This post is the first in a series looking at the AMI. Click below to read the others:

1. Whats wrong with the AMI
2. The Great AMI Debate: Round 2
3. The Stark Reality of the AMI
4. The AMI Bites Back
5. Marketing the Marketers: the UK perspective
6. Bowll bites back: Geoffrey responds to the AMI

You can read the full version of this in June Marketing, but heres something to whet your appetite:

Why is it that so few marketers are happy to call themselves that? Why
isnt it felt to be sexy to be a marketer? I blame the peak body of
marketing: the AMI. The Australian Marketing Institute. They have let
us down as a career group and they need to do something about it. Or
take marketing out of the title of the organisation and call us all
something else.

Every time I go to an AMI function this is a topic I
hear debated. The lack of leadership, the poor performance. You can see
the die-hards who still go along when the topic is right, but their
shoulders are hunched over. They shuffle out of the functions,
uninspired, down at heel, thinking that was just one more example of
why they should have studied accounting or law, where at least you get
a career thats going somewhere and they care about the members of it.

• What kind of professional support is there in marketing land?
  
• Who’s helping marketers? Where’s the counselling, the
  discounts on Mortgages, the discount fuel card? There’s a nice thought.
  
• How come our profession gets no lobbying?
  
• When was the last time you saw something positive about professional marketers on the news?
  
• Sick of being part of a profession that gets no appreciation?
  
• How come there’s no marketers on boards?
  
• What do you get from the AMI?
  
• What could they be doing for us? Is it them who should be?
  
• Is there another body, or should we set one up?

I have been a member of the Australian Marketing Institute for some three or four years and got bugger all
for it. Im also a member of half a dozen other organisations, from
chambers of commerce to clubs to similar professional groups and I get
more from every single one of them than I get from what is supposed to
be the peak body of our profession. Whats wrong with the AMI? What can
we do to make it work for us?

I expect comments.