What is a Marketing Director / Strategist / Manager?

Recently I've chatted with executives and recruiting teams charged with hiring a Marketing Director, Marketing Strategist, or Marketing Manager. There seems to be a good deal of confusion among the non-marketers as to what to expect from these roles. For this post I thought I'd offer my generalized but otherwise accurate definition.

A marketing director/strategist/manager is... part architect and part technology enthusiast. We are always passionate about the big picture and mentoring the individuals that bring the vision to life. We are perpetual students of business, business intelligence, and numbers. Today more than ever, we are knowledgeable as to the technical capabilities, compromises, and requirements of the electronic tools that empower our profession. Finally, through experience we've acquired the real-life wisdom for creating and guiding marketing strategies, budgets, plans, assets, systems, processes, and KPI's that will truly effect profitable business results. We wear a dozen hats and juggle them well.


A marketing director/strategist/manager is not... an expert in the physical creation of all the individual components that make up the marketing plan. For example, I am very knowledgeable as to what a well optimized website looks like, and in a 2.0 world how it should perform. I've even developed a few sites myself! This knowledge however, is a far cry from being a qualified website developer. These web professionals have intimate knowledge of database architecture, design, flexibility, and scalability. They dream about the intricacies of usability on the multitude of browsers and platforms. They have strong working knowledge of all of the various development languages and tools one can employ on the web. Each and every category of marketing includes a similarly lengthy list of competencies. A qualified director/manager will bring on professionals with the required qualifications.

In short, it's your marketing director/manager/strategist's job to determine what is needed to meet organizational needs, architect an integrated plan that delivers on those needs, put together a team with the specific development expertise that is required, guide and mentor the creative process, monitor on-going results, and massage the plan, the mix, the controls, the team, and the assets as situational events occur. Shake-it-up and repeat.