It starts with us - the marketers and leaders who understand the value of brand - to preach its impact. It's an uphill battle, for sure. And honestly? It's not fair that so much is on marketing's shoulders - to do the work while simultaneously having to prove there's value in the work. It's exhausting. But this is the reality. We have to keep telling the story of why this works. Right? Or is there another way? #marketing #branding #brandmarketing #brandauthority
I had a call recently with a brand marketing leader at a prominent tech company, as part of prep for a podcast that I have in development. It was intended to be a meet and greet, to go over the podcast ahead of a recording date, but it went a different direction. This marketing leader had come from a deeply impressive branding background in the B2C world before tech, at a global and award winning-level. As experts in brand marketing go, she is as accomplished as they come. So it caught me off guard when she said "I'm hesitant to do this podcast". The reason, it turned out, was because of her frustration with how brand marketing is not respected or understood in tech. How small of a box brand exists in at her company, and how limited its scope is. And this is at a company whose brand would be regarded as at the higher end of the industry. What I was expecting to be a prep call became a private venting between us, even though we had just formally met. Now, of course, B2C faces its own challenges when it comes to showing brand impact, but calls like this one really drove home how brand marketing as a formally trained discipline is nearly entirely missing in tech. The depth of literacy with some of the core principles of marketing are fundamentally misunderstood, even ridiculed by some marketers as they sell their own versions of marketing. The old playbooks in marketing are certainly broken, and if we are to educate leadership towards change, I really believe it starts with us making sure we're fully educating our own function. Because it speaks volumes to me when someone so impressively credentialed in brand marketing could find herself so quickly downtrodden by how our industry treats it.