“Ask a finance person what NPV is and how to calculate it and you'll likely get the same answer just about anywhere you go in the world, but if you ask a marketer to define a segment, however, you'll get a thousand different answers!”
As I read this comment in an article, I was reminded of a piece of advice someone gave me a few years back-‘ Marketing is subjective and if you have the conviction don’t bother about what others think because there are hundred ways of doing things, just that you should know what you’re doing!’
The article mentioned something which all of us would have felt at some point in time during a conversation with other marketers- you get the sense that even though you are talking about marketing, sometimes you aren't on the same page about how marketing should work, be implemented or the direction it's headed?
During my internship, I had a chat with lot of members from the marketing team, for whom marketing was still a shot in the dark. Some had worked before in firms that never made a marketing plan. But, then I checked with other people from P&G etc and found that the bigger firms were more conscious of things like ROIs and depended a lot on facts and figures. And I think that such practices come from experience. The same holds true even for marketing professionals. I believe that when most of us will start out, we won’t have much of an idea about how things work. But, over a period we’ll develop ideas, patterns, opinions of our own that will shape our definition of the marketing profession. We tend to believe everything of what we hear or read from our first influencers, the professors, and the subsequent ones like books, blogs et al but we would surely find a disconnect during our first job as the requirements and the variables change!
Another aspect of this discussion would be to see it from the eyes of people who see marketing as an art vs the ones for whom it’s a science. And I think that is where the marketing is an ‘art’ contingent wins as if it were to be an exact science, we would see the same things over and over again! The ‘artist’ within a marketer is, I think, the reason why developing a common ground for marketing is tough.
What do you guys think of this? And also what all can be done to address the issue of marketers not being on the same page!
