Maybe it’s just me, but when I worked in-house, it was amazing how many colleagues (often those near the top) were closet marketing experts. This can have an interesting effect on marketing people and their work.

The Culprits

• Marketing experts come in all shapes and sizes:
• ‘My way or the highway’ – It doesn’t appeal to me so it’s worthless. The myopic view of “only what I relate to has value”, often delivered by characters that Myers Briggs would describe as “introverted yet intuitive”. Probably the most infuriating case.
• The ‘self-publicist’ – I’ve done some media training, I am on social media and I can use Powerpoint, so I understand everything about the subject of marketing.
• ‘I worked in sales and read Philip Kotler’ – Marketing people often lack direct sales experience but the reverse is also true for sales people who assume they know marketing. The two are different arts, both of which require practical experience to master.

The Results

The impact of all these “views” tends to generate two types of marketing leaders:

The alpha leader, who ignores all comments and adopts the raging bull stance to barge ideas through at any cost. On the plus side this gives a consistent approach, but fails to engage the business’s most important brand communicators – its people – who maythen fail to understand the brand.

The consensual leader, who takes notice of all comments and changes direction every quarter – leading to a lack of consistency and a brand which becomes more internally focussed than externally driven.

The views I took most notice of were those which started with “when I was talking to our customers about this…” or “I think our customers will think this…” Because putting ourselves in our customers’ shoes is what we try and do every day.

Why only marketing?

I don’t see such a correlation of this syndrome in other professions. When was the last time you heard a senior colleague critique the finance team for their treatment of straight line depreciation? Or IT’s policy on cloud based storage?

But an opinion is better than no opinion

As my career developed I came to see the ‘marketing experts syndrome’ as a challenge which keeps you on your game. It’s also great for developing both the art of persuasion and the skill of diplomacy.

It also reminded me of one important fact. If senior colleagues are interested in marketing, that is inherently a good thing. Because the alternative is to been seen as an unimportant function which just does fluff. And who wants to do that?

If you want to raise the standing of your marketing, get in contact.