Growing up in Fremantle Western Australia, there were two kinds of athletes: The Specialist and The Generalist.

The Specialist who generally went to public schools, would play a single sport year-round and would dedicate all of their time, energy and physical and mental bandwidth to mastering that sport.

For me, this was Australian Rules Football.

The Generalist (who was most likely a private school kid), on the other hand, would play multiple sports that would change with the seasons, and they would dedicate all of their time, energy and physical and mental bandwidth to becoming competent in all of them.

Outside of sports, it’s apparent that certain vocations and industries require Specialists and others, Generalists.

You don’t want the individual performing your Corneal Eye Graft surgery to be a generalist, just like you don’t want the individual running your company to be a specialist.

It’s advantageous for eye surgeons to specialise in the anatomy and medicine of the eyes just like it’s important for Chief Executive Officers to have general know-how in multiple facets of how a company and its people operate.

Specialists and Generalists

The craft of marketing, however, is one of those rare vocations where it’s necessary that the aspiring are both “specialists” and “generalists”.

They must dedicate all of their time, energy and mental bandwidth to specialising in the craft of marketing while gathering a tremendous and generalised knowledge of the outside world.

Because the primary purpose of marketing is attention, marketing is made stronger through the use of metaphorical thinking; the mental process where the mind naturally looks for similarities between two very different unrelated subjects to better understand them and want to find out more.

As a marketer, it’s far easier and more effective to reach for connections via metaphors when there is general knowledge in a number of different subjects. The better we know how people are thinking the better we can serve them.

Hence why marketers should observe as much as they market.