Before marketers learn AI, or the language of the boardroom, or purpose, or storytelling, or any of the other things we keep telling them they need to master, many of them need to learn something more basic. They need to learn marketing.
There, I said it. I know it sounds provocative. It isn’t meant to be. It’s just what the data says.
I think many American marketers would be even better if they had a basic, up-to-date, operating model of marketing. And I can prove it.
Earlier this year I worked with the global market research firm Ipsos to measure marketing knowledge in the U.S. We surveyed a representative sample of American marketers and, among a battery of other questions, subtly asked them ten simple sub-undergraduate questions about marketing offering them four multiple choice answers to choose from.
The questions were basic. The team at Ipsos told me they were too easy. And they had a point. The questions asked basic things like whether marketers knew what a quantitative market research method was, what penetration means, about whether they knew what segmentation targeting and positioning was, and whether they could name the four Ps.
The results are incredible.
More than 40% of American marketers don’t know what positioning means. Half of them don’t understand what penetration is. Two thirds of them cannot identify a quantitative research method. 54% of them don’t know what “above the line” or “omnichannel” means.
All told, two thirds of American marketers would fail the most basic test of marketing knowledge.
Meanwhile, most marketers rate their skills very highly. Eighty-four percent of American marketers rate themselves above average at marketing—a statistical and disciplinary impossibility.
How do we explain this contradiction?
Well, we can use the same Ipsos survey to try and find answers. Controlling for all the other variables, we examined a host of potential correlations to try and find out why so many American marketers know so little about marketing.
