All the Gear, No Idea

I am sure you have heard the expression “all the gear and no idea” to describe the person who buys the best golf clubs, squash racket, or running watch and looks the absolute business in their fabulous golf glove, designer running shoes, or the “must have” gear that is made from a material developed during the space race.

And yet, when they turn their hand to the sport in question, they are bereft of the one vital thing required for sports competence - talent.

BTW - I include myself in this, I have very little sporting ability.

This week, I'm wondering if a similar thing is happening to marketers and the tools we have available. Today, especially with all the opportunities AI offers us, we have no shortage of gear.

But..

A Canva account doesn’t make you creative.

HubSpot doesn’t make you an email marketer.

ChatGPT doesn’t make you a creative copywriter.

Riverside doesn’t make you a radio star.

Zapier is not marketing operations.

Grammarly doesn’t give you the eye for detail and tone of an editor.

SurveyMonkey doesn’t make you a gifted researcher.

Google Analytics doesn’t make you a performance marketer.

Tableau doesn’t make you a data scientist.

(etc)

The answer to whether a marketer can do a specific activity is not “I have access to x tool”.

I don’t think that we marketers are necessarily to blame for this, okay, maybe a bit. We are a curious bunch, love to play with these tools, and are eager to please.

However, I think that, given today's budget pressures, particularly in some smaller companies, there is an expectation that we need Swiss Army knives. With a decent budget for subscription to tools, it’s job done, rather than hiring a specialist.

Similar to being a shit sportsperson, to be honest, I am the world’s worst at this, and this Tuesday 2¢ might be a note to self.

I love playing with this stuff. This week I decided to replatform my personal website onto Ghost, create a custom theme, which meant learning a new markup language, reacquaint myself with responsive HTML and CSS, and, as the cool kids say, all the things. Things that a specialist would have completed in an afternoon. Last year, I decided to become a certified HubSpot CMS developer. I am supposed to be a CMO for fucks sake.

In my defence, I do consider this my hobby, you might do golfing, one weekend I decided learning COBOL was a good idea.

Perhaps this should be filed away in the “just because you can, should you” marketing file (something that screams out for an acronym - JBYCSY, hmmmm…).

And, of course, nobody buys a Swiss Army Knife for their kitchen. I don't stone my olives with the odd-looking blade that I think plucks stones from horses' hooves. I shouldn't expect an excellent performance marketer to create great-looking blog promo images.

To round this out with another analogy, I’ve just learned that the proverb “clothes maketh the man” was first recorded in Latin by Erasmus in his book Adagia in 1500, but in 2025, do tools maketh the marketer?