Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

A marketing career blueprint for the young man who asked.

He had just landed a job as a marketing assistant at a tech company. A few weeks in, he found me on LinkedIn and sent two questions. The first was polite. The second was a plea.

Did you always want to be a marketer, and how did you go about becoming a CMO?

Please Sir, help. I looked at your CV and I think it’s the path I want to follow. How and what should I think about my marketing career?

My grandmother would have approved of the second question before she approved of the first. Indlela ibuzwa kwabaphambili. He did the right thing. But before I answer, a warning that every honest elder owes a young man who asks for directions: the road I walked has been resurfaced, rerouted and in places demolished. What I can give him is not a GPS. It is a map, a compass, and a few stories about where I fell into the ditch.

Part one: I did not dream of marketing and becoming a marketer. 

I never heard the word “marketing” as a profession until my fourth year at university. The only professional career anyone sold us at Luhlaza Senior Secondary School in Khayelitsha, was chartered accountancy, because SAICA came to our school with posters and promises of earning R20,000 a month in 1992. As a boy I wanted to be three things: a teacher, a preacher and a healer.

What I was not was a man of things, not physically fluent. At technical school in Gugulethu-NY1,  I failed carpentry the way Julius Malema famously failed woodwork; I could not make an ashtray or a chair to save my life. I nearly burned the school down in electrical work. In the mechanics class I took a car engine apart and could not put it back together. My crowning achievement was bricklaying: my one-metre wall collapsed before the inspector arrived to inspect it. Eventually the technical school did everyone a favour and sent me off to focus on academics. Even there, I was the boy walking around talking to people, motivating, supervising, heavy on theory and light on doing.

So I became a teacher. And my first pay cheque delivered a message the profession never says out loud: on this salary I would never buy uMama a house, and I would never move far from Khayelitsha or Gugulethu. That is an indictment of what we pay teachers, not of teaching. I have written about that before and I stand by it. But I was a young man with a mother and a plan, and the numbers did not work.

I went back to UCT and asked the dean (or the deputy dean; memory blurs the titles) for advice. He asked me one question: do you like things, or do you like people? After the ashtray, the near-fire, the engine and the wall, that was the easiest exam I ever wrote. People.

He sent me to Prof John Simpson, who told me to study marketing. His reasoning has stayed with me for nearly three decades: marketing is the discipline that deals with people, and people are predictably irrational, emotional beings who feel and only sometimes think. It would also pay far more than teaching, enough to buy my mother a house and move as far from Khayelitsha and Gugulethu as I wanted. Years later Dan Ariely made Predictably Irrational the title of a bestseller, and I ended up doing a PhD in behavioural science. Prof Simpson got there first.

Then I did the unglamorous thing. I went to the Careers Centre and signed up for their mock interviews with real companies: BMW, Unilever and Research Surveys. After the mocks, BMW and Unilever both invited me into their graduate placement  programme processes, and both made me offers.

I wanted BMW. Obviously. The car, the vibes, the ladies. My stepfather (Shelter Mkhuseli Hude) told me to slow down and phone both companies with one question: what is your training programme? Unilever, then,  known as the university of marketing, sent me a detailed programme that included leading and managing a P&L. BMW had no programme to speak of; I would start at a dealership. My stepfather’s verdict was short: money follows skill. People pay the person who solves problems. Skill up first, then earn up. I repeat – Skill up first, then earn up. The real salary of your first job is the training. The money is the receipt. His last words of advise were- ” Slowly built last”

I chose Unilever, and that decision paid me for twenty-eight years. Economists have a dry name for what my stepfather knew in his bones. Gary Becker called it human capital and drew the line that matters for every graduate: some skills are general, valued by any employer, and some are firm-specific, valued mainly where you learned them. A structured programme that teaches you to run a P&L, read research and brief an agency, judge a creative, do the 4Ps,  is general capital. A dealership floor without a programme is mostly a car. Cal Newport makes the same case in plainer language: passion is not the starting point; rare and valuable skill is, and the satisfaction tends to follow it.

Part Two: The Map.

Now to his second question. Before you decide how to climb, know what the mountain range looks like. Marketing is not one job; it is five families of jobs that need each other.

My own road started in the fourth row. I was a statistician by training, and my early years were market research, data science, consumer and market insights: the architect’s corner. Brand came later. A marketing assistant at a tech company will probably touch three of these tracks in a single week. Good. Use the first year to notice which one makes time disappear, and which one you do only because your manager is watching.

Part Three: Three Decisions.

Decision one: are you a lifer or a switcher?

Lionel Messi spent most of his career at Barcelona and won everything. Cristiano Ronaldo crossed clubs and leagues and also won everything. Sir Alex Ferguson coached one club for over a quarter of a century and won everything. Pep Guardiola moved between Barcelona, Bayern and Manchester City and won everything, for now (Man City 150+ charges). Different strokes for different folks. Neither path is superior; each has a price.

The evidence on price is more interesting than the folklore. In the US, where the best long-run data sits, the Atlanta Fed’s wage tracker shows job switchers have usually outpaced stayers on pay growth since 1997, by about 0.7 percentage points on average. But the premium is cyclical, not a law. In early 2025, for the first time in about fifteen years, stayers briefly got bigger raises than switchers, because when the market softens people switch from weakness rather than strength. In South Africa, with unemployment where it is, assume the market is softer for you than any American chart suggests.

There is also a bill that arrives later. Matthew Bidwell at Wharton studied external hires against people promoted from inside into the same jobs. The outsiders were paid roughly 18 percent more, yet scored lower on performance for their first two years and were more likely to leave. The extra money is partly a premium for not yet knowing how the place works. Switching pays, but you pay too: in relationships, in context, and in the trust that only comes from staying long enough to be wrong in front of the same people.

Switch for skill, not only for salary. Never leave in the middle of a lesson.

My rule for young people is simple. Before you move, finish at least one full learning loop: a launch from brief to results, a full budget year, and at least one failure you had to explain to someone senior. Leave before that and you carry a title you have not yet earned. And when you do switch, negotiate. I wrote in The Trophy Cannot Pay Rent about prestige that does not convert into pay; a new logo on your LinkedIn is not a raise.

Decision two: agency, client, or hybrid?

Where you sit shapes what you learn. There are three broad seats in the stadium.

The common advice says start at an agency if you are early, energetic and unsure of your specialism, because juggling many brands compresses years of experience into one. Move client-side when you want to understand the business of business and own a brand’s long-term destiny. Go hybrid if you love creative execution but want corporate resources and cutting-edge tools.

That advice is sound, and I did not follow it. I went straight to a client. Which tells you the real rule sits underneath the categories: go where the training is hardest, most structured, and most honest about results. For this young man, the gift is that he is already in a hybrid seat. My advice: get as close to the product team and the data as your access allows. Learn the funnel numbers before you learn the office politics.

Decision three: generalist, specialist, or T-shaped?

The money in this debate eventually favours breadth. A study of S&P 1500 CEOs by Custódio, Ferreira and Matos found that generalist chief executives, measured by experience across roles, firms and industries, earned a premium of about 19 percent a year over specialists, and the premium was highest when the job was complex, such as a restructuring or an acquisition. David Epstein makes the cultural version of this argument in Range, which I leaned on in A Case for Pro Preparedness.

But read the study carefully: that premium belongs to people with a lifetime of varied experience. Nobody starts as a generalist CEO. My path was specialist first (statistician, data, market research, consumer and market insights) and only then generalist: brand manager, marketing manager, marketing director, vice president, CMO. The T gets built from the stem up.

Depth is the entrance fee. Breadth is the promotion.

Breadth without depth makes you a pleasant meeting attendee. Depth without breadth makes you an excellent technician who reports to someone who has both. Get very good at one thing that a business will pay for, then widen deliberately, one adjacent skill at a time.

Part Four: Three Disciplines That Build the T

Discipline one: know your level, honestly

One of the companies I worked for graded every marketing skill on a five-step ladder. I have never found a better tool for an honest conversation about growth.

Pick the skills your marketing role actually runs on:consumer insight, digital, AI, brand positioning, briefing, media, analytics, budgeting, storytelling, growth marketing, business (DAUs, MAUs, Revenue, ARPU etc), agency management, stakeholder management. Rate yourself on each. Then ask your manager to rate you blind, and compare. Self-ratings drift upward, especially in the early years. The gap between the two lists is your development plan, and it is far more useful than a generic course catalogue. In Odogwu I argued for talking big with receipts; this ladder is where the receipts come from.

Discipline Two: Ukufunda Akupheli (70:20:10)- Continous Learning & Development.

The 70:20:10 model says roughly 70 percent of growth comes from doing the work, 20 percent from other people (feedback, mentoring, shadowing) and 10 percent from formal training. It comes out of research by McCall, Lombardo and colleagues at the Center for Creative Leadership in the 1980s, and I treat the numbers as a heuristic rather than a law; I said as much in Uleqa Ntoni? and in the Career Insurance series. The proportions are not the point. The order is.

• The 70 deepens the stem. Volunteer for the ugly, high-ownership project in your chosen channel: the campaign that is underperforming, the migration nobody wants, the launch with an impossible date. Live campaigns teach what textbooks cannot.
• The 20 widens the bar. Have  mentors, sponsors , and coaches. Sit with the data analyst for an afternoon. Ask the sales manager what the brand team never understands. Find a mentor two levels up and another outside your company. This is why I like,  The Mentorship Boardroom (TMB)  led by Yolanda Cuba, currently  Deputy CEO MTN South Africa, have a mentor through TMB and at work or outisde work : nobody climbs this alone.
• The 10 fills named gaps. Take the course after your ladder audit shows the gap, not before. A certification in analytics means more when you already have a campaign to apply it to.

Most young professionals and those from under-represented groups they invert it. They collect certificates (the 10) and hope the 70 will arrive. They are Over Certified and Under Exposed. 

Discipline Three: Live Where Art Meets Science.

Prof Simpson’s sentence had both halves in it. People are predictable: that is the science. People are emotional and irrational: that is the art. Marketing careers stall when people pick one.

Art without science is a guessing game: beautiful campaigns that miss the audience, drain the budget and cannot prove ROMI ( Return on Marketing Investment), or  a cent of revenue. Science without art is invisible: perfectly targeted messages so sterile that nobody notices them. The evidence backs the marriage. Les Binet and Peter Field’s work for the IPA in the UK showed that long-term brand building and short-term sales activation do different jobs, and that most brands do best with a deliberate balance of the two rather than chasing only the quick, measurable win. Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow gave the science side its laws. Rory Sutherland’s Alchemy reminds the science side why the illogical idea so often wins.

In practice the intersection looks like this. Use intuition and empathy to form the hypothesis; use data and testing to prove it right or wrong. Data tells you what is happening. Art tells you why people care. A T-shaped marketer is fluent in both the spreadsheet and the story, and refuses to be embarrassed by either.

The Indlela Audit: eight questions for the one who asked

1. Things or people? Answer it honestly. It decides more about your track than any job title.
2. Lifer or switcher? Either is fine. What is the learning loop you will finish before you move?
3. Where is the hardest training I can reach? Choose the seat by the programme, not the perks.
4. What is my stem? Name the one skill you will be known for within three years.
5. Where am I on the ladder? Rate your eight core skills, then get them rated blind by your manager.
6. Who are my 20 percent? Name one mentor above you, one peer outside marketing and one person outside your company.
7. Am I fluent in both the spreadsheet and the story? If not, which one am I avoiding?
8. Who is walking behind me? Indlela ibuzwa kwabaphambili. One day someone will ask you.

The teacher, the preacher and the healer.

Here is the part I did not tell him in the LinkedIn reply. I left teaching for marketing because the pay cheque could not carry my dream – my  mother’s house. And somewhere along those twenty-eight years, through Unilever, India, UK,  the boardrooms of global brands, the boy who wanted to be a teacher, a preacher and a healer came back.

I teach now, at UCT, Wits, GIBS and Harvard Business School. I preach on this blog every week, to a congregation that argues back. Evengelise and advocate for boys and men via media interviews, published a book This Country Hates Our Men(Boys).  And through African Men Care ( http://www.africanmencare.com) I try to heal, one boy and one man at a time. Marketing did not replace the calling. It funded it, and it trained it. The skill came first. The calling waited, patiently, for the skill to arrive. If you decide to have side husltes , here is the YC rule I like – “if the side hustle cannot make in one month what you earn in 6 months then you do not have a business side hustle you have a hobby”. Multi tasking means doing everything less well. The brain task switches not multi tasks. If early on you worship many masters, one of them will suffer since your cognitive badnqidth is stretched too thinly and compromised.   If  work is your most important source of cash flow, be great at work, respect your employer, respect the opportunity and only on weekends,  do your business side hustle. 

So to the young man in my inbox: welcome to the profession of people. Learn deeply, widen deliberately, and find the elders who will tell you where the ditches are. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. Nobody becomes a CMO alone, and nobody should arrive there without a list of names of the people they lifted on the way. Lastly- Please, Do not be an asshole, lead with Courage, Candor  and Compassion. The workplace os full of managers and leaders who are responsible for all tje chronic medication used by their direct reports. Do not add to the pain, be a soothing balm.

My name, Mzamo, means try. That is the whole blueprint, really. Ask the way. Then try.

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Sources and further reading

Becker, G. S. (1964). Human Capital. University of Chicago Press.

Bidwell, M. (2011). Paying more to get less: The effects of external hiring versus internal mobility. Administrative Science Quarterly, 56(3).

Binet, L. & Field, P. (2013). The Long and the Short of It. IPA.

Custódio, C., Ferreira, M. A. & Matos, P. (2013). Generalists versus specialists: Lifetime work experience and CEO pay. Journal of Financial Economics, 108(2), 471–492.

Epstein, D. (2019). Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Riverhead.

Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Wage Growth Tracker: job switchers vs job stayers.

McCall, M. W., Lombardo, M. M. & Morrison, A. M. (1988). The Lessons of Experience. Lexington Books.

Newport, C. (2012). So Good They Can’t Ignore You. Grand Central.

Sharp, B. (2010). How Brands Grow. Oxford University Press.

Sutherland, R. (2019). Alchemy. W. H. Allen.

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Dr. Mzamo Masito

Between Thoughts – Intellectual Musings

Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table.