Are we Producing Poor Marketing Professionals these days?
Let us talk about the quality of marketing output we presently experience.
The genesis of this article was the sight of 3 consecutive survey links which I saw in some WhatsApp groups earlier this morning - the morning of the day I started writing this article.
I could not find the third survey when I penned this, but let us go on. For anyone who is a member of these groups, you would have noticed how common these requests have become; members are asking for help with filling out one survey or the other.
I started out marketing with the basic knowledge that is, you start by getting consumer insight before you design any marketing strategy or campaign. The bulk of the campaigns I have witnessed of late have been riddled with little or lack of insight and it is baffling.
Now, to many who understand how consumer research and insight are gotten, you would realize that - the attempts in these screenshots are the first phases of this process, which is to administer a questionnaire to intended consumers to develop insights for a marketing campaign.
Let us start by reviewing what marketing research is, it is defined as the systematic gathering and analysis of marketing-related data to produce information that can be used in decision-making.
Through analysis and interpretation, the data are transformed into information suitable for decision-making purposes by marketing professionals. Typically, data alone are simply not usable. It is the analysis and interpretation of the data that makes them useful to those of us who work in marketing.
This definition of marketing research, it shows how pivotal the process of data collection, analysis and interpretation is important and also how interconnected they are. In these modern times, you find that marketing pros (agency or client side) share these surveys which are supposed to be for a particular target audience in WhatsApp/telegram/Slack communities so the survey can be filled, meanwhile, this is supposed to be for a particular target audience as described in the survey themselves.
It creates a domino of wrong decisions being made which is seen in the way and manner marketing campaigns are being executed in these times.
For any marketing campaign, the insights which sit at the base of the campaign are the most important part of that campaign as it informs the campaign end-to-end, therefore, the kind of research we witness these days where people use Google forms/Jetform etc to carry out surveys which are being filled by individuals who are;t the target audience of the product.
Another angle to this is the quality of marketing education available to professionals. The decentralisation of the career, which is a good thing to have happened to the function seems to have created a function where a sizeable number of practitioners do not have quality education on the function. Coupled with the lowering of its entry barrier with digital marketing, many who work in marketing cannot exactly tell you what their work is beyond the free course they have taken and it has created a problem of trust in the function by this sizeable number as many in this category rise through the ranks to actually become marketing leaders - do not be surprised, this is a thing.
So the question lingers, with the culture of marketing mis-research going on in the industry and the lack of marketing education also on the increase, are we producing poor marketing professionals as a community globally?