Why I don't believe in sector expertise (and what I use instead)

I've led marketing inside a global gaming company, a pharmaceutical giant, a travel technology business, a financial services firm, and a consumer electronics brand. Different industries. Different products. Completely different regulatory environments, buyer behaviours, and commercial models.

And yet the fundamental approach I used in every single one of them was the same.

That's not arrogance. It's the thing I've come to believe most strongly after twenty-five years of doing this work: great marketing is not about knowing an industry. It's about knowing an audience.

I call this audience marketing. And I think it's the most undervalued philosophy in the profession.

The sector expertise myth

When businesses hire marketing leadership, the first thing most of them look for is someone who has worked in their sector before. Financial services wants someone from financial services. SaaS wants someone from SaaS. Healthcare wants someone who already understands the regulatory landscape.

The logic seems reasonable. Less onboarding. Fewer mistakes. Someone who already speaks the language.

But here's what that thinking misses. Sector knowledge is learnable. You can get up to speed on an industry in weeks if you approach it properly.

What you cannot easily learn, what takes years to develop, is the instinct for understanding what makes people act. What they're afraid of. What they actually want versus what they say they want. How to reach them at the right moment with the right message and earn enough trust that they take the next step.

That's audience marketing. And it travels.

When I joined Electronic Arts, I wasn't a gaming insider. I was a marketer who understood how to build a direct relationship with a customer, how to identify what would make them spend, and how to create the infrastructure that would let us test, learn and scale. We built the EA Store across 31 territories and delivered the first million-dollar Xbox Live microtransaction for FIFA. Not because I knew gaming better than anyone in the room, but because I understood the audience and built the commercial model around them.

When I moved into financial services at Just Group, the product was completely different. The regulatory environment was completely different. The buyer journey was longer, more complex, and more emotionally loaded. But the core discipline was identical: understand who you're talking to, understand what they need to hear and when, build the data capability to reach them precisely, and measure what actually matters.

Same approach. Different context. It worked.

What audience marketing actually means

Audience marketing starts with a question that sounds simple and turns out to be surprisingly hard to answer honestly: who are we actually talking to, and what do they actually care about?

Not the ICP document that lives in a slide deck. Not the persona that was built three years ago and has never been revisited. The real, specific, sometimes inconvenient truth about who your customer is, what their life looks like, what problem you're solving for them, and why they should trust you with it.

Most marketing skips this step, or does a surface-level version of it, and then wonders why the campaigns don't convert, why the messaging doesn't land, why the leads are coming in but the sales team says they're not the right ones.

Audience marketing does the harder work first. It builds genuine understanding; through data, through insight, through actually talking to customers and listening to what they say. And then it builds everything else from that foundation.

This is why it travels across sectors. The tools change. The channels change. The compliance requirements change. But the human beings on the other end of your marketing don't fundamentally change. They still want to feel understood. They still respond to relevance. They still make decisions based on trust.

The data underneath it

Audience marketing isn't soft or instinct-led. It's one of the most data-intensive approaches to marketing there is; which is probably why I've spent so much of my career building the data infrastructure to support it.

At Just Group I worked closely with the CDO to build out the organisation's data capabilities from scratch — not because it was interesting as a technical project, but because you cannot do genuine audience marketing without understanding who your audience actually is at a level of precision that gut feel can't give you. We implemented a full enterprise data platform, CRM and marketing automation engine specifically to get that precision.

At Travelport I implemented Oracle Marketing Cloud across a global business spanning 11 languages, with BlueKai as the data management platform underneath it. The social listening, the lead scoring, the campaign attribution; all of it was designed to help us understand what our audience was doing, what they responded to, and where we were losing them.

The technology is not the point. Understanding the audience is the point. The technology is just what makes it possible to do that at scale.

Why this matters for your business

If you're a founder or a business leader thinking about your marketing, here's the practical implication of all of this.

The most important question you can ask about your marketing right now is not "are we in the right channels?" or "is our creative good enough?" It's "do we genuinely understand our audience well enough to earn their attention and their trust?"

If the answer is yes, if you have real insight into who your customer is, what drives their decisions, and how your product fits into their life, then almost everything else in your marketing becomes easier to get right.

If the answer is no, or not really, or we have some personas somewhere, then that's where the work needs to start. Because you can have the best channels, the best creative, the best tech stack, and still be talking to the right people in entirely the wrong way.

That's what I do. I come into businesses and build the audience understanding that good marketing runs on. Then I build the strategy, the team, and the infrastructure around it. The sector is almost irrelevant. The audience never is.

One last thing

People sometimes ask me how long it takes to get up to speed in a new industry. My honest answer is that it takes about three weeks to learn enough to be useful and about three months to stop saying anything that makes the subject matter experts wince.

But understanding the audience? That starts on day one. Because the questions are always the same, even when the answers are completely different.

Who are they? What do they need? Why should they trust us? What's stopping them?

Answer those questions with rigour and honesty, and you're most of the way there.

Every time.

Gareth Foster is the founder of crowd. - fractional CMO and marketing leadership built on the principle that great marketing follows the audience, not the industry. If that philosophy resonates with where your business is right now, let's talk.