David Beckham couldn’t tell you a damn thing about the Magnus effect. But boy, could that man kick balls curly.
In 2020, I wrote hundreds of hours of course materials for marketing students, up to degree level. I went in thinking I knew how people learned. A thousand hours later, I realised I was repeating everything that failed me about the education system.
Here are the top three revelations, should you ever find yourself in front of a baying mob of marketing students.
1. “If you can’t explain it, you don’t understand it.”
Maybe true in theory. But in practice, the best doers often can’t explain with perfect precision. They feel.
David Beckham (probably) couldn’t give you the exact physics of the Magnus effect. The difference between him and most physicists is that he could actually do it.
There is a science to marketing, but there’s also an art that you cannot ignore, either in teaching or in marking someone else’s work.
2. “Theory before practice.”
That one fell apart fast.
Marketing is a vocation. You need a feedback loop. It’s like learning guitar, or almost any sport. You can’t just read about it. You play. You fail. You adjust. You get better. Only then does the theory make sense.
3. “Understanding is rational.”
It isn’t. It’s sensory. Emotional. Subconscious. Real understanding lives in muscle memory, empathetic awareness, and taste: that quiet sense of what “good” feels like.
I’d inherited these ideas from my own schooling and carried them around like gospel, which is funny, because they didn’t even serve me that well at school.
Then I started talking to some very esteemed tutors about it. They just smiled and said: “Well… yeah, obviously.”
Maybe the real marketing lessons were the ones I learned along the way.