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I originally published a version of this essay in February 2020. Enjoy.

Read time: 9 minutes

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The best marketers might call themselves marketers... But they are secretly strong in other disciplines.

Over the years, I’ve been asked, “How can I become a better marketer?”

My answer has changed over time. But one thing has stayed constant: only focusing on marketing is not enough.

By all means, study the fundamentals and latest trends in marketing. If you ONLY do that, though, you’ll back yourself into a corner. Your box will get smaller and smaller.

Instead, get good at adjacent disciplines. The adjacent disciplines will give you the je ne se quois that expands your lateral thinking. They make you a sharper, savvier, more nuanced operator.

The best marketers have expertise in adjacent disciplines.

Under the hood, they are a salesperson.

Or a product person.

Or a designer.

Or all of the above (and then some).

These adjacent disciplines become a marketer’s special sauce. This allows you to create work with texture.

You’ll become a “marketer plus,” if you will.

Btw, I say marketer here, but this applies to operators in general.

If you want to level up, here’s a list of marketing-adjacent topics I recommend:

1. Negotiation

Negotiation is a dance and much of it is about what’s unsaid, reading between the lines, and taps into visceral, subconscious reactions. Your customer wants you to build value and not accidentally give up power/concessions. You want that too. So learn the negotiation basics, then go deep. You’ll start to see negotiations happening everywhere. It will help you sharpen your messaging, pricing, and everything in between.

Learn about this:

• Power dynamics

• Alternatives your customers have

• Alternatives you have

• Understanding incentives

• Giving concessions

• Building value

• Not accidentally giving up power

2. Sales

You can’t nurture leads and build brand awareness forever. Eventually, you have to sell something. Sales teaches you to keep your eyes on the prize: closing sales. This helps you stand out as a marketer and will make you more influential within your organization. The closer you are to bringing in revenue, the more central you’ll be to important company decisions.

Learn about this:

• How people make decisions

• Buyer’s remorse

• The role of fear in purchasing decisions

• Psychology that shifts depending on low cost or expensive items

• Deniability

• Tension (when to resolve, when not to)

• Rationalizing your decisions

• Becoming impatient with BS and time-wasting

• Framing 90% around your recipient

• Ruthless focus on results and outcomes

• Thinking flexibly

• Choosing marketing tactics to support short-term vs long-term sales

3. Business analysis

You can work with data but not be analytical. You can be analytical without working with data.

Shockingly, I’ve worked with financial planners and paid acquisition managers who work with numbers all day, but did weird things like add percentages or celebrate raw numbers without checking the percentages.

I’m fortunate to have started my career as a business analyst at Gap Inc. I was part of a rotational program where they invested a ton into both formal training and on-the-job shadowing and mentorship. It’s made a lasting mark: The principles I learned there shaped how I think about numbers, interpreting data, and making defensible claims.

You can learn these concepts on your own, too. It’s not really about numbers. It’s about your ability to think clearly and interpret information. It’s about calling BS and developing a spidey sense for when numbers seem “off” and too good to be true.

Learn about this:

• Levers (price vs volume)

• Making inferences

• Pointing out faulty logic or logical stretches

• Raw numbers versus percentages

• Percent contribution

• Trend lines of change over time

• Patterns and pattern breaks

• Gut checking numbers

• Healthy sense of paranoia

• Using accurate language, i.e. using words that reflect your level of certainty

• Stating assumptions explicitly

• Making defensible claims

• Creating “standalone” claims that don’t need your voiceover

• Explaining your rationale

^ I wrote about much of the above in How to sharpen your analytical thinking—even if you’re not a numbers person.

4. Psychology, behavioral economics

Studying psychology and behavioral economics will help you better understand people, which is pure upside. When you master these concepts, you can mix and match to stack them.

Learn about this:

• How people are irrational

• What we say vs what we do

• Common motivations

• How we process information

• Strategic empathy

• Unconscious biases and how they play out in daily life

• Inception, i.e. planting ideas in people’s heads

• Cognitive dissonance (one of my favorite unconscious biases)

• Placebos (another favorite)

• Recency bias (okay, lots of favorites)

• Reciprocity

• Loss aversion

• Lies we tell ourselves

• Practical ways to influence and persuade

• Psychographics versus demographics

• Worldviews

5. Copywriting

You will go far in your life if you can write well. You might have good intentions or a brilliant idea, but if you can’t express them… No one cares.

I find most people agree on high-level strategies, but things fall apart in execution. They can’t translate their strategy into customer-facing words and images that get the outcome they’re looking for. Strengthen your copywriting skills, and you’ll strengthen your execution.

Learn about this:

• What makes you sound corporate versus human

• Robot voice method

• When to break grammar rules intentionally

• Using words with emotional resonance

• Non-obvious things like the visual layout of text

• How to edit your own writing

• Basic UX principles of how people read/skim

• Visceral reactions of certain words

• Avoiding backstory scope creep

• Framing ideas

• Sequence and priming your audience

• Picking the right words/phrases to convey what you mean

• Avoiding language that’s unintentionally dramatic, negative, or heavy

6. Fiction writing

I studied the craft of writing fiction because it made me a better marketer for non-fiction copy. This is different from copywriting to sell. The craft of fiction will teach you about how to get people to FEEL something.

I have some friends who are the nicest people IRL. But when they send texts or emails, I think, “Do you hate me?? Are we even friends?” That’s because their warmth doesn’t translate in their writing.

Learn about this:

• Believability

• Motivations

• Getting your audience to feel something

• Show, not tell

• Indirect ways to communicate

• Whether a sequence of events make sense

• Conjuring visual imagery

• Highly-leveraged details and nouns

• Word choice

• Point of view (first-person “I,” second-person “you,” third-person)

• Expanding or decreasing the psychological distance with your reader

7. Product

Product and marketing are intertwined. The marketing should be built into the product itself. In other words, you can’t build a great product if you aren’t simultaneously thinking about how it will be marketed and why customers will tell their friends. And you can’t tap into the best ways to market your product if you don’t understand how the product is built, who it’s for, and what it’s for.

Especially in tech, there’s an idea that product people are rigorous, sharp, and analytical. But marketers don’t get that benefit of the doubt. Many people look at marketing as a fluffier discipline. This is ironic because the field of product management was inspired by brand management marketing to begin with.

My hope is marketers will one day get the recognition we deserve. I believe one way to accomplish that is to have a unified set of concepts/frameworks for talking about our ideas. This way, the outside world of non-marketers can understand our decision-making principles. The lists of sub-topics here are meant to be a start in this direction.

Learn about this:

• How customers use the product

• Unspoken needs

• Looking at customer behavior, not words

• User flow/user experience

• Reading clues and making assertions

• Product design

• The construction of how things are made (yes, even for digital products)

• Weighing cost/benefit of solving problems

• Network effects

• Getting people to do the thing you want them to do

• Frequency/magnitude of a problem and how to solve

• Whether to change the product or change the marketing

8. Design

Design will heavily influence whatever you create. If you have great copy, but it’s paired with terrible design, no one will read the copy. They’ll be too distracted by the design.

“This doesn’t look like a product someone like me would use.”

“This doesn’t look legitimate.”

“This looks cheap.”

In the macro sense, design is the fastest and most visceral way to send a signal about who your product is for.

In the micro sense, if you have poor design in your everyday Google Docs, your manager and coworkers are judging you. Don’t send documents that are poorly formatted, with different font sizes, and hard to read. It’s distracting and makes you look sloppy, which undermines that good work you do.

Improving your design eye helps with both the macro and the micro.

Learn about this:

• Visceral reactions from design

• What do you want people to be reminded of when they see you

• Using design to enhance your message

• Semiotics and heuristics

• Spotting common design flaws

• Making sure design looks good enough not to be distracting

• Not over-using formatting

• Understanding why work looks messy

• Creating work that looks clean

9. Showrunner, producer

Marketers on lean teams are showrunners who produce campaigns, events, and more.

When you think like a showrunner, you think like a person who is accountable for making something happen. You own the big picture and every detail—because missing a detail could ruin everything. This ability to take complete ownership to ship a project is a valuable skill, whether you’re managing others or on a team of one.

Learn about this:

• What it takes to get something done

• How to herd cats

• How to say no respectfully and warmly

• How to create a good spec so you can delegate with confidence

• How to follow up properly

• Seeing big picture and individual component parts

• Project management

• Getting what you need from different parties

• Appreciation of airtight execution

• Builder mentality of creating something that didn’t exist before

• Finding low overhead solutions that are easy to implement and good enough

Read about these topics.

Practice them.

Take on projects that require these skills.

These marketing-adjacent topics will help you develop your sense of judgment. You’ll improve at making high quality, high velocity decisions—which will ultimately help you translate your intent into strong execution.

What is it all for? All of this helps you bring your ideas to fruition, so your audience will feel the same excitement you feel about your product.

Which of these disciplines is catching your eye? What concepts are you most curious to dive into?

Hit reply because I’d love to hear from you. Thanks for being here, and I’ll see you next Wednesday at 8am ET.

Wes

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