Marketing Can't Agree on What Marketing Is

A recent Ipsos report found that only 35% of marketers could pass a basic ten-question quiz on the fundamentals of marketing. I don’t know if your LinkedIn algorithm has been abuzz about it, but mine certainly has.

I will say upfront that I completely agree with the report’s conclusion, which asserts the need to build stronger foundations and fundamentals, to create conditions for more disciplined marketing, to commit to formalized and ongoing training, and more. And the data shows that those who had more formal marketing training tended to do better on the quiz (and other interesting things; the whole report is worth checking out).

But the report doesn’t seem to address (and, in fact, illustrates) the bigger problem.

The ten questions were about marketing basics, but they weren’t universal. The questions “When marketers talk about ‘STP’, what do you think they are referring to?” and “When someone talks about ‘DBAs’, what do you think they are referring to?” were referencing Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning and Distinctive Brand Assets respectively. With a B.A. in journalism I could, at best, be considered someone with marketing-adjacent formalized training,¹ but I had no idea what either of those initialisms was referencing. I’ve never used them, and I’ve never heard them used.

With my 15 years of experience, I could definitely give a training on segmentation, targeting, positioning, brand assets, and much more, but I wouldn’t have gotten either of those questions right.

But a couple of quiz questions is a minor issue in the end, the data from the report is certainly directionally accurate, and people can (and will) quibble over question selection and wording forever and ever.

My major takeaway from this report is the complete lack of alignment, structure, or authority around the marketing discipline. We can’t even agree on what marketing is and isn’t, what it does and doesn’t include. There are, of course, all the random comments on LinkedIn and Reddit with people saying PR is marketing and marketing is responsible for things like website uptime. But marketing institutions aren’t helping either.

The American Marketing Association says, “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” which, in my opinion, is so broad as to be useless. I was actually having an email conversation with someone about this definition, with quite a bit of back and forth, and I was only able to get them to acknowledge it was flawed when I pointed out that you can replace “marketing” with several other disciplines and the definition will still work.²

The Chartered Institute of Marketing says, “Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.” which I guess is a little better, but I’m still not sure what exactly it’s saying. If I told someone my job was to “satisfy customer requirements profitably" they might rightfully assume I’m a plumber.

Again, I am all for training. But training requires a curriculum. And a curriculum, especially about fundamentals, typically assumes some sort of consensus about those fundamentals.

I’m not calling for a marketing equivalent to CPA exams or passing the bar. But if an accountant were asked to take a quiz on their discipline’s fundamentals, they wouldn’t have to ask the follow-up question of, “Fundamentals according to whom?”

The Ipsos report definitely supports the argument for the need for formalized training among marketers. But it also reinforces the overarching disparities within the marketing discipline about what the heck we’re even doing.