Over the weekend I got a LinkedIn request from a colleague with his description as an “ardent marketer”. Shouldn’t it read as marketeer…or maybe not. Made me ponder how an aptly spelled “marketer” should be written any different way which I thought was also commonly used.
So which one is actually right – marketer or marketeer? After all if you relate other professions and how they are addressed – farmer, plumber or even in my IT industry, a coder – there’s not much to debate on how a marketing professional be addressed.
But how did “marketeer” come about and what does it mean – googling it over didn’t help with much insights either. The online dictionaries don’t seem to differentiate these words much (nothing that is not obvious) and neither do any of the random commentaries on this topic from bloggers to practitioners, till I stumbled on one link, courtesy www.educba.com
And it said “the ‘marketeer’ is not someone who does a megaphone blast announcing a new brand launch or persuading more buyers to a take a look at their offering. The core activity of the ‘marketeer’ is building customer relationships by connecting with them and conversing with them.” It goes on to illustrate in the article infographic that a marketeer is not ‘target’ focused but ‘experience’ focused and that a marketeer is more creative than a marketer that sees a consumer more than a just a number or a data.
Now that really changes the entire perspective and gives a whole lot of new meaning and purpose to the spelling – and what we do, what we ought to do as markete(e)rs. It fundamentally puts the notion that the role now is to not just to push the product or service into the market but continuously engage with consumers throughout its life cycle. It highlights the point Prof Mohanbir Sawhney of Kellog, Northwestern University makes that it is now the era of “always-on conversations not campaigns” and marketing will increasingly be measured on engagement – what he calls ROE (return-on-engagement)! Surely marketing as it is, or as it was, is not the same anymore. It needs new media, new thinking and new skills – and a new job description, no matter how you spell it.
So back to our question – what is right, the marketer or marketeer? Or does it matter.
A rose is a rose…!
