Aside: This title is a reference to Stanely Kubrick's naming of the 1964 film, 'Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb', which itself is a play on Dale Carnegie's book, 'How to Stop Worrying and Start Living'.

Marketing has a bad rep with non-marketers. I found this to be especially true when I was learning marketing in business school. As I applied frameworks to case studies and created slides to promote a fictional humane mouse trap for 20% of my grade, the two words that I most strongly associated with marketing were bullshit and fluffy. In short, I thought marketing was everything but humane.

This perception stayed with me throughout my university years and into my first full-time job. It's hard to think otherwise when the first thing you see if you look up "marketing" are a bunch of impersonal words.

Marketing is the process of intentionally stimulating demand for and purchases of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes ... Wikipedia

My mind only started to change when I started doing more marketing myself. I've come to appreciate marketing as something that's thoughtful and analytical rather than bullshit and fluffy.

Marketing is thoughtful in the same way that you're thoughtful when you make a great recommendation for a friend. The only difference is that you're making recommendations at scale for a big group rather than one person. When recommending a yummy restaurant, a thrilling movie, or a scenic trail for a friend, you must take into consideration their tastes and preferences. You might think about what's accessible to them, which neighbourhoods they enjoy, and what their budget is. When you market, you have to do the same. Marketing is being thoughtful.

Marketing also extends beyond soft skills and often requires the same level of rigour investigative journalists use to break watershed stories and astrophysicist use to map the stars in the universe. It's impossible to listen intently to a million different voices so you might find yourself carefully choosing a focus group and spending hours preparing interview questions. From there, you might survey the market and summarize a sea of data points into a handful of insights. To do this well, you can arm yourself with Python scripts, SQL queries, and more. Marketing is being analytical.

If you find yourself thinking that marketing is a dirty word like I did, just know that marketing does matter and it takes a lot of heart and brains to do it well.