What does this have to do with anything?

Looking back, February 2021 is pretty hazy given (waves arms around wildly) everything, but I distinctly remember first connecting with Xavier Univeristy professor Karen Eutsler about speaking to her Marketing 310 class at Xavier University - Williams College of Business .

I was delighted to be invited and even more excited to meet students attending this well-renowned private Jesuit university. Living in Cincinnati, I meet people all the time who impress me to no end, and almost invariably I learn in our conversation they graduated from Xavier.

Being prepared is what enables you to be flexible – the ability to be comfortably flexible is the result of consistent hard work.

Karen and I scheduled this guest lecture months in advance, but as things tend to go, I ran into a last-minute scheduling conflict. Knowing I’d have about half the time I usually get to talk and learn from the students, I threw out my standard deck and instead, I broke down the top five things I’ve learned about global business and marketing to drive positive change.

#1: Reputation is currency in business, and perception is reality. Personal reputation and integrity is intuitive. Why do we completely associate an executive or leader's reputation with the organization they lead? Because organizational reputation is personified through perception.

Many of the students I’ve talked to over the years are keen to start their own businesses, so the challenges of maintaining the legacy of a reputation may be less relevant to them. My challenge to them is to discover and then understand the key drivers of their organization’s reputation: think about transparency about how your product is made; consider how you can make sure the people who buy what you’re selling know and believe that your company will always do the right thing. In practice, this means your team should co-create a reputation-building strategy, and then develop and deploy consistent strategies that hit on every angle of reputation management.

#2: Importance of brand trust. Some folks might conflate reputation and trust, but there’s enough nuance in those definitions for me that I call them out separately.?

• Reputation is what opinion leaders, customers, retailers, and critics think and say about you and your brand.
• Brand trust is a belief or a covenant you develop with the people who buy your services or goods - not only do they think your company is a good one, but they trust your components or your service.?

Another distinction: when I think about building my reputation strategy, I’m thinking about third-party validation, critics, opinion leaders – politicos like Will Robinson trained me to know “what our opponents say about us.”?

#3: This never goes without saying: you can never be too prepared. There’s no such thing as “winging it” – even the most gifted speakers and most talented leaders practice their craft. The only reason it looks “easy” or you might perceive that they didn’t need time to prepare is because they’ve practiced these skills continually.?

The corollary to being prepared is being flexible and agile enough to adapt to new environments and employ all the things you learned through practice in a different context.?

Being prepared is what enables you to be flexible – the ability to be comfortably flexible is the result of consistent hard work.

#4: Balancing the “now” and “next.”

Imagine you’re one of the students in Marketing 310: you know today’s lecture will feed into tomorrow’s test, but you also need to be thinking how what you’re doing or learning today will impact the future state.?

No one manages this balancing act exactly the same way, but just like anything, can be honed and improved over time. You can’t get too caught up in planning for the future without doing the hard work of delivering today. Executing or implementing for only today is not a long-term strategy; and getting too caught up thinking about (read: worrying about) what happens in a quarter or a year does not keep you in a constant state of readiness.

#5: One word: optimism. Let’s define what optimism is not: it’s not saying everything will work out for the best - that’s toxic positivity. And it’s not manifesting a result through belief.??

When I say I’m an optimist, what I mean is I believe that if we put in the work of being prepared and maintaining flexibility, by balancing both the “now” and “next” - and to do that all in service of building and maintaining reputation and trust – we can expect to achieve our anticipated outcomes.?

At this point you should be saying: what does any of this have to do with executing global marketing?

Here's my answer:?

Great marketing is underpinned by a long-term, strategic investment in building reputation and creating trust.

Great marketing considers what needs to be true now and what needs to be true next – and the answers to that is what creates the strategy.?

Great marketing happens when you prepare so effectively that you’re able to react with total flexibility when reality changes.

Great marketing is the application of optimism: that the lives of your customers or clients can be better for the long-term because of your policy, service or product.?

Hit me up in the comments or via DM to share what you’ve learned about marketing, whether you lead a global brand or market services to your local community.