Midlife Marketer Coffee Chat with Jessica and Paul Robinson

In select issues, I’m going to chat with members of our “Marni’s Midlife Marketers” community to learn from their career journey.? This week, I spoke with Jessica Robinson and Paul P. Robinson who shared how they successfully reinvented their careers as midlife marketers along with top lessons learned from their experiences.

Jessica Robinson

How have you reinvented your career as a midlife marketer?

Reinventing a career while relocating to a new hometown can be both a daunting and transformative experience. Like with many people, the pandemic prompted a reevaluation of life’s priorities, emphasizing the importance of balancing work, family, and personal connections. Initially, leaving a secure corporate position in a new hometown 1,200 miles away to explore new opportunities was challenging and uncertain. I took the summer off to spend time with my teenage children and reassess my goals. This period of reflection helped me realize my desire for a career that offers flexibility and the opportunity to foster new relationships. For me it was time to embark on the path of starting my own consulting business, start a side hustle and give back to my community. Starting a consulting business allows me to leverage my marketing expertise while exploring flexible work options, such as joining Fraction of Fraction (www.FOAF.pro). The Fractional CMO role keeps me connected to a network of amazing professionals who can help bridge leadership gaps and accelerate business growth.? Additionally, pursuing a side hustle centered around my passion for pickleball (www.inkydinkdo.com) enables me to scale up my capabilities, while effectively balancing professional growth with personal satisfaction.

What is your perspective on what value midlife marketers can provide for their clients and companies?

Midlife marketers offer invaluable experience and insight to clients and companies. With a deep understanding of market trends and effective strategies, we provide strategic guidance that drives growth and innovation. Our seasoned approach to problem-solving allows us to navigate corporate culture and politics efficiently, ensuring that initiatives are implemented smoothly and effectively.

What are the top lessons learned that other midlife marketers can take away from your career journey?

My journey underscores the vital importance of staying connected, engaging with the community, and aligning career choices with personal passions and values. These principles have proven invaluable, providing support, opportunity, and a sense of fulfillment. More specifically, these are some of the lessons learned:?

• Maintain Your Professional Network: Maintaining connections with former colleagues and industry contacts offers essential support and new opportunities during transitions. These relationships often lead to new connections and demonstrate how much people genuinely want to help others succeed.
• Engage with Local Community Resources: Getting involved with resources like SCORE, where I became a certified Mentor, allows you to help local entrepreneurs and apply your skills in new ways.? Or join the Chamber of Commerce to better understand the local business landscape and build relationships.?
• Embrace Flexibility and New Ventures: Transitioning from a corporate job to starting a consulting business and side hustle taught me the importance of being open to new opportunities and adapting to change in new ways.
• Squash any Imposter Syndrome: Embrace your years of expertise and perspective when transitioning from corporate to consulting, or any other new role. Recognizing your strengths and seeking support from mentors can help overcome any adversity that enables you to thrive.
• Balance Professional Growth with Personal Satisfaction: Aligning your career with your interests and values, like pursuing a side hustle around a personal passion, ensures a fulfilling and sustainable work-life balance.

Paul Robinson

How have you reinvented your career as a midlife marketer and What is your perspective on what value midlife marketers can provide for their clients and companies?

The most defining characteristic about a “midlife marketer” (or perhaps a seasoned marketing executive) is that this cohort has NEVER not been reinventing themselves!? We have experienced the incredible, dramatic and frenetic pace of change that no other marketing cohort has had to make in their career journey in history. We have had to manage a landscape in marketing that includes (literally) the invention and transition from analog to digital, from broadcast to segmentation / fragmentation, from voices we trust to not even hearing almost any voice due to the sheer volume of simultaneous messages. We’ve had to manage up, down and through political, economic, societal and technological changes that have more than shifted but foundationally rebuilt our commerce, communications, experiential and audience platforms and measurements - all while remaining strategically relevant and valued in our organizations. To this cohort, change has been more than constant, it's been constantly changing in its pace and expectations.

All of this has made us incredibly well suited to reinvent ourselves - for we are the prototypical generalists in a world of specialists. This view has been the impetus for my journey through this phase of being a midlife marketer.?

It took me a while to not only realize this, but lean into it. The pressure is real to position yourself in terms that most job descriptions are written, and as most hiring managers are pressured into finding the right fit for.

I would encourage midlife marketers to lean into what made them successful in the first place - the ability to create and leverage the strategy across all tactics, and how to measure that success with a view that values science while articulating and recognizing true insights, art and intuition.

Through this approach and with this lens, I’ve been successful in reinventing myself by NOT overtly reinventing myself. The more I tried to reinvent, the more stress and tension I created in my story - and it isn’t surprising the results reflected that tension. For me, the results changed when I didn’t try to reinvent, or even reposition, but just to align and properly position and embrace the value of my journey and the sum of my experience as a generalist unencumbered by the perceived value of specialist as the only path to success. My focus was and continues to be looking for opportunities that have embraced the true value my career journey can uniquely provide.??

What are the top lessons learned that other midlife marketers can take away from your career journey?

I wouldn’t be so bold as to think my journey - or any other - should be held out as “lessons” for others - I can only tell my story for others to dissect for the parallels and for paths of divergence - that illuminate a window of opportunity in the journey of others. There are literally books and newsletters highlighting the practical advice that is critical in any career journey (especially in transition) regarding networking, volunteering, etc. and all of it is 100% correct. But to me, the most important, and most difficult thing in the process is best described by Curly (Jack Palance) in the movie City Slickers and that is to find your “one thing”. When questioned by Mitch (Billy Crystal) what that one thing was, the answer is “That’s for you to figure out”. Sometimes the best thing you can do is to listen only to your inner voice to guide you to really, really understand where you will be fulfilled.? I’d venture that for most that “one thing” isn’t the title, the salary, the brand on your business card (if you still even have one of those) - but the reason most of us got into Marketing to start with - and it's the intrinsic feeling that building, creating and sharing our talents in valuable ways.

As we’ve all been living through the most recent tectonic shift in the world, and the ones on the horizon (seen and unseen), it may be the time to be a little selfish and build the next part of your journey for your internal legacy, and not your external one.

Marni's Top 10 Favorite Marketing Jobs

Please check my LinkedIn profile activity daily for all of the job listings I share on an ongoing basis.

Discover, Principal Business Data Steward - Media/Marketing

ESPN, Senior Vice President, Marketing

Feastables, Director, Integrated Marketing

Isagenix, Chief Marketing Officer

Johnson & Johnson, Group Product Director- Immunology Lifecycle Marketing

JPMorgan Chase, Commercial Banking Marketing Strategy Lead

Mars, Data-Driven Marketing Senior Manager

Obama Foundation, Lots of Job Opportunities!

Syneos Health, Media Supervisor

VML, Lots of Job Opportunities!

About this Newsletter

As mentioned in Forbes, “A midlife crisis is defined as a period of emotional turmoil in middle age, around 40 to 60 years old, characterized by a strong desire for change.”? However, marketers begin their midlife crisis much earlier.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average age of a US marketing/advertising manager is 39.0, compared to 46.7 for all managerial roles.

While the marketing industry has responded to issues of gender, race, and sexual harassment, there continues to be no movement against ageism.? This issue has been swept under the rug, but it is very real.

When I was laid off from my job in advertising in my 30s, it was a dark and scary time.? I had no idea what was next for me and needed to figure out a way to reinvent myself.? I remember all of the people in my network who went out of their way to help me and those who let my emails go into “cyberspace”.? That experience made me realize how important it is to “pay it forward” to help other “midlife marketers” figure out what’s next in their career journey.? Life is too short to stay in a job that doesn’t align with your core values and connect to something greater than yourself.

This bi-weekly newsletter for “midlife marketers” (from new managers to senior leaders) has easy-to-read tips and actionable advice on ways to design your own career path, take your career to the next level and how to master the art of networking.? This newsletter will leverage my insights to help you navigate your career journey. Each issue will also include a curated list of job opportunities shared from my network of 7,500+ marketers.

• Find your ideal career: Discover ways to find your dream career that aligns with your values, strengths and passions.? Learn how to manage career transitions and leverage your transferable skills to design the life you want.
• The art of networking: Learn how to build and maintain authentic relationships over time to find hidden job opportunities.
• Hot career topics: including designing a portfolio career, setting boundaries, dealing with ageism, imposter syndrome, self-care during transition, and more!
• Curated list of my favorite marketing job opportunities

About Marni Gordon

Marni is passionate about paying it forward to help marketers who want to thrive in a career they love. Marni is an Associate Certified Coach (ACC) through the International Coaching Federation (ICF), a Certified Career and Executive Coach from New York University (NYU), and a Certified Group Coach from Group Coaching HQ (ICF Certified Program) with 25+ years of corporate marketing leadership experience. Marni has an extensive background creating community, networking, training individuals and groups, developing individuals in a variety of high-performance roles, and facilitating discussions to help clients uncover their own insights, action plans and accountability. Marni is a super connector and will help you become one too.