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.
Colin Lewis
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Cognitive dissonance, conmen and cults: The ways marketers delude themselves
Colin LewisWhether 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.
The first step to being an expert is choosing to be
Colin LewisWe can all become excellent in aspects of our career if we make the active decision to pursue greatness.
Having a ‘career strategy’ means brutally examining your situation
Colin LewisWe often mistake goals for strategy, but to be strategic about your career requires first diagnosing your situation, then giving yourself a competitive advantage.
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Seven tried and tested strategies for getting back into work
Colin LewisThe 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.
Careers won’t pick up where they left off
Colin LewisMarketers 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.
Branding is still alien to many B2B firms
Colin LewisThe 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.
Your output will only be as good as the inputs
Colin LewisReading and learning can help marketers take inputs and turn them into valuable outputs. The key is to decide what topics are important to you.
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Marketers must break out of the ‘expertise trap’
Colin LewisExperience combined with expertise is seen as the holy grail, but could this expert perspective cause marketer’s outlook to narrow?
Beware ‘Hotel California’ brands – those you can never leave
Colin LewisSubscription 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.
NPS is where customer insight starts, it’s not your ultimate goal
Colin LewisMarketers 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.
Opportunity lies at the edge of acceptability, so get comfortable there
Colin LewisMarketers need to understand that the edge is where opportunity is and by learning to become more comfortable there they can find more opportunities.
Marketers need ‘hard’ skills if they want to be taken seriously
Colin Lewis‘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.
The right questions are more important than the right answers
Colin LewisWhen 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.
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Strategy is a luxury for small brands – focus on being better known
Colin LewisSmall brands may have many of the same challenges as big brands, but growing a startup is about entrepreneurship and sales, not marketing strategy.