Courage and Mindset: Leading with Purpose

This article talks about the much-needed mindset shift in marketing, why courage is important in marketing, how to empower courage, examples of courage, useful lessons for scaling and building marketing teams, and most importantly reinforcing a mindset of empathy and service.

With a thick Scottish accent and unconventional looks, hailing from an industrial town of fewer than 5,000 people, Magdalane appeared on a stage in Glasgow on April 11, 2009, convinced that this 'trial' performance would be a final tribute to her mother. "To show her I could do something with my life" was her aspiration. It probably took seconds for the crowd of over 200 to label her, based on her simple looks and her accent.

The next 120 seconds (see video) were transformative in 'expectation alteration' and in the judge's own words 'the biggest wakeup call ever'. You know her as Susan Boyle.

Mindset can be altered.

The marketing landscape has changed at lightning speed in the past three years. And even more so in the last six months! So, too, has the definition and skill set of the marketer. Beyond "just" marketing, a marketer must now possess the technical know-how to drive adoption of technologies that improve customer interactions, increase revenue, optimize pricing, build brands, and expand awareness.

In the past few years, a new customer has appeared on the scene who was born or raised digital, is highly social, loves to measure everything, and expects things instantly. Serving this customer with legacy marketing programs, processes, technologies is not a recipe for success and requires transformation and courage with customer-centricity at the core.

The landscape changes also bring with it new chromosomes that package up the DNA of a marketer today. Gone are the days of impetuous execution and 'activity lists.' Instead, courage with a key set of skills -- packaged to deliver maximum growth velocity to an organization -- are in demand. In addition to core marketing skills, marketers have to be instigators, innovators, integrators, and implementers. For more details on these skills see Marketing Team Vitals.

Hypergrowth markets and unicorns often contribute to the notion of 'speed' and introduce interesting marketing complexities and challenges. I say speed is important but more important is 'speed at scale.' In an ever-changing hypergrowth environment, you are striving to build an organization, while keeping the trains running on time, while ensuring stability and introducing new programs, while delivering Vitamin R (revenue) to the organization -- all in a short window. Hiring alone, as one example, can be a full-time job for several months.

Delivering this requires a servant leadership mindset with continuous testing and iteration instead of a comfortable "stay the course" strategy. It's a combination of creativity, consistency, crowdsourcing, and collaboration rather than building a team that is on a definable career path. Leading a marketing function today takes a wholly different skill than it did five years ago. Chief among them, courage. 

Marketing as a function is not the same. It would be unrecognizable to the people who wrote the textbooks on marketing, years ago. Today, its less instinct and more math, its empathy vs expedite, its crowdsourcing and collaboration - its mindset over muscle. And, as Brian Fetherstonhaugh of Ogilvy One has spoken and written about, it is no longer about the four Ps (product, place, price, and promotion) but about the experience, everyplace, exchange, and evangelism. Time to rewrite the textbooks? I think so.

Adapting and adopting these changes in marketing in an environment of virulent passion that fondly clings to 4Ps or GMOOT (see below) requires humble courage. 

EMPOWERING COURAGE

You empower courage by having a strong foundation that encourages ideas to start with fact-based strategic insight. 

What is strategic insight? Simply put its the understanding, wisdom, and intuition you bring to a situation. It is the result of your experience, your ability and willingness to consider alternative ways of viewing the world and looking at the issue from all angles. 

A few years ago, when I had engaged Colin Powell as a keynote speaker for a major conference. In our prep work leading to the conference, Mr. Powell shared a key lesson with me. He said he tells his team, "Tell me what you know, tell me what you don't know, and only then, tell me what you think. For if you tell me what you know and think, and I make a wrong decision, it's your fault. But if you tell me what you know, tell me what you don't know, and then tell me what you think, and I make a wrong decision, it is my fault." 

Strategic insight is the discipline of looking at the issue at hand, from all angles.

And most certainly beware of the envious pursuit of GMOOT. "GMOOT" syndrome, short for "Get me one of those," is the basic command from CEOs to CMOs or CMOs to their agencies. It sounds over-simplistic, but it's an existential reality where someone read something in Ad Age or saw that a rival company was doing it or was told by another executive he/she had to get into the game, etc. GMOOT puts the best-laid marketing plans in awry. I am a strong proponent of experimentation in marketing, but when GMOOT takes the form of Gollum (or Sméagol) it can hurt your marketing spend, team dynamics, and brand. Experimentation is good, the envious pursuit of GMOOT is what you want to stay away from.

A strong bias for the truth, having an environment where it is OK to have the courage to tell it like it is. The Dove campaign illustrates the courage to step out beyond the traditional and expected work that was so typical in the health and beauty segment. Moving beyond perfect, beautiful models was risky, but it was also courageous and focused on this strategic vision: "To make women feel comfortable in the skin they are in, to create a world where beauty is a source of confidence and not anxiety. The Nike ad 'believe in something' highlights taking a stance on social issues, with courage.

An environment for creative courage, striving for strategic disruption. Creative courage is the ability to step out of your comfort zone and truly make an impact. It the ability to create new symbols, new patterns, new forms to often make a new world. Ideas over Ego and a fearless work environment give rise to creative courage.

Two really good examples of creative courage that I have come across are Apple's Start the Revolution Ad and Levi's Inspire with Empathy - Go Forth and Work Ad. The Apple ad introducing the Macintosh personal computer is legendary because of certain believed truths and began Apple's meteoric rise to consumer product superstardom, and it only aired once. Levi's advertisement showcases the impoverished town of Braddock, Pa., in a dignified manner and has had a positive effect on the community.

Some of the most useful lessons learned when it comes to building and scaling marketing teams quickly are: 

• Always over-communicate.
• Never underestimate the need for education within the broader organization of which marketing programs are deployed and why.
• Don't fill gaps, hire for growth. 
• Avoid, 'Oh yes we did it this way there, so it should work here' approach. Marketing, in my opinion, is not a cookie-cutter exercise and often a tailored suit for the business and its objectives.
• Safe is risky, be bold. On the graph of think, there are two axes, big and different. So be free and think bold and think differently.
• Drive Vitamin R -- not 'sales,' not just bookings, not just leads, not just MQLs or SQLs, but revenue which includes renewals, upsells, cross-sells, through delightful customer experience. 

REINFORCING A DIFFERENT MINDSET

Particularly in a post COVID world marketing requires an acute shift in mindset. Speed and agility are paramount.

Yes Vitamin R (revenue) is still important, but perhaps a purely muscled focus for Vitamin R in today's world is inversely proportional to the trust you will gain and retain with your customers.

Inspired by Stephanie Buscemi's article on Leading through Listening and more so the recent webinar Leading with Purpose and Empathy with Matthew Lieberman, Carla Zakhem-Hassan, Naveen Agarwal, and Lina Shields for this great discussion on marketing during a crisis -

One has to reframe their strategy in the context of leading with a service mindset. Staying true to your value and purpose is ever more important. Quality, relevant, and empathetic content over volume is in demand. I am amazed that some brands still drum awareness with FOMO at the heart of their marketing message vs adding incremental value to the customer. Thanking your customers is good, but in today's environment is it enough, does it add utility or value from a customer's perspective? In today's world you cannot just retrofit to digital, just does not work - a different mindset is required.

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Courage and empathy cannot be taught in a classroom. It can only be gained through multiple experiences and it comes from the heart. Mindset, however, can be changed. Isn't it time to change the marketing mindset?

As Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh once said, "The longest journey you will ever take is the 18 inches from your head to your heart."