STOP competing with other Marketing Professionals and help your clients compete in the market.
I’ve been saying some variation of that sentence for years now and today I am convinced it is a fact and a threat to our industry and the people we serve.
I’ve spent the last fifteen years working in marketing. I started as a social media manager in a comic book shop in Wichita, Kansas (Shout out to Wizard’s Alley (previously Wizard’s Asylum) - Brian Hunter is revolutionizing the face of brick and mortar retail TTPRG) and eventually earned executive-level marketing roles overseeing multi-million-dollar brands, large-scale campaigns, licensing partnerships, events, content teams, and growth initiatives.
And through every stage of that journey, from local businesses to national brands, from small teams to large organizations, I’ve watched the same pattern repeat itself like a bad movie.
Marketing professionals spend an extraordinary amount of time focused on other marketing professionals.
We compare ourselves to each other. We critique each other. We debate tactics, platforms, strategies, and trends. We worry about who’s winning, who’s growing faster, who’s getting more attention, and who’s being recognized. We spend the most precious resource we have - our time - focused on the wrong challenge.
Meanwhile, the customer quietly leaves the conversation.
The business owner gets buried beneath frameworks. The audience becomes secondary to the process. And somewhere along the way, the purpose gets lost.
The assignment was never to beat the agency down the street. It is to help businesses grow. To understand the people whose vision the brand is or will be built upon.
The assignment was to communicate clearly enough, consistently enough, and honestly enough that trust could be built between a business and the people it serves. The reality of my lived professional experience is that I have never found real growth in competition with other marketers. But I have watched hyper-competitive marketers learn soul and business crushing lessons because their focus was skewed towards beating their competition, not the businesses they were trusted to serve.
I’ve found real growth through curiosity and a genuine desire to serve the professional marketing community alongside serving my companies, brands and clients. In many ways, I can feel my career slowly towards how my experience and perspectives can help shape the marketing industry itself in ways that better serve commerce long-term. One of the unexpected benefits of having a career that has taken me through so many different industries, communities, and environments is that I’ve had the opportunity to learn from an incredible range of people.
I have learned from executives, business owners. I have learned from creators. I have learned from salespeople. I have learned from marketers with twenty years more experience than me and I have learned from marketers who had just graduated school.
In fact, some of the most valuable conversations of my career have happened with people who had significantly less experience than I did. Not because they knew more than me, because they knew something I didn’t.
That’s true of all of us.
I’ve never met a person who didn’t have something to teach me if I was willing to listen. But curiosity becomes difficult when we’re viewing one another as threats.
One of the most transformative pieces of advice I received in my twenties had nothing to do with marketing. Someone told me 'Jealousy is admiration that hasn’t been properly understood yet.’ and I remain thankful that even at 23, I had enough frontal lobe development to hear them, consider this and begin building this value within myself.
Whenever I found myself jealous of someone’s success, creativity, confidence, influence, or skill, I stopped asking why they had it and started asking what it was about them that I admired.
That small shift changed the trajectory of my career. Jealousy creates competition. Admiration creates learning.
One closes a door. The other opens one.
Over time, I realized that every person I envied was actually handing me a roadmap. They were showing me something I valued, wanted to learn or develop within myself. Once I started looking at people that way, the need to compete with them largely disappeared.
I became far more interested in understanding them and thankful for greater access to fresh perspectives and knowledge. I think that marketing as an industry desperately needs more of that mindset right now. We’re living through one of the most significant shifts in consumer behavior we’ve ever seen.
Entire generations have grown up inside the marketing machine.
Gen Z understands advertising differently than any generation before them. Gen Alpha will understand it even more deeply.
Many of them will grow up in a world where nearly everyone they know is selling something in some capacity. Their friends will have personal brands. Their classmates will create content. Their favorite creators will have sponsorships, affiliate links, storefronts, memberships, products, and partnerships.
They are not naive consumers. They’re highly sophisticated consumers. They know what advertising looks like. They know what influencer marketing looks like. They know what manufactured authenticity looks like.
And because of that, many of the traditional signals of authority are becoming less persuasive.
Polish alone is no longer enough. Digital perfection looks like bullshit to them.
People want sincerity, transparency and to feel understood. Marketing walks a tight rope alongside psychology, but that’s for another soap box. This is why I find it so interesting that some corners of marketing continue moving further away from people and deeper into systems.
Now, to be clear, I absolutely LOVE systems. Sexy, sexy systems!
I love organization. I love process. I love operational excellence.
Some of the work I’m most proud of in my career involved building systems that helped businesses communicate better, move faster, and execute more effectively. But I’ve never believed that a system should exist simply because it worked somewhere else.
The most successful marketing systems I’ve ever built were built specifically for the businesses they served. Different people. Different goals. Different challenges. Different opportunities.
The solution wasn’t successful because it was repeatable. It was successful because it was responsive. That’s one of the reasons I often describe marketing as architecture.
An architect doesn’t walk onto a piece of land carrying a blueprint and then search for a way to force reality to fit it. They begin by understanding the land, the purpose, the people, and the problem they’re trying to solve.
The blueprint comes afterward. I’ve always believed marketing should work the same way.
The business comes first. The people come first. The purpose comes first.
The strategy comes afterward.
And perhaps that’s why I’ve never been particularly interested in competing with other marketers. My mind does not associate them with the feeling of competition.
The competition is whatever stands between my client and the people they’re trying to serve.
That’s where my attention belongs. Not on another marketer’s follower count. Not on another agency’s process. Not on another consultant’s client list.
Just on the work.
The future of marketing will not belong to the people who are best at looking like marketers. It will belong to the people who are best at understanding human beings.
And if we spent half as much time learning from one another as we spend competing with one another, I think we’d all become better marketers, better business leaders, and better stewards of the brands we’ve been trusted to represent.
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