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

Right. The Obvious Questions Answered.

What's the actual difference between being in marketing and being a marketer?

Being in marketing means operating within the marketing industry, running paid campaigns, writing copy, managing social, doing SEO, designing creative. Valuable, skilled, necessary work. Being a marketer means being responsible for quantifying the market opportunity, building a commercial strategy for how to capture it, and then commissioning or overseeing the executions needed to deliver measurable business outcomes. It's primarily a commercial role with creative dimensions, not a creative role with commercial dimensions. Most people working in marketing, including many very senior people, are in the first category. That's not a criticism. It's a description. The confusion between the two is what causes problems.

Do you need a marketing degree to be a proper marketer?

No, but you need the discipline and the body of knowledge, however you acquire it. The problem isn't formal education specifically, it's the absence of any grounding in how markets actually work, how buying decisions are made, and how investment in marketing connects to commercial outcomes. You can get that grounding through study, through mentorship, through deliberate practice alongside people who have it. What you can't get it from is years of running campaigns without ever asking why the campaign exists, what commercial problem it's meant to solve, or whether it worked in any commercially meaningful sense.

Why does the marketing industry seem so divided and confusing?

Partly because it's genuinely broad, the range of disciplines that fall under marketing is enormous, from econometrics to copywriting to brand strategy. Partly because low barriers to entry mean people can build large platforms within specific channels without ever engaging with the wider discipline. And partly because the incentives favour novelty over rigour. Proclaiming that the marketing funnel is dead or that everything changed with AI generates more attention than saying 'the fundamentals are still the fundamentals, and most people just aren't applying them properly.' Which is both less exciting and considerably more true.

What should someone in marketing focus on to become a proper marketer?

Start by learning how buying decisions actually work, not in your specific channel, but in general. How awareness connects to consideration. How mental availability is built. How share of voice relates to share of market. How to size a market opportunity and connect marketing investment to share gains. Then start connecting the work you do to commercial outcomes rather than just channel metrics. Not 'the campaign got a 4% click-through rate' but 'the campaign contributed X to pipeline and here's why I believe that.' The shift is from optimising activity to owning outcomes. That's what separates the two.

Is channel specialisation a problem for the profession?

Not the specialisation itself, specialists are essential. The problem is when specialists stop at their channel and never connect upward to commercial strategy. A great SEO specialist who understands why organic search matters in the context of overall demand creation is doing marketing. A great SEO specialist who optimises for rankings without understanding why those rankings serve the business is executing a tactic. Both are valuable. Only one is a marketer.