The Lost Generation of Marketers

TLDR:

Where to learn about Marketing
The Lost Generation of Marketers
Tool:

Google was my best teacher

Despite getting a Marketing degree from a well-regarded business school, I learned more about Marketing from Growth Hackers and Dan Kennedy books than I did from school.

The problem with every form of teaching Marketing is that it’s too reliant on the technological shift at the time. When I was in college our professors all had a depth of Retail experience.

That didn’t translate to the undeniable software boom that was happening at the time. Some theories might stay the same, but understanding the core principles of the channel changes virtually everything else.

But the real miss was not teaching the students how to sell. If I could take back my entire college curriculum and spend a couple hundred bucks reading Dan Kennedy, Russel Brunson, Robert Cialdini, and Daniel Kahneman I would in a heart beat.

Why?

They taught me the most important elements of Marketing: 1)Selling and 2) How humans make decisions. Once you understand those 2 core elements everything else becomes tactics and deeply understanding a platform.

If you haven’t read the 4 authors above I highly recommend it. Growth Hackers is outdated at this point, but was great about a decade ago.

For 946 real ones who are here week in and out. I appreciate you. Let’s talk about how Marketers who started their career over the past 4 years are going to be in for a tough decade ahead of them.

Testing out a backwards article today. Here are the takeaways if you don’t want to read the whole piece.

🧠 The Takeaways

Marketers who started from 2019-2025 aren’t learning real Marketing. It’s our job to help them.

1. Marketers today are too short term focused and don’t understand how to properly invest in the full mix of their channels.

2. There are 4 key steps of the buyer decision making process: Problem unaware, Solution Aware, Product Aware, Most Aware.

3. Think of your Marketing mix like a champagne tower. You need to overflow the top of your funnel to fill everything downstream.

👷 What can you do about this?

1. Guide them through the whiplash of everything working to nothing working. Give them realistic return horizons.

2. Provide them with more resources, books/blogs and small budgets to experiment themselves. All Marketing teams should have 10% test budgets.

3. Have them spend more time researching how core channels impacts each other.

Now for the goods.

The Lost Generation of Marketers

We have done, and continue to do, a major disservice to the Marketers who started their careers from 2019-2025. They’re going to have a tough time becoming 10x marketers because of how we’ve been treating Marketing.

Let’s break down this 2019 - 2025 period:

From 2019 - 2022 sales came in so easily that Marketing was like standing outside with a bucket while gold was falling from the sky. Marketers treated every channel like a last-click direct-response channel because they all they really needed to do was be outside with a bucket.

Every Marketer worth their salt knew it was too good to be true and wouldn’t last. But it’s easy to understand how a new comer thought they had a Midas touch. Launching and scaling had some bumps, but on the whole sales were coming in so fast and furious it looked like everything drove more sales.

From 2022 - 2025 we’re going to give Marketers such short ROI time horizons that they are only going to myopically focus on the channels that are actually last-click direct response. The breadth of channels they saw success in will collapse from virtually all, to the bottom of funnel activities.

The economic crunch and shifting consumer trends are mostly to blame for this, but the net result will be the same. 6 years of telling them they need to focus on putting Revenue on the board today.

It’s not their fault. They’ve done exactly what they were told to do. Go make money today. Not giving them more nuance is where we have lead them astray. Despite what some people might say, making money today is not Marketing’s job.

1. Making money today is a function of Sales.

2. Making money tomorrow is a function of Marketing.

I’m not saying Marketing shouldn’t sell. It’s a core function of great Marketing, but you shouldn’t expect that sale to come in immediately. Changing people’s mind takes time.

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So how is this generation f***ed?

We’ve trained a bunch of Marketers on how to spend across all channels, but they don’t properly understanding how buyers make decisions and what channels impact the decision making process.

Then told them to go chase dollars in any channel they can prove a trackable return. Robbing them of the actual lesson they need to learn.

What buyer actions can Marketing influence throughout their journey to get them to make a decision that’s beneficial for my business?

At the end of that day that’s what Marketing is. We can add all the bells and whistles, strategies and hacks, but a Marketers real job is to influence people’s decisions with the budget they have.

They need to understand the 4 key buying stages and how to accelerate a customer through each stage.

1. Problem Unaware

2. To Solution Aware

3. To Product Aware

4. To Most Aware.

They need to understand what messaging in what channels speaks to each segment and how they can swiftly move a prospect through each of the stages.

The challenge most startups face is they attack Most Aware so aggressively without investing in Problem Unaware + Solution Aware they end up saturating the Most Aware and Product Aware segments. That leads to 1 of 2 things happening:

1. Growth comes to a screeching halt

2. CAC and Time to Purchase explode (leading to Point #1)

What should they be doing?

Great marketers strategically place bets in channels to hit all of these areas at once, pushing and pulling budget back based on how sales are going and when the Finance team expects to see a return on the investment.

The easiest way to visualize this is a champagne tower.

Building brand awareness (aka. targeting Problem Unaware and Solution aware segments) is the most expensive and hardest to measure area of Marketing. If you don’t pour so much into the top cup it overflows the lower level cups won’t fill up.

The pattern of overflowing one level to fill up the next is how the progression of Marketing should work. Consistently bringing in new prospects at the top of the funnel and catching the overflow in the lower areas in how successful businesses are built.

I really like the imagery of the champagne splashing around because that’s what Marketing is. An imprecise practice that always has some spillage, but with a great structure you can minimize how much champagne hits the floor (wasted budget). When done well it’s a beautiful success and a spectacle others talk about.

The 2 concepts I’d add to this image:

1. Changing the shape/color of the glass at each level to represent different channels.

2. Building “overflow catchers” at each level to reduce the spillage hitting the floor.

You can spend all the money in the world building the fanciest stack of glasses and overflow catchers, but if you don’t have enough champagne splashing over the rest will eventually dry up.

We haven’t taught this generation is to look at their Marketing channels this way, instead they see the channels they manage as a firehose and a bucket. If a new Marketer doesn’t have the skills to understand what investments in what channels impact down stream sales. They’re toast.

What can we do to help them?

There are 3 actions we all need to take.

1. Give them appropriate return horizons based on Margins and CAC Paybacks. What investment timeline do they actually have?

2. Have them break down their marketing mix against the awareness stages. Do the budget %’s align with company strategy?

3. Run incremental tests (increase/decrease budgets 10%+ on 1 specific channel) to see the impact your marketing channels have on each other.

This is probably happening right now in your business.

If early 2023 sales are slow look back to what higher funnel channels you cut late last year. Most likely a cut in higher funnel channels then is now impacting downstream (easier to track) channels that you didn’t realize were related.

A great example of this from my time at LuMee:

Emails were crushing it for us and MUCH cheaper to run than Facebook ads. The team wanted to save Marketing budget while keeping the sales pace so they decided to reduce the Facebook cold prospecting ad spend (Top of the tower) and push more sales through email (Lower levels of the tower).

What happened?

Sales across both channels decreased. We learned the hard way that the Facebook Cold Prospecting ads were feeding the Welcome and Abandoned cart email flows, the 2 largest consistent email moneymakers, and when we reduced the champagne splashing from the top cup everything else dried up.

We also captured fewer emails which has all the downstream revenue impacts on an email program. When we increased the Facebook ads again the whole program spun back up and we saw sales return to their steady state.

The more important lesson we learned was if we always backstopped ad channels with email capture we could justify a higher spend knowing the secondary ROI of feeding our email program would offset the “low ROI” on the initial spend. As long as the Email program converted them later on.

It’s hard to theoretically learn these lessons. Most of this comes down to experimenting in the real world and learning from “plowing the field with our faces”.

As Founders/Experienced Marketers it’s our duty to share this information and create environments where Marketers can learn these lessons to become the 10x Marketers this generation has the potential to become.

As always. Stay confident, connect with your customers, and keep crushing it.

Jeremy Horowitz

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