Strength is objective. 

Attractiveness is subjective.

I can either pick up 400lbs or not. It doesn’t matter who’s in the room or what shirt I wore. This objective fact creates a natural pecking order. 

The guy or gal who can lift the most = the strongest. Simple as that.

But what about deciding who is the hottest individual? A little more complicated.

I will never walk into a New York private gym and try to deceive the biggest guys there that I can lift 400lbs. Because if they want, they can put 400lbs on the rack and force me to “prove it”; a literal litmus test.

All this to say that marketing is the opposite of strength. It’s akin to attractiveness—subjective as all hell.

Anyone can say they know how to do marketing. 

Anyone can put Fractional CMO in their LinkedIn headline.

How do we litmus test them?

We can’t. That’s why marketing experts are losing their ground. There are so many marketing gurus out now that we cannot separate the real from the fake.

This is dangerous for the person who needs to hire a marketing expert or marketing position. So how can you weed the good from the bad? (“Can the real Slim Shady please stand up?”)

A straightforward way to differentiate the fake from the real is to see who is a true practitioner; are they executing what they say they know? 

Is their knowledge 100% theoretical with 0% practical/actionable?

I was there when I began. I “knew a lot” about marketing but never tried anything or experimented on my own.

That stopped when I began posting on LinkedIn three years ago. And I took a step further by creating this email.

While there is no foolproof way to figure out who truly knows their shit, look at what they are creating or not creating. This shows you how much practical/actionable knowledge they have.

And in the end, practical knowledge unlocks marketing’s most significant breakthroughs. 

Marketeer Insights ⚔️

Don’t talk the marketing talk. Walk the marketing walk.

🧠 + ❤️ // JO