Everyone Has an Opinion on Marketing. Few Carry the Work.

I’ve been thinking about how subjective marketing feels; not just creatively, but culturally.

It’s one of the only fields where everyone seems comfortable weighing in. Not in a casual way. In a confident way. People don’t usually tell accountants how to do their job. Or give architects feedback mid-blueprint. But marketing? Open-fkn-season. And I don’t think it’s because people are arrogant. I think it’s because marketing looks easy from the outside.

You can see the final product. A post. An ad. A menu. A brand moment.

What you don’t see is everything behind it.

-The strategist.

-The writer.

-The designer.

-The analyst.

-The project manager.

-The trend researcher.

-The brand voice guardian.

-The platform translator.

All under one title.

Marketing didn’t just become subjective; it became stacked. And with that came the expectation that one person can do all of it, seamlessly. And then, on top of that, we’re asked to explain it?!

Not just explain what we made, but justify why it exists at all.

-Why this color?

-Why this tone?

-Why this platform?

-Why now?

-Why not something else?

Most times to people who have never done the job. Never seen the constraints. Never sat in the trade-offs.

Again, feedback isn’t the problem. Good marketing should invite conversation. What’s exhausting is the assumption that every decision is up for debate, and every opinion holds equal weight, regardless of context, education, or responsibility for the outcome.

Marketing is subjective, yes. But it isn’t random. There’s strategy inside the subjectivity. Intent inside the intuition. And often, a lot of compromise inside the final product.

So now the job isn’t just creating. It’s translating. Explaining why something works. Defending why something exists. Justifying decisions that were never purely creative to begin with. And sometimes I wonder when that became part of the job description.

I don’t have a neat conclusion here. Just a growing appreciation for how much modern marketing requires, and how invisible most of that work still is.

Maybe the real skill now isn’t just taste or execution. It’s knowing how to carry the work and the explanation at the same time. Maybe it’s always been this way, and we’re just finally naming it.