Marketers are masters of silo building, new label creation, and generally acting as if what we did was rocket science. But obfuscation isn’t doing us any favours if we really want to be taken seriously.

It’s annoying when clients think anybody can do marketing. Even in this era of supposedly data-driven everything, some of our colleagues in other departments still think that our job consists in printing logos on pens and mugs.

To combat this attitude – or so I suspect anyway – marketers, empowered by the ever-growing martech landscape, love to come up with new labels and entire sub-disciplines. These things show that what we’re doing is real, and hard:

Thought leadership marketing, Growth marketing, Performance marketing, ABM, Demand Gen and Lead Gen (with these last two, I’ve found that even people who have them in their job title often struggle to define the demarcation line).

Specialisation: good; obfuscation: bad

Now there are three main reasons why you’d need all these different labels to describe your discipline:

• To pay tribute to the complexity and different skills required to do the job (e.g. as a strategist, I wouldn’t touch performance marketing)

• To show you’re dealing with a completely new thing (like when search engine optimisation, SEO, became a discipline in its own right)

• To re-package an existing thing and give it a shiny new coat (e.g. you could argue that PR had become so exclusively focused on contacts over content quality, the giving-away-valuable-insight-for-free attitude of content marketing had to come to the rescue; or that ABM is really just all the principles of B2B marketing done properly, for one juicy prospect)

So my point is not that when new labels in marketing come up, they shouldn’t be taken seriously (well, some of them shouldn’t, really). My point is that they’re all still Marketing, after all:

1. In any real-world marketing department (and even in large agencies with lots of specialists) there will be significant overlap between these disciplines (and the people doing them)
2. The overlap is a good thing. E.g. content strategists need to work with performance marketers to learn if their assumptions were right, and to double down on the messaging that works, rather than the one that doesn’t. If we don’t generally pull in the same direction and keep talking to each other, we’re not going to see results. 

So while specialisation, new tech and methodologies are important for the entire discipline of Marketing to be taken more seriously, there’s a downside to the proliferation of labels. They’re confusing for many people, and especially for non-marketers, because they can signal that one fashionable new thing should be favoured over another (even though hardly anybody ever agrees on the definitions). And that I have a real issue with.

The Content/Product/Brand divide

Nowhere is this more infuriating than in the – to my mind – artificial divide between  Content, Brand and Product Marketing. 

If you’ve ever worked with me, you probably know that I first landed in the world of B2B tech when “Content Marketing” was the latest, hottest shit. CMOs everywhere were proclaiming that “content was king”. In order to establish itself as a discipline and justify its existence, content had to differentiate against brand marketing (ie high-faluting, top-level visions) and product (deep-in-the-weeds tech specs). 

Content marketing does this by helping brands “become the authority on what you know better than anyone else”. It makes visible the expertise that exists in a business and turns it into attitude, advice, and “how-to” pieces that 

• Grab attention with an attitude based on a view of the market
• Earn trust by demonstrating knowledge of the space
• Deliver differentiation by showing how product features connect to the above and make the vendor different, and better, than its competitors

It’s easy to see that if you want to do this well, it’s quite complex: it requires a proper positioning, i.e. a thorough understanding of the intricacies of a product and the wider tech stack it operates in; the competitive landscape and categories; the buyers, their preconceptions, and the organisational dynamics they deal with; the appetite of your client to stand out or shake things up; and quite a bit of reading between the lines. These are, and have always been, the basics of good marketing.

The other thing that feels pretty obvious to me is that “Content” really isn’t separable from “Brand” and “Product”, and it’s mad to me that we often act like it is. What you choose to talk about in your content, and the attitude you take, forms part of your brand. And if your content isn’t strongly tied to the expertise conferred by the product you’ve built, it won’t be credible. (The same goes for performance marketing by the way: if your metrics don’t relate to the strategy you’ve built, you’re doing vanity reporting).

Labels change – the principles of good marketing don’t

Today’s hottest shit seems to be Product Marketing. In-house, it pays fantastic salaries, and it’s usually completely separate from Content, which has often been relegated to the production of “thought leadership”. Job descriptions for product marketing roles emphasise positioning skills, competitive landscape analysis, customer insight, and the development of value propositions. That’s cool. These are all the right ideas, but they’re not really new – just packaged up with a new label, and given a slightly different flavour.

What I’m really trying to say is that, since I’ve been in the job, the principles of good marketing haven’t changed. We’ve got a lot more digital tools to produce and measure content, and we’ve developed new, and legitimate disciplines as a result of that. There’s nothing wrong with that. But fundamentally, we’re still trying to get through to the people most likely to buy from us, and land an impactful message, ideally first-time round. In B2B, there’s no shortcut to doing that. You’ve got to put in the work. Changing the label won’t change the effort it takes. And if the labels cause you to build silos and stop you working towards the same goal, then I recommend you stop what you’re doing immediately, go back to first principles and specialise from the center out, not from one discipline in. You won’t regret it.