Good morning leaders.
This week: Simon (Swan) returns with his take on what will help many of us stand the test of time and move away from being remembered as our last title and as the corporate world is being reshaped its time to engineer our edge to stand out and stand the test of time.
Last week: We were reminded of the importance of knowing if and when to use AI in our campaigns and projects. If you missed it, you can read it here
If you are new here or the email was forward to you and want to receive the newsletter straight to your inbox you can subscribe for free, here.
Remember to Share to your team if you find this useful or copy and paste https://www.marketingunfiltered.co/p/98
→ 2500+ Marketing & Business Leaders Want You Here
If you are serious about connecting with over 2500 marketing and business leaders, we are looking for the right partners to sponsor Marketing Unfiltered - we are offering a dedicated presenting sponsorship package to the end of the year, sponsored series & back catalogue sponsorship.
Apply to sponsor below or get in touch here
By Simon Swan - Connect On Linkedin - Read Simon’s Other Marketing Unfiltered Articles
Master the Core
There’s no shortage of marketing courses, frameworks and textbooks.
Having a solid understanding of the fundamentals matter even more, and I’d suggest that mastering them is a non-negotiable. But mastering the theory is just the ticket to the game in my opinion. Thankfully those barriers to entry in putting yourself on a course have but been eliminated
But what has changed significantly are a number of external factors impacting our working life.
Corporate life offers that safe and secure scaffolding: a title that answers “what do you do,” a team that reflects status, a budget that creates attention, a promotion cycle that gives ambition somewhere to point. But take the scaffolding away, and even highly capable marketers can struggle to describe their value without reaching for the company name or job title.
The executive career is changing outside of just having the qualifications to get you through the door. But longer working lives, flatter organisations and AI uncertainty will mean that the next decade can’t be managed as business as usual
My view is the advantage will belong to marketers at any level who can retain their skill-set and at the same time build outside of your core skills but also your e.g. reputation, human judgement and the ability to make change happen.. Key factors that are not found through a manual.
It’s going to be getting more comfortable with your career that doesn’t follow a straight line but trusting your own judgment to navigate your next steps as what got you through the door, keeps you relevant, and makes you genuinely valuable across your career is something will be something else entirely.
What’s Your Edge?
The old bargain was straightforward: build expertise, take on bigger teams, manage bigger budgets, keep climbing the ladder (if you wanted to).
But those “rules” have changed.
Lynda Gratton’s recent Harvard Business Review article names the tension precisely:
“Careers are getting harder to plan because working lives are lengthening at exactly the moment AI is making the future of work less predictable…in a working life that may span 60 years, your real advantage will come not in predicting what might come next but in preparing yourself to navigate that outcome, whatever it is”.
Building an edge for your career over the long term shouldn’t be seen “as a vanity project” but rather a way to invest in yourself to add “career insurance”.
Building your edge is the visible, portable evidence of how you think and the problems you can solve as well as developing your own capabilities and ways of working that offers something different
What’s Your Impact
Your “Edge” could show up in a lot of places such as if you write to develop your opinions, if you mentor, speak, guest lecture…or simply becoming known as the person who brings clarity to a difficult situation. But it’s also that added extra you can bring into a business outside of your job description
Rishad Tobaccowala calls this a “company of one” mindset - it’s owning your own network, your own learning and your own reputation and applying it in your own unique way into a business.Organisations that call on you in future won’t do it because of your job title. They’ll do it because of what you’re known for.
Start Right: A Practical Guide To Building Your Own Method
Whatever organisation you walk into a startup, government, a global FMCG business a handful of practical questions have set me up every single time:
Understand the category first.
Is it growing?
Is there innovation happening?
Who’s the audience, and who are the real competitors?
A proper situation analysis before you touch a channel plan is what earns you buy-in later.
Connect marketing to how the business operates, it’s objectives or expectations of its owners…The P&L is always a good entry point to data but also have the conversation with your CFO and his/her team e.g. where do they see savings, growth or efficiency coming from, and where could marketing actually support that? Is the role of marketing understood?
Interrogate the culture. Is it flat or command-and-control? Does it reward collaboration, test and learn and cross-silo working? Some of this you can and should ask directly in the interview process, not discover six months in.
Spend your first 90 days listening, not presenting. Book time with customer service, finance, warehousing, dispatch whoever sits closest to the friction. Ask what their KPIs are and where they think things break down. You’ll learn more here than from any onboarding deck.
Michael Watkins’ book The First 90 Days is worth reading as a practical map for starting somewhere new, which almost nobody talks about enough.
My time at Kitbag whilst a start-up, we had limited marketing budget and zero agency support. So we’d ask our customers.
How did you find us?
Why did you buy?
If you’ve bought elsewhere before, who from?
That habit taught me more about the business than any dashboard has since and it’s something anyone, in any role, at any company, can start doing this week.
👋 Does this resonate with you or will it with your team? 👋
Hit share below to help other develop or copy and paste: https://www.marketingunfiltered.co/p/98 in your slack or teams channel
The Squiggly Career Is Now The Normal Career
Careers today are what authors Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis call squiggly: they move sideways, diagonally, sometimes even backwards, before they leap forward which is a refreshing and alternative take to a traditional career plan mapped as a sequence of roles for example.
The shape of work itself is moving the same way. Estimates suggest that within the next decade, more people in the US could be working freelance or as entrepreneurs than in full-time employment the future of work is increasingly project-based, gig-shaped and reputation-driven.
My Squiggly Career
My own path has looked squiggly on paper, retail, sports ecommerce, government, FMCG and each move looked unusual at the time! Building social capital from zero, in a new category, every time. What travelled was the core: the customer-first thinking, the discipline of connecting marketing to business goals, regardless of channel or sector
Your core travels, (what you’ve learnt, the courses you completed); the edge is what stretches it and provides a wider point of view
The modern career question isn’t “what job comes next?” It’s what body of work are you building, what problems do you want to be known for solving, and which options are you creating before you need them?
Why EQ Is Becoming Marketing’s Most Valuable Skill
For decades, the professional world ran on IQ: how much you know, how quickly you can process information but what it can’t easily replicate is emotional intelligence, the ability to read a room, build trust across departments, collaborate across silos, mentor junior colleagues, and bring people along with you..something to consider when building your edge
The organisational evidence backs this up. Marketing Week career and salary survey identified nine key trends currently shaping marketing teams burnout, team turmoil, pay gaps and recruitment failures among them and none of those are solved by a better channel mix.
They’re solved by people who lead with empathy, listen and build genuine relationships inside their organisations.
That’s an edge to build your business capability, helping to reduce hidden friction, improve the quality of information reaching the top, and gives any transformation a far better chance of developing.
Your title may change or the organisation may change. The ladder may disappear. But the combination of marketing craft, visible usefulness, trusted relationships, AI fluency and emotional intelligence stays valuable across every context you take it into.
- Simon Swan
The 3️⃣ Marketing Campaigns To Steal From
Thanks for reading again today. Go and have a great weekend!
Danny Denhard & Harry Lang