Someone asked me if I could tell her how many marketers there are in the world... including public relations.

I don’t know if there have been any studies done to determine how many marketers there are in the world today. However, within the United States and Canada, I can say that the American Marketing Association is among the largest associations for marketers and is made up of over 38,000 professional members. While many Marketing associations focus on one specific area of marketing, (such as advertising, market research or public relations) I’ve found the AMA to reach a wider audience because it covers every area of marketing. As great as the AMA is, I decided that 38,000 couldn’t be the number for the entire universe…

So, I took a look at the self proclaimed Marketers on LinkedIn:
Within LinkedIn there are more than 567,000 individual bios that contain the term “Marketing” in their profiles. While only 292,000 have selected “marketing and advertising” as their professional category and only 141,000 have selected the “market research” category to identify themselves. To include PR in the mix, I found that 277,000 have selected “public relations and communications” as their professional category.

Keep in mind that a person can only select ONE category for their profile.

Oddly enough, if you add up the three distinctions together (Marketing and Advertising, Market Research and Public Relations and Communications) you will have 710,000 individual profiles on LinkedIn who have identified themselves as marketers… even though only 567,000 actually use the keyword “Marketing” in their profile.

I find it quite interesting that 20% of all these Marketing individuals did not feel the need to use the word, “marketing” in their profile to best describe their job, their work experience or their interests.