The Problem With Being In The Marketing Industry

The title itself is self-explanatory. Working in the marketing field for almost a year and a half now has allowed me to make a few observations regarding this industry , more specifically, how non-marketing people see us.

Catching up with different individuals over the holidays contributed to my observation that people who don't work in the industry have a very vague idea as to what marketers (people who are in marketing) really do. I've observed this on more than one occasion. For example, when talking to a friend who works in the field of computers. He asked me what I did for work. I nonchalantly replied "Oh I work in the Marketing Department." I literally saw his eyes turn glassy, as if he was a deer staring into the headlights. He absolutely had no idea what I do for a living.

Do you notice that most professions evoke a certain image in the mind whenever one mentions it? When you say "I'm a nurse", for example, you immediately picture a lady in a white outfit, carrying a bunch of charts and an array of medical tools. When one says "I'm a chef", you picture a jolly, balding man wearing a chef's hat and an apron. Heck, even the word call-center agent evokes an image of a person sitting at a desk, wearing a headset, mindlessly jaberring away. However, when you now say, "I'm a marketer." Now what image comes to your mind? An old lady carrying a big rattan basket, on her way to the wet market to buy fish heads and what not. Seriously speaking, the profession known as a marketer does not even evoke an image in the minds of people who are not in the industry. Now how fulfilling is that?

The better question to answer is - What does a person in Marketing really do? Honestly, I don't really know the answer to this question, and i've been asked more than a few times. What do I reply to queries like this? I give them the patronizing, talking to a 3 year old spiel: "Well, I handle a particular brand. I prepare marketing plans, I come up with promotions for it, I evendevelop TV commercials (even that's a lie)." I give them this answer with the hope that whoever I'm talking to is satisfied enough, and drops the topic altogether. Maybe I don't really have a clear grasp as to what a marketer like me is supposed to be doing, and combine that with poor explaining skills - you come up with a half-assed explanation like that.

I think being in this field requires a person to be a jack-of-all-trades. You have to know a little bit of everything. Here's how I sum it up - you need a little bit of an artist's creativity, a dash of an accountant's financial acumen, a story-teller's imagination, a businessman's savvy, a pinch of a fortune teller's foresight (or lack of), the persuasion skills of the Godfather, and the theatrics of a Hollywood actor. Yes, I honestly think that this is what one needs to thrive in the field of marketing. However, be reminded of what they say about jack-of-all-trades - they are masters of none.