You're in marketing? OK, but you're not a marketer.

February 5, 2025

I want to open a discussion about the difference between marketers and marketing, because they are different things.

There is an industry called marketing, and it includes many different roles, responsibilities and expertise. It's very broad, and it's everything from a true generalist to a channel specialist practitioner.

So within our world of marketing, we might have someone whose job is to engineer algorithms. Search engine marketers, content marketers to some degree, PPC marketers.

We might have someone whose job it is to make media recommendations. We might have a copywriter, a graphic designer, an art director, a brand manager.

All are roles in marketing, no doubt, but I’d argue that the brand manager is the only role that can be described as a marketer.

As a terminally online marketing nerd, I’ve seen so many discussions about the relevance of the four Ps when most people in marketing only really get to work on the one, the Promotions P.

If this is your truth, it’s because you are in marketing, and you are not a marketer.

And that’s fine. The vast majority of people in marketing aren’t marketers.

Marketing is a broad church, running from engineering to creativity with many steps in between or combining the two in some brilliant way or another.

Doing work that is in the service of marketing is not being a marketer.

Let’s look at some examples.

Agencies. The vast majority, with a few exceptions, of agencies do not do marketing. They do advertising, or comms, or content, or digital, or creative, or PR.

It’s far more executional than what a marketer does. It’s actually more fun, sexier and more often than not more rewarding.

What a marketer focusses on is quantifying the market opportunity for a brand or product, building a strategy for that brand or product, and then commissioning or overseeing the executions, campaigns, partnerships, agencies, or whoever is needed to deliver to the key results and objectives. What you're doing is you're focusing on the business outcomes that marketing can deliver.

The role of a marketer is honestly more of a spreadsheet and dashboard role than it is a creative one.

This isn’t to downplay or disregard creativity, and this former creative can confirm that it helps to be creative. Because on the whole you are using creativity to solve problems, to address challenges and also you will be working with and briefing creatives, so It’s good to understand their world though also that you are outside of it.

As a fractional CMO most of my time is either overseeing research, unpacking research or creating a strategy based on research that's going to help a business grow and devising an executional plan to deliver to the strategy.

And what will help the business grow are all of those things which are in marketing but which a marketer doesn’t do.

It's how we reach the customers, the literal market of marketing.

But it's not the same thing, though that doesn’t mean there aren’t transferable skills.

I was having a conversation recently about strategists and strategy, and I definitely believe that strategists - whether they're brand strategists, creative ad strategists, comms strategists, media strategists, strategy strategists or whichever other kind of strategists there are now, I'm losing count - have something in the mindset and approach that is far closer to what marketers do than what other agency folk would typically do.

I will at this point say that I love creatives, and in particular copywriters. They make everything come to life in a relatable and human way that my spider graphs, funnels and OKRs don’t.

But I think if we're a bit clearer about the difference between being in marketing and being a marketer we'll have fewer misunderstandings, fewer internet pile-ons over bloody semantics.

It’s tricky because we have an industry called marketing, and a specific role within that of marketer.

But as with the loyalty debate, I'm not one to suggest changing nomenclature, so I think we just need to get used to it and get on with doing great work.

But when someone says “as a marketer, I...”, I always wonder whether they are a marketer, or they are otherwise in marketing.

Cheers