If you want good marketing, hire a marketer who is qualified!

Too many people who claim to be ‘experts’ in marketing have no training and no qualifications. Do not make the mistake of trusting them with your marketing!

If their skills are self-taught and only based on their experience and common sense, don’t expect them to make much difference to your company’s bottom line. And they could be causing you huge damage.

You’ll probably find they may know about media and communications; but when it comes to market segmentation, pricing strategies, product design, distribution channels, competitive differentiation, internal marketing and all the other aspects of marketing, they won’t be able to help you much.

Learning about marketing – and being qualified – will add immense value to the contribution your marketers can make to your company. But there seems to be an inbuilt prejudice against it; it’s as if it’s not ‘macho’ to be qualified.

Mark Ritson in Marketing Week has written a brilliant and amusing article about this very subject, and I commend it to you: ‘We must fight the philistines on the value of marketing training.’ You wouldn’t trust a brain surgeon who isn’t qualified, or a lawyer, or a surveyor.

So why trust an unqualified marketer?