Covid career conversations: Learning from those who have been through it
Colin LewisOur columnist has received numerous messages from people whose careers were disrupted by the pandemic. There are clear commonalities in their experiences.
Our columnist has received numerous messages from people whose careers were disrupted by the pandemic. There are clear commonalities in their experiences.
Whether it’s the efficacy of brand purpose or the belief consumers are all socially liberal, we’re too easily lulled into marketing ‘cults’ that stop us seeing the world as it is.
We can all become excellent in aspects of our career if we make the active decision to pursue greatness.
We often mistake goals for strategy, but to be strategic about your career requires first diagnosing your situation, then giving yourself a competitive advantage.
The consequences of the pandemic are now being felt in redundancies, and if you’re in this position, a structured approach is your best bet for finding the next opportunity.
Marketers left unemployed by the Covid crisis shouldn’t assume their careers will resume in the same form – you’ll need to rethink your skill set and challenge your own behaviours.
The real challenge for B2B marketers is not brand management, it is change management, and convincing a CEO and senior management who do not have the background of its value.
Reading and learning can help marketers take inputs and turn them into valuable outputs. The key is to decide what topics are important to you.
Experience combined with expertise is seen as the holy grail, but could this expert perspective cause marketer’s outlook to narrow?
Subscription businesses are taking off but companies need to ensure they are creating value, rather than just extracting it, if they don’t want to end up on a dark desert highway.
Marketers should be using NPS and other customer satisfaction scores as a starting point to prompt more insight but all too often they are seen as the end point.
Marketers need to understand that the edge is where opportunity is and by learning to become more comfortable there they can find more opportunities.
‘Soft’ skills like communication and empathy are clearly important, but marketers need to brush up on core technical skills like strategy, data and measurement to be truly effective.
When it comes to customer insight, all to often marketers go in knowing what they want the answer to be, but becoming a better questioner is a skill that can be learnt.
Small brands may have many of the same challenges as big brands, but growing a startup is about entrepreneurship and sales, not marketing strategy.