Revival Post: Your Marketing Career

So many fantastic marketers have come to me lately looking for career advice. I find myself referencing the insights I captured here time and again. Felt like it was worth reposting....

"65% of children entering grade school this year will end up working in careers that haven't even been invented yet." Cathy N. Davidson, Duke University, The Atlantic. New technology, business models, processes, company cultures and many other factors are making this true.

At the same time, young people are getting incredible power and opportunity. You can create influence through the quality and quantity of your connections socially, academically, and professionally--and how you can activate those relationships for the things that are meaningful to you.

When you combine these two facts, new marketers face unprecedented opportunity. But it will require a level of awareness of this context, industriousness, and charting your own path in order for you to realize your potential and achieve what you can't even imagine yet.

It's exciting, but an important change. Those before you, the senior marketing leaders, can't necessarily help you plan your course based on their paths. (Respectfully, they may not fully realize this change yet themselves...) So knowing when to make a traditional decision vs. forge your own choice will be important. Knowing when humbly to eat your oatmeal and when to skip breakfast will be a critical skill. Be aware and be intentional.

Think about what you love, think about what you hate and think about what transferable skills you want to learn. This can be an amazing filter for jobs. Think about roles in terms of industry skills and not company-specific titles. Once you find the job(s) that fit your filter criteria, start working your connections and industriousness to get an introduction. You might just surprise yourself what will happen. Stop guessing or resume building what you think you need and directly apply for the job you want. They'll tell you what you need if there are skill gaps and otherwise, you may just get it. This is non-traditional MBA thinking. Stop worrying about your job 5 years out. At most, think about the job you want after the next one and if this next job keeps you on that path.

Finally, industriousness. You may find the curiosity and ambition that got you into school are more important for crafting your career than many of the lessons you will learn in it. Be an autonomous life learner. Don't wait for your company to offer training or a class. Log on and start doing yourself. Tinker and try. Knowing the core marketing and branding skill sets will be more important than ever. Such as: listening and anticipating on behalf of customers for the development of new products, distribution to make it easy to learn about about and access them, the experience you create in their delivery and service, plus how you communicate about them. Marketing (aka branding) can be the meaning that flows through it all. Respect these skills and learn them faster. Find people who can teach you sooner. Ask them now.


There is an emerging battery of writing on the changing role of marketing. As my own role merges social media, marketing, product and service--the old labels seem too limiting. I focus a lot on this, including the post Marketing is a Tax. For a really thoughtful look about how this ambiguity applies to the marketing function, please read: Building a New Agency OS by Mel Exon the Managing Partner and Founder of BBH Labs (@melex). I discovered the original quote from Cathy Davidson from Mel, one of my on-going must reads. In addition, I recommend Rishad Tobaccowala's piece on The Five Keys to Marketing in 2012.
_____________________
Added January 20, 2012
Fantastic article by Seth Godin on this topic:

"Now that the industrial economy is over, you should forget about doing things just because it's assigned to you, or "never mind the race to the top, you'll be racing to the bottom."

However, if you're different somehow and have made yourself unique, people will find you and pay you more, Godin says.

Instead of waiting around for someone to tell you that you matter, take your career into your own hands. In other words, don't wait for someone else to pick you and pick yourself! If you have a book, you don't need a publisher to approve you, you can publish it yourself. It's no longer about waiting for some big corporation to choose you. We've arrived at an age where you choose yourself."

______________________
Added April 10, 2012
Interesting article today on Ben Casnocha and Reid Hoffman's new book "The Start Up of You." I haven't read the book yet. But it appears to cover many of these same concepts. The book has actions and next steps to help rather than just diagnosing the changes. Here is a link to the article.


"The world has changed. The world of work has changed. Many of the assumptions that have guided how we think about careers in America are no longer true" -- Ben Casnocha.

What Do Marketers Do? Part I

What do marketers do? The word marketer is thrown around a lot and sadly it seems in a more negative than positive way. I take so much pride in what I do: making meaningful things, relationships, experiences and stories for people. It seems weird that the word to describe that would have so much baggage. Hmmm.

The word market emerged around 1154 defined as a "meeting at a fixed time for buying and selling livestock and provisions." The word marketer then meant someone who "trades, deals, or buys at the market." Over the years, it evolved to "someone who promotes or exchanges goods for money" and unfortunately, at the turn of the 19th century, had associations with shilling and quackery (using false claims to promote something beyond its actual effectiveness). Marketing seems negatively perceived as a word that lives between the Mad Men basking in $50MM media buys and the analytical deceivers tricking and promoting their way into getting people to click more ads or buy more things.  It is as if marketers are described as conjurers trying to get as many people as possible to buy things they don't need or want. Yuck.

And today's marketers have certainly played a role in this declining reputation: using words like target, penetrate, segment and generate demand then referring to people as wallets, users and mass consumers. Look at marketers' job titles: Head of Most Valuable Customer Acquisition. VP of  Sales Optimization. Masters of Business Administration. Manager of High Potential Customers. Who's potential? The customer's or the company's?  I often say that marketers should always speak with respect and as if the customer were sitting right next to them. How you speak and humanize people often translates into how you act. Seems somewhere along the way we forgot that.

It feels like marketing itself needs a rebranding. I'm not tackling that here. But I do fear in the midst of the confusion and negative associations that the role of the marketer is getting lost. The best marketers are a vital voice for customers. They are authentic. They care. Marketing is a noble profession when it is at its best meaning: serving customers in a way that they value enough to pay for it and in return growing a company that creates jobs and the fascinating, useful, and meaningful products to keep that cycle going sustainably. As idealized as it sounds, in the markets of 1154, that trade nurtured the community and the people who were part of it. It feels like that should be possible today.

So here I am going to decode what a marketer actually does.

The Three Little Pigs Campaign for The Guardian UK

This campaign is so good I am speechless. The ingenuity, but more importantly the guiding cultural insight meshed with The Guardian's transformation. It is a great brief and the work is on brief. Jason Gonsalves from BBH Labs wrote an overview of The Whole Story campaign and the business strategy here. As a teaser, I pulled the video and one of the images below. But you'll appreciate it even more as a marketer if you see it all together on their site. Thank you to BBH, The Guardian and the storytellers.

___________________________________

Addition March 9, 2012:

There are amazing parallels between the Three Little Pigs piece and the real life way KONY 2012 is playing out. From the connective spread of the message to the backlash and so forth. Fascinating and timely parallel. Here is the film and a Guardian article summarizing the controversy.

Learning Marketing on the Job

If you are trying to learn marking on the job, here is a Pinterest Board I created of really good videos, slideshares, books, plus more. They help marketers mobilize people inside and outside of companies. They can help you understand the role of a marketer and how that is changing. It has classics, plus actionable information on the forefront of marketing. They are inspiring, practical and personal--not academic. Here is the link.


For your convenience, I categorized them with brief descriptions so you can self-serve a la carte. It is current as of today. The Brand Binge posts are at the top. This was so much fun to do. I love that marketers have such generous spirits to share and learn. Me too.

John Willshire: Love and Lifestrapping

John Willshire is wise. He reminds why I love what I do and why I am so optimistic and hopeful about marketing and branding. He talks about the people in a brand's community as Blacksmiths, not salesmen. He has a beautiful way of saying this on Smithery.co:

I woke up this morning to his great post: Love and Lifestrapping - Entrepreneurial Inspiration From #firestarters. It is a quick reflection on loving what you do. It also touches on themes I have written about like minimal viable marketing in a soulful way. Enjoy it. I did. 

Thanks, @willsh.

Minimum Viable Marketing

This question showed up on Quora: What does start up branding mean for an early stage company? Is it just picking a name and a logo? I have been asked this question from start ups before. There are also some similarities when an established company is piloting a new product. I wrote a short answer on Quora and then got more questions. So I answered them all in the spirit that it might help engineers and founders bring their amazing ideas to the world. I hope so.

The Brand:

Branding isn't just a logo. A logo or an ad may capture the meaning of a brand, but it can't create it.

A brand's meaning is created by every touch point a person has with a brand. So we have to make sure the people who are responsible for delivering those experiences -- employees -- understand our brand values. They have to believe. We have to believe.

I have found that start ups and their founders have audacious dreams to change the world that can make a great brand ideal.

Google started out to "democratize the world's information." Square wants to "change the way people do business." Kiva wants to "connect people through lending to alleviate poverty." Method wants to "make products that work, for you and for the planet." Pinterest is trying to "connect everyone in the world with the 'things' they find most interesting."

People don't pull all nighters at Square to process payments. They could do that at Paymentech. Square employees want to change the world. They are inspired by a leader who is trying to. You can feel it in everything they do: their design, pricing policy, tweets, plus more. The logo and name are a white square -- very generic -- which makes this point even more powerfully.

Your Marketing Career

"65% of children entering grade school this year will end up working in careers that haven't even been invented yet." Cathy N. Davidson, Duke University, The Atlantic. New technology, business models, processes, company cultures and many other factors are making this true.

At the same time, young people are getting incredible power and opportunity. You can create influence through the quality and quantity of your connections socially, academically, and professionally--and how you can activate those relationships for the things that are meaningful to you.

When you combine these two facts, new marketers face unprecedented opportunity. But it will require a level of awareness of this context, industriousness, and charting your own path in order for you to realize your potential and achieve what you can't even imagine yet.

It's exciting, but an important change. Those before you, the senior marketing leaders, can't necessarily help you plan your course based on their paths. (Respectfully, they may not fully realize this change yet themselves...) So knowing when to make a traditional decision vs. forge your own choice will be important. Knowing when humbly to eat your oatmeal and when to skip breakfast will be a critical skill. Be aware and be intentional.

Think about what you love, think about what you hate and think about what transferable skills you want to learn. This can be an amazing filter for jobs. Think about roles in terms of industry skills and not company-specific titles. Once you find the job(s) that fit your filter criteria, start working your connections and industriousness to get an introduction. You might just surprise yourself what will happen. Stop guessing or resume building what you think you need and directly apply for the job you want. They'll tell you what you need if there are skill gaps and otherwise, you may just get it. This is non-traditional MBA thinking. Stop worrying about your job 5 years out. At most, think about the job you want after the next one and if this next job keeps you on that path.

Finally, industriousness. You may find the curiosity and ambition that got you into school are more important for crafting your career than many of the lessons you will learn in it. Be an autonomous life learner. Don't wait for your company to offer training or a class. Log on and start doing yourself. Tinker and try. Knowing the core marketing and branding skill sets will be more important than ever. Such as: listening and anticipating on behalf of customers for the development of new products, distribution to make it easy to learn about about and access them, the experience you create in their delivery and service, plus how you communicate about them. Marketing (aka branding) can be the meaning that flows through it all. Respect these skills and learn them faster. Find people who can teach you sooner. Ask them now.


There is an emerging battery of writing on the changing role of marketing. As my own role merges social media, marketing, product and service--the old labels seem too limiting. I focus a lot on this, including the post Marketing is a Tax. For a really thoughtful look about how this ambiguity applies to the marketing function, please read: Building a New Agency OS by Mel Exon the Managing Partner and Founder of BBH Labs (@melex). I discovered the original quote from Cathy Davidson from Mel, one of my on-going must reads. In addition, I recommend Rishad Tobaccowala's piece on The Five Keys to Marketing in 2012.
_____________________
Added January 20, 2012
Fantastic article by Seth Godin on this topic:

"Now that the industrial economy is over, you should forget about doing things just because it's assigned to you, or "never mind the race to the top, you'll be racing to the bottom."

However, if you're different somehow and have made yourself unique, people will find you and pay you more, Godin says.

Instead of waiting around for someone to tell you that you matter, take your career into your own hands. In other words, don't wait for someone else to pick you and pick yourself! If you have a book, you don't need a publisher to approve you, you can publish it yourself. It's no longer about waiting for some big corporation to choose you. We've arrived at an age where you choose yourself."

______________________
Added April 10, 2012
Interesting article today on Ben Casnocha and Reid Hoffman's new book "The Start Up of You." I haven't read the book yet. But it appears to cover many of these same concepts. The book has actions and next steps to help rather than just diagnosing the changes. Here is a link to the article.


"The world has changed. The world of work has changed. Many of the assumptions that have guided how we think about careers in America are no longer true" -- Ben Casnocha.

Marketing is a Tax

"Marketing is a tax you pay when your product is unremarkable" is a quote from Robert Stephens founder of the Geek Squad. It has taken on a mythic-ness across the Internet and is a particular favorite among tech companies. There is incredible power and importance in Robert Stephens' 11 words. Blasphemy from my marketing mouth? Not on your life.

However, I fear many people may be misunderstanding the importance of this statement. Marketing in his sentence literally means traditional advertising and paid media. Folks use his quote as yet another grenade in the battle between the product / tech and marketing teams (sad). When a launch fails, all too often the marketers point at the product team and vice versa (sadder). I believe the genius of the expression that "good products market themselves" is misunderstood and has a ton to do with a stage in a brand's life and the nature of the product. Google search, yes. Google wave, no. Google is now running Chrome advertising which will drive search traffic. Tivo was a truly great, leading product without successful marketing and it struggled. Segway?

Hmmm. Marketing isn't just communications. Semantics feel important here. Marketing means: listening and anticipating on behalf of customers for the development of new products, distribution to make it easy to learn about about and access them, the experience you create in their delivery and service, plus how you communicate about them. Marketing (aka branding) can be the meaning that flows through it all.

I am a marketer on the frontier of what we marketers do, and it is hard to explain my role in any traditional terms. My work crosses product and communications. With technology and customers' changing use of it, the traditional siloed roles of NPD, advertising, tech teams, etc. don't necessarily make sense. A perfect iconic example is Steve Jobs. Do you notice how the tech folks see him as their hero? And so do the designers, the distributors, the businessmen, the advertisers, and the marketers. I love that. He was all of them. Another perfect example I like to use is Facebook. Every consumer products company wants to work with Facebook right now because that's where the customers are. So who do you send to the meeting with Facebook? Are they a media partner? Are they a distribution and sales channel for your product? Are they actually part of your product (eg games, payments)? Are they servicing through your social media team? In a corporate org structure, you could imagine sending 20 people to Facebook across NPD, Advertising and Media, Servicing, etc. It just doesn't work that way anymore. Many technology companies are media companies and the more they can integrate the creation, curation or distribution of stories (aka content), the more those silo lines can blur. As the Internet of Things emerges and the Internet is embedded in more and more everyday objects like cars and cameras, the possibilities get even more amazing. "Marketing" or whatever we are going to call ourselves has to keep up. And when we mash the old roles up, it is so much fun. We're just getting started. Let me give some examples.

Media marketing is part of the product itself...
Facebook "likes" is a perfect example. As you use the Facebook platform, you are broadcasting your interests in a very branded way by Facebook. This works extremely well, because the product by its nature is social. But what about other products that aren't literally social themselves?

Threadless. They run t-shirt design competitions through an online social network. According to Bonfire Social Media, Threadless "revenue is growing 500 percent a year, despite the fact that the company has never advertised, employ no professional designers, use no modeling agency or fashion photographers, have no sales force, and enjoy no retail distribution." However, they do understand social media and have built an active, empowered following of hundreds of thousands of people. The shirts become the media. They all carry the Threadless brand.

Product is part of the media advertising...
For the launch of Jay-Z's biography Decode Jay-Z, Microsoft Bing and Random House literally took pages of his book and placed them where he grew up in NYC. The product itself became the advertisement, instead of the traditional "author head shot, cover art and launch date." It also gave a reason for customers to explore the Bing technology rather than watching a video demo. I love this campaign. (Interesting, from May 2010 to 2011 Bing gained search marketshare from Google. In May 2011, Google started their largest traditional campaign ever).

So back to Robert Stephens' and his quote that rang across the Internet world in 2008 and is still reverberating today. What I have since deduced is that Robert Stephens was working with Crispin Porter + Bogusky around that time. To break the finger pointing between the marketing, sales and tech teams at Best Buy (who purchased Geek Squad in 2002), I bet Stephens' and his agency Crispin threw a white flag up to the tech and product teams to shift the dialog away from advertising. Geek Squad spent a considerable budget on marketing, just not all on traditional paid media. They shifted the expensive television media budget to "bake the marketing" into the product experience. The branding on the Geek Squad cars, the uniforms for the agents, plus more. They had custom made shoes that left tens of millions of guerilla marketing imprints of the Geek Squad logo. This brand story is even more amazing to me because Geek Squad is a service, not a tangible product, and their service is not inherently social or embedded in tech.

Robert Stephens has a very unique understanding of branding and an amazing relationship with his marketers. You can see the irony in using Stephens' words to dismiss the true, forward looking marketing leaders, branders or the function all together. These are the types of marketers who the product and technology dreamers might want to find in their organizations--the marketers who truly respect what they do and who may even know how to read a little code.

John Iwata the CMO at IBM says, "The marketplace is changing faster than the marketing function." Let's change that.
____________________________
Update 11/15/11:Timely video on Amazon and Facebook: Changing the Definition of Marketing.
____________________________
There are two really good reads I have found on this topic of silo-jumping: Marketing in a Time of Change by HHCL in "Please Read It Now, Now, Now" and not surprisingly, Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses That Market Themselves by Alex Bogusly and John Winsor. You can also read more about the original Geek Squad branding in this 1999 article in Fast Company.

Listening Wrong is as Bad as Not Listening

Here comes some of the art. I think this is at the heart of making marketing more meaningful--not just meeting expectations, but blowing them out of the water. I love that there is so much focus on listening to customers. But I wish there was as much attention among marketers on how to do it. In other words, how to interpret and then act on it. I have simplified this to three basic scenarios for customer listening based on what a marketer is trying to do.

Serving Customer Needs
What do customers like about a product? What isn't working? What features are they asking for? What are they complaining about? Even the mere act of creating a place for customers to express their opinions is important to respecting them. People who generously give of their own time to let you know insights about your product as they use it deserve to be heard. Part of building a relationship with them is hearing their feedback, acting on it and making sure they know it.

Leading Product Innovation
"It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them", a quote from Steve Jobs. Customers will not literally tell us what to do when it comes to new product development. This fact can be so hard to accept if you are really listening and respecting customers. As Henry Ford said, "If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."