Graham Robertson 's Linkedin Analytics

Non-marketers, please stop telling marketers how to do their jobs! You are embarrassing yourself. Every marketer has suffered the stop-by at the desk, having to listen to the dumbest ideas ever. The finance person, plant manager, even the CEO all stop by and say, “You know what would be a great idea…” We have to listen, smile, and then say, “Great idea,” no matter how dumb or lame the idea is. This is the curse of being a marketer because non-marketers always tell us how to do our jobs. No one ever tells a pilot, “I hear the Pittsburgh airspace is good today” or tells a surgeon about a new scalpel their taxidermist uncle uses. Accountants don't get non-accountants stopping by with tax tips. I suppose that everyone who has a TV and can critique Super Bowl ads believes they can now claim to be marketing experts. When I see people on LinkedIn writing, “Marketers need to think more about the consumer,” I think you’ve never met a real marketer. The best marketers started doing that around 1915. This is now popular among non-marketers. When I hear, “Marketers should analyze data,” again, I think, what incompetent marketers have you been hanging around with? That’s been a significant part of the job since 1950. Sure, big data. However, I have been working on data from share report data to Ipsos tracking data to weekly Walmart sales tracking data. Do you even know what marketers do? When I read, “The CEO should be in charge of the brand,” I think, “Well, then the CEO should be in charge of the IT system.” Sure, they are in charge, but they should be smart enough to delegate to the experts who will strengthen their brand. The best marketing-led organizations have bottom-up recommendations, empowering the brand manager to tell their directors what they want to do, who then support them in moving that up to the VP and President. The worst organizations are when the CEO walks down the hall and asks, “Why are we not on Instagram? My 15-year-old daughter showed me how cool it is this weekend”. This is likely why the average tenure of a CMO is under 24 months at this point. They are like sports coaches, who are hired to be fired, by the impatience of getting results. Or is it the impatience of not implementing the dumb ideas? When I hear, “Marketing needs to be more than just advertising” once again, you don’t understand the job….typically, advertising is 10-15% of the job. The best marketers determine the strategy, figure out the brand promise, brand communication, product innovation, purchase moment, and consumer experience…they touch all of them and decide on all of them, but they let their experts run each of those touchpoints. When I read about brand building and transaction marketing being two separate skills by two separate types of people, I quietly think you're an idiot. Marketers don’t just “do marketing.” We run a business. We touch everything.