Everyone needs to understand how marketers think and what they can do for business. Marketing lies in your persona and attitude as much as in the marketing weapons available to you. Maybe marketing isn’t for you, but if you work on it (and want it) you can turn yourself into a brilliant marketer. Alternatively you can learn how to work with marketers so your respective skills shine. Unfortunately some marketers today are behaving more like ordinary tradesmen than the magicians they need to be. To be brilliant our marketing people need to be inspirational, not merely adequate.
Be an optimist, because the first golden rule of marketing is that ‘nothing is impossible’.
Personality checklist
All good businessmen are jugglers
But none more so than marketing people. Marketing is an art but with a bit of science thrown in. If you are going to be as good as you can, you need to have both intuition and the ability to dissect data. You need to be an optimist and a realist. You need to know when to gamble and when to cut your losses. You need to be adept at separating wheat from chaff. This is a juggling act of time, money and resources.
And, shifting focus from office and documents to the outside world, because in a people-business brilliance can’t exist behind a computer alone. We all of us spend an increasing amount of time dealing with hundreds of emails, working on spreadsheets, processing stuff. Start looking people in the eye, start inspiring and being inspired, start listening and start trying to be brilliant.
Marketing people like to take control at meetings. Meetings are great fun because they put people on their mettle. Meetings at their best are great because they are idea-generative. Meetings need to end with a burst of positivity, which marketers are good at. Remember, ‘nothing is impossible’ – this is the real marketing person’s creed.
Too much of the world today is merely competent. It is fit for purpose. It is satisfactory. That does not make it competitive enough when others are striving for excellence. John Neill, CEO of Unipart, said of Britain in the 1980s: ‘people in UK manufacturing didn’t know what good was’. We didn’t then, but many are now beginning to know what brilliant is. And the good news is we’ve always been good at marketing. The challenge now is to prove we can excel at it and get to that A* level.
Imagine selling your brand to someone you’ve never met before. Think about how you would inspire them.
If you don’t love selling, you aren’t a marketer
Let’s not get too technical about basic selling. In simple terms, do you like pitching and do you want to win?
Imagine the ideal state of mind: you’re enthusiastic and friendly; you talk in user-friendly, non-technical language in order to reach people at their level; you show how your product solves the problem they’ve got; and you keep their attention. Above all, you want to show you love your product and want them to love it too.
This is about being hands-on, getting out and about, hearing, smelling and touching the world around us. Marketers need to be salespeople, bookkeepers and creative storytellers all in one. They need to be jugglers but most of all they need the instincts of the hunter-gatherer salesperson because that’s when you can really smell what’s going on in the market.
Be a rebel
Thomas Jefferson said a bit of rebelliousness now and then did a bit of good.
Do not ever be a yes-man. If the product you are marketing needs improving, changing or even withdrawing from sale, get it done. The only place for a popularity contest is with the consumer. Your job is to be the guardian of the brand, of quality, and of that bond of trust with the end user that will keep you in business.
Being a rebel does not mean being an idiot. It means being clear about what’s right and what’s needed. It’s about being your own man or woman. Just-get-away-with-it is not in the vocabulary of the ‘brilliant marketer’.
Zig when the others zag
Be unpredictable. In GE, the huge US conglomerate, they set up a project company-wide, as the dotcom boom started, entitled ‘destroyyourowncompany.com’. This was a classic piece of zigzag thinking.
So here’s how to zig and to zag. Draw a line down the centre of a piece of paper. In the left-hand column write ‘us’; in the right-hand column write ‘our competition’. Write down your plan in summary and then what you would do to thwart it if you were the competition.
Now write down an action on your part that might really wrong-foot your competitor. For example, increasing your quality and reducing your price simultaneously, which will be painful on margin but horrible for your competitors, or increasing your price significantly and improving your service levels and positioning yourself much higher – a real premium choice, or simply increasing your marketing spend. The art of being counter-intuitive can provide dividends. Learn it and be a tricky competitor.
Are you a big brand or a little brand?
Do not fight out of your league as you won’t have the resources. Read Eating the Big Fish by Adam Morgan to understand the role of the smaller challenger brand. The classic example of small challenger David (Avis) fighting market leader Goliath (Hertz) was in the advertising line: ‘When you’re only number 2, you try harder. Or else.’ Being short of ammunition forces you to be clever. As the scientist Lord Rutherford said, ‘We have no money so we shall have to think.’
Learning from your peers and the stars
Sir John Hegarty, founder of the British advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty, said:
‘You must understand that I am cursed with being an incorrigible optimist … I work because I love it. I’m genuinely interested in stuff. I love staying alert and keeping an open mind. The thing that ages you more than anything else is closing down, having a fixed point of view … [advertising has] entered the world of fashion where creativity and innovative thinking are paramount.’
Rachel Bell is CEO of Shine Communications. She is totally convincing and committed. She has clarity, certainty and focus. With her, PR moves centre stage. No wonder Shine wins so many awards. Her big lesson is to love her clients, be in business partnership with them and be tireless in trying to improve herself, her people and her clients’ sales. Listen to people like her.
Arjo Gosht who founded Spannerworks, which got really big in the digital space, and then sold it to iCrossing, is the sort of person to listen to. Search engine optimisation comes to life when he speaks.
Look at TED to see great speakers talk on a variety of subjects and study the passion and conviction with which they communicate their ideas: Sir Ken Robinson on creativity, Matt Ridley on this radically improving world and Sal Khan on mathematics. Marketing is an attitude of mind as well as a set of skills. An enthusiast who’s still learning will usually outwit a cynic who’s a master of technique.
What connects all these people is their hunger to win, to learn and to get something done. In my experience find a marketer and then find one who laughs, talks and does narrative – a storyteller – and listen to what they say. You’ll learn loads.
Finally, when given a list of candidates for a vacant post, Napoleon said, ‘Bring me lucky generals, not just good ones.’ Energy and guessing well can lead to luck, but most good marketers are the sort of optimists who seem to make their own luck. The sun shines on them and their glasses are always half full.
In marketing you have it in your power to transform a business.
How to develop your marketing muscle
Is there really such a thing as marketing muscle? Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, described how he, as a teenager, suddenly ‘got’ maths. It was, he said, like the sun coming out and a pattern emerging out of complexity.
For me it happened when I began to take data seriously and the numbers in a piece of market research (a Nielsen, Taylor Nelson or AGB tracking study) began to tell me their story. Suddenly seeing it and hearing it in your head are exciting.
You’ll develop your marketing muscle and practise your marketing skills by trying to see patterns emerging from life around you. This will vary from market to market, so if you want to be a business-to-business marketer, spending long hours in Tesco or in Wetherspoons may be less helpful than going to a trade fair in Hanover.
Marketing – some useful exercises
Not everyone wants to be in marketing, not everyone has the extrovert and enquiring mind about people that being in marketing requires. However, if you are in business it’s essential you understand what marketing is all about and how the marketing mindset works. Like learning a musical instrument or being good at a sport, being a master at marketing takes a lot of practice, a lot of knowledge and constant questioning. Those best at it immerse themselves in it and become addicted to it. It is more than just a job. It is a calling.
So if you want to do it, go for it. And if you don’t, then try to understand those enthusiastic and energetic fanatics in your company and treat them kindly.