Posted by Michael Fassnacht, EVP, Chief Customer Intelligence Officer, Draftfcb

The great growth success in our Chicago office over the last 12 - 18 months allowed me to search and meet a lot of candidates for open positions across most of our divisions. It’s always interesting to ask incoming candidates why they would like to work in an agency like Draftfcb? Quite a few candidates are not able to have a direct or meaningful answer beyond the usual platitudes that “it sounds exciting”, “I want a new challenge”, “I heard you have great Mocha Frappuccinos at your coffee bar” or “A friend told me that you are the only agency in Chicago hiring people and I don’t want to move to Kansas”.

The right, or at least the most relevant, answer is closely linked to what it means to be a marketer in 2008. In my view, it comes down to the two fundamentals that any marketer should focus on: First, trying to understand consumers and their behavior. Second, creating something so unique, interesting, and relevant that it can change a consumer’s behavior, ultimately leading to the sale or usage of our clients’ products. A lot of people in our industry forget these two fundamentals; they forget what our industry is all about. They focus either on their own grandiose spotlight and brilliance at fancy industry events or their career survival in an environment of recession.

To pursue these two fundamentals in today’s world is more exciting than ever in the history of our discipline.  First, the methodologies of and approaches to understanding consumer behavior are as multifold, diverse, and creative as never before. Just look at the ever growing discipline of behavioral economists or at the expanding practice of Social Media Analysis that mines the behavioral data of millions of consumers on the Web. We marketers should know and utilize them intensely and not solely rely on Don Draper’s brilliantly insightful moments at a smoke-filled bar after three martinis. These moments of individual brilliance are not gone but they are fueled and supported by a more rigorous and scientific approach that our discipline did not develop until a few years ago.

Second, the means of intersecting with consumers, driven by a deep consumer understanding, are broader and wider than ever. We marketers can build a small Web applet that transforms marketing from a communication to a service point used by millions of consumers, or we can put a sticker on an apple in a grocery store, spreading our message to tens of thousands of browsing shoppers, or we can design the environment of a new pop-up store introducing a new product to thousands of visitors.

We marketers have the full freedom to create whatever we believe will drive a true change in consumer behavior as long as we do our data and insights homework, increasing the probability of success. Done right, this truly liberates creativity in all of us across all disciplines and functions.

Being a Marketer today is more demanding, scientific, and creative than previously, but it still comes down to the two basics: understanding the consumer and creating something relevant for or with the consumer.

At the end of every single day, we should ask ourselves if we have done anything compelling or innovative in one of these areas. And we should only hire new colleagues who are striving to fulfill this demanding but simple mission of what it means to be a marketer today. Anyone else can go to Starbucks for their Mocha Frappuccino.