Why this idea means business : We explore the good and bad of marketing leadership. Learn what marketing leaders who know their stuff do. And the warning signs of a marketing leader who’s stuffing it up. Read this for thought-provoking ideas about marketing leadership.
How much is this idea worth?
Idea : To deliver more effective marketing activity by improving specific leadership skills. Based on our standard business case assumptions, the value of this idea is :-
- Source of business – More customers
- Skill area – Marketing
- Commercial hypothesis :-
- # customers = 1,000
- Spend/month = $100
- Est. new customers = +85 (+8.5%)
- Est. sales increase = +$8.5k (monthly) | +$102k (annual)
“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a Chief Marketing Officer”. Said no one ever.
Yet CMOs are clearly not in short supply. The marketing press is always full of them waffling out “wisdom” like some sort of marketing Yoda. The customer, understand them you must. Well, thanks. Never would have thought of that …
Add to that all the Marketing Directors, VPs, SVPs and EVPs of Marketing forever giving interviews and appearing on event panels and podcasts.
Marketing leadership these days seems to be all about building your personal brand profile. It makes us wonder when these self-promoting shysters do any actual marketing.
The need for marketing leadership
We’re not after marketing anarchy here. Well, maybe a little. But we do think those in marketing leadership positions aren’t challenged often enough. So they get away with dull ideas and mediocre marketing.
As we believe in giving good business ideas a fair go with more meaningful marketing, this sticks in our craw a fair bit.
You might assume that those who reach the top of the marketing leadership career ladder are the “best” at marketing.
But work with these types and you soon realise that this is often far from the case. Just read their interviews. Watch them at events. Listen to their podcasts. The odd one might have genuine creative thinking and insight. But mostly, they just spout marketing and managerial blah.
What great marketing leadership delivers
Marketing leads the relationship with the customer, building brands that attract and retain customers profitably. Simple, right?
But it sounds like the typical high-level blowhard statement someone in marketing leadership would say. So testing for great marketing leadership should start with digging deeper into the meaning behind their words. To find the truth in what they do.
Great marketing leaders don’t just understand customers. They ensure all marketing decisions enhance customer relationships.
There’s often a difference between decisions that make “business” sense and those that make “customer” sense. Shrinkflation. Inflation-busting price hikes. Enjoying jollies at Cannes in the middle of a customer cost of living crisis. Great marketing leadership fights off these wastes of time, money and effort. Instead they focus on what’s best for customers.
Great marketing leaders also build brilliant brands. But that doesn’t mean fancy PowerPoint presentations to impress the board, and getting designers to polish the packaging. Great marketing leaders are across every part of the marketing mix, the marketing plan and the whole customer experience. They inspire their teams and agencies to do brilliant work.
Do all these things with style and imagination, and all that sales and profit and budget-holding accountability takes care of itself. When customers love your brand, growth inevitably follows.
When marketing leadership grates
This sounds obvious. But in reality, it often doesn’t work out like that. That’s why there’s so much mediocre marketing.
This happens because many businesses focus more on “leadership” than “marketing”.
We’re not against the idea of leadership. However, we are against how badly it’s often done. And the horribly negative impact it has when that happens.
HR teams spend lots of time trying to train people in leadership skills. A fine intent. However, the execution and outcomes frequently don’t live up to the intent, particularly when some leaders aren’t held to account for their bad behaviour.
Leaders who turn up late to meetings and ignore the agenda that everyone else has prepared for. Those who say they won’t read emails as they prefer face-to-face, but who never have free slots in their diary. The ones who take credit for their team’s work (without acknowledging them) but blame them the instant something goes wrong. And those who help their mates rise into undeserved positions while backstabbing those whose faces don’t fit.
If none of this sounds familiar, then you’re either :-
- lucky.
- not very observant.
- one of these bullies, backstabbers and bullshitters yourself.
What causes this mediocre marketing leadership?
What drives this bad behaviour? Our alternative 4Ps of marketing article suggests it’s partly because many marketers spend less time than they’d like doing marketing.
For example, there’s the huge time sink that is project management. Trying to shepherd different functions into delivering goals while juggling their competing and conflicting interests.
So you spend a lot of time planning and playing politics to make sure things get done.
However, this means negotiating, influencing, and trading off the wishes of different internal stakeholders. And regrettably, it’s these sorts of skills that push you up the marketing leadership career ladder. You build partnerships and relationships with other functions who perceive you as someone they can work with.
However, this doesn’t necessarily lead to great marketing. Marketing is externally focused on the customer while marketing politics is overwhelmingly internally focused. Great marketing comes from breakthrough ideas, where you have to shake off the status quo and take risks. And that rarely works politically in your favour with other functions.
The pain of marketing leadership
Our recent creative leadership article showed how marketing usually leads the fight to get innovation flowing through a business. A fight against functions whose focus is more on operational efficiency than on creative effectiveness.
It doesn’t help that marketing leaders spend most of their time with these other barrier-creating leaders. It’s easy to become detached from the realities of marketing when you spend your time with people who don’t get it. You become more like the people you work with. If they prefer playing it safe, so, slowly, do you.
This is where the final of our alternative 4Ps came in – pain management. It’s always a challenge to lead change. The worst types of marketing leadership go with the flow and play it safe. Buddy up to keep the peace with their board colleagues rather than championing what’s right for the customer. They’re more of a brand steward than a brand leader.
3 ways to spot great marketing leadership
One big challenge with leadership is its subjectivity.
To be a great leader, you need other people to perceive you as a great leader. But how you define great leadership varies wildly. It’s subject to huge amounts of bias.
If your boss regularly promotes you and you get nice salary bumps, you’ll think they’re a great leader. Even if the work they oversee is terrible, and they treat other people like crap.
There’s also a natural tendency to support and promote people with similar views to yourself. So people who have more of a challenger mindset, who bring more diversity to marketing decision-making usually find themselves pushed out of the rat race to the top. Deemed and doomed to “not fit in”.
Better instead to look for more objective ways to evaluate marketing leadership e.g. :-
- look at the work.
- look at the culture.
- do a sniff test.
Look at the work
The most obvious way to judge marketing leadership is the quality of the work that their team produces.
Look across the whole marketing mix.
Does the business have a powerful and profitable range of products? Are its communications driven by great insight and imagination? Does the price make sense in terms of the brand’s competitive strategy and is it available in all the right places?
Great marketing leadership understands how to create a culture where these key marketing principles thrive.
Look at the culture
When you see a team led by great marketing leaders, you can feel their energy. Their drive. Their sense of purpose.
This is because those leaders set up the culture to let these sorts of positive marketing behaviours flourish. It’s in the people they hire. The environments and processes they establish. And in the way they motivate and inspire people as leaders.
Great marketing leadership means walking the walk on culture as well as talking the talk.
It means pulling in all those other functions like your finance, supply chain and IT teams and getting them to support activities that engage customers and drive growth and innovation.
When marketing’s done right, you can smell it in the air.
Do a sniff test
And smell drives our third and final check on great marketing leadership. The sniff test on marketing leadership is about using your common sense.
Listen to what marketing leaders say and what they do. If they said that to you down the pub, would you believe them? Or think they’re an idiot? If they put their ideas to your mum, would she love them or loathe them?
Great marketing leaders are clear, genuine and honest. You hear what they say, see what they do, and you believe them. You trust them.
They pass the sniff test.
So if they drone on about data but can’t tell their standard deviations from their square roots, back away. If they bang on about Artificial Intelligence without any actual intelligence, steer well clear. And if they claim customers have strong emotional connections with their very functional everyday product (they don’t), give them an extra wide berth.
Conclusion - The mastery and mediocrity of marketing leadership
There’s often an inverse relationship between how good a company’s marketing is, and how frequently you hear their marketing leadership team brag about it. Great marketing work speaks for itself.
The best marketing teams get on with it because they focus on the customer. And customers don’t read marketing magazines, go to marketing events or listen to marketing podcasts.
But they do buy products and services, and that’s what great marketing leadership prioritises.
There are great marketing leaders out there. If you know what to look for. We’ve given you some pointers. But you’ll find a lot of lazy thinkers and political stirrers in marketing too. If you don’t want your brand to be an average nobody and live out the rest of its life like a schnook, learn how to tell the difference.
Check out our be a better marketer and marketing brain articles for more on this. Or get in touch if you need help with mastering marketing leadership.
Photo credits
Like a boss : Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash
Man giving speech : Photo by Miguel Henriques on Unsplash
Happy woman : Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
Angry face : Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash
Glasses : Photo by Josh Calabrese on Unsplash
Thumbs up (adapted) : Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Woman sniffing flowers : Photo by Elly Johnson on Unsplash
