What you need to know!

As a marketing professional, you have two choices:

Be the Voice of the company - for this you need to know your product/service inside out. you are the 'Product Expert'.

Be the Voice of the customer - in the company. For this you need to know your customer inside out. You are the 'Market Expert'.

If you are neither, your chances of success in marketing are low.

Does 'Experience' matter?

As jobs get commoditised, people get replaced by those who can do it cheaper,faster,better. How do you ensure you are in the second list?

- What innovation are you bringing to your job, everyday?

- The biggest impact seems to come from technology- internet, mobile,TV,convergence,social media.... How is this impacting your job/helping you do it better? Are you using these?

- How relevant is your experience? With everchanging marketplace, the experience of an environment 10years ago may need to checked.

- Are you learning from others' failures and successes so that you 'experiment' less?

- How 'networked' are you for absorbing ideas from outside your 'field of comfort' and apply them to your current job?

There is a reason Robots did not replace humans. we need that creativity all the time!

The 'BIG' temptation

Temptation to aim for something BIG the very first time, is quite common anywhere in life. Whether its Chinese olympics or the 56inch LCD tv or the Whopper Mac ......

This is not free of risks. Anything BIG falls, it makes BIG noise. Aiming for something BIG in a business context has more risks and chances of failure because the complexities have grown tremendously.

This tendency is especially common for people coming new to the organization who want to impress with MEGA things. But one needs to know that you are more remembered for the failures than successes and so you cannot afford BIG failures.

Aim for smaller objectives, smaller projects, smaller goals and ideas.

They tend to be more successful and give you the footing to try something bigger.

Cutting the Middle wo/man in marketing

How many of the marketing folks you know of , talk to the customer DIRECTLY?

Or do they depend on secondary/tertiary information fed by sales/colleagues/press/analysts etc?

Nothing comes close to interacting first hand with the customer and I see many marketing folks not very comfortable with that. The truth between the lines , the informal communication, the true meaning behind the words... all this one gets to appreciate only by interacting with the customer directly.

But interacting with customer needs lot of confidence , knowledge and skill. This is the reason perhaps many organizations do not 'allow' marketing folks to talk to customer directly as they are not sure that the marketing folks dont create a 'wrong' impression with the customer.


But this is the 'moment of truth' for marketers. The one most powerful in the organisation is the one who drives customer and business. Let that one be marketing folks. Amen to that!