I find myself having hard time to explain marketing these days because the conversations are all nerdy talk stuffed with a series of weird lingo and superficial sentences. To quote a few examples,

Connect the dots of “atomic” customer interaction trace, understand paths to purchase, reveal the identity of the customers who left no addressable fingerprint.

Build powerful predictive model; enriched data enables the creation of powerful features driving greater predictive accuracy.

Moving from transient & transactional to meaningful relationships.

Build a reverse buy flow funnel by establishing direct buyer’s engagement.

I am not going to mock my peers who speak professionally on stage or at the Board room. In fact, I occasionally (getting less and less) speak like this to give myself a high ground to brag about my experience of encountering the holy grail of digital marketing. But the way the marketers speak or the vocabulary we use are just distancing from the audience. Be frank, sometime, we just want to brag instead of communicate. Do you think so?

Mindset vs. skillset

I would say digital marketing today represents the whole marketing. The line has been a blurred divider for the traditional (I even feel irrelevant every time when I mention the term – traditional) marketing and the digital marketing (which is certainly NOT non-traditional). However, the shift of paradigm in marketing is more on the mindset, not the skillset. The acquisition of the skillset remains an obstacle even though there are tons of digital marketing courses, certificates, badges for expertise, etc, etc. Why it is so difficult to attain the digital marketing skill?

In my experience, 50% of digital marketing are technical. Try to name a digital marketing practice that is not involved with tech? A website or an App has things like the server side, front end, database, an insight report has to deal with the dataset, using a spreadsheet formula to tabulate and crunch the data, Big data or AI for marketing is more on the hype side, Crypto is bizarre, etc., I can go on and on. But don’t you see all these are enough to be feeling nerdy 🤖 ?

Fighting for 3 minutes only

No complain. Since 16 years ago Bill Gates talked information at your fingertips, we now live in an attention economy with everything moves and changes in a slight second. We spend 3 minutes for browsing a web page and collectively we watch 1 billion videos per day on YouTube. We have either so little time or so big appetites to consume all kind of information. We can’t miss a bit because we want to stay relevant. If you do marketing today, you must know how to use the technology to acquire information or be informed. You got to keep your pace with the rest of the world.

And how to keep the pace relevant to the world? Knowing that your marketing quotient is 50% mindset and 50% skillset, you should keep the mindset logical and analytical. The skillset is not easy as I’ve just said that if you are not a geek. Your mind reacts to the world when troubleshooting the problem is the general intelligence that cannot be artificially replicated by technology, yet.