I have been working in journalism/corporate communications/marketing since before email became part of the working day. Before WhatsApp groups, Canva presentations, social-media calendars and dashboards updating in real time. I remember when the agency came to the client’s office carrying the advertisements, printed on 11-by-17 paper, and physically presented the creative. We sat around a table, looked at every word and image and discussed whether the work was right for the product, the customer and the business.

Then came PowerPoint. We all remember “death by PowerPoint”, when every meeting seemed to require 72 slides, several graphs and somebody reading every bullet aloud from a screen. Now, we can build a campaign, publish it and receive audience reactions from around the world in a single afternoon.

The tools have changed dramatically. The responsibility has not.

People sometimes look at marketers in their late 40s, 50s and beyond and wonder why we are involved in everything. Why are we asking about the product, price, packaging, distribution, sales figures, customer complaints, staff behaviour and what happens when somebody actually walks into the store?

Because that is marketing.

We learnt the profession when there was no internet waiting to give us an immediate answer. If we wanted to understand what was happening in another market, we read magazines, newspapers, trade journals, industry reports and case studies. We watched what global brands were doing, collected advertisements and studied how products were positioned. Research took time, access and intellectual curiosity.

More importantly, we spoke to people.

We sat with clients in person. We visited stores. We spoke to sales representatives, distributors, cashiers and customers. We conducted focus groups and listened while people explained what they liked, disliked, could afford, could not find or did not understand. We watched people encounter products in real life. We saw their faces when they tasted something for the first time, struggled to open a package or could not understand the instructions.

In fast-moving consumer goods, sampling was not an afterthought. It was research, promotion and human interaction happening at the same time. You placed the product in someone’s hand, watched them try it, asked what they thought and gave them a reason to buy it. No amount of reach could replace that moment of truth.

That kind of marketing taught us something analytics alone cannot: people do not always behave as they claim they will. What someone says in a survey, what they select in a focus group and what they eventually pay for can be three different things. That is why observation, testing, sampling, sales data and customer conversations all mattered.

Today, too many companies seem to believe that putting a product on social media is a sales strategy.

Post it. Boost it. Get an influencer to hold it. Count the views. Celebrate the likes. Then quietly avoid the question that should have been asked from the beginning: Did it sell?

A post can receive 100,000 views from people who have no intention or ability to buy the product. It can generate thousands of likes in a country where the product is not distributed. It can go viral without changing one person’s purchasing behaviour. Reach tells us that people may have encountered the content. It does not automatically tell us that they noticed the brand, understood the offer, remembered it, wanted it or bought it.

That distinction is not nostalgia. It is supported by modern marketing science. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising warns that using short-term online metrics as the primary measure of performance can have dangerous implications for long-term business success. Its effectiveness research distinguishes between immediate activation and the slower work of building memory, preference, pricing power and future demand. The strongest marketing does both. It creates sales now while building a brand people will choose later. IPA, ⁠The Long and the Short of It⁠

Psychologically, marketing works through far more than momentary attention. Human beings use memory, familiarity, emotion, social proof, perceived value and mental shortcuts when making decisions. A customer is more likely to consider a brand that comes easily to mind in a buying situation. Researchers at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute call this mental availability. But the same brand must also be easy to find and buy, which they call physical availability. A brilliant social post cannot compensate for a product that is unavailable, incorrectly priced, badly packaged or poorly distributed. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute⁠

This is why those of us trained in traditional marketing ask so many questions. Where is the product sold? Is it on the shelf? Can the target customer afford it? Does the packaging stand out? Does the name make sense? Is the experience consistent with the promise? Are we attracting existing buyers or expanding the customer base? What happened to sales during the campaign and what would have happened without it?

Google now encourages marketers to use incrementality testing to determine the revenue a campaign actually caused, not merely the activity that occurred while the campaign was running. That distinction matters because correlation is not causation. Sales may increase during a campaign because of seasonality, a price promotion, expanded distribution or something a competitor did. Proper measurement asks what additional sales the marketing produced and what return the business earned on its investment. Google’s guide to incrementality⁠

The irony is that, while marketing has become more specialised, companies have collapsed several disciplines into one badly defined job. Look at many advertisements for a “Marketing Executive” or “Social Media Manager” and the company is actually searching for a strategist, copywriter, graphic designer, photographer, videographer, video editor, community manager, media buyer, events coordinator, customer-service representative and data analyst. Five jobs have become one job, with one salary and one impossible deadline.

Then we wonder why the work lacks depth.

The young woman hired to do all of that is not necessarily the problem. Quite often, she has been given no proper research, mentorship, brand strategy, customer data or approval structure. She has simply been told that something must go out today. So the organisation rewards speed over thought, volume over accuracy and visibility over commercial value. It has created the pseudo-marketer it now depends upon.

However, professional standards still have to matter.

You cannot claim to represent a brand while refusing to proofread. You cannot market Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival while being careless with the spelling of J’Ouvert, the history of the festival or the cultural meaning of what you are publishing. Culture is not decorative content. Language is not something to tidy up after the design is finished. When a brand misspells the name of a people’s tradition, the error signals that nobody in the process cared enough to check.

That affects trust. Research in digital usability has repeatedly found that spelling and grammatical mistakes damage perceived credibility because people use small visible errors to infer larger invisible problems. If a company is careless with the words on its public-facing material, customers may reasonably wonder whether it is equally careless with its product, service or money. Nielsen Norman Group⁠

The great global campaigns were never merely attractive pieces of content. Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” began in Australia with consumer insight, names printed on physical packaging, retail distribution and a product people could find, purchase and share. It eventually travelled to more than 80 countries. The social conversation amplified an idea already built into the product and the buying experience. Social media was part of the system. It was not the entire system.

Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” began with research into women’s relationships with beauty, then expanded across advertising, public relations, education, online content and live initiatives. Harvard Business School describes it as a global campaign built through research and evidence-based practices, incorporating advertisements, school curricula, online resources and public events. It became culturally significant because it was a sustained brand position, not a collection of unrelated posts. Harvard Business School⁠

Those campaigns understood something we appear to be forgetting: social media is a channel. It is not marketing itself.

This is not an argument that everything was better before the internet. It was not. Research was slower, access was unequal and some of the old processes were cumbersome and expensive. Digital tools have made it possible to listen faster, test ideas more efficiently, reach niche communities and measure behaviour with extraordinary precision. Younger marketers bring platform fluency, cultural speed and ways of communicating that every experienced marketer must respect and learn.

But knowing how to operate the newest tool is not the same as understanding the whole profession.

Those of us who began before email have lived through print, radio, television, direct mail, public relations, trade promotions, PowerPoint, websites, search, email marketing, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, influencers, automation and now artificial intelligence. We did not stop learning when the media changed. We added every new channel to the foundation we already had.

We remember when marketing required us to leave the office, enter the market and look another human being in the face. We remember that the customer is not a follower count, the culture is not a trending audio and the product has to deliver when the camera is turned off.

So when marketers in their late 40s, 50s and beyond appear to be “doing everything”, understand what you are really seeing.

We are not doing everything. We are connecting everything.

The research to the insight. The culture to the language. The product to the promise. The promotion to the place where the product is sold. The attention to the action. The campaign to the customer and, ultimately, the marketing budget to the money it was supposed to make.

Because a pretty post may stop a thumb. But marketing is supposed to move a business.