Author’s Note: I’m diving headfirst into some semantic pedantry today, so I want to acknowledge that up front.
When I see marketers post some variation of “People think marketing is simple” all I can think is “But marketing is simple.”
Marketing builds awareness of a company's products or services among current and potential customers, then uses targeted messaging across relevant channels to turn that awareness into demand, and that demand into qualified leads.
Put that way, the discipline of marketing is simple. We take people from "I have no idea who you are or what you do" to "I think I'm probably ready to buy something from you." That is not a complex concept or expectation.
Then again, there are a plethora of inputs and considerations and factors that go into developing good marketing, making it harder than it looks. But the same can be said of any discipline.
The semantic and pedantic distinction that I’m making, and that I think more marketers need to make, is the difference between something being simple because it’s uncomplicated and being simple because it doesn’t require much effort. Marketers hear "simple" and take it to mean "easy," which they extrapolate into "low-value" and then overcorrect into "complicated." And whenever marketers try to explain to non-marketers that marketing is actually pretty complicated, I think that does more harm than good.
One of the reasons we all hate lawyers is because they’ve clearly built obfuscation into the system in such a way that they’re the only ones able to shepherd anything through that system. The law isn’t simple, and lawyers want to keep it that way.
Some marketers are guilty of the same behavior. They create these micro-disciplines within the marketing world for no apparent reason. They treat every decision as high-stakes, debating with a dozen people about voiceover options for a 30-second promo video or need a 45-minute meeting to choose between two stock photos that will both work fine. Marketers seem to call their work complex hoping it earns them respect, but it ultimately leads to no one (including marketing leaders themselves) actually being able to prove marketing’s value.
Yes, there’s a lot that goes into marketing. And yes, we’re rightfully frustrated by those who reduce all of marketing to TV spots, newsletters, and social media posts. But marketing is simple. Build awareness, generate demand, drive qualified leads. And lucky for us, the marketing toolbox is full of proven ways to do all those things. We take the corporate-established business objectives, KPIs, and target audience(s); develop key messaging based on direction from the product team around what problem the product solves and what it does better than similar products; and then build marketing assets which we utilize across relevant channels.
Simple does not mean easy. Marketing is hard. It has a lot of parts and pieces, and those parts are genuinely difficult to execute well. Writing a good piece of content is hard. Building a brand that holds up over time is hard. Getting clean attribution out of a messy pipeline is hard. Doing all of it consistently, on budget, without chasing the newest shiny thing, is hard.
But none of that makes it complicated. A marathon is simple. You run until you've run 26.2 miles. Nobody would call the rules complex, and nobody would call it easy. The difficulty lives in the preparation and the execution, not the concept.
Because many non-marketers don’t understand what marketing does, and many marketers both don’t understand and can’t explain what marketing does, marketing is facing a huge credibility gap. Given that, marketers should be championing the idea that marketing is simple (in that it’s easy to understand, not that it requires little effort). We should be simplifying the scope of the discipline. We should be under-promising and over-delivering. We should stop insisting on this manufactured complexity in order to try to reinforce how special our work is.
Our power will come from being able to clearly show our unique value: building brand awareness among a target audience, generating demand, and driving qualified leads, all by utilizing these really great tools in the marketing toolbox that have been proven to be able to do those things.
That's what marketing is. It’s not easy, but it’s pretty damn simple