Repost: Learning Marketing on the Job

I have a batch of new readers who are trying to find their own marketing mojo. Some of you may have seen this before. Reposting for the newbs.

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.

For your convenience, I categorized them with brief descriptions so you can self-serve a la carte. It is current as of February 2012. The Brand Binge posts are at the top. All of the links can be found here (that was easier than embedding them all below). This was so much fun to do. I love that marketers have such generous spirits to share and learn. Me too.

The Service Pivot

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads” – Jeff Hammerbacher a 28 year old Harvard mathematician who was one of Facebook's first 100 employees.

I saw this quote in a Bloomberg Businessweek article talking about the technology energy focused on “getting shoppers to buy” and the “life dream of Silicon Valley” of ad-based business models and marketing-driven culture. Folks point to Groupon, Zynga, and Facebook as examples.

The fascinating part of this focus on monetizing ads is how many of the entrepreneurs loathe marketing itself. Larry Page has openly critiqued marketing, saying at one point "if we have to use marketing then we have failed". Yet Google made $36 Billion on advertising revenues in 2011. They are reliant on a business model that they don't wholly buy into themselves. Larry Page is not alone. Robert Stephens, founder of Geek Squad, stated that "marketing is a tax you pay for being unremarkable.” It has taken on almost a mythic notion in the technology sphere. Facebook is sincerely trying to create more personalized recommendations based on social connections to make ads and deals more relevant. But it is still all about ads as a revenue model for Facebook as far as the eye can see.

And the fact is, even as a marketer, I believe their issues with ads aren’t necessarily misguided (or at least the way a lot of advertising goes to market). I get their point. Many consumers loathe “disruption” and the amount of marketing in today’s world, too. And many businesses are struggling to find the return since marketers need scale and ROI. The struggle between consumer experience and advertising results has been messy, and it's getting messier.

Service instead of advertising business models?
So here's the rub: technology companies need to make money to fund the amazing tools and fascinating products people crave – let alone rationalize their very high valuations to shareholders. But is advertising the only place to fish? I don't think so.

If the ultimate goal is to create a profitable, scaled business model that benefits both businesses and consumers, why not pivot to focus on service rather than advertising? What are the yet undiscovered business models in service? 

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.
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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."

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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.

TIME's: Ten Ideas That are Changing Your Life

Before I say anything, watch this.

I had one of those unforgettable learning moments about 2 years ago when Alex Bogusky talked about The Nine Gorillas. They were the major trends affecting our lives that were right in front of us, but we didn't truly see them or appreciate their impact. I learned from the Gorillas, and also the power of the obvious. Making sure we don't miss the movements of the tectonic plates as we focus on the pressure and rubble along the fault lines.

I hadn't seen such clearly articulated ideas until I read the March 12 issue of TIME magazine: 10 Ideas That Are Changing Your Life. For those who didn't see it, I created a Cliff's Notes of excerpts and paraphrasing here. Thank you, TIME. Important, human insights for those trying to create relationships, serve, and design for people. There is also an optimism about them that I love.

1. Living Alone is the New Norm
The extraordinary rise of solitary living is the biggest social change that we've neglected to identify, let alone examine. In 1950, 4 million Americans lived alone and made up only 9% of US households. By 2011, nearly 33 million Americans live alone making up 28% of all US households.  The percentage of households increases as you look internationally to Sweden 47%, Japan 31%, and Britain 34%. According to sociologist Eric Klinenberg, living alone helps us pursue sacred modern values -- individual freedom, personal control and self-realization which are trumping economics. Solitary dwellers are primarily women, with the majority in the US being middle-aged adults from 35-64. In recent decades, young adults from 18 to 34 have been the fastest growing segment of the singleton populations. Fascinating, there is little evidence that the rise of living alone is making Americans more lonely. Living alone provides an opportunity to turn off and be better selves when we reconnect.

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.

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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.