Why I Left Marketing to Become a Celebrant

3 May

I spent most of my working life in marketing, helping businesses explain what they do in a way that makes sense to other people. Clear, honest, relevant. No waffle. No trying too hard.

A lot of that work came down to understanding people. What matters to them. What doesn’t. What they say they want, and what they actually need. Those two things are not always the same.

Like most industries, marketing has changed hugely over the last few years. AI can now do in minutes what once took meetings, thinking time and several rounds of back and forth. And as we’re all finding out, some thing AI can do are brilliant, other things (cartoon of yourself anyone…) not so.

But it has also made something else more obvious - being human and interacting with other humans matters much more.

Once you start paying attention you see it everywhere. The hairdresser who remembers your sister was unwell. The nurse who takes the extra minute and asks the right question. The person in the village shop who knows your boys have football on a Sunday and asks how they got on.

Those things stick with you because they are real.

And when life becomes more significant, the human side matters even more.

A wedding. Welcoming a child into a family. Saying goodbye to someone you love. These are not admin tasks to be ticked off and rushed through, they’re moments people remember. Moments where families gather, emotions run close to the surface, and everyone wants to feel that what is happening has been properly marked.

After 25 years in marketing, I found myself wanting to do work that was about real people, doing real things.

Something where getting to know people properly was not a sideline to the corporate brand and marketing we were all doing, but the whole point.

So now I work as a celebrant, creating ceremonies for weddings, naming ceremonies and celebrations of life.

Every ceremony is shaped around the people involved. Their personalities, their relationships, their stories, the tone that feels right for them. Sometimes joyful and noisy. Sometimes thoughtful and gentle. Often both, because life is usually both.

For many people, choosing a celebrant offers more freedom to do things in a way that feels personal and true to them – to have the choices to include faith if that is important, to add family traditions or a cultural ritual, or to sing ABBA or dance down the aisle – your choice.

There is no right answer, as long as it’s right for you.

What I know for certain is this: when people are given the time and care they deserve, it shows.

Everyone in the rooms feels it, and it lasts way longer than the ceremony.