We often treat marketing like a noun. It’s a department, a campaign, a strategy we execute, so on and so on. But what if we've been thinking about it wrong this whole time?
Maybe it’s a verb.
This thought crossed my mind at a recent national public health conference as I sat through panel after panel with rooms full of professionals who were genuinely scared about their future. Every conversation and Q&A circled back to the same fear: funding cuts. Not theoretical ones — real ones happening right now. This isn’t a political statement, it’s just reality for some industries.
By the end of the conference, I was left feeling like marketers were just missing the whole dang point. After seeing and talking with these people face to face, the last thing I wanted to do was send them emails about “exciting opportunities” and “game-changing solutions.
We do this constantly. We get so focused on our campaigns and our metrics that we forget to actually look at what's happening with the people we're trying to reach. We treat marketing like this thing we do TO people instead of WITH them.
Focus on What Actually Matters
The people at this conference weren't just "budget-conscious decision makers." They were tired. They were frustrated. Some of them were probably updating their resumes in hotel rooms after sessions about "innovative Meta tactics" that felt more like pipe dreams than real solutions.
I'm not saying you need to completely overhaul your marketing every time something changes in your industry. That would be exhausting and impossible. But maybe we could start by asking different questions. Instead of "What do we want to tell them?" maybe ask "What are they dealing with right now?" Instead of "How do we position our product?" maybe ask "How can we actually help?"
The Thing About Trust
When you show people you understand their reality — not the version of their reality that's convenient for your messaging, but their actual reality — something shifts. They start to trust you. They start to see you as someone who gets it, not someone who's just trying to sell them something.
And trust is everything in marketing. It's everything in business. It's everything in relationships with other humans, which is ultimately what all of this is about.
I'm still processing everything I saw and heard this week. But I keep coming back to this: marketing is an action we take with our audiences. Marketing is a verb.
