No, I'll never be the best in any discipline. And I don't want to.
I have actively decided not to be in the top 1% in any particular field of marketing! I will never specialize to become the best at one skill, and I will never give one discipline disproportionately more effort compared to others. All because I believe it’s in my, my coworkers, and my companies best interest.
If you specialize in one field you are prone to filter information that does not benefit what you currently do. If you are the best at Facebook Ads and heard that TikTok Ads is a more profitable way of driving awareness - would you believe that? Would you take the risk of leaving what you’ve worked so long to master? Would you tell your leader? I believe small- and medium-sized businesses about to jump the chasm that employs specialists miss out on opportunities in a fear of diversifying away from what the marketer is good at.
The company decides to fight for the consumer’s attention against 10,000,000 other advertisers. Instead of looking for emerging opportunities, you stick to what is safe, but over time, the chances that you will reach greatness doing the same thing as 10,000,000 others are very small.
The Fat T Marketer
Marketers have slowly developed into t-shapes. And marketers have gotten more and more specialized within their respective fields as new channels develop.
The traditional T-shaped marketer https://course.growthtribe.io/t-shaped-marketer
The T-shaped marketer has an understanding of many areas of your marketing organization but is a specialist in one or two areas, well equipped for an organization where there are resources and space for being specialized. The situation in a small- or medium-sized organization with 3-8 employees in the marketing department is different. Having too many specialists on the team will leave them unable to answer trends where they lack operational capabilities to make good tactical decisions. Not only do they lack the capabilities, but it’s likely they’ll face backlash from employees who see their specialties threatened due to the change.
The answer to these struggles is: The Fat T Marketer
How Gartner portrays the Fat T Marketer How to Build Your Marketing Organization (gartner.com)
The Fat T Marketer is a t-shaped marketer with a depth of knowledge in more areas. The Fat T marketer provides your organization with more agility, more capabilities, and a higher willingness of challenging the status quo. Where a change in the market landscape will be seen as a threat to the T shaped marketer, it’s an opportunity for the fat T shaped marketer to bring all h*s capabilities together and create the best solutions for the company. Even if it means changing, or even putting aside, one of the skills they’re specialized in.
The Fat T shaped marketer will be a key to enabling a growing companies marketing department to get the most out of its resources and enabling it to change based on markets, customer preferences, consumer behaviors, and expectations.
I see specialization of marketing knowledge as a great challenge for small- and medium-sized businesses. Because the existing information is clustered. Google and Facebook have built up an empire of marketers specializing in advertising on their platforms. That is what the talent knows, and that is where advertisers goes (pun intended). With luck evaporating over time.
How do I develop myself as a Fat T Marketer?
I don’t believe that you need the deepest of knowledge in every field to be great at something. I said I’ll never be in the top 1% of anything, that’s not completely true. I’ll be in the top 1% of people your growing organization needs to cross the chasm. From every skill that I get deep knowledge about, I bring a framework based on experience, shared knowledge, and information that will make it easier to bring that knowledge to life in an agile and adaptive way where you string together strategy and tactics, brand and performance, customers and growth.