Marketing Is a Piece of Cake, Said No Marketer Ever!

Take my word for it! I love cake and I can assure you, it tastes nothing like marketing..

Souha Arbi
Sep 4, 2018 · 8 min read
Contemplating my future as a marketer — it’s looking pretty bright!

We all know what a doctor’s job consists of, right? Meet patients and go through all the symptoms he has learned by heart for years to try to find the perfect match to our illness. Then comes the prescription, paying the fees, and there, we’re done.

As for the engineers, it is a bit different. They combine physics’ rules along with the mathematical equations to figure out how things work, or make them work a little better, faster, and more efficiently. Or even create them from scratch!

But, when it comes to business men and women — or even more so, marketers — nobody actually quite knows. Do they wake up every single morning to suit up, go to work, and sit behind desks waiting for the hours to pass?

The answer would definitely be, no. (Unless you’re in Tunisia working in the public sector, then it’s a definite yes. flashing neon lights and all. (it’s a joke, don’t hate.))

Marketers work every hour, every minute, and every second to keep life as we know it the way it is. Or even make it a bit more enjoyable. All those brands we long for, the food chains we love to Instagram, the apps we scroll on our way to skip-class, helping us keep up with our exes and their exes — in a totally healthy way, I’m sure — , or even the clothes that have quotes reassuring us that we have our lives together.. they all have a huge competent staff of creative men and women working day and night to keep the company strong against competition and survive the market. They work behind the scenes yet are fundamental to the growth of our modern society. It’s almost like they work some sort of magic! After all, no good actor can stand out without the proper lightening, the right angles, the perfect sound equipment, the highest camera in definition, and the mesmerizing script.

THAT is the kind of spell they cast on us. To enchant us. And THAT is why I decided to become a marketer.

What you’d think giving presentations looks like, after all the training my MRK classes gave me.. (finish reading to learn the sad truth)

Okay, we get it.. But what is marketing?

Marketing is about studying people, knowing what they like and dislike. Then you use that knowledge in order to deliver a personalized story that resonates with them and gets them engaged. It’s about knowing how to get their attention and make them stay throughout the whole journey. I loved the storytelling in commercials, how the music, the script, and the setting came together not to just convey a message but to associate a special feeling with the brand in question. A feeling that our subconscious plays every time we see their product in a store or on a website.

That’s when I knew I wanted to be a copywriter. I don’t only want to deliver a message, I want to create a feeling within the customer. A feeling of trust, engagement, and pure awe.

People still think of marketing as “the mere job of selling empty words to the public”. Sure. Along with:

  • The loads and loads and loads of research and benchmarking — basically hoarding information to come up with a one-line conclusion: “yes it doesn’t work”,
  • Keeping up with social media trends and algorithms (and there you thought you were done with your CS classes.. They’ll finally come in handy.. sort of),
  • Digging for hours looking for a small piece of information until you read the whole internet without finding what you were looking for,
  • Studying the market and understanding customers coming from all walks of life, LI.TE.RA.LLY, with their likes and dislikes, political correctness, pop culture, and “triggering social triggers” — if I may call them that way,
  • Doing a thorough competitor analysis, strategic planning, and all those fancy concepts they don’t teach you properly in school,
  • Staying “innovative, creative, bold, but professional” (don’t get me started on this one),
  • Constantly creating content till you use up all the words in your brain and suddenly, you can’t even talk properly because you’re literally out of words!
  • Dealing with the fact that, sometimes your content won’t get attention and you don’t know why, sometimes it will get over-the-charts popular and you still wouldn’t know why,
  • Stalking other brands to figure out what worked for them and what didn’t, experiment, then start from square -135.2,
  • yada yada..

Sure. it’s just “selling words to the wind” for you. But not for us.

For me, marketing is:

It’s the only (I think) discipline that combines audio and visual arts, neuroscience, psychology, data and analytics, behavioral science, writing, strategizing, and everything in between!

It requires huge efforts to find, not just the best, but the right words that convey the true value of the everybody’s hard work. Hell it’s a heavy burden to put in words how hard everyone worked for this baby product to see the light! All the sleepless nights the Dev team has spent investigating a broken line of code. The fountains of coffee keeping everybody’s eyes open day-in-day-out. The endless brainstorming meetings the management went through to make sure everybody’s well taken care of. The limited budget everyone is creatively going by with and hacking the heck out of. And all the thought put into the UX/UI of the product, for a seamless and happy user journey.

And you, as a marketer? You get to define the face, the voice, the emotions, and everything that the company stands for, through small details sprinkled every here and there. The welcome emails, Facebook posts, Instagram stories, insightful blogs, fun videos. You get to define the persona of the company and its reflection to the public. No overselling, no underselling. Just just-right selling.

Now if you don’t think that’s one of the toughest yet most exciting jobs out there then please, by all means, let me know what is.

  • Disclaimer: I did say “one of the” not “the one and only ultimate job there is”. No hate please.

Now in case you’re not bored out of your mind by now and actually stuck around this far, here are some key takeaways:

(From both Marketing as a major and as a job)

  • Being a marketer is no fun walk in the park — I hate how this idiom assumes that it’s fun to walk in the park. It’s not an exact science or a bunch of formulas you apply and TADA it works. Very far from that, actually. It requires patience, grit, creativity, thick skin (for your rejected ideas), not getting married to your aha moments (again, for rejected ideas), and a shit ton of trying-failing-trying-again loops, excuse my French.
  • A great deal of being a marketer involves being your own teacher. There is no class that can ever teach you what you can teach yourself. The marketing world is ever-changing -by the second!- and nobody knows what groundbreaking app or video will get published tomorrow and change “the game”. You have to be always prepared to discard everything you’ve worked on and hop on the new wave. And always remember, you can never go wrong! (well unless you accidentally insult or hurt a famous person/entity’s ego. Don’t do that.)
  • Classes, as pointless as they may seem — and most likely are — are your best beginner resource. Get the basic keywords and concepts from there and dive deeper on your own free time. Don’t think that your professors are giving you all the knowledge you need nor think that you know everything and don’t need their help (okay maybe not all professors cuz let’s face it.. ). There are plenty of resources, ebooks, videos, talks, blogs, newsletters, podcasts out there that could keep you busy and very well rounded for another 100 years!
  • You got an idea? Sure. Means nothing. Experiment, fail, test, go crazy, try again, go out there, pitch it over and over, stay unbiased, don’t get defensive, listen, find that devil’s advocate, take note, keep your mind/imagination open, and remember, everything and anything can inspire you. Just look closer. This is the only way you can find your right message and actually find out what people really REALLY unconsciously want.
  • You gotta love presentations. And by love I mean literally live in a presentation. If you’re considering marketing, you’d better get comfortable with dressing up and pitching whatever you half-asleep put on the coffee-induced slides literally the night before while sounding all confident like you know your shit. Chances are, that’s your 3rd presentation that day. But don’t worry, you’ll lose count at some point and it wouldn’t matter whether you’re pitching the right presentation to the right class. As long as you look confident, nobody cares. Remember: If you can’t convince them, confuse them!
  • You gotta love case studies. (Same as loving presentations, except with a page or word limit) My only advice is: choose your team wisely and may the odds be ever in your favor because the rest of the class will remember and by God you don’t want to be the team-that-shall-not-be-named. (too many references but trust me, you don’t want to be part of any teamwork drama).
  • Finally, choose marketing because you love it. Don’t do it because the other majors deal with numbers (we do too, trust me, I cry every time), or because they seem boring. Marketing has defined some of the world’s biggest companies for years. The legendary battles between Coca Cola and Pepsi, Apple and Samsung, and others are to die for. Yet, here in Tunisia, aside from the 3 Musketeers: Orange, Ooredoo, and TT, marketing is almost non-existing. It’s our duty, as revolutionary new-age young creative millennials, to show the world how it should be done. So don’t do it if you don’t love it enough.
What it actually looks like: Laughing at my own puns and dad jokes mid-serious presentations!

Whoever said “find something you love and you won’t work for a day” was completely mistaken. I believe they should’ve said something that goes along the lines of: Find something you love and you’ll work for a lifetime. Except, it won’t always feel like work, but rather more like entertainment, self-fulfillment, and complete utter joy.

So, to all those who ask me why I chose Marketing, the answer is very simple: I chose it because it is as random, as challenging, as unexpected, as thrilling, and as stimulating as.. well, life!

TBS Stories

Tunis Business School, one story at a time.

Souha Arbi

Written by

I love writing. If only I loved sitting down to actually write as much.

TBS Stories

Tunis Business School, one story at a time.

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