When the Fearsome Marketer appears

The Fearsome Marketer is a frequent specter in my career strategy discussions with ambitious clients.

While working with Growclass folks over the last few years, I’ve discovered that many people have a polished, perfectionist ideal of what excellence looks like. Sometimes, the gap they perceive between said expectations and their lived reality stops them from fully owning their existing successes.

Why is it so easy to feel like a fake marketer?

In short, marketing isn’t an easy or forgiving profession. The average tenure for a chief marketing officer is roughly four years. In startup land, time spent in that chair is often much shorter.

Why? Success and ROI can be tricky to define and measure and budgets shift. Anyone with a halfway decent command of the language you work in will have strong (sometimes entirely unfounded) opinions about your work. Privacy policy trends (e.g., GDPR in Europe) and demographic shifts are making user behaviour harder to track, leading to much gnashing of teeth about collapsing funnels and new frameworks.

Add the influx of AI tools, late-stage capitalism, widespread layoffs, and the standard challenges that come with being the people at the end of the market-facing production chain, and it’s not hard to see why there’s a lot of change in the average marketing job.

Sometimes, individuals take that sense of uncertainty and internalize it, attributing their perceived lack of success to some deeper and more personal failing.

“I don’t have a degree in marketing,” is a frequent confession made in these chats. “I’ve done some content and analytics, but not ‘real’ growth.”

Guess what?

However you landed your job, whatever training you’ve had or not had, and (most especially) whatever the size and scope of your projects—

“If you’re doing the work, you’re a marketer.”

Where does the “fearsome marketer” come from?

I’m a lifelong Pride & Prejudice fan. When it comes to the adaptations, I prefer the 2005 to the 1995 version (YMMV and that’s perfectly okay). Jane Austen may have lived long before the Internet, ad tracking or conversion funnels, but she understood human behaviour.

Perhaps that’s why when I hear career strategy clients disparage their careers, this scene from P&P comes to mind. After all, it’s a field dominated by women.

I’ve updated the diagloue accordingly. Behold, the fearsome marketer:

Does your profession have its own version of the Fearsome Marketer?

You can find my post about the Fearsome Marketer on LinkedIn and connect with me there.