The English language. Full of rules, traditions, anomalies and a healthy dose of complexity. A debate that’s been rearing its head at Forward Role HQ for a while now is the correct way to describe a marketing professional: Are they a Marketer or a Marketeer? Do people say one thing but type something different into a job search or on their CV? Is one right and one wrong? We decided to carry out some research to get to the bottom of it once and for all.
Round 1: Definition and Official Usage
The English language. Full of rules, traditions, anomalies and a healthy dose of complexity. A debate that’s been rearing its head at Forward Role HQ for a while now is the correct way to describe a marketing professional: Are they a Marketer or a Marketeer? Do people say one thing but type something different into a job search or on their CV? Is one right and one wrong? We decided to carry out some research to get to the bottom of it once and for all.
What does the Collins English Dictionary tell us? In terms of definition, not a lot:
It gets more interesting when we look at trends. According to Collins, Marketeer is ‘used rarely’ and in the lower 50% of commonly used words. On the contrary, Marketer is ‘used occasionally’, and one of the 30,000 most commonly used words in its dictionary.
Round 1 Winner: Marketer
Round 2: Preference
It’s one thing typing a word into a job search to generate the best results, but what term do people actually like and prefer to use? While it can be tough to get a definitive answer on something so subjective, we launched a simple Twitter poll asking our followers which term they believe is the right one. As you can see from the below, the results were conclusive with Marketer receiving 79% of the vote and Marketeer trailing behind with 21%.
Round 2 Winner: Marketer
Round 3: The Data
The last piece of the puzzle came from the data we gathered from LinkedIn. We analysed the amount of people who use Marketer or Marketeer on their personal profiles, job titles and job descriptions throughout the social networking platform. Here are the numbers:
|
Location |
Marketer |
% |
Marketeer |
% |
Total |
|
UK |
42,186 |
87.2% |
6,217 |
12.8% |
48,403 |
|
US |
182,734 |
98.6% |
2,688 |
1.4% |
185,422 |
|
China |
3,266 |
96.3% |
124 |
3.7% |
3,390 |
|
Australia |
18,509 |
96.9% |
591 |
3.1% |
19,100 |
Although the data from China and Australia is comparatively low compared to the UK and US, we still see that Marketer is the most commonly used across the board. Us Brits are most likely to use Marketeer with instances of the term amounting to 12.8% on LinkedIn, compared to the next highest at just 3.7% in China.
And when we also boiled down regions in the UK, there’s very little difference in usage. In other words, there isn’t a particular area that possesses a penchant for Marketeering.
|
|
Marketer |
Marketeer |
|
Manchester |
88.6% |
11.4% |
|
London |
87.4% |
12.6% |
|
Birmingham |
88.4% |
11.6% |
|
Liverpool |
90.6% |
9.4% |
Round 3 Winner: Marketer
And the winner is...
It looks like we have a definitive winner! Marketer is the:
-
Most commonly used term according to the Collins English Dictionary
-
Preferred term according to our Twitter poll
-
Most likely to be used throughout LinkedIn
Despite this, Marketeer is still a term that us Brits, in particular, have a soft spot for compared to other countries in the world (surely any word sounding like musketeers has to have a place in our vocabulary!). One thing’s for sure, Forward Role is firmly on Team Marketer now and so the debate can finally come to an end.
Now we just need to settle what’s better; specialist or generalist job titles? Watch this space...
