Despite conventional wisdom suggesting otherwise, stone tool-making, which dates back 2.7 million years, is the world’s oldest profession. Marketing must then be the world’s second oldest, since someone needed to effectively communicate to someone else that the tools were available for purchase or in trade for an armadillo.
What’s changed about marketing in the last 2.7 million years? Everything and nothing. Creating and capturing demand in order to create a profitable customer remains a marketer’s fundamental job. This is just as it was in the Micoene epoch, even if it has gotten a tad more complex, and the tools more sophisticated than stone.
Today’s CMO is tasked with separating a few signals from a global cavalcade of noise in order to guarantee growth certainty in perpetually uncertain times. Traditional constructs and measures of what was once within a chief marketer’s control have gone the way of flip-phones, and marketing has become decentralized, disaggregated, democratized, and, far too often, siloed within enterprises, making the job of determining the optimal allocation of scarce resources—in order to create and capture demand—more difficult than at any time in history, at least until tomorrow.