The focused marketer

Here is a question – a trade-off, no less – that will permeate your entire marketing career: focus or diversify?

As a young, upcoming marketer, do you double down on the sector you got to grips with in your first role, understanding more about its possibilities and constraints, finding ever more effective ways to leverage your knowledge of the competition, the regulations, the unmet customer needs? Or do you use your next move to broaden out to something totally new, to give yourself more options as you navigate your future career?

Further along that pathway, when charged with leading an agency selection, do you mandate prior experience in the sector, to ensure a swift, seamless transition from pitch to execution? Or do you decide based on eclectic creative firepower, and accept that the agency’s sector ignorance is going to make the early stages sticky?

Similar fork in the road when you’re CMO. Build a team already steeped in the category dynamics, to offer the board the arrowhead of specialist focus? Or deliberately bring in what challenger-brand founder Adam Morgan called ‘intelligent naives’ – smart thinkers from unrelated sectors – to foster freshness of vision and guard against groupthink?

In fact, such is the fractal nature of things, that the focus/diversify dilemma scales up way beyond the confines of a single discipline, to exert its force on decision-making at the level of the corporation itself.

An example of that came earlier this month with news from a corporate behemoth led, as it happens, by a former marketer.

The corporation is Unilever, the marketing-literate CEO is Fernando Fernández, and the decision came firmly down on the side of focus. The business announced it plans to divest its massive food division to specialise on its brands in the faster-moving consumer streams of beauty and personal care.

For a historically broad-based business like Unilever, this is a courageous call, putting a line through power brands such as Hellmann’s and Knorr, to lavish attention on the likes of Dove, Lux and Wild deodorant, while prioritising acquisitions within just two hotly contested categories.

At the elevated level of the corporation, then, the consensus is clear: focus wins.

But let me take you back down the chain again, and ask you to put yourself in the place of that upcoming young marketer, at the front end of their career. Given the increasing value placed on focus in our brand-owning companies, should you do likewise, and stick tightly to a single sector? Isn’t that what Fernández himself did – a Unilever lifer who came up through beauty and personal care? Should you opt for focus right here and now in these early steps along your career pathway?

There is a simple answer to that. Yes and no.

The challenge of marketing excellence

The first thing to recognise is that, in choosing a career in marketing, you have already focused. You haven’t become a journalist, doctor, pilot or chef. Within the corporate domain, you’ve said no to finance, you’ve not been tempted by operations, haven’t gone for HR, not been seduced by sales. You’ve already narrowed right down, based on some combination of appetite and aptitude.

And what is meant to be the benefit of this single-discipline focus? Excellence. The expertise that stems from specialisation. But it’s here that we hit an awkward truth about our discipline: for all the common acceptance that specialisation is meant to sharpen skills, marketers, for the most part, are not all that special.

If that is a harsh critique, it is one backed up by the evidence. Only 24% of UK marketers have any kind of formal training in the discipline. Most kind of learn on the job. Or kind of don’t.

A report published this month reveals the depth of the problem. In its ‘Marketing Anchors’ study, research firm Ipsos surveyed 1,226 marketers in the UK, US, Canada and Australia. Its sobering conclusion? “Only 35% of marketers meet a basic benchmark of foundational marketing knowledge.”

I can offer some anecdotal evidence in support of that. At last year’s Festival of Marketing, a roving vox-pops team asked attendees if they could name the marketing ‘4Ps’. Most struggled to get beyond one or two. While I can empathise with the brain freeze that hits when you’re ambushed with a mic in your face, this is basic stuff, marketing 101, the kind of list that should be rattled off with finger-snapping ease. The impression I got was that many marketers had never seriously engaged with it.

So, my advice to a young, first-step marketer – to any marketer, come to that – would be to focus in on achieving excellence in the discipline.

Understand consumers better. Know your way around all research methodologies – from ethnography to conjoint analysis – not just focus groups. Familiarise yourself with the powerful lever of pricing. Learn how to produce an effective size-of-prize segmentation study. Get your head around the difference between a good econometric model and a mediocre one. And then, with this heightened capability in place, feel free to let intuition play its part. You won’t be one of the greats without it.

But having focused tightly in on marketing itself, having given it the time, the study, the respect it deserves, diversify by sector if you want to. And why wouldn’t you? Switch from B2C to B2B, from product to service, from big corporate to not-for-profit. Work in sectors at diametrically opposite ends of the spectrum. It will make you harder to neatly categorise for head-hunters, but they will be blown away by the burgeoning evidence of your core talent. It will earn you the flexibility to take your career in exciting new directions, and protect against getting trapped in a category that suddenly becomes unviable.

Tight sector focus might make sense at the corporate level, but in the end people are not corporations, and personal happiness is a factor, alongside career success. A professional life of variation, curiosity, stimulus and freshness of challenge is more rewarding than one spent in a narrow category subset of an already discrete discipline. We have only one life. Focus, if you will, on that.