Two-Thirds of American Marketers Would Fail a Basic Marketing Test

Before marketers learn AI, or the language of the boardroom, or purpose, or storytelling, or any of the other things we keep telling them they need to master, many of them need to learn something more basic. They need to learn marketing.

There, I said it. I know it sounds provocative. It isn’t meant to be. It’s just what the data says.

I think many American marketers would be even better if they had a basic, up-to-date, operating model of marketing. And I can prove it. 

Earlier this year I worked with the global market research firm Ipsos to measure marketing knowledge in the U.S. We surveyed a representative sample of American marketers and, among a battery of other questions, subtly asked them ten simple sub-undergraduate questions about marketing offering them four multiple choice answers to choose from. 

The questions were basic. The team at Ipsos told me they were too easy. And they had a point. The questions asked basic things like whether marketers knew what a quantitative market research method was, what penetration means, about whether they knew what segmentation targeting and positioning was, and whether they could name the four Ps. 

The results are incredible.

More than 40% of American marketers don’t know what positioning means. Half of them don’t understand what penetration is. Two thirds of them cannot identify a quantitative research method. 54% of them don’t know what “above the line” or “omnichannel” means. 

All told, two thirds of American marketers would fail the most basic test of marketing knowledge.

Meanwhile, most marketers rate their skills very highly. Eighty-four percent of American marketers rate themselves above average at marketing—a statistical and disciplinary impossibility. 

How do we explain this contradiction? 

Well, we can use the same Ipsos survey to try and find answers. Controlling for all the other variables, we examined a host of potential correlations to try and find out why so many American marketers know so little about marketing. 

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. 

Read the data here.