Difference Between Marketer vs Marketeer

Marketing is now a business term that has become common place in business lexicon but many a time people get confused about this function. Some people tend to think of it in narrow terms to imply it’s another name for sales or some others view it as developing strategies to promote a product or creating a brand.

Marketing is much beyond but most people are aware of the jobs available in these functionality. The jobs in these function are normally denoted as Marketing Executive, Marketing Officer, Marketing Manager, Director-Marketing and so on. On the sales side they are denoted as Sales Officer, Sales Executive, Sales Manager, Director- Sales and the like.

Marketer-broad umbrella term

In common discussions and articles, there is a requirement to have an umbrella term for most functionalities that denote a persona who is not attached to a particular job function like marketing manager, brand manager but a more generic term that denotes a person capable of decision making. A visualizer in an ad agency is part of the creative team who decides on what colours, pictures, infographics should go with a particular campaign. A Public Relations Manager is independently capable of deciding on communication strategy to deal with an issue facing their company.

In marketing parlance, marketer is someone one who has decision making capability and powers to conceptualise and execute marketing strategies in an organization. The job function may differ from company to company but the marketer is key part of strategy and operational part of the organization.
Sometimes, it can also denote a particular firm or group – such as pharma marketers, real estate marketers, consumer electronics marketers, marketers of personal loans and advances, insurance marketers among others.

Here marketer denotes a firm or organization whose role it I to develop new markets, new territories and help their parent company come up with new products and services which customers require.

Head to Head Difference Between Marketer vs Marketeer (Infographics)

Below infographics on Marketer vs Marketeer, throws light on major points of differences between the two.

The Marketeer

We have heard of musketeers popularized by the work ‘Three Musketeers ‘ by Alexander Dumas. It is a key position in the infantry of the modern army. Likewise, a racketeer is someone who indulges in fraud or cheating on a sustained basis to fool the public. What then is a marketeer?

There are differing views on who is a marketer or whether they are the same as the marketer or do different roles in an organization. One school of thought feels both marketer and marketeer are the same and both are used interchangeably by the people.

A survey by UK based Orchard, digital and creative marketing consultancy, found that over 78.3% of marketing professionals preferred to be called ‘marketers’ while 21.7% felt they are better known as ‘marketeers’.

One marketing professional felt, marketeer rhymes with racketeer and possible creative negative images for that functionality. Another felt shocked by the new spelling and terminology. He felt that some of the guys should be doing ‘marketeering’ rather than marketing. In LinkedIn majority of subscribers in marketing preferred to be called marketers rather than marketeers.

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Emerging paradigm shift for marketeer

If we Google marketeer in news category, marketeer seems to be used interchangeably with marketer in reports from different countries. However, there is an attempt to classify ‘ marketeer’ as specialized marketing breed capable of engaging more with consumer or customer rather than using the ‘megaphone’ approach to reach the maximum target audience.

If marketeer was meant to be a synomym just as physician is to doctor, then there was perhaps no need to create two different spellings for essentially the same role. Perhaps, it would only cause confusion in the minds of people and not recognizable or distinguishable for most people. In many countries, such as UK, US or Australia, the word ‘marketeer’ is unheard of, according to some analysts.

However, there are attempts being made to classify marketing function as linear and customer-focused. The traditional marketing persona or the ‘marketer’ is primarily focused on identifying the need of a customer or a consumer group and devise a product with the support of the technical team.

Once the product was conceptualized, the marketer would go about creating a brand with the help of mass media, building relationships with distributors and working out the logistics of making available the product in all targeted regions. Hi job would also involve co-ordinating with the advertising and public relations team to create hoardings, banners and displays in different locations.

Once the product was developed and branding done, it was essentially a ‘push’strategy the traditional ‘marketer’ who know needs to do the persuasion to make the consumer buy the product.

However, the creative part of engaging with the consumer, customer or prospective target customers was not in the expertise of the ‘marketer’ and that is where the ‘marketeer’ takes the center stage, according to some analysts.

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.

However, ‘marketeer’ is not someone who indulges in ‘marketeering’ which has got a negative connotation such as black marketeering which is banned or not legalized across the world. Many news items referring to black market activity describe it is as a ‘marketeering’ activity.

The critical role of ‘Marketeer’

The consumer is now bombarded with ad campaigns in the mass media that it is not easy to get noticed in the cacophony. The new marketeers are the musketeers of marketing with consumer as the King. They must listen and speak instead of sending out linear messages without understanding the consumer. The key difference is that they don’t own customers but customer’s moments. Here are the key attributes of Marketeer persona :

The foregoing discussions have proved that for most people the term ‘marketeer’ is still not acceptable but to a small group who have tried to create a different creative persona for ‘marketeer’, here is an attempt to develop further on the theme and give clarity to their perceived qualities that distinguish them from marketers.

1. Marketeer is more creative

The marketeer doesn’t have a linear view of the market whereby the industry produces a product, does the branding and creates a unique selling proposition. Thereafter there is a bombarding of campaigns to get noticed by the consumer. Brand recall among consumers is attributed to success in the market place which is partly true. However, the best campaigns and their frequency cannot guarantee brand recall across all geographies as recent marketing surveys have indicated.

The ‘marketeer’ is more creative compared to the marketer in the sense that that each consumer is not just a number or data for the former. The consumer is king and has the power to determine the success or failure of a brand in the market place.

2. Marketeer has more consumer engagement

The marketeer believes in keeping constant touch and conversation with the consumer who could be existing buyers or could be potential customers of the product or service. The marketeer believes that existing customer is not a robot or an inhuman not having a persona. Each individual has his desires, aspirations,thoughts, motivations, needs, and outlook about life, life style and their role in society. The marketeer believes in understanding their motivation and sending invaluable inputs for product development team to work on.

For eg. In the case of passengers, understanding the motives of buying a car in a particular price range can help automobile makers come up with better models. In the #1 million range are buyers looking or power or comforts or good looks. Or if it’s a vehicle meant for the whole family is boot space more important than leg space.

In real estate, a premium residential flat may be possessed more for its branding and locales but there could be other features customers may be looking at- quality gyms, swimming pools, gardens, play area and grocery stores within premises. Understanding the requirements of a product or service, getting their feedback and analyzing them are all part of the marketeers’ game.

3. Marketeer is not target focused but experience focused

The traditional ‘marketer’ is most likely to focus on achieving numbers and expanding territory of product distribution or developing sub brands to show top line growth. The ‘marketeer’ while not discounting the importance of achieving top line numbers is also more focused on giving a good experience to the customer not only about the product but also with the company.

In the South Indian city of Kerala, the top selling electronic voltage stabliliser V-Guard attained that position not only because they offered a good product but they considered customer to be king and never refused to take back a defective product and put all emphasis on customer service which paid off in the long run pushing competition several steps down the line.

4. Marketeer is data driven

This is the age of big data and a treasure is hidden in consumer interactions, transactions through enquiry, sales, billing activity, feedback. This has to be analysed and worked upon. More companies are realizing the value of big data and implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions to gather data and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) to integrate all the functions within an organization.

5. It has social empathy

The success of the marketeer lies in imagining themselves in another’s shoes and be truly human. Machines don’t have empathy even if they perform tasks that humans find it hard to do- robots in medicine and manufacturing. Great marketeers will be well-rounded and curious personalities not the left brain driven analytical types.

6. Marketers need to be visionaries, social media focused

Until a few years ago, marketing was all about mass media and hoardings and banner displays in public places. Now the media has expanded to the web and social media has emerged as a medium on its own. Now no marketing is complete without online and social media marketing not to forget inbound practices through blogging and content marketing strategies.

It needs to use the social media and web to get valuable insights in terms of opinion, suggestions and experiences but more importantly get big data regarding consumer tastes, preferences and desires. The explosion of social media has thrown up new applications that automate several activities on web and FaceBook, Pinterest, Twitter etc. The marketeer needs to work closely with the social media team on using such tools or learn to use them.

Conclusion

Much of what has been conceptualized about the ‘ marketeer’ functions and role are attributable to marketer as well as the role itself overlapping and several gray areas are seen where they both have a role to play.

Tai Tran a regular contributor to Forbes has quoted several expert who pointed out that the millennial marketer or marketeers outlook and profile has to change with the changing times. They need to think like entrepreneurs and demonstrate thought leadership. An entrepreneur is strategic, creative, analytical and passionate about their work. Therefore, these qualities have to be imbibed by the marketer or marketeer as well. They need to keep pace with the latest digital technologies which are cost-efficient and has more geographical reach.

More importantly, they need to demonstrate thought leadership, according to Glenn Leibowitz, Head of Communications at McKinsey. They should have atleast two active social media accounts, Linkedin, Twitter or Facebook. They must be actively blogging and sharing thoughts on a variety of topics related to the industry.

Great marketers make products succeed in the market place with their understanding of applied micro-economics, the nuances of supply, demand and the consumer psychology. The new age marketer has to have social empathy, techno-savvy, know a variety of strategies including inbound, ambush, and event based promotions to deliver better results.

The marketer need to keep track of topline growth in any company but the changing business dynamics and consumer trends dictate the need to understand the consumer better through engagement and continuous innovation to stay ahead of competition. It remains to be seen how fast the industry will come to accept the ‘marketeer’ persona and seem them as a subset of marketing function in an organization. As of now your word processor will highlight the term ‘marketeer’ in red t show that it is not a recognized spelling in its dictionary!

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