By Biggest fuck up
My first marketing role was at a university where I was the workhorse, cleaning and managing their CRM. In my first month, I sent a completely half-finished, incoherent email to 200,000 people.
I was absolutely mortified and thought I was going to be instantly fired. My manager at the time, who in hindsight was an incredibly supportive and genuinely lovely person, had a chat with me and made it very clear this couldn't happen again, but also ended the conversation saying, "Eh, I've done worse. It happens".
Rant
My big bugbear is that I don't think people truly understand what marketing really is.... There's this mindset we perpetuate that marketing is deterministic, it's a one-in, one-out, linear thing. I do this thing, and this action happens predictably, every single time.
When we don't push back on this and make the case for the fact that marketing is probabilistic, we end up being treated like a vending machine.
I think this is where a lot of the disconnect between other departments and marketing starts to creep in, because we're not very good at articulating this in a way that is understandable and cements what our role actually is and what we actually are trying to deliver.
In reality, marketing works more like probability than physics. It doesn’t deliver results in a straight line; it builds the odds in your favour by building the conditions that make growth possible, things like trust, familiarity, recall, and credibility.
Useful advice
Again, going back to my early career, one of my marketing directors I worked under gave me the piece of advice that they are always looking out for people who can relentlessly execute. This has always stuck with me. Having an extreme bias for action.
It's really easy to get tied up in theorising and strategy. I say this ironically because I run a marketing strategy consultancy. Strategy and direction-setting are very important, but at the end of the day, if you don't do the thing, nothing will happen.
So I always try to ask myself what is the incremental next thing that I can do, an action that will move this wider piece forward. I need to be clear, though, on what "moving forward" actually means.
This is more a wider business piece of advice. But when I first set up Open Velocity, I had a piece of paper above my desk that said "overhead = death". I think marketers can learn a lot from that mindset of really understanding profitability, margin control, and how every additional cost, whether that's a piece of software or an increase in paid acquisition costs, can creep up and destroy what you're trying to build. So that focus on being really lean and tight has never gone away and is a good lesson for anyone running a business or marketing team.
