What does a Marketing Executive / Brand Manager actually do?

The short version

Marketing executives run the campaigns that make people buy — emails, social, content, events, ads — usually juggling several at once while reporting numbers upwards. It's less glamour, more spreadsheets and stakeholder wrangling, especially in the first few years.

The pitch: the skills transfer to every industry, you can watch a campaign actually move revenue, and the ladder to brand manager and head of marketing is well-trodden. The catch: junior pay doesn't stretch far in the cities where the jobs are, marketing budgets get cut first in a downturn, and AI is hoovering up the first-draft content work that used to fill a junior's week — the safe niche is strategy, data and judgement, not volume output.

Entry routes that actually work

• Degree + portfolio — any degree; prove it with real numbers from a society, side project or freelance gig.
• Marketing apprenticeship (Level 4–6) — paid while you train, increasingly respected, no debt.
• Agency junior → in-house — touch ten clients in a year, then move client-side with the experience.