We’ve had passion, process, purpose, and a pile of other pathetic proposals. While we fiddled with these substitutes, we lost the heartland of our discipline. Marketers vanished from product development and lost input into pricing or distribution strategy. Today, most marketing departments just handle communications.
But Chip Wilson knows that product is the most important “P,” and that marketers should be able to understand their consumers enough to improve, evolve, and advance the product in line with the brand.
That’s hard for most modern marketers, because they have zero experience and no remit to work on the products they sell. We have become so estranged from our products that we now need Product Marketers, because most “marketers” only know about advertising—if you’re lucky.
Entrepreneurial
If there’s a secret to resilient brand management, it’s the sheer bloody-mindedness of entrepreneurial thinking.
Far too many marketers tuck themselves into the warm embrace of process, consensus, and political correctness while tiptoeing around risk and innovation like there’s a prize for mediocrity. But the entrepreneurial approach—biting off more than you can handle and attacking, not supporting, the orthodoxy—is the only antidote to irrelevance.
Every breakthrough brand, from Apple to Nike, was led not by caretakers, but pirates willing to chart new territory and occasionally run their ship aground in the name of progress.
But it becomes logarithmically harder to maintain an entrepreneurial streak as the potential risk from failure increases. Jeff Bezos was amazing at growing Amazon, but even more astonishing at maintaining its entrepreneurial edge as his company grew bigger than almost any other.
Creativity
Too many marketers confuse marketing prowess with creative leadership.
I’ve been lucky to work with great creative people in my career. The first step in mastering creativity is realizing most of it isn’t coming from marketers. We are more creative than the finance department, but once you’ve worked with Parsons-trained talent, you appreciate that the role of marketing is to select, support, brief, and appreciate true creative talent. Not to be it.
Good marketers should learn to brief—a skill most are abjectly awful at. But their arrogance combined with the cowardice of agencies (who talk openly about the disastrous inability of clients to brief but say nothing to them directly) means nothing changes and creativity is always the loser.
