Why I’m a Marketer

I never meant to be a marketer.

I studied English and art history. My teenage dream was to be a magazine editor. I used to study mastheads like recipe ingredient lists and read each glossy collection of pages like a book, using the small subscription insert card like a bookmark.

Having graduated into the post-2008 recession, amidst the fumes of the detonated publishing industry, it became clear that it would be wise to keep my options open. I was, and always had been, interested in a wide variety of things — I took a bunch of pre-med classes my first two years of college, I’d been involved in performing arts since age 3, I liked volunteering, I had some teaching experience — so this seemed OK. My concern was more how to bushwhack my way to a clear career path. I cared less what the end goal was, more that there was one at all — preferably with a linear route, even if it was long.

The first year after college, balancing a couple of retail and restaurant jobs and freelance work while I flung resumes out into the corporate world like frisbees, I fretted about how I should have stuck with the pre-med track, or pursued law school, or participated in On-Campus Recruitment to vie for a consulting job (I would have hated all of those things).

I finally got an interview for a publisher assistant role at a medical publishing company, Philly being the unassuming global capital of the medical publishing industry — who knew?, and found myself enchanted by the secret bookcase door in the reception area (never mind that the bookcase was lined with unimaginably boring medical textbooks and journals) and by the prospect of a salary and health benefits. Over the span of the two or three hours I was there, meeting with each of the seven publishers I would be assisting, secret bookcase door emblazoned in my brain, I went from gamely convincing myself medical publishing was useful and important and also logical given my pre-med foray (that linear route!), to keenly desiring this job offer. A day or so later I was offered the role, I accepted outright (with zero financial negotiation — but that’s a topic for another day), and at last my professional ship pushed away from the shore.

I only worked there for a year, but during that time I found that a few ship sails had been unintentionally raised that pointed me in the cardinal direction of marketing. For one thing, some of the work involved producing (and by producing, I mean ordering catering for prep meetings about) conferences and exhibitions to promote the sale of our textbooks and journals. But more significantly, as the resident young person in the office I was soon tapped to help spearhead the migration of all that written content online.

It was the genesis of widespread business and brand use of the internet, when we still capitalized Internet, when Twitter was just three years post-launch, and Foursquare and Tumblr were still a thing. The iPhone was two years old, the Huffington Post four years old, and account verification didn’t exist yet. I taught myself how to use Microsoft SharePoint to web-edit 10 different journal websites, tracking and reporting analytics with WebTrends.

Without realizing it, I had stumbled into digital marketing, starting with online content — in a way, the 2000s equivalent of the print magazine industry.

A decade-plus passed, the tiller shifting this way and that as I charted my course, making career decisions based on four things: head, heart, gut, and wallet. Was I excited by the thought of day one on this job? Would I learn a ton? Did I believe in the people leading the business? Was there integrity in the work? Would it pay my rent?

Whenever I fussed over how it still didn’t seem clear where the current was headed, it was a Steve Jobs quote that provided solace: “You have to believe that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” In other words, it doesn’t have to make sense now. You’ll make it make sense later.

At various junctures I’d lift my gaze from its ardent focus on the day-to-day to consider the big picture, the long term, seeing so many different potential paths forward, spending time analyzing what I was uniquely good at and what came easily to me, and clocking with relief the “answer.” Like, “OK, got it, my thing is the food industry” (or social media, or content, or full-time freelance writing, or brand marketing).

What I’ve realized is that, first of all, there’s plenty of time for different chapters in your professional life. Author Suzanne Redfearn (I loved her thriller In an Instant) is also an architect and restaurant owner. Pope Francis was first a bouncer, then a janitor, then a chemist at a food science lab. It’s easy to admire, even envy, people who’ve always known precisely what they want to do and spend decades methodically working towards that predestination. That’s great — truly — for those people.

But the second thing I’ve realized is that, for me, the “thing” that powers me professionally is the thing that powers me personally. It’s not a market category or a field of work. It’s my #1 value: connection. Real, authentic, human connection. The things that are the most meaningful to me are centered on true human connection: deep conversations with close friends; art — written, performed, or otherwise — that speaks to some fundamental element of the human experience; volunteering time, energy, and dollars to women impacted by incarceration; working through gnarly business challenges alongside close colleagues; doing anything at all with my family.

Marketing is the professional epitome of human connection. The purpose of marketing is to create a connection with a consumer. To what end, depends on a million factors. But the goal of every marketer, no matter their category or industry, B2B or B2C, agency or client side, brand or growth, media or creative, is to connect.

I’m grateful to have cut my teeth in the DTC space, because you can’t get much closer to connecting with consumers than, well, talking directly to them. And honestly, with the increasing criticality of first-party data, almost every company is now communicating with, if not selling to, consumers directly.

Marketing is in a weird moment. CMOs are tasked with more than ever. The DTC VC-backed startup growth playbook is growing stale. Consumers are, rightfully so, demanding hyper-personalization but also airtight respect of privacy and data security. With the rise of social commerce, there are myriad communication and distribution channels, which means a boundless constellation of consumer experience pathways. There are more than 50 million people who identify themselves as creators, and TV watching hasn’t slowed down from pre-pandemic, which means the media ecosystem is more saturated than ever. Brands and businesses — finally — can’t get away with not taking a (real, not “woke-washed”) stand on social and political issues. Everything old — print! radio! — is new again, and everything new — influencer marketing, push notifications, Snapchat filters, real-time reactive tweeting — is old news.

But all of that’s our problem to figure out. We, the marketers. How do we not just reach, but truly connect with, people both online and off? Lots of them, and the right kind — i.e. people in our target audience, at scale. In an authentic, conscientious way that resonates. That makes a positive impact, for real, on society. And that, ultimately, yes, delivers revenue.

Because the third thing I’ve realized at this stage is that it’s truly possible for people and companies to be good and do well at the same time. The burden and privilege of both those responsibilities lies within marketing.

And what more stirring professional mission is there than that?