The role of the marketer was not significant. Neither was their sector or their age or seniority. The size of their company was slightly meaningful, with a small improvement for marketers working at bigger companies.
But there was one variable that provided most of the variance in those that failed versus passed a basic test of marketing: formal training.
By formal training I mean a University course or professional certificate or online training in marketing. And by untrained, I mean those marketers whose most extended training stretches to workshops, on-the-job learning and self-training via YouTube and other means.
If an American marketer had formal training in marketing, they were more than six times more likely to pass a basic test of marketing. Hardly a surprise, right?
Except in marketing, we have built a culture of making it okay to work in the profession with zero formal training.
Senior marketers will even suggest training in marketing is a deficit for career progression.
Make the case for marketing training and you will immediately encounter marketers vigorously opposing the point. “Look at all the senior marketers who have prospered without any formal training,” they will say.
“And look at this anecdotal experience I had of a trained marketer who was not very effective,” someone else will add.
In essence, ignore the obvious correlation between training and knowledge and look at isolated outliers instead.
There are clearly many great marketers who have built excellent careers without formal training. But those same marketers would be even better with it, and the data says so.
According to the Ipsos data, if you have been formally trained, you are also more influential within the organization, more motivated, more strategically adept, better at budgeting, happier in your career progression and much more likely to work in marketing for the next decade.
That message should not be scandalous. It should be obvious. Training in marketing makes you better at marketing. More knowledgeable. More confident. Happier. More influential. More strategic.
All the things marketers need in the age of AI that approaches.
It takes relatively little time and investment to gain a world-class training in marketing these days.
The next time someone suggests that training in marketing is optional or even sub-optimal help me to push back. Direct them to the Ipsos data. Move their finger from the outlier dot to the big fat line that correlates marketing training with marketing knowledge.
