Inequality keeps up with pace of change
Let’s start with the shocking. In 2001, the pay differential between men and women in marketing director roles was just £2,700. If you’re a male marketing director in 2010, however, you stand to earn £17,000 a year more than your female counterparts.
The sample of our readers that participated in the 2010 Marketing Week/Ball & Hoolahan salary survey operates across every discipline and level of seniority but the gender inequality is most emphatically illustrated at director level.
Such stark inequality doesn’t wash. It shouldn’t happen anywhere. Let alone among professionals who more and more, will reap their strength and status within organisations from their knowledge and understanding of people, behaviour and attitudes to, among other things, fairness and entitlement.
Elsewhere, the survey unearths a wealth of insight into how you and your peers are remunerated. One thing our feature highlights is how fast the industry is changing. Many of the roles scrutinised in the survey simply did not exist ten years ago. Marketers must now not just create demand but also use the right tools to recognise and identify existing demand. They must then send the right message to the right person at the right time to exploit that demand.
The media landscape that marketers rely on to reach those customers looks nothing like it did even five years ago. And the market we work in and the skills and tools we all use to do our jobs will continue to evolve.
Some are not convinced of this. A number of distinguished business leaders view “new” tools such as search and social media as fads and predict a return to traditional methods of marketing. I would advise them to look past the specifications and capability of Google’s new phone Nexus One, or the comparisons to Apple’s iPhone. They should look instead at why Google launched a phone at all. Similarly, look at Apple’s announcement last week regarding its acquisition of mobile ad network Quattro and what that does to shore up its business offerings in the spaces Google wants to inhabit. Both developments have created headlines in the past ten days and rightly so. They will, however, come to be regarded as ripples in a longer term shift in power. Such changes are indicative of the sort of brands that will wield the greatest power in terms of understanding how consumers interact, and in the way marketing must therefore be done. Such moves should be regarded as evidence that the changes still haven’t fully played themselves out.
