What do marketers actually do?

I get asked this question often. Sometimes it comes up when I am speaking to students. Sometimes my kids ask the question. Its a funny question for me because, well, I've been doing it so long I simply assumed everybody knows what we do. Don't they?

The fact is, the job is not that simple.

The role of a marketer is to sell the vision for a company and evangelize its abilities without getting too far out in front of the experience so as to frustrate the audience of consumers for that product. Every marketer wants to inspire, surprise and delight the customer, and ensure that the promise of the brand will match the experience of the brand, delivering success.

Marketers are storytellers who have to write non-fiction. We need to tell stories, but they can't be too far from the truth. Your story needs to resonate and drive an action in the consumer, knowing that when they take that action it will deliver what they hoped. If your story gets out too far as to become too visionary, and too aspirational, it will fail. What the consumer is hoping for has to be delivered, or at least very closely resemble what they wished for, to be successful.

The best marketers are able to weave a complex narrative into something simple, and then create a methodology for distributing that narrative through a series of touch-points that reach the audience, captures their attention, and nudges them towards taking an action. This is often viewed as the combination of art and science. I refer to it as wizardry and magic. The magic of marketing comes from not knowing exactly how you are going to do it, but giving yourself the time and the space to craft an approach, execute that approach and optimize that approach to success. I've heard that hope is not a strategy, but hope is the underlying motivation of any marketer. We hope we can solve the problem, and we always believe that we can.

I find my best ideas will come up at the strangest of times. They never materialize when I am seated at my desk. They only pop up from the depths of my subconscious when I am doing something else. That's when my brain will connect a dot it saw earlier with a concept I was reviewing at a different time, and create something valuable. That is when the magic happens; when you least expect it, but hope it will come through.

A great marketer also has to be able to rummage through the numbers and find the data that can prove the value of their ideas. You cannot rely on others to do it for you. You have to be willing and able to dive in, get dirty, and crunch the numbers. As mentioned before, the science part of what we do is there and the struggle for many marketers is real. Not all marketers love them some good ole' data. I do, and that has always benefitted me.

The honest truth of things is that everyone thinks they are a marketer, but everyone actually can be and everyone in the organization should be. Everyone in your organization are selling the idea at some point in the day. Maybe to a customer, maybe to a prospect, maybe to another employee. If you work at a company, you believe in what it does, and you hope it will succeed. How will it succeed? By connecting customers and consumers to the product, and ensuring the promise matches the experience. When it does, that is magic (at least it can feel like it is). I often work in start-ups and the experience of a start-up is this every day. Large organizations want to act like start-ups, but they always forget about the magic part. They overlook the storytelling part. They focus on the legacy of the message more than experience of the product to that next customer, who is more indicative of the future of your product than anything a legacy customer will ever say. You should, as a real marketer, embrace the people in the organization who think they are marketers. They are not being critical of you. In fact, they envy you. They wish they could be a storyteller and a magician each and every day.

So what do marketers really do? We tell non-fiction stories that surprise and delight, and which are rooted in the truth and the experience of a brand, product or service. We ideate and orchestrate those stories into journeys that guide a customer, and we understand the ever-changing nature of those journeys, always willing to refine and revise. Our work is never done, but we hope with vigor and passion that we can adapt as needed, and we do. Oh, and we embrace those round us who want to be part of the magic, because everyone can be part of the magic.

That is what a marketer does.