When I started in the A/E/C industry, I had a content marketing background, 3-year-old InDesign experience (from my college newspaper!), and only a scant understanding of what the actual work of an architect entailed.
There was a lot of humility in the first few years. There was a lot I didn’t know.
And even though I learned, I kept that feeling close, the feeling of not knowing. I was a mere marketer, lucky enough to work with professionals. The architects.
And this would happen:
“So what do you do?”
“Oh, I work for an architecture firm, but I’m not an architect.”
Awful, right?
I think I meant it as a joke. A little lark—to create a little chain of logic and work through it for my listener.
Works at an architecture firm? But not an architect?!
I thought I was creating something there, with my little joke, generating a dissonance that set me up to clarify: “I’m the marketer for the firm.”
But it never happened that way. Instead, the claim often sounded sad. Someone asked me once if I wanted to be an architect, but wasn’t.
I denied the thought in the moment. But, privately, I wondered. Did I want to be an architect? Was marketing architecture just a cover for my true unrecognized desires?
No, not really. I didn’t want to be an architect. In fact, I loved what I did—chasing new work, marketing the firm. But then why was my elevator pitch so bad as to be a joke? (And not a funny one, at that.)
It took my wife pointing it out to me to cut it out. When she asked why I introduced myself that way, I had no answer. It was just how I did it? I liked making my shitty little joke?
So, I started doing it differently. I started to defend myself to myself.
“So what do you do?”
“I try to win new work for an architecture firm.”
Taylor Coe 