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The article delivers answers to five questions in the sources' words. Trouble is, there were too many great insights to fit to print.

Consider the following to be some "deleted scenes" from the story, or if you haven't read it yet, a little taste of what the feature has to offer. And be sure to check out our latest Marketing Power podcast episode, where we delve deeper into this topic with Eduardo Conrado and Jim Trebilcock, marketing leaders at Motorola and Dr. Pepper Snapple, respectively.

Q: How would you define a Renaissance marketer?

Jim Trebilcock, executive vice president of marketing, Dr. Pepper Snapple Group: A Renaissance marketer is someone that has a pretty good range of experience, but they are not approaching marketing in the same way [throughout] their 20 years in the business. They continue to learn and continue to evolve the way they approach it, and not that they have to be experts in every area, but they know how to get the right resources to be able to tap into new growth areas.

Q: What qualities do you think are necessary to be a great Renaissance marketer and why?

Jack Klues, managing director of Vivaki Communications: That individual has to have an inherent and insatiable curiosity about things, with not only how things work but how things are going to look, especially when you look out at the near term and longer term. … You don’t have to be an expert in content creation and messaging, or digital, or search, or CRM, but I think the Renaissance marketer has to have a core working knowledge of all those disciplines and a respect for all of them. … The other skill is someone who can actively listen and be prepared to respond to what’s going on around them. … If they are paying proper attention, they see gaps in consumer needs.

Q: Many marketers have progressed along the same track during their entire careers, but to be a Renaissance marketer, you need to know a little, or ideally a lot, about many avenues of marketing and business. So when and how does one jump the track? How and when did you do it?

Tony Weisman, president of Digitas Chicago: You need to jump around, and I think the earlier you start jumping around in your career, the better. … I think that was considered a negative years ago, now I think it’s considered a positive. … I would definitely get a grounding in media. I would definitely get a grounding in any enterprise that is about consumer listening and insight. … I spent the majority of my time at Leo Burnett working for two companies, McDonalds and General Motors, and those were totally integrated businesses. When I worked at McDonalds for eight years I sat with my client, side by side, for media promotions, retail, PR, African-American, Hispanic marketing. … I stumbled into this appreciation for these disciplines. I came away from that realizing that this was comfortable; this integrated, multi-discipline approach to businesses felt very right to me. … [For my career] it was finding a company and culture that fit and in each case try to learn new skills.

Q: What does the future hold for Renaissance marketers? Do you think we’ll be seeing more of them in the coming months and years, or do you think marketers will stick to a path and become specialists in one or two areas?

Mary Ann Mele, president, chief strategic officer and principal, R&R Partners Inc.: It has to be both. Not all of our brains are the same. You have to have people you and I might consider generalists, somebody who knows enough about each area but has the ability to put them together in effective combinations and is fairly effective in driving collaboration in people. And we have to have specialists. We have to. I would fail miserably if I didn’t have specialists, especially with technology moving the way its doing.