Are Great Marketers Born or Created?

Sometimes marketing can seem a lot like magic. Great marketers come up with brilliant idea after brilliant idea and amazing brands are created and built.

These marketers seem like a breed apart. They effortlessly come up with insights into their business environment and customer’s psyches and then create ways to connect and inspire.

But the question is, were these people born with the ability or did they learn it?

I have had the privilege of working with a number of great marketers over the years and in my experience they share a few common traits.

The first and perhaps the most important is that great marketers have the habit of looking beyond the obvious. They look at a situation, hear what is said and watch what is done. But then they go deeper. They work hard to understand both the conscious and unconscious drivers of behavior. They explore all possibilities to understand what is driving their business environment. This determination to leave no stone unturned results in their getting critical insights that others often miss.

The second thing that I have seen consistently with great marketers is that they are willing to challenge the status quo. It is very simple. If you are not looking for new ways to do things, you are not going to find them.

It is not easy. People don’t like change and it takes courage to push for it but too often we accept the way that things are without question.

The great marketers do not.

Lastly, all the great marketers that I have known have a vision and the ability to share it. They know where they want to go and inspire their colleagues with that vision.

Teams and not individuals build great campaigns. The great marketers know this and work to optimally leverage the ideas and perspectives of their team in developing those campaigns.

So are these abilities, core to being a great marketer, innate or learned?

The first, the ability to truly understand your business environment and customers comes from a set of skills that are easily learned.

When I coach marketers there are a couple of simple exercises that they can do that moves them a long way forward in this skill set. The first is to write down what the key questions are that they need to be asking in order to understand their market and customers. The second is making sure that they understand what conscious and unconscious decision criteria are and how to recognize them.

Understanding your business environment and customers also means not settling for the easy answers. Once you have learned the skills, it takes practice and self-discipline to continue to push to make sure that you have explored every possible angle as opposed to settling for the answers that seem most obvious.

When it comes to challenging the status quo, it is true that some people seem more wired to do it than others (my youngest daughter would be a case in point…). However, this is an area where there is a lot that you can do to support a culture of finding new ways of doing things. The way that you set up your meetings, workshops and brainstorming sessions can really drive this and I talk at length about this on one of my YouTube videos (Creating an Innovative Environment for Your Team) if you are interested.

Not always the easy thing to do but if someone wants to be a great marketer, they have to be willing to push for change and work to create a team environment and culture that supports it.

Lastly, vision. We all have vision. Being able to communicate that vision is another very coachable skill. Whether it is when you are writing, presenting or leading meetings, the ability to communicate effectively across the different mediums is a skill that can be developed with coaching and practice.

When we see someone performing with excellence, be it a colleague or an athlete, we often assume that they have innate skills that we ourselves do not posses. What we don’t see is the coaching, thousands of hours of practice, mistakes learned from and the homework done to master the craft.

Are great marketers born that way? No. Great marketers become great marketers because they go out and get the right training, work hard, learn from their mistakes and do not give up.

Maybe the lesson here is not that great marketers can be created, it is that through getting the right support, hard work and persistence, the really great marketers are able to create themselves.