Why being a generalist marketer isn’t a "cop-out"

The LinkedIn debate nobody can escape

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Every single day for the past week (at least), the first thing I see when I log into LinkedIn is a semi-viral post of somebody ripping a marketing job ad to shreds because it lists more than five marketing skills.

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You know the type of posts I’m talking about. Screenshots of job descriptions annotated in red with captions that read like a public service announcement: “This is why marketing is broken” or “They’re asking for five jobs in one.”

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I get it. I also understand that the algorithm is probably rewarding my bad habit of clicking “See more” or doom-scrolling through the comments with more of the same. But that’s not really my point.

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What is interesting is how confidently these posts frame breadth as a flaw. As if being able to do more than one thing in marketing is inherently exploitative, unrealistic, or a sign that a company “doesn’t understand marketing”.

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And while there are plenty of badly written job ads out there alongside exploitative hiring practices (we’ll come back to that), this knee-jerk reaction exposes a bigger tension in our industry: the growing suspicion of the generalist marketer.

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Somewhere along the line, “full-stack”, “generalist”, or “T-shaped” stopped being shorthand for adaptability and strategic thinking, and started being treated as a cop-out. As if choosing breadth over hyper-specialisation means you’re unfocused, under-skilled, or just unwilling to pick a lane.

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Which is convenient. And also wrong.

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The false binary of depth vs breadth

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(Warning - I started writing this section and may have gotten a little carried away. If you read it all I’ll buy you a coffee next time you’re in Manchester.)

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One of the biggest problems with how we talk about marketing roles is that we frame depth and breadth as opposites. As if you have to choose one, and choosing both means you’re doing neither properly.

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In reality, context matters far more than LinkedIn would have you believe.

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I’ve seen specialism work brilliantly. I’ve also seen it fall flat when it’s dropped into the wrong environment. If you’re a small, scrappy startup, hiring a content strategist before a generalist marketer often isn’t the best move. They might be excellent at that one thing, but without wider context - social, SEO, email, product, customer support - it’s hard for their work to fully land. And they probably won’t be thrilled if you suddenly need help filming a TikTok or jumping on event comms.

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Flip that scenario and the opposite is true. In a large enterprise with established processes, a big team, and a brilliant CMO setting direction from the top down, depth makes complete sense. The strategy exists and the machine is already running.

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This is where the binary falls apart.

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In startups, lean teams, and founder-led businesses, breadth usually improves outcomes rather than diluting them. I’ve worked in roles where, in a single day, I might host an event for customers, write FAQ answers based on those conversations, and turn the insights into a blog post. That worked not because I was doing “everything”, but because I was close to the users. I knew how they spoke, what frustrated them, and the questions they were actually asking…not the ones we assumed they were asking.

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That’s how work really gets done in these environments. Not in neat, siloed job descriptions, but through collaborative teams where everyone gets stuck in. It can be intense and emotionally taxing - startups usually are - but that closeness to the product and the problem is also what makes them effective.

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In these situations, generalists often play an underappreciated role: the translator. The person who joins the dots between technical teams and customer-facing ones. 

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When you sit across marketing, product, sales, and customers, you start to notice where things don’t quite line up. A company might invest heavily in defining tone of voice through workshops and focus groups - but then you listen to real users, and they speak in a completely different way. And suddenly, the marketing doesn’t resonate.

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This isn’t just a marketing problem, by the way. My mum has been a nurse for over 40 years, and in many nursing homes, “residents” have quietly become “service users”. This is a term chosen by those who are, far, far removed from day-to-day care, in the name of neutrality. The unintended result is alienation and depersonalisation of people already grappling with a loss of independence.

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And that’s what happens when decisions are made in depth, but without breadth. The context is lost.

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Don’t call it a cop-out

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Calling yourself a generalist marketer is often treated as a half-answer. As if you’re really saying “I haven’t figured out what I’m good at yet” or “I do a bit of everything, but nothing particularly well.”

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Which, frankly, says more about how we value marketing than it does about generalists.

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Being a generalist marketer isn’t about flitting between channels and hoping for the best. In my own experience, it’s more like developing a broad, interconnected understanding of how different marketing disciplines actually work together to drive outcomes. It’s seeing the full picture - from strategy through to execution - and understanding that decisions in one area inevitably ripple into others (usually whether you planned for it or not).

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Generalists tend to operate with what people like to call a “systems-level mindset”. Less obsession with individual channels in isolation, more focus on how content, social, email, events, product, and customer experience intersect in the real world. Not in theory and not in decks, but in practice.

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And in practice, generalists are often most effective in environments where priorities shift weekly and resources are…optimistic. Startups, scale-ups, and lean teams don’t need perfect handovers, they usually need marketers who can adapt, problem-solve, and move comfortably between strategy and execution without everything grinding to a halt.

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There’s a persistent assumption that “proper” marketing only happens when roles are neatly defined, handovers are pristine, and everyone stays firmly in their lane. That model can work well in larger, more mature organisations. But it just doesn’t reflect how a lot of businesses actually operate day to day. For early-stage or small teams, generalist marketers often provide the much-needed momentum that keeps things moving.

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Of course, generalism comes with trade-offs. Breadth doesn’t replace depth. But it does prioritise relevance, integration, and speed - which, in many contexts, matter far more than channel-specific perfection. I know I may have repeated myself a few times here, but the value isn’t in mastering one thing in isolation; it’s in understanding how multiple things contribute to the same goal.

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So no, being a generalist marketer isn’t a compromise or a cop-out. It should be seen as a strategic response to complexity. Customers don’t experience brands through organisational charts or job titles, they experience them as a single, joined-up journey - and a lot of the time generalists are the ones actually optimising for that reality.

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