
Translator
Diviner
Instigator
Creative

Inspirer

Marketers find the higher purpose and the "why" in what a company does. We find the mythic in the mundane. We inspire action inside and outside of companies. Inspire action. I love that. We celebrate our passions and lean into our fears. We create work we can be proud of and we do it with optimism.

Simplifier
We render the complex simple.

Customer Voice

Companies are often organized by product. Finance metrics, P&Ls and the systems that produce them are often structured by product or channel. That is how they can be measured. Therefore, brands often go to market by product--instead of going to market by customer. That is often what is referred to as marketing silos and is more exaggerated in mature companies with lots of products. Why does this matter? A customer may have multiple products from a company. A person may be a business owner, a consumer, an affiliate and a corporate employee. Customers don't care about the silos. They want you to talk to them across their whole relationship not just by the product you are marketing at that moment. How does this cause confusion or dissatisfaction: Do you remember information they provided in another part of the company? Do you know what other products they have? Do you put the product you are marketing into context for them and how it might complement those other products? Are you competing for their attention with other products from your own company? As a customer it must seem unbelievable reading this. But if you are a marketer inside a company, you probably know exactly what I mean.

The best marketers look at the whole company. We connect the dots on similar projects or where the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts for customers. We see outside in from the perspective of the customer. We not only know our product, but the whole company's portfolio and how we fit into it. We pay attention to how a customer sees us as a company, not as the silo we sit in, and use that as a point of departure to communicate to them in an easy way that respects them.

Silo Jumper

If you are going to take the perspective of a customer, you need to reach across the aisles. As I talked about above, most companies are organized by product or channel. The best marketers are incredibly loyal to a team and to their "customer," but often define that team differently than by organization structure or hierarchy. We are silo jumpers.

Translator

We translate between engineers and creative directors. Between finance and sales teams. We are interpreters. We need to deeply understand our internal collaborators--what they need, how they communicate--in order to influence and collaborate. We need to translate what we hear from customers and the marketplace into actions. This skill is critical. If you can't communicate internally, you won't be able to communicate externally. I can't stress this enough. The first step is realizing you need to do it and then working on doing it really well.

Diviner

We are strategists. We are reading the tea leaves of the future by voraciously reading blogs, annual reports, social media, plus more. We are listening and learning all the time. We move between the day to day scorecards to the strategy 5 years away. We keep a long term perspective and help reverse engineer road maps for others to get there. We are defining the movements of the tectonic plates while we are making our way through the pressure and rubble day to day at the fault lines.

Instigator

Right now, all marketers are change agents. We are fascinated by breaking down the way companies and whole industries do things. We are hackers. We will nudge the keepers of the status quo into uncomfortable territory, but we'll be there with a net so they don't fall.

Creative
We are farther on the creative spectrum in the room. We aren't necessarily art directors or painters. But we are ingenious. We bring a diversity of thought and action and we appreciate that diversity in others. We are both left and right brained.

The skills underlying these roles are the transferable, foundational skills for great marketers. It always amazes me when I go over this list, how much it is has to do with how you work with other people inside of companies to have the biggest impact for customers outside of them.

As Simon Sinek said, great brands are like great leaders. The best marketers are accountable, confident, informed risk takers, and fearless--all with a generosity of spirit. Being good and marketing are not at odds. It's the exact opposite. Marketers build relationships and that takes trust, authenticity and caring. I really believe that.

If these are the leadership roles and skills, then what are the functional ones? That's Part II.

End note: There is an interesting overview of the evolution of marketing on Wikipedia.