To build a successful marketing career, you have to hit deadlines, know your business cold, stay open with your communication, take control of your brand, use the feedback you get, and listen hard to the experts around you before you decide. Miss these behaviors, and you will eventually annoy someone enough that they get rid of you. You have likely heard the term CLMs, short for Career Limiting Moves. The six below are the non-negotiable ones. Keep missing them and you will be gone, no matter how good the rest of your work is.
For a lot of marketers, these sit in a blind spot. You can be excellent at everything else in the job. Then one of these brings you down, and you are left wondering what happened.
The six career limiting moves that hold marketers back
1. You miss deadlines
Never look out of control or sloppy. Marketers already carry too much, so once you start missing deadlines, the work stockpiles on top of itself. Do not become the person who keeps negotiating extensions. That worked on a university essay. In the real world of marketing there are no extensions, only missed opportunities. Miss one, then two, then three, and your behavior reads as a pattern. I went to school with someone who asked the prof for an extension on everything, and the prof always said yes. She thrived in school and never made it in marketing. In my 20 years in marketing, I never once asked for an extension.
2. You don’t know your business
Avoid getting caught off guard by questions you cannot answer: sales, growth, margins, spend, market share, and your forecasts. Ask the questions yourself and carry the numbers forward in your head. I grew up a baseball stat geek, so remembering every number on my business came easy. I never tested people for sport. But when I ran 15 brands and you ran one, how do you think it landed when I knew your numbers better than you did? Knowing your business and your numbers is your job, and nobody is going to do it for you.
3. You are not open with your communication
There should be no surprises, especially for your boss. Keep everyone aware of what is going on. If something might go wrong, make sure people know early. When you communicate upward, lead with the situation, the implications, and the options, then move fast to a recommended action plan. When something does go wrong, walk in with the plan already built and the action items laid out, before your boss ever says the words “we need a plan.”
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It is without a doubt the most practical book for those who want to follow brand management that I have ever read in my life! Beloved Brands is written by a real, experienced marketeer for marketers. This book contains methodologies, tools, templates and thought processes that Graham actually used and uses in his career.
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As a 24-year marketing veteran at a Fortune 100 company, I thought I knew everything I needed to know about building brands until I started following Graham on social media. Graham has an amazing gift of bringing to life the critical elements of brand building and management in a delightful, easy-to-understand way and includes numerous examples and case histories that turn theory into practical reality for the reader. His tools and templates throughout the book make it VERY easy for the reader to immediately apply the critical principles of brand management to build a brand that consumers will love for the long term.
4. You fail to take control of your destiny
Act like the owner. The best marketers run their brands and never let the brands run them. Stay slightly ahead of the work instead of chasing it to completion, because once you are chasing you can never catch up, and you end up showing up to beg for help. When you own a brand and you know the answer, train yourself to speak in a telling way. Once you hold the reins, people expect you to tell them what to do. As your boss, I would much rather pull you back on something than spend my time coaxing you to share your thoughts.
5. You ignore feedback for growth
Always seek out feedback and accept it, good or bad, as a lesson. Treat it as a gap you can close rather than a personal attack. The best marketers are ambitious and want to get better, and that means hearing hard feedback without falling apart. It is fine to dislike the moment. I have watched many strong marketers look devastated in the heat of feedback, ready to quit. I have seen that look a hundred times. Those same people came in the next morning ready to make the change and show it to everyone watching. Marketing is an iterative career. We repeat the same 20 skills at junior, mid, and senior levels. The best get better each pass. The worst do not.
6. You make decisions without listening to your experts
Marketers have a strange relationship with subject matter experts. We do not make the product, sell it, build the ads, buy the media, or run the event. As the ultimate generalist, we decide everything.
Early in your career, learn to use your experts to teach you the job while you still lead them, even when they have 20 years on you. These people have watched hundreds of marketers walk through the door, and handled right, they will quietly teach you more than your boss ever will.
By the time you reach director or VP, those same experts become your advisors and sounding boards on the hardest calls. They do not want to make the decision or lead the room. They want you to do that. So hear them out fully, question and challenge them, then give the direction that moves everyone toward the goal. You make every decision, and if you manage this relationship badly, they hold enough sway to influence the decision to get rid of you.
The leadership behaviors of the best brand leaders
The leader behaviors of the best brand leaders
The best marketers stay accountable for results, lead their people to build bench strength, carry broad influence across the organization, bring an authentic and consistent style so their decisions read clearly, and run the business like an owner.
- Be accountable for results. Hold everyone accountable, get things done, stay on strategy, and learn to work the system with every function in the building.
- Take on people leadership. Manage your core team and stay genuinely invested in their development through honest coaching, teaching, and feedback.
- Carry broad influence. Make the decisions and own the strategy when you execute through others, and reach into other functions by thinking about what they need.
- Bring a consistent style. Stay aware of your impact beyond your own team, and lead well under pressure while remaining flexible for others.
- Run the business like an owner. Stay accountable to both the long-term health and the short-term profit of the brand, rather than to your own standing, and make decisions that serve the brand, consumers, customers, the marketplace, and society.
I have broken these five areas into 20 specific brand leader behaviors you need to lead well. As you climb into bigger marketing roles, these behaviors become as important as the skills you collect along the way.
Marketing Careers
On a classic marketing team, there are four key levels:
- Assistant Brand Manager.
- Brand Manager.
- Marketing Director or Group Marketing Director.
- VP Marketing or CMO.
At the Brand Manager level, it becomes about ownership and strategic thinking within your brand plan. Most Brand Managers are honestly a disaster with their first direct report, and get better around the fifth report.
When you get to the Marketing Director role, it becomes more about managing and leading than it does about thinking and doing. To be great, you need to motivate the greatness from your team and let your best players to do their absolute best.
And finally, at the CMO level, you must create your own vision, focus on your people to make them better and shine, drive the business results, and run the processes.
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We work with your team on the five core marketing skills: Strategic Thinking, Brand Positioning, Marketing Planning, Marketing Execution, and Brand Analytics. Your marketers learn new tools, concepts, and ideas that trigger new thinking, then take each tool on a test run and get our feedback so they keep improving.
For more information on our Beloved Brands Marketing Training programs, click below or email Graham Robertson at Graham@beloved-brands.com
