Marketing News: May 2019

2019 HIRING TRENDS

THE GIG ECONOMY

AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

AMA.ORG

INTERNAL MARKETING

MAY 2019

THE CAREER ISSUE

MAY 2019 NO.

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table of contents AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

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SEEN ON AMA.ORG

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ANSWERS IN ACTION

• Snapshot • Core Concepts

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SCHOLARLY INSIGHTS

• Jeff S. Johnson and Joseph M. Matthes • Allègre L. Hadida, Jan B. Heide and Simon J. Bell

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EXECUTIVE INSIGHTS

• Lawrence Crosby • Keesa Schreane • Lisa Guillot

50-53 CAREER ADVANCEMENT

• Career Management • Client-based Learning

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AND NOW, A WORD FROM ...  Career Trends 2019

The job titles, salaries and skills you need to know.

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 Going Solo

The gig economy was born in the wake of the Great Recession; since then, full-time freelancing has risen in popularity. With many now predicting that most of the workforce will be full-time freelance in the next decade, marketers and marketing managers alike must plan for their future.

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 The Marketing is Coming From

Inside the House

Companies are using external marketing strategies—including communication software— to strengthen internal employee engagement and brand buy-in.

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MAY 2019

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR VOL. 53 | NO. 5 AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

Get the job, get better

Bill Cron Chairperson of the AMA Board 2018-2019 Russ Klein, AMA Chief Executive Officer rklein@ama.org EDITORIAL STAFF

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t the AMA, we view our job as one of vital importance—to make you, the marketer, more successful in your career. This issue is all about helping you get ahead.

If you’re curious if your job title truly reflects what you do daily, or whether you need to shore up your skill set for the career you want, check out page 26 for ZipRecruiter’s marketing job title guide. Writer Zach Brooke explores how companies are staying ahead by implementing external-marketing strategies on their internal teams. If you’re interested in making the leap into the gig economy and going full-time freelance, staff writer Hal Conick has tips from the pros on page 34.

Soft skills, technical proficiency and

Phone (800) AMA-1150 Fax (312) 542-9001 E-mail editor@ama.org David Klein, Chief Content Officer dklein@ama.org Molly Soat, Editor in Chief msoat@ama.org Sarah Steimer, Managing Editor ssteimer@ama.org Julian Zeng, Assistant Managing Editor jzeng@ama.org Hal Conick, Staff Writer hconick@ama.org Bill Murphy, Designer wmurphy@ama.org ADVERTISING STAFF

future-thinking ability all factor into how you do your job. What are you doing to stay relevant?

MOLLY SOAT Editor in Chief @MollySoat

Fax (312) 922-3763 • E-mail ads@ama.org Sally Schmitz, Production Manager sschmitz@ama.org (312) 542-9038 Nicola Tate, Associate Director, Media Channels ntate@associationmediagroup.com (804) 469-0324 Miranda Maclean, Recruitment Advertising Specialist miranda.maclean@communitybrands.com (727) 497-6565 x3404 Marketing News (ISSN 0025-3790) is published monthly except June/July and November/December by the American Marketing Association, 130 E. Randolph St., 22nd Floor, Chicago, IL 60601.

Circulation: (800) AMA-1150, (312) 542-9000 Tel: (800) AMA-1150, (312) 542-9000

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Marketing News welcomes expressions of all professional viewpoints on marketing and its related areas. These may be as letters to the editor, columns or articles. Letters should be brief and may be condensed by the editors. Please request a copy of the “Writers’ Guidelines” before submitting an article. Upon submission to the AMA, photographs and manuscripts will not be returned unless accompanied by a self-addressed, adequately stamped envelope.

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DIANE DOMEYER

CRAIG WINZER

Diane Domeyer is executive director of The Creative Group, a specialized staffing service that places creative, digital, marketing, advertising and public relations professionals.

When she’s not managing operations for TCG’s locations or speaking about career and workplace trends, you can find her on a bike or spending time with her husband, five kids and grandchildren.

Craig Winzer was born and raised in Northeast Ohio. He enjoys creating illustrations for magazines such as Time Out New York, Cosmopolitan and Las Vegas Weekly. He also makes paintings and shows his work at local bars and cafes.

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All rights reserved.

Without written permission from the AMA, any copying or reprinting (except by authors reprinting their own works) is prohibited. Requests for permission to reprint—such as copying for general distribution, advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works or resale—should be submitted in writing by mail or sent via e-mail to permissions@ama.org.

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LETTER FROM THE CEO

The Ongoing Effort to Bridge the Knowing-Doing Gap

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ack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric, once commented on why his company was outperforming and dominating so many business sectors: “We may make smarter decisions, but I know we make more decisions,” he said. “We learn by doing. Every decision drives an action, which in turn opens up new options for yet more decisions.”

But some organizations, despite their talent and knowledge, can’t seem to get anything done. Unlike at GE, where Welch’s teams made decisions and acted, these companies are suffering from a knowing-doing gap. The phenomenon was first explored more than 25 years ago by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, who tried to demystify why certain organizations couldn’t seem to get things done. They defined the knowing-doing gap as the forces that undermine an organization’s ability to turn knowledge into action.

There is some historical precedent for this: Pre-internet, the cost to bring a single idea to market or a large audience could bankrupt an organization.

But now, the world is becoming less risky. Built to last is no longer in vogue; firms favor built to adapt. Some organizations have closed their knowing-doing gap by being more resilient and adaptable.

In Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future, authors Joichi Ito and Jeff Howe reference a company that spent $3 million on a feasibility study to determine

whether to invest $600,000 in a project. Had the company simply learned by doing and the project failed, they only would have lost one-fifth of what they spent on second-guessing. Ito and Howe indicate that those who understand the equation of weighing the risk of doing something now—against the cost of thinking about doing something later—will win in the new world of breakneck innovation.

It’s very difficult for organizations today to create and sustain competitive advantage. Many experts say that organizations of the 21st century no longer compete based on what they do as much as on what they know. Yet knowledge transfer and information exchange are more efficient, faster and cheaper than ever before. Consequently, fewer firms seem to have true knowledge advantages, placing the burden on execution.

But this is not a case against knowledge acquisition. It is a case for decisiveness, empowerment, responsibility, understanding and learning by doing. It’s OK to not know. The recognition and acceptance of not knowing offers a strategic advantage over the most esteemed think tanks and oracles who believe they have forecast the future. It sounds odd to build an enterprise around the principle of not knowing, but the military, life sciences, technology and even the news media have re-imagined themselves and created hardwiring for complexity and unpredictability; they are the ones showing the

most resilience.

The passion behind doing applies to matters big and small.

Epic expressions of disobedience for the benefit of society are what we call activism. These are the doers; think of the civil rights movement, Gandhi or the Boston Tea Party. The most successful organizations and people in history were doers.

They were not distinguished by their planning capabilities, but by being different and executing brilliantly. Their approach was shoot, aim, shoot again. Today, it’s called being agile.

The premise is straightforward.

There is a higher cost of waiting and planning than there is in doing and improvising. Many innovators would say if you aren’t mortified and embarrassed by your original work, you waited too long to launch.

RUSS KLEIN CEO

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Global State of Remote Work 2018 Workers cite productivity and focus as top reason to work remotely

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eople who work remotely at least once a month are 24% more likely to feel happy and productive in their roles than those who don’t or can’t work remotely. This is according to Owl Labs’ 2018 Global State of Remote Work survey, which polled more than 3,000 workers across 23 countries to analyze how they think about remote work.

The top reason people in the U.S. choose to work remotely is increased productivity and better focus, which surpassed last year’s No. 1 reason of improved work-life balance.

Respondents in North America are the most likely to work remotely to avoid a commute compared with other continents, yet are the least likely to work remotely to save money.

Owl Labs’ data shows that 56% of companies worldwide allow remote work, so-called “hybrid companies,” or are fully remote. The concept of a hybrid company has become increasingly common in the U.S. In 2017, Owl Labs found that companies offering remote-friendly options have 25% less turnover than those that do not.

More than half of respondents in North America occupy “individual contributor” roles, and more than 25% of North American respondents work in government or education.

Eight percent of respondents work in technology and marketing.

—JULIAN ZENG

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#

reason people choose to work remotely Increased productivity and better focus

56%

16%

of companies allow remote work

of companies are fully remote

How often do people work remotely?

NEVER/CAN’T 32% ONE DAY PER MONTH 16% ONE DAY PER WEEK 21% MORE THAN ONE DAY PER WEEK 13% ALWAYS 18%

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Global comparison stats

Respondents’ Industry in North America

OTHER

TECHNOLOGY & MARKETING

MANUFACTURING & INDUSTRIAL

HOSPITALITY & TRANSPORTATION

HEALTHCARE & MEDICAL

52% of employees work from home at least once a week.

29%

8%

12%

4%

10%

When compared to global average ...

South America has 81% more fully remote companies.

VICE PRESIDENT

Asia and South America each have 9% more companies that don’t allow remote work than the global average.

C-LEVEL EXECUTIVE

8%

4% GOVERNMENT & EDUCATION

27%

Africa and Australia have the most hybrid or fully remote companies with 59% and 60%, respectively.

DIRECTOR

11%

Respondents

by Role

NORTH AMERICA INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTOR

52% FINANCE & INSURANCE

10%

MANAGER

25%

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The Drunk Shopping Economy Could Be Worth Billions According to a survey by The Hustle, 79% of people have made at least one drunk purchase.

Marketers should be familiar, as the survey found that 86% of marketers have made a drunk purchase.

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onsumers who shop online drunk may be a market worth $45 billion in revenue per year, according to a survey of 2,000 alcoholconsuming Americans by The Hustle.

According to the survey—“The 2019 Drunk Shopping Census”—the average drunk shopper spends $444 and tends to spend on clothing and shoes on Amazon (the platform of choice for 85% of all drunk shoppers surveyed).

The Hustle reports that 79% of people surveyed have made at least one drunk purchase.

The Hustle says that 80% of women shop drunk compared with 78% of men. Millennials also drunk shop more than baby boomers by 13%.

The most likely professions to drunk shop are sports (94%), transport (92%), oil and energy (91%), recruiting (87%) and marketing (85%).

The least-likely drunk-shopping professions are writing (60%), art (64%), education (68%), computer engineering (68%) and retail (70%).

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Online shops are already using drunk shoppers to their advantage, according to The Hustle, as many post late-night flash sales. The Hustle cites a quote from Gilt Groupe in The New York Times in 2011: “Post-bar, inhibitions can be impacted, and that can cause … healthy impulse buying.”

—HAL CONICK

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SNAPSHOT

Bumble Partners with Serena Williams on Female-Empowered Connections The tennis great helped Bumble promote the three platforms on its app: dating, friendships and professional networking

BY STEVE HEISLER

theheis@gmail.com

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umble launched in 2014 as a dating app that flips the script on most online encounters. Unlike its competitors, such as Tinder and OkCupid, Bumble regulates who can take the initiative. Users swipe right (interested) or left (uninterested) based on other users’ minimal profiles. If there’s a match between people of the opposite sex, the woman has 24 hours to initiate a conversation, which leaves them immune

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to advances from the man.

But the company also has two lifestyle products that are unrelated to dating: Bumble BFF and Bumble Bizz. Bumble BFF matches users based on common interests to enable new friendships.

Users still fill out profiles, which include many of the same questions as the dating portion, such as what they might enjoy doing on a Friday night. The default option limits matches to the same sex,

and often the users are married or in a relationship. Bumble Bizz is a professional networking tool that allows users space for a headline, a mini résumé and a bit about their personality in the workplace.

It doubles as a safe space for women, who sometimes encounter men trying to force a work situation into a date. Bumble wanted to bring attention to these two non-romantic ventures through its first Super Bowl ad campaign this year, “to communicate that we’re more than just a dating app,” says Chelsea Maclin, VP of marketing. The Super Bowl broadcast was also an opportunity to reach an underserved female audience. “Half of viewers [of the Super Bowl] are women, but the majority of conversations around the Super Bowl are geared toward men,” says Alex Williamson, Bumble’s chief brand officer. “This was a moment to break through the noise and speak directly to the women.”

And who better to promote feminine power than one of the world’s all-time great athletes, tennis legend Serena Williams?

Action The idea for Bumble’s partnership with Williams began germinating before the app ever launched. Bumble’s founder Whitney Wolfe Herd had taken it upon herself to execute a grassroots campaign; she grabbed a handful of pink tennis balls, headed to a nearby court, snapped some photos and posted them on Instagram with the caption, “The ball is in her court on Bumble.” “[Wolfe Herd] said, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could get Bumble off the ground and one day get Serena Williams?’” says Williamson, one of the company’s original employees.

When it came time to run their first Super Bowl ad, the #InHerCourt campaign was the perfect opportunity for Bumble to showcase Williams. “We partnered with Serena because not only is she an incredible global athlete, but she’s more: a mother, partner, business owner and investor,” Maclin says. “This aligns with all three [Bumble] verticals in a meaningful way.”

Williams also served as the co-creative

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SNAPSHOT

director for the spot alongside Wolfe Herd, meaning she consulted on the initial ideas and how they were executed during the shoot. The crew was composed entirely of women and took place on a tennis court painted with the three colors associated with Bumble’s products: yellow for Date, aqua green for BFF and orange for Bizz.

The spot includes voiceover from Williams as Rita Ora’s “Soul Survivor” plays in the background. “Don’t wait to be given power,” Williams says in the commercial, “because here’s what they won’t tell you: We already have it.” The line is punctuated with the thwhack of a racquet hitting a tennis ball.

The campaign ventured beyond the TV spot itself. Williamson conducted interviews with women in corporate leadership positions, asking them to describe instances where they made the first move in dating or in business. Video compilations of those, shared on Bumble’s YouTube channel and embedded on the company’s website, acted as companion pieces to the Super Bowl ad. Among those interviewed were Nicole Portwood, VP of marketing at PepsiCo, and Natalie Egan, founder of the workplace inclusion training service Translator.

Other videos were posted on Bumble’s YouTube channel beginning a month prior to the Super Bowl, with new ones available every week or so. Most were brief chats with Williams and Wolfe Herd from the set of the commercial, about making the first move in love, work and friendship, though one was an extended behind-the-scenes look at the commercial shoot and conversations with other Bumble employees. The official Super Bowl spot was posted the day before the game.

Results This year’s Super Bowl had an audience of 98 million, an enormous viewership for the Bumble ad. The commercial has expanded beyond its airdate and has amassed more than 2.3 million views on YouTube. Maclin says the video has been seen 9 million times across all channels.

The campaign garnered 7 billion global

media impressions, which included pieces in Adweek, CNN and The New York Times. The campaign drew praise from female-focused brands on Twitter.

Good American, the body-positive clothing company co-founded by Khloe Kardashian, tweeted about the campaign to its more than 25,000 followers and called the spot the “highlight of the evening for us!” The account of the award-winning documentary “Miss Representation,” which boasts nearly 96,000 followers, praised the fact that the spot had “Women in front of and behind the cameras. A rarity in the #SuperBowl.”

Bumble also dubbed Feb. 4—the day after the Super Bowl—“First Move Monday.” For each “first move” made on the app through Feb. 8, Bumble donated to the Yetunde Price Resource Center, a Los Angeles-based support center for individuals living in violent communities.

The company did not disclose the amount per message donated.

Bumble’s relationship with Serena Williams has only deepened. In early March, the company announced that Williams will join Bumble Fund as an investor, joining a team that includes actress and singer Priyanka Chopra Jonas.

The fund was created in August 2018 to invest in women-owned businesses, particularly those run by people of color. As of this article’s publication, the fund has provided assistance for nine companies, including Translate. While Bumble could not provide figures on the exact dollar amounts they’ve invested, a spokesperson says the average award is $25,000 and the range spans from $5,000 to $250,000.

The fund’s mission complements Williams’ own Serena Ventures, introduced in 2014 and which boasts a portfolio of 30 companies. Williams joined Wolfe Herd in April to field pitches at the Bumble Fund open call—first viewing written proposals then sitting in on a round of live presentations.“We’ve learned as an organization that there’s an appetite for what we’re trying to do,” Maclin says. “Kindness and respect and quality and accountability are what we’re trying to foster.” m

answers in action

COMPANY

Bumble FOUNDED

December 2014 HEADQUARTERS

Austin, Texas CAMPAIGN TIMELINE

The commercial debuted Feb. 2, the day before the Super Bowl, and ran during the game. The First Move Monday campaign ran Feb. 4–8.

CAMPAIGN RESULTS

The ad was viewed by 98.2 million people watching the Super Bowl, racking up 7 billion global media impressions.

The YouTube video of the commercial has been viewed 2.3 million times as of press time. Serena Williams became an investor in Bumble Fund a month after the campaign.

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CORE CONCEPTS

8 Ways Marketers Can Improve Their Résumés Résumés aren’t the only thing you need in a job search campaign, but they’re still important

BY HAL CONICK | STAFF WRITER

hconick@ama.org

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arketers are experts at promoting products and services for brands, but when searching for a new job, many have trouble promoting themselves.

“It’s much more personal,” says Brand Your Career owner Michelle Robin, a former marketer who now works as a career coach for marketing and sales executives. “They’re just not comfortable promoting themselves or don’t know how to write about their accomplishments in the right way.”

It’s important for marketers to grow comfortable with promoting themselves, as employees in the U.S. now change jobs more readily than ever. The average U.S. worker changes jobs 12 times during their career, lasting a median four years at each job, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A 2018 survey from Robert Half

found that 64% of professionals believe that changing jobs every few years can be beneficial, up 22% from 2014.

While real-life networking and social media platforms such as LinkedIn have become more important for job searches, résumés remain the key marketing tool in any job hunt. But very few résumés stand out to recruiters. According to Glassdoor, companies receive an average of 250 résumés for every corporate job posting; from this pile, between four and six people are interviewed and one is hired.

Additionally, most recruiters don’t give résumés much time—Ladders reports that, on average, recruiters scan each résumé for six seconds.

With attention low and competition high, here are eight steps marketers can take to better promote themselves with their résumés.

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Be Formulaic but Riveting Résumés can’t be boring, but they must be formulaic to a point. Wendi Weiner, a career and branding coach for leaders and executives and owner of The Writing Guru, says that résumés must have a few things: • A BRANDING STATEMENT: A short, adlike statement telling hiring managers what kind of value you’ll bring.

• A PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY: These are quick-hitting versions of the rest of your résumé, summarizing the skills and achievements you will bring to a particular job.

• KEY CAREER HIGHLIGHTS: These are especially critical for experienced executives, Weiner says.

• PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: For younger professionals, Weiner says that education should be higher up on the résumé, then moved further down as they gain career experience.

While everyone’s résumé should have the basics, Robin says that résumés should also stand out from others in the pile. She coined an acronym to help: TRASH. This stands for targeted, riveting, accomplished, succinct and honest. Few people may think of their résumé as riveting, but Robin says it can be done by showing personality.

“The riveting comes in by weaving in your personal brand,” Robin says. “Add a little spot of color here and there. You don’t even have to get all fancy unless maybe you’re a visual artist, but you can do something to stand out from the sea of gray that human resources sees.”

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Be Succinct The biggest problem Robin sees is marketers who don’t narrow the scope of their résumé.

“They feel like they’re going to miss out on opportunities,” Robin says. “They feel like they’re leaving opportunities on the table when it’s just the opposite. People don’t hire broad experience. They don’t care about that. They hire people to solve problems. You need to be clear on what problems you solve.”

Weiner says that even the most experienced executives need to fit their careers onto a two-page résumé. An

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CORE CONCEPTS

executive may have many speaking engagements, articles published or board experience that could extend to a third page, she says, but they’re in the minority.

The most important rule, Robin says, is to let the content dictate the length.

A two-page résumé of fluff will always look bad, but a two-page résumé filled with relevant experience can be a great marketing tool in a job search.

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Talk Accomplishments, Not Activities Instead of simply listing what you’ve done in each job, Robin says that the linchpin of a résumé should be accomplishments.

An activity may be, “I led 20 campaigns,” but an accomplishment would be, “I increased traffic by 20%.”

The problem for many marketers— especially those who have worked at the same job for years—is that they may not remember specific accomplishments from past jobs. Weiner says that even those who are happily employed should keep an ongoing list of what they’ve accomplished to tell the story of their career.

“It used to be a summary of your work history, but today it’s got to be a strategic marketing document that sells your value in a branded way with storytelling,” Weiner says. “You want to make it resultsand achievement-oriented rather than just a boring list of job responsibilities.”

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LinkedIn is a Complement, Not the Centerpiece LinkedIn will never replace the résumé, Robin says, but job recruiters will always search your name on Google.

“In marketing, it’s important to make sure that your digital brand is out there and that you can be found for what you do best,” she says. “LinkedIn needs to complement your résumé, but don’t ever dump your résumé into LinkedIn. It doesn’t add anything.”

When recruiters click on your LinkedIn profile, they should get a deeper look into your career story and your personality.

If there are two candidates who have the same skill set, recruiters may look at each LinkedIn page to see who better fits into the company culture.

answers in action

[A résumé] used to be a summary of your work history, but today it’s got to be a strategic marketing document that sells your value in a branded way with storytelling.

Marketers should also have a professional headshot taken for their LinkedIn profile image, Weiner says.

Marketers should check that the dates on their résumé and LinkedIn match up.

Recruiters will likely see it as a red flag if they don’t.

“Remember: Your LinkedIn profile is your digital footprint,” Weiner says. “Your résumé is only getting seen by a handful of people that you actually send it to, whereas your LinkedIn profile gives you visibility of 500 million users.”

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Never Lie Back to Robin’s TRASH acronym: H stands for honest. Never lie on your résumé.

“And people do it,” she says. A 2017 survey by CareerBuilder found that 75% of HR managers have caught a lie on a résumé.

“That’s such an easy thing to check,” Robin says. “It’ll come back to bite you at some point.”

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Get Rid of…

For years, people looking for jobs would insert an “objective” into their résumé, calling out what kind of position they were looking for. But Weiner says that a résumé needs to be more strategic and instead include a branding statement or professional summary.

Robin agrees and adds that professionals should also rid their résumé of the phrase “responsible for.” “Nobody cares,” she says. “And it’s passive.”

She also advises against long paragraphs: “If you’re looking at more than three lines of text, it’s getting hard to read, especially when it goes all the way across the page.”

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Leave Out Hobbies and Interests, Unless They Fit Marketers should leave hobbies and interests off their résumé, unless they’re relevant to the career or show an accomplishment, Weiner says.

“I’ve had clients who have hiked the Grand Canyon, rim to rim,” she says.

“That is an amazing thing to actually include in the résumé because it shows a type of determination that you’re not going to see every day. But for example, if your hobby is cooking, sewing or knitting and it doesn’t relate to an achievement for the industry that you’re in, it’s not going to be a value-add item to include in the résumé.”

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To Start, Go Deeper Than the Résumé The résumé is no longer the only marketing tool in a job search—many jobs are filled before they’re publicly posted.

“People end up spending too much time slaving over their résumé, wanting to get it to perfection when they should be spending more time networking and building relationships that can turn into career advocates,” Robin says.

Instead of starting a job search by rewriting your résumé, job searchers should start by figuring out where they want to go next in their career, how they can get there and who they know. Then, they can figure out how to revamp their résumé and target their search to the job that they want. In 2016, CareerBuilder surveyed recruiters and reported that 63% say that they want to see résumés tailored to the open position.

“There’s no magic bullet in your résumé,” Robin says. “You need to be targeted correctly for the right job.” m MAY 2019 | MARKETING NEWS

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SCHOLARLY INSIGHTS

Effectively Use Temporary Marketing Organizations The temporary organization is the love child of digital transformation and the gig economy. A new study explores how to best harness these groups to drive results.

BY ALLÈGRE L. HADIDA, JAN B. HEIDE AND SIMON J. BELL

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ompany marketing teams routinely partner with external firms, such as advertising and creative agencies, to achieve strategic goals and execute their work. As the marketing function’s responsibilities grow in an era of digital

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transformation, teams are increasingly relying on a different kind of outside help: the temporary organization.

A new study in the Journal of Marketing provides a playbook on aligning with temporary organizations

to identify and address common pitfalls and to structure and manage teams effectively.

Temporary organizations bring diverse contributors to work on a wide array of initiatives, including product innovation, advertising, selling and event management. Temporary organizations can increase organizational agility and drive results in a short period of time.

Participants can include thought leaders, vendors, consultants, gig economy workers, employees and even competitors.

One study described them as “the organizational equivalent of a one-night stand.”

While their use is increasingly prevalent with cloud-based talent

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SCHOLARLY INSIGHTS

pools and digital collaboration, the properties of temporary organizations are not well understood. Their inherent characteristics—including a lack of shared history among members and uncertain future interactions—can create organizational challenges. Members are often working together for the first time, which makes selection of the right talent a critical undertaking.

In addition, temporary organization members do not share the same incentives as company employees, which can create enforcement problems. These challenges can lead to cost overruns and compromised performance when not mismanaged.

Our research team sought to rectify that gap by deepening companies’ understanding of temporary organizations and describing how best to leverage them. We identified three types of temporary marketing organizations that vary in terms of member selection and enforcement qualities.

The stand-alone temporary organization is composed of members who have not worked together in the past and are not expected after the task is completed. Members collaborate on efforts such as radical innovation or oneoff product launches. This model faces unique enforcement problems because of its discrete time frame, which creates weak incentives for team cooperation.

One strategy to counteract this problem is to provide financial incentives, such as revenue-sharing contracts, that align parties’ interests.

In the hybrid temporary organization, members may have worked together in the past, but have limited expectation of doing again. Representative projects include feature film production and marketing campaigns. This type of organization has limited enforcement mechanisms to drive results.

In a fully embedded temporary organization, members share organizational-level reputations and norms, even if they have not directly worked together in the past. They may also find themselves interacting again on future projects. Examples include

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The properties of temporary organizations are not well understood. Their inherent characteristics­—including a lack of shared history among members and uncertain future interactions—can create organizational challenges. internal consulting units or new product development teams within a permanent organization. This type of temporary organization has explicit enforcement mechanisms, including low-powered incentives such as promotions and nonmonetary rewards, as well as centralized authority and monitoring mechanisms.

Companies need to consider portability (whether selection and enforcement needs may be portable or supplied exogenously), from either pre-existing agent relationships (in the case of a hybrid temporary organization) or from a permanent organization (in the case of a fully embedded one).

Our team created a framework and playbook that use the three organizational forms and the “three Ts”—task, time and team composition—to discuss their makeup.

Key propositions include: TASK: The more novel the task, the greater the need for organization-specific selection and enforcement mechanisms.

Thus, it is more likely that stand-alone temporary organizations will be used over hybrid organizations (which do not provide portable selection benefits) or fully embedded organizations.

TIME: The shorter the duration of the task, the less feasible it is to craft organization-specific selection and enforcement mechanisms. Thus, it is more likely companies will use hybrid temporary organizations (which have portable enforcement benefits) instead of stand-alone forms (which are timeconsuming to create) or fully embedded forms (which have fewer portable selection and enforcement benefits).

TEAM: The more diverse the team, the greater the need for enforcement through low-powered incentives. Thus, it is more likely companies will use fully embedded temporary organizations than hybrid and stand-alone forms.

CREATIVITY: The closer the match between the novelty of a temporary marketing organization’s task and its selection efforts, the more creative its output.

SPEED: The closer the match between the novelty of a temporary marketing organization and its selection efforts, the greater its decision-making speed.

Managers can use the playbook and its inputs to design temporary organizations and manage them to achieve desired results. In addition, they can use the playbook to determine the best mechanisms to ensure the optimal selection of team members and enforcement of their behavior throughout the duration of the task, depending on the recommended form of temporary organization. Doing so will help managers ensure that temporary organizations achieve desired performance outcomes. m

ALLÈGRE L. HADIDA is university senior lecturer in strategy at Cambridge Judge Business School and fellow at Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge.

JAN B. HEIDE is the Michael Lehman Distinguished Chair in Business at the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

SIMON J. BELL is a professor of marketing in business and economics at the University of Melbourne.

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JOB TRANSITION

Study Reveals Secrets of Successful Sales-toMarketing Transitions Helping employees transition from sales to marketing jobs increases the likelihood of successful marketing strategy implementation

BY JEFF S. JOHNSON AND JOSEPH M. MATTHES

S

ales professionals often move into marketing roles to pursue their own career ambitions or follow a company’s predefined career track. While sales and marketing are complementary and integrated functions, they also have

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different areas of focus. Marketing is inherently strategic and focused on corporate, industry, digital, advertising and public relations. Meanwhile, sales can be both strategic and tactical, focused on winning major new customers, deepening

relationships and executing customer calls and visits.

Intra-organizational mobility can help employees develop cross-functional skills, enhance their understanding of firm functions and increase their job satisfaction and loyalty. However, job transitions can also create substandard outcomes, such as lost time and poor performance.

Past sales-to-marketing job transition research focused on a subset of the transition, starting when professionals are preparing to take on new roles. Our study analyzed the motivational factors prompting job transitions and the acquisition strategies used to secure new roles, providing valuable insights into how employees successfully executed their transitions. We explored the drawbacks of role shifts and by doing so,

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created a more complete model that firms can use to prepare sales staff for their transitions into marketing roles.

To understand the successes and challenges, we conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 56 professionals who had transitioned from sales to marketing within their organizations, professionals who transitioned but did not remain in marketing roles, and executives involved in creating and monitoring these transitions. Participants were diverse in their ethnicities, organizations and industries.

Of the 56 participants: • 32 were successful transitioners with an average of 4.1 years of experience in sales and 6.2 years in marketing. Of this group, 37.5% were female.

• 11 were failed transitioners, with 3.8 years of experience in sales, 3.5 years in marketing and 5.9 years in other roles.

Of this group, 36.4% were female.

Based on the interviews, we identified six key facets of the sales-to-marketing transition process: motivation, acquisition, preparation, encounter, adjustment and stabilization. For the adjustment and stabilization phases, participants provided insights that reinforced existing research, so we chose not to include this information in our research.

Interview findings included: • MOTIVATIONS: Participants said that intrinsic motivations­—such as taking on a more strategic role, helping an under-performing department or applying educational knowledge in a real-world setting—were most important in deciding to pursue a new role. These factors outweighed extrinsic motivations, such as meeting unspoken organizational expectations, working for a more powerful organization or achieving work-life balance.

• ACQUISITION: Sales professionals recognized that marketing role requirements differed significantly from their sales jobs. To succeed in their sales roles, they stressed sales achievement, strategic thinking and an analytical mindset. Most reported

sales achievement as the least effective skill to showcase. Early career salespeople promoted their analytical gifts and lacked strategy experience, while late-career sales staffers found strategic ability more compelling to interviewees.

• PREPARATION: Upon being hired for new jobs, some respondents prepared themselves broadly by reading marketing texts and taking marketing courses. Others took a targeted approach, interviewing organizational marketing peers and gathering data on their new role. Most respondents felt the targeted approach was better, as it provided more relevant content they could use immediately.

• ENCOUNTER: After transitioning to their new roles, newly minted marketers noted that they lost certain benefits associated with their sales roles. Some noted they were working for lower pay, had lost the freedom to set their own schedules, had less customer interaction and had less exciting jobs as they worked on longer-term projects.

Challenges included increased pressure because of more difficult roles, increased ambiguity with setting goals and greater exposure to organizational politics.

Later-career sales staff felt the loss of benefits more keenly than early-career staff, who were more focused on surmounting new challenges.

Respondents identified several traits that helped them transition, including having a

Helping employees make the salesto-marketing job transition increases the likelihood that marketing strategies will be implemented successfully.

scholarly insights

marketing mindset, team orientation, seeking proactive feedback, gathering information and outsourcing certain tasks.

Other factors that aided the transition, but were outside their control, were working for an older firm with more institutional knowledge, selling products rather than services and marketing differentiated products. Firms can support transitioners by providing them with a marketing academy to gain proper training, crosstraining marketing and sales to give staff early exposure to different roles, creating cultural openness to transitions, formalizing marketing roles and providing continued customer exposure.

Helping employees make the salesto-marketing job transition increases the likelihood that marketing strategies will be implemented successfully. In addition, successful transitions can reduce tensions between sales and marketing organizations and provide sales staff with aspirational career goals. Drawbacks of facilitating the sales-to-marketing transition could result in suboptimal pricing due to excessive customer empathy, and the loss of customer relationships and more reactive and less strategic marketing. In addition, these transitions can create a misallocation of human resources if high-performing sales staff move to marketing solely for career advancement, depleting the sales force. Despite these conflicting potential outcomes, respondents concluded that the benefits of the transition process outweighed the drawbacks.

Our study provides managers with valuable guidance as they set human resource strategies in their firms. They can use study insights to choose the right salespeople, prepare them for new roles and create a supportive culture with instructional tools to gain new skills and capabilities. m JEFF S. JOHNSON is an assistant professor of marketing in the Henry W. Bloch School of Management at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

JOSEPH M. MATTHES is an assistant professor of marketing at Marquette University.

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executive insights

DATA MANAGEMENT

Data is a Product

BY LAWRENCE A. CROSBY AND CHRIS S. LANGDON

 lawrence.a.crosby@gmail.com  csl@pacificcoastresearch.com

I

t’s easy to view software as a product or service. Software instructs hardware how to process data. Data, however, is a product, though it is seldom considered so. Consequently, many data providers have not embraced product management, an integrative discipline capable of driving better results. Career opportunities exist in these firms for young, tech-savvy marketers who are willing to step up and help define the product manager’s role.

Like any product, data can be sold if buyers perceive they have value in satisfying a need. Data has features and characteristics, although these are not always articulated in the language of the customer. Data products are built from raw materials (e.g. bits and bytes), involving successive layers of aggregation to generate something useful, such as insights. Ownership rights are associated with data and have become a major point of contention regarding privacy.

Similar to a carton of milk, data has a shelf life and expiration date, at which time it becomes no longer valuable. Data differs in terms of quality, which can be difficult to discern given its highly intangible nature. The business world will face an onslaught of new data with the arrival of 5G high-data-rate networking, the internet of things and autonomous vehicles.

Data is at the epicenter of consumer marketing, from digital customer journeys to voice-based user interfaces, virtual assistants and personalized recommendations. Where data is notably expansive and complex, data analytics rule the roost. Despite this, the notion of data as a product to be managed hasn’t widely caught on. Product management isn’t new, with roots dating back to the 1930s at Procter & Gamble. Within the

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last decade or so, it has gone through a metamorphosis driven largely by the digital revolution. The tech industry has helped elevate the role of the product manager to that of a mini-CEO, whose job starts and ends with the customer and who is responsible for aligning all the functions necessary to successfully launch and maintain a product—including operations, design and engineering, marketing and sales, and finance and legal.

Data products begin with a novel idea that is often the result of several minds coming together. An information need is identified that might be satisfied through capturing and aggregating data around a phenomenon. (For example, ancestry.com leverages the genealogical records of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.) It is at this point that the discipline of product management should begin because creativity at the concept development phase must be paired with a candid assessment of target markets, the competitive landscape, positioning opportunities, branding options and the business model. The product manager should lead this analysis.

The next major phase involves the design and testing of a prototype. Two issues emerge that require the manager’s close attention. One is assuring the quality and integrity of the data: Does the data accurately and reliably capture characteristics of the phenomenon it claims to measure? To assure this in the prototype phase, assess how the data relates to other measures of the same or similar things. Is the data in some way predictive? For example, does a consumer lifestyle indicator predict openness to a purchase recommendation?

The second issue concerns the methods by which customers may access the data. This is analogous to retail channel decisions in product marketing. While it could be as simple as emailing datafiles, data delivery usually involves some level of bundling of the data with software. That software can enable data governance that rules who can access data for what use,

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executive insights

of the key lessons of quality assurance is to design and improve processes so they don’t produce defects. The product manager might, at this point, consider implementing a parallel test: manual versus automated. Do the two methods produce the same result at each step in the data factory?

Much can be said about the product manager’s responsibilities around launch and promotion, but there’s a tendency to overlook the product manager’s responsibilities post-launch. These are partly operational and partly strategic.

From the operational standpoint, it is critical that the product manager maintains direct dialogue with the customer to understand the customer journey and subjective experience and how to improve them.

On the strategic side, the product manager should also pay close attention to growth opportunities. Is there a chance to enter new markets, such as when Cerner moved from electronic medical records into population health?

What about product extension, such as giving Bloomberg Terminal users access to data on firms’ supply chains?

Companies can benefit from conceptualizing data as a product.

Borrowing from the software industry, data marketers should adopt the modern view of product management as a multifunctional, continuous-loop, customercentric discipline. This opens the door for a new breed of product manager, one who blends traditional soft skills, business savvy and an intense customer focus with knowledge of applied statistics, data management and software development. m LAWRENCE A. CROSBY, PH.D. , is the retired dean of the Drucker School of

and it can allow the user to download, interrogate and visually display data.

Therefore, the user and software interfaces require close examination: Are the steps convenient and foolproof? Is the output easy to understand?

The next phase of the process might be called “scale up and automation.” This is the stage where the manual activities

of creating the prototype are streamlined and data is labeled, classified, cleaned and prepared for delivery, often using artificial intelligence methods. Too often, product managers have tossed automation tasks to operations. This can be a huge mistake if data integrity is lost in the data factory. In the end, the product manager is also the data product’s chief quality officer. One

Management and currently the chief data scientist at the KH Moon Center for a Functioning Society, a part of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University.

CHRIS S. LANGDON, PH.D. , is a development executive with Deutsche Telekom’s Data Intelligence Hub and a Research Associate Professor at CGU’s Drucker School.

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CAREER ENRICHMENT

Creating a Career of Compassion and Purpose Intertwining service and profit can create a meaningful workplace that enhances careers and enrichens the community

BY KEESA SCHREANE

 keesa@keesaschreane.com

S

hawn Askinosie, CEO of Askinosie Chocolate, says getting rich as a chocolate maker is not his focus.

I recently spoke with Askinosie on an episode of the “You’ve Been Served”

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podcast, during which he told me that delivering fair and equitable pay to farmers in his supply chain—from Kenya to Ecuador—is his primary objective.

He says Askinosie Chocolate also

contributes to childhood education in the communities where it does business.

For example, the company’s experiential learning program, Chocolate University, provided laptops to students in a Tanzanian school and funded the school’s first computer teacher. The company has also sponsored school trips from its Missouri home base to visit farms in various countries, where students taste chocolate and get an inside look at the business.

These initiatives may sound overwhelming if you’re a CMO or entrepreneur, and probably sound downright impossible if you’re a marketing manager trying to positively impact your team members. But it starts by understanding your purpose and why you’re in business. What is your mission?

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Is it education? Financial empowerment?

To create workplace readiness programming?

Before defining your organization’s purpose, the first move is to understand what your purpose is as an individual. I’ve always been drawn to communicating important concepts to audiences through education and awareness. My interests range from financial empowerment to developing programs that demonstrate compassion and service in workplace environments.

Whenever I align myself with firms, teams or other individuals with a strong desire to improve our organizations or people, it always results in a powerful community development or employee engagement program.

I serve as co-chair of a women’s business resource group where our aim is to create programs to empower women and engage with customers and community members who share the mission of empowering women in the workplace.

We shifted our energy and resources to girls in STEM and I used my connections as an advisory board member at the Girl Scout Council of Greater New York to determine the best programming to impact girls in our organization. After researching the technical skills and confidence-boosting environments that would best serve teenagers, I sought out relevant colleagues who were interested in helping young people. Many of them had never participated in social impact programs, but they wanted to make a positive difference and were on board with actively creating and implementing the program. We pulled together women from our firm who were data scientists, product managers and technologists.

This months-long mentorship program for young women in our Girl Scout Leadership Institute became a superb corporate social responsibility case study.

One of the most fascinating outcomes of the program was the authenticity and vulnerability of the adult mentors. One

colleague shared her story of coming to New Jersey from Chile with her family.

She reflected on being the only girl in her elementary school class who did not speak English. She had a desire to communicate with the other students and was frustrated as a child because she was not able to verbally share with other kids. Many of the young women in the Leadership Institute were able to relate, and that led to a richer experience for mentor and mentees.

In the years since running that program, we have asked the men and women in our business resource group what they are interested in doing for our community. This initial program sparked creativity and touched on a desire that already existed; people simply needed to see an example of how to carry out this type of initiative. We have since strategized and executed programs around financial empowerment, workplace readiness and United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Our purpose has been to organize around a common goal with measurable performance indicators for ourselves and those we support.

Shawn Askinosie believes that if we do not intertwine service and profit while creating a meaningful workplace for our colleagues, then our economies and products will suffer. Managers and entrepreneurs can work to understand what gets their colleagues excited about their work and how the business can bring its products and services to market to improve the lives of others. From this foundation, we can create a mission that excites us and integrates the best of what we deliver to market with a desire to make our environments better—both inside and outside the organization. m

executive insights

Whenever I align myself with firms, teams or other individuals with a strong desire to improve our organizations or people, it always results in a powerful community development or employee engagement program.

KEESA SCHREANE is host and executive producer of the podcast “You’ve Been Served.” She is a featured columnist in Essence, Latina and Black Enterprise magazines and an on-air contributor with NASDAQ.

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MINDFULNESS

When to Choose a Consultant, Mentor, Coach or Therapist You wouldn’t hire an electrician to fix a leaky pipe, so why hire the wrong professional to help solve your career issues?

BY LISA GUILLOT

 lisa@bebrightlisa.com

Y

ou long for something bigger in your career or business. You know you want to make an impact and create memorable work, but you can’t

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seem to take the first step toward that future. Maybe you fell into your current job and can’t get out of the daily grind.

Or maybe you know what type of role in

which you want to be and are ready to build your career with purpose and want a sounding board to support you.

You may know that you’re ready for professional career support, but from whom? I’ve worked with coaches, consultants, advisers and therapists, and—as a professional coach myself—I find it extremely helpful to distinguish between these services.

As a member of the International Coaching Federation (ICF), I’m ethically required to share the difference between coaching, consulting and therapy. I like to think of it in visual terms: Therapy, or counseling, is like the foundation of your home. We all have a past, and sometimes past emotional issues are still an issue in how we function today.

Consultants are like the windows and walls of your home. If you wanted to

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replace your windows, you would call an expert to recommend the best windows for your home. Coaching is a home renovation blueprint; it creates a future vision and an action plan to get there.

A mentor is like an all-knowing friend who has recently—and successfully— bought a home and is full of advice and connections.

Knowing what answers or advice you need can help you determine which type of career professional can help.

WHEN TO HIRE A… Coach According to the ICF, “Coaching is partnering with clients in a thoughtprovoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.”

As a professional ontological coach, I honor my resourceful and creative clients as the experts of their own lives.

I’m trained to listen and reflect at a deep level, always asking more of them than they ask of themselves. Ontology is the study of who you are being, versus what you are doing. A facilitative coach will tell you what to do, an ontological coach will support, challenge and advocate for you to reach your highest future vision.

A coach is not a cheerleader. Coaches partner with you to win the game of your life, not to cheer you on from the sidelines. They are paid to guide clients to create authentic leadership, inspire and motivate teams, reveal true desires and build a life by design. A coach works with a client to create future experience in their career, business or any area of life.

WHY WOULD YOU HIRE A COACH?

If you are looking for a transformative approach to your life and career through deep mindset shifts and decision-making.

Consultant or Adviser I come from a brand strategy background and often consult my clients on personal and business branding. I clarify when I’m wearing my consultant hat because

consultants and advisers are paid for industry experience, expert guidance and execution, whereas coaches do not need to be the expert of an industry. A consultant is a professional who provides expert advice. They have proven methods and strategies to help you reach your personal and professional goals. An adviser is similar; I work with business adviser Patrick Dichter from Cultivate Advisors, who brings his expertise and industry know-how to each conversation.

Dichter defines a coach as “someone who helps you by asking the right questions and working on the personal challenges.

A consultant gives you answers or completes a defined project, and an adviser sits somewhere in between— wearing the coaching hat, swinging to consultant at times and solving business challenges together.”

WHY WOULD YOU HIRE A CONSULTANT OR ADVISER?

You have a goal, but you need the strategy and structure to help you achieve it.

Therapist or Counselor Coaching and consulting are not therapeutic in nature. If sessions with my clients turn toward mental health issues, such as an event or trauma from the past that is blocking them from moving forward in their career or life, I recommend they seek a therapist or mental health professional. “Behavioral health counseling or therapy is focused on understanding the impact of mental health on an individual’s life and helping them heal,” according to therapist Suzanne Muirheid. “Counselors work with clients to increase self-awareness and insight, often providing reflection and making connections in one’s self history and current functioning. They then help clients develop coping skills and execute plans to reach their goals of overall wellness.”

She says there is no limit to what counseling can address, including issues that are long-term and deep-seeded to relatively new, but problematic to daily life or relationships.

executive insights

WHY WOULD YOU HIRE A THERAPIST?

“People generally seek therapy because they are feeling blocked, experiencing maladaptive emotional and behavioral health symptoms and are otherwise not functioning optimally in their lives,” says Tiffany Louise, a social worker and professional coach.

Mentor A mentor will have experience and potential contacts to share with you. They can help you avoid mistakes and pitfalls they may have experienced in their career journey.

Because a relationship with a mentor is typically free, I recommend being extremely professional in how you choose to create and maintain the relationship.

Great mentors are seasoned leaders who are short on time, so you will need to determine your goals, ask the right questions and take advice with an open mind.

WHY WOULD YOU SEEK OUT A MENTOR?

If you are looking for someone who has “been there, done that” and is open to sharing advice.

At the end of the day, this is your livelihood and your life. Find someone who is honest and willing to challenge you to create the future you desire. Go beyond what you think is possible and beyond your industry’s blueprint.

If you are feeling unsure of what to do and are lacking confidence, know that confidence is not something that any of these professional services can give you.

Confidence comes from taking the leap toward your goals, one step at a time.

Each one of these professional services can support you, but your success is truly in your hands. Create it with purpose and intention and ask for help along the way. m LISA GUILLOT is a transformational leadership coach, brand strategist and founder of Be Bright Lisa. She coaches executives, entrepreneurs and teams within organizations. Lisa speaks about creative leadership and purpose.

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CAREER Trends 2019 the job titles, salaries and skills you need now

by Sarah Steimer Illustrations By Craig Winzer

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maRketinG joB tiTles

If you search employment websites for the term “marketing,” the screen fills with every imaginable variation of the career. ZipRecruiter, an online employment marketplace, compiled a list of the top marketing jobs ranked by job volume on its website, from January through April.

The following sample job descriptions, also provided by ZipRecruiter, are based on some of the top Google search terms related to marketing jobs.

Head to ama.org for more job description examples.

1

Marketing Assistant

2

Marketing Coordinator

3

Marketing Manager

campaigns to completion and

4

Marketing Associate

report on results.

5

Marketing Representative

6

Marketing Specialist

7

Entry Level Sales Marketing

8

Entry Level Marketing Assistant

9

Event Marketing

MARKETING ASSISTANT Duties and responsibilities: • Track existing marketing

• Develop strategies to improve existing and past marketing efforts.

• Coordinate market research studies via multiple methods, including phone surveys and online applications.

10 Marketing Advertising 11

Marketing Intern

questionnaires and other

12

Digital Marketing Manager

market research.

13

Junior Marketing Associate

• Analyze data compiled from

• Assemble and present reports that collect and analyze market research data by

14 Sales and Marketing Representative 15

Marketing Internship

consolidating, summarizing

16 Entry Level Marketing Representative

and formatting information

17

Product Marketing Manager

into formats that optimize

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Brand Ambassador

readability.

• Analyze data to uncover industry trends.

• Compile and distribute

19 Digital Marketing Specialist 20 Marketing Director 21

Sales and Marketing Associate

relevant financial and

22 Marketing Sales Representative

statistical information.

23 Director of Marketing

Requirements and qualifications: • Bachelor’s degree in

24 Marketing Management 25 Marketing Analyst

MARKETING COORDINATOR Duties and responsibilities: • Conduct research and analyze customer behavior.

• Creatively envision macro and micro needs to design and implement successful marketing campaigns.

• Manage effective tracking systems for online marketing activities.

• Identify and analyze competitors.

• Prepare reports via the collection and analysis of sales data.

• Collaborate with the design department.

Requirements and qualifications: • Bachelor’s degree in marketing or relevant field.

• Proven success and significant work experience as a marketing coordinator or similar role.

• Solid working knowledge of traditional and digital marketing tools.

• Experience with multiple research methods and use of data analytics software.

• Expertise with SEO/SEM campaigns.

• Familiarity with necessary CRM

marketing, business or

and content management system

statistics.

software.

• Previous experience in sales and marketing preferred.

• Commercial awareness of the industry and current developments.

• Receptive to opportunities for continuing education and professional development.

MARKETING ASSOCIATE Duties and responsibilities: • Develop and implement strategies with marketing team.

• Gather and analyze consumer behavior data in web traffic and rankings.

• Generate reports on marketing and sales metrics; compile forecasting reports.

• Improve reach to customers through SEO campaigns.

Requirements and qualifications: • Bachelor’s degree in marketing, business, statistics or relevant field preferred.

• Two years’ experience as a marketing associate, marketing assistant or related position.

• Significant experience with SEO/SEM campaigns and digital tools.

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• Superior computer skills, including marketing technology applications.

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Julia Pollak, a labor economist at ZipRecruiter, shared insights on marketing jobs.

MN What trends related to marketing jobs

BRAND AMBASSADOR Duties and responsibilities: • Skilled in social media and able to communicate information

DIGITAL MARKETING MANAGER Duties and responsibilities: • Manage company website.

• Oversee management of all digital channels.

• Manage day-to-day messaging; update and manage company blog, e-newsletter and social media.

• Conduct and report analysis of site and social traffic.

• Establish and monitor ROI and KPIs. • Create, maintain and implement digital marketing and editorial calendars.

Requirements and qualifications: • Bachelor’s degree in marketing, communications or related field.

• Five to seven years’ experience in marketing; three-plus years of digital marketing experience.

• Understanding of e-commerce, pay-per-click, SEO and SEM. • Knowledge of media-editing software; working knowledge of web design principles, best practices and content management platforms.

• Familiarity with analytical tools such as Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools.

about products and services online effectively.

• Generate, share and reply to online reviews in a positive and open manner.

• Work trade shows as a spokesperson for the company.

• Network and gain the trust of potential customers and partners.

• Understand our products and services; fully inform potential customers.

• Use word-of-mouth marketing techniques, such as referral incentive programs.

• Provide feedback to the marketing and product departments regarding customer insights and questions.

• Track and generate reports on competitors’ marketing activities.

Requirements and qualifications: • Bachelor’s degree in marketing, communications or relevant field.

• Previous work experience as a brand ambassador, promoter, influencer or another similar role.

• Solid social media presence on multiple platforms, with above-average followers.

• Documented success in creating targeted SEO-friendly online content.

• Strong working knowledge of scheduling tools for social media such as Hootsuite.

have you seen in the last few years? Are titles getting more or less specific? Are there more or fewer marketing jobs in general?

JP We saw strong growth in marketing jobs in 2018, which makes sense given that consumer confidence continues to be relatively high.

Confident consumers spend more, which creates increased demand for marketers to help companies compete for their dollars. As far as job titles go, we are still seeing large numbers of general titles, with some notable new additions in experiential marketing roles like in-store demonstrators, food demonstrators and field marketers. Social media marketing roles have also increased, as the rise of influencer marketing has led to triple-digit growth in related jobs year over year.

MN What do the common skills required tell us about marketing job qualifications?

JP As always, marketing jobs today require strong soft skills, such as communication skills and customer service skills. Demand for those baseline skills remains constant year over year, with more specific skills breaking down along channel lines. For social media managers, for example, experience with Instagram and social listening tools are key requirements, but communication skills are constantly in demand no matter the role.

MN How do marketing career trends compare with job trends in general?

JP There are over 1 million more open jobs than there are job seekers. It’s a great time to be a job seeker, and that’s true for marketing professionals as well.

MN Any other insights on marketing career trends?

JP The rise of marketing automation tools is driving a marked increase in marketing jobs that require [artificial intelligence] skills. From 2017 to 2018, ZipRecruiter job postings that referenced AI and machine learning skills increased by more than 500%, a trend that included content marketing, product marketing and marketing analyst roles.

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The Market for Marketers: Hiring and salary Trends

BY DIANE DOMEYER

E

mployers across the U.S. are eager to hire professionals who can contribute to their customer experience and digital marketing initiatives. I help connect companies with highly skilled creative candidates, which gives me a frontrow seat to the enormous demand for creative talent.

With profound change happening in the marketing industry and current economic conditions, it’s important to be aware of hiring trends, whether you’re looking to assemble and retain a top team or advance your career.

The Creative Group 2019 Salary Guide has insight into the skills in greatest demand and the latest employment trends, including salary details for a range of marketing positions.

The Current Hiring Environment: Shortage of Talent

Let’s start by taking a closer look at the job market from an employer’s perspective. Businesses face an unemployment rate that has been at or under 4% for the past year—it hovers around 2% for collegedegreed workers who are 25 or older. Rates are even lower for most marketing roles. To meet a growing need for talent in an environment of shortages, agencies and creative departments know they need to use a variety of staffing strategies.

One solution has been to speed up the recruitment and hiring process. Employers are getting back to applicants sooner and making more prompt job offers so they don’t miss out on top talent. This is particularly important, as our research shows nearly seven out of 10 candidates lose interest in a company if they don’t hear back within two weeks of an interview.

Another strategy is to resist the temptation to hold out for the perfect marketer who can “do it all.”

Such candidates are very rare and a long search will only cripple your progress. Rather than expecting candidates to have experience in—for example— branding, copywriting, search engine optimization, social media, marketing automation and customer analytics, many managers are hiring for fundamental marketing strategy and then providing on-the-job

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training to fill skill gaps.

Content agencies and marketing departments are also increasingly relying on freelancers or consultants for specialized expertise in areas such as web analytics and video production. In addition, many employers use project-based work as a way to evaluate talent before making a full-time job offer.

The In-Demand Skill Set

It’s no secret that much of today’s marketing takes place on the internet, placing a premium on specialists who understand and can navigate the online world. Seventy-one percent of creative and marketing professionals surveyed by The Creative Group said it’s challenging to find candidates with up-to-date digital skills. The technical skills most lacking on their teams include: • Data science, data analysis and A/B testing • Web and user experience design • Content creation and content marketing • SEO, search engine and pay-per-click marketing Companies seek professionals with expertise in these areas, as well as experience contributing to an organization’s overall strategy and effectiveness in attracting, converting and retaining customers.

Whether you’re an employer assessing a candidate or a job seeker writing a résumé, emphasis should be placed on digital savvy and the impact it has on business. Hiring managers want to see a connection between an individual’s day-to-day duties, the firm’s bottom line, and a desire to keep up with the latest marketing trends and best practices.

Employers today also recognize that in-demand digital proficiency isn’t enough. Soft skills—including written and verbal communication expertise, ease when collaborating with others, client relations experience and a positive attitude—are just as valuable. In another survey by The Creative Group, 23% of advertising and marketing executives said they weigh soft skills more heavily than hard skills when evaluating candidates for creative roles; 58%

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knowing What You’re Worth and Paying Competitively

Whether you’re looking to negotiate your own compensation or hire and retain top talent, it’s always good to know what your industry’s skills are worth. Here’s a sample of some starting, national midpoint salaries in marketing:

Content strategist

$73,000

Digital marketing coordinator

$54,500

Digital marketing manager

$79,500

Email marketing specialist

$53,750

Event/trade show coordinator

$41,500

Marketing analytics manager

$93,250

Marketing analytics specialist

$68,000

Marketing director

$108,000

Market researcher

$60,750

SEO/SEM specialist

$62,500

Social media manager

$57,750

equally consider both. These include strengths such as dependability, empathy, innovative thinking and problem-solving prowess.

The Full Package: The Importance of Perks

Money is important, but you may be able to sweeten a compensation package in ways that will allow for better work-life balance.

Job seekers in today’s market will negotiate flexible schedules, remote work options, wellness packages, meal allowances and sign-on bonuses just as they would their annual salary. In this hot job market, employers are realizing that they need to compete in terms of both salary and benefits. Go ahead and discuss terms: All parties are in a stronger position

to get what they want before—rather than after— finalizing a job offer.

As the marketing industry continues to evolve rapidly and the war for talent rages on, businesses will be challenged for the foreseeable future by shortages of skilled workers. That being said, it’s an exciting opportunity for both employers and employees to change with the times and do meaningful work.

DIANE DOMEYER is executive director of The Creative Group, a specialized staffing service that places creative, digital, marketing, advertising and public relations professionals.

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sofT skIlls seT yoU aparT

H

ard skills, the experience and abilities listed on your résumé, are often what land you an interview.

But soft skills are what make you stand out from other candidates in the interview process. Soft skills shine through when you answer the stereotypical but telling questions of, “Where do you see yourself in five years?”, “Can you tell me about a time you overcame a challenge?” or “Do you have any questions for us?”

“Everybody coming in for the interview is qualified,” says Theresa Merrill, a career coach who helps job seekers market themselves on LinkedIn. “How you separate yourself is your soft skills.”

According to LinkedIn’s 2019 Global Talent Trends report, 80% of surveyed talent professionals say that soft skills are increasingly important to the success of a company. Based on LinkedIn data, the top soft skills in high demand relative to their supply are, in order: creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability and time management. Ninety-two percent of survey respondents also say

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soft skills matter as much as or more than hard skills and 89% say bad hires typically lack soft skills.

You should be clear about what soft skills you possess and how to showcase them before submitting your résumé for consideration.

seLf-awArenesS

Before you can hype your soft skills, you need to identify what they are.

When Merrill works with clients on their personal brands, she suggests they ask their own clients and colleagues to describe their top soft skills. “It’s interesting, they always come back with things they didn’t [originally] have on their list.”

Corey Collins, a career and empowerment coach, agrees with polling your peers. He suggests asking how a room or situation changes when you enter it, and recommends compiling a list of your soft skills to remind yourself of your strengths and set your intentions. Collins says that becoming aware of your soft

skills is the first step, but you must choose to own those qualities. “A lot of times, the people that I work with are aware of [their skills] but there is this self-doubt or this block,” he says. “We start creating … stories in our head and telling ourselves what we are not, versus what we know to be true about ourselves.”

Self-doubt, commonly referred to as imposter syndrome, can impede a job seeker’s ability to own their soft skills once they identify them. “Every level is a new devil,” Collins says. “The higher you climb up in the ranks, the imposter syndrome will show up every single time.”

If confronting this self-doubt, Collins says to tap into your list of soft skills and make an agreement with yourself to stand for those qualities.

builD youR sofT skilL muScle

Some skills may come naturally: You may have always been a strong communicator and are comfortable in a leadership role.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn to strengthen other skills. “You tend to start off pretty weak until you build that muscle up through consistency and repetition,” Collins says.

Merrill emphasizes the need to put your soft and hard skills into practice, that advanced learning comes through execution. She likens this to taking a cooking class, then making the dishes on your own—adding or subtracting ingredients to suit your taste. “Some people have the recipes, but they don’t actually cook the meal,” she says.

Another way of thinking about this would be going back to school for more degrees but failing to get real-world experience.

“We don’t work in a vacuum,” Merrill says. “We work in an environment where we have these open workspaces. People that are able to seek help and that know if

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hoW onE crEativE leArned about buRnout the harD waY there’s some kind of issue with somebody, they know how to resolve because they’ve dealt with people. Those are the people that [employers] really want.”

hoW to shOwcasE youR sofT skIlls

The soft skills worth highlighting can be pulled directly from a job description or from a company’s mission statement.

But be prepared to showcase those skills by example. You can’t simply say that you’re a good communicator without communicating well.

“Everything you’re doing should be highlighting the different skills that you possess,” Merrill says. “If you show up late, if you’re not organized, those things are already portraying that you don’t have those kinds of skills. But conversely, if you’re really on top of things and you’re detailed in the way that you communicate back and forth, they’re already thinking that you possess those skills.”

Collins emphasizes the need to listen closely and respond thoughtfully during an interview to showcase soft skills.

“One of the fundamental elements of communication is not just listening to respond, but listening to understand, being able to ask clarifying questions and not rushing to just get out an answer,” he says.

Merrill also recommends coming to an interview with something of your own agenda. You should know what soft skills you want to highlight and answer questions by incorporating stories that reflect those skills. “If they ask you, ‘Tell me about a challenge you had in the workplace—how did you handle that?’ and you know that adaptability is an important skill [for the job], you want to convey in that answer how you adapted to a change that occurred. Provide a story that demonstrates how you used that skill to solve a problem.”

Graphic designer Taylor Cashdan loved getting involved in as many creative tasks as possible. But he was stretching himself thin and experiencing high levels of stress.

His body sent him a warning flare: He awoke one day in 2018 experiencing atrial fibrillation. He was driven to a hospital, shocked with a defibrillator and had “a moment of sheer clarity that I needed to slow down.”

“You have to really look at what’s reasonable for you,” Cashdan says.

“There’s a difference between ambition and blind ambition.

Focusing on the things that matter, tracking them appropriately and knowing when to turn off or shut down are of the utmost importance.

I really think that ... balance can be achieved, but it all comes down to the pre-step: acknowledgment that something isn’t right and that you’re willing to try something new before you do some real damage.”

On the same note, you occasionally need to say goodbye to people in your circle who breed nothing but negativity and stagnation. Your circle should be the group clapping the loudest when you have success and be there to mentor you through your failures.

3. LEARN TO INCUBATE.

Let’s say you have two hours that you originally wanted to use to start two projects: one project you like and one you don’t. Your normal plan of attack would be to split the time between the two. Instead, double down and give those two hours to the one that brings you joy and furthers your goals. This extends to the people you surround yourself with.

4. LEARN TO JUST BE.

Be intentional about the choices you make, the tasks you take on and the actions you carry out. And be present when making decisions and working on projects.

Cashdan offers this advice for working smarter and avoiding burnout.

1. ASK YOURSELF TOUGH QUESTIONS.

Consider your to-do list: Is it necessary to finish everything right now? Do the people around you encourage your success? What’s your overarching plan? Will your current tasks and colleagues successfully lead you to the next thing?

2. LEARN TO SAY ‘NO.’

It’s time to trim the fat: If not all of your work is essential, it’s time to start saying “no”—“no” to projects you don’t really have interest in, “no” to tasks that will overload you and “no” to plans in which you don’t want to participate.

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Digital Marketing Skills Quiz

Wondering what digital marketing skills you need to brush up on? Instructors from the AMA’s digital marketing bootcamps provided the following questions, the answers to which every digital marketer should know.

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How do search engines evaluate and determine what sites will perform and rank highest in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for a given keyword?

a. Content that comes from bigger brands will always perform better. b. If the brand is also paying for pay-per-click ads. c. The primary keyword frequency and repetitive usage in a given amount of text. d. What site provides the most useful answer and the best user experience.

2

Which of the following statements about structured data is false?

a. Your site can be penalized for manipulating structured data. b. You’ll quickly move up Google rankings once you implement structured markup on your site. c. Implementing structured data can help improve your clickthrough rates (CTRs) from the SERPs. d. Structured data helps Google by providing explicit clues about the meaning of a page.

—Questions provided by Jenny Munn, SEO consultant at The Munn Group.

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What measures email marketing engagement?

a. Click-through, click-to-open and bounce rates. b. Delivery, hard bounce and double opt-in rates. c. List growth, site traffic and cost-per-click. d. Lift, list farm and Google Pixel rates.

4

What types of emails are sent with an automation tool?

a. Triggers and replies b. Activation/deactivation c. Enhanced e-receipts/ upsells d. Only a. and b. e. All of the above

—Questions provided by Aaron Templer, founder and strategist of Three Over Four.

5

Responsive design allows for:

a. Better pictures. b. Websites with more feeling. c. Website displays that match your device size and orientation. d. None of the above.

6

Who provides guidelines and standards for mobile to inform your digital strategy?

a. Mobile Marketing Association b. Internet Advertising Bureau c. CTIA d. Digital Advertising Alliance e. All of the above

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You can use ads.txt on publisher sites to identify:

a. Approved content providers b. Targeted audience profiles c. Authorized digital sellers d. Display ad requirements

—Questions provided by Shane Johnston, principal at Market Position Strategies, and Todd Coats, associate director for brand and creative at the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants.

8

What is the second-largest search engine worldwide?

a. Google b. Bing c. YouTube d. DuckDuckGo

9

The average response time of businesses on Twitter to respond to a tweet is:

a. Two hours b. Five hours c. 10 hours d. 24 hours

10

What social media site is projected to account for 40% of all social media-driven purchases this year?

a. Pinterest b. Facebook c. Instagram d. Snapchat

—Questions provided by Cord Silverstein, president of Advocacy Social.

There are more questions and detailed answers at ama.org.

ANSWER KEY: 1-D; 2-B; 3-A; 4-E; 5-C; 6-E; 7-C; 8-C; 9-C; 10-A

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GOING

SOLO

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The gig economy was born in the wake of the Great Recession; since then, fulltime freelancing has risen in popularity. With many now predicting that most of the workforce will be full-time freelance in the next decade, marketers and marketing managers alike must plan for their future.

BY HAL CONICK

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I

n 2016, after spending years as the head of marketing departments, Mike Volkin quit his job. He felt liberated to be out of the office, especially his office chair.

“Humans weren’t designed to just sit in a cubicle for eight hours a day and just

work,” he says, now leaving work once a day to play tennis under the California sun.

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After quitting his traditional job, Volkin started working as a freelancer and entrepreneur; he now runs his agency, 800lb Marketing, and works as a fractional CMO for many small and midsize companies. As a fractional CMO—essentially a freelance marketing executive and strategist— Volkin hires freelancers and staffers, holds weekly meetings and sets the company’s marketing strategy. “I’ll get a department up and running and headed in the right direction,” Volkin says. He never becomes the CMO of any single company and doesn’t want to; he’s able to work with different companies on a contract-to-contract basis, paying for his own health insurance, setting his own schedule and making a good living—he says that he makes $10,000 or more most months.

Though Volkin’s role as a roving CMO is unique, he’s part of a growing trend of full-time freelancers in the job market. According to the 2018 Freelancing in America report by Upwork, Freelancers Union and Edelman, 28% of full-time workers are now freelancers, up from 17% in 2014. This number will rise, according to multiple studies—Robert Half International reports that 34% of the economy will be freelancers by 2023; another report by Upwork goes even further, saying that the majority of the workforce will be freelance by 2027.

“I think that’s conservative, actually,” says Volkin, who also works as an entrepreneur coach. Volkin says that he’s had more inquiries from coaching clients about going full-time freelance in the past year than in the previous five years combined. He estimates that 20% of those inquiries have been from marketers.

Thus far, the trend of working and striving for full-time freelance trends younger. Prudential’s 2018 Gig Economy Impact by Generation surveyed millennial-aged workers and found that 62% believe traditional full-time employment will disappear in the next three decades, with freelancers making up 75% of the job force.

The report also surveyed older generations— Generation X and baby boomers—who tend to work as full-time freelancers due to circumstance rather than by choice like millennials. The younger generation, the report finds, possesses a greater comfort level with taking career risks and views freelance work as a step toward realizing long-term goals.

Jeremiah Owyang, founding partner of research firm Kaleido Insights and a technology analyst, says that the U.S. economy has always had freelancers, gig-workers and consultants (the terms are mostly

interchangeable). But since the Great Recession in 2008, Owyang says that it’s easier to both become a freelancer and hire one. Online freelance platforms such as Elance (now Upwork) and Freelancer. com—in addition to gig giants such as Uber and Airbnb—were all founded in 2008 or 2009, giving unemployed workers new ways to make money. It marked the birth of what’s often referred to as the “gig economy.”

In 2014, marketing managers began employing more freelancers, Owyang says. According to a 2017 report from Upwork, 58% of marketing managers use freelancers to help scale projects and fill staffing shortages.

The move to freelancing full time can be scary for marketers used to regular paychecks and a benefits package, just as hiring an outside creative can be frightening for marketing managers who want to protect their intellectual property and brand voice. But while the relationship between marketing and freelance is new and growing, curious marketers can learn from those who have blazed a trail in the early days of marketing’s gig economy.

Is Freelancing for Me?

After a three-year stint in various marketing roles at HubSpot, Sarah Goliger left to work at a startup. It didn’t work out, but the timing did. “My now-husband was also at a startup at the time; that didn’t work out either,” Goliger says. “We both found ourselves with a blank slate.”

Goliger and her husband traveled to Southeast Asia for five weeks, came home and immediately started working as full-time freelancers in their respective niches. Now, Goliger works as a digital marketing consultant and a life coach, often getting referrals from her former HubSpot colleagues.

Freedom has been Goliger’s favorite part of her freelance work. “There’s so much opportunity to create whatever kind of lifestyle you want,” she says.

“I think it’s a much faster way to grow, compared to a full-time role.”

For those in their prime working years, feelings of freedom and growth are often stated as reasons they’re drawn to full-time freelancing. The 2018 Freelancing in America survey asked full-time freelancers and non-freelancers whether their work “provides upward mobility”—72% of freelancers agreed, compared with 53% of non-freelancers. The difference may be the result of freelancers more actively educating themselves—70% of full-time MAY 2019 | MARKETING NEWS

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advantages Schedule flexibility: “There’s so much opportunity to create whatever kind of life and lifestyle you want,” Goliger says. “More traveling. If I want to sleep in, or if I want to [leave] in the middle of the afternoon, I can. It’s totally flexible.” According to the Freelancing in America report, 80% list flexibility as one of the top reasons for freelancing full time.

Being your own boss: Most everyone who freelances full time says that they enjoy the autonomy and ability to make their own schedule, to “be your own boss.” In the Freelancing in America report, 81% of freelancers list this as their top reason for freelancing full time.

Space to think: Weismann says that an underrated benefit of fulltime freelancing is having the time to let work “come to you a little bit more organically and at the right pace.” Perna agrees, referencing her inbox that went from 100-plus emails each morning when she was managing 32 people to about a dozen messages when she started her own consulting business.

Ownership of the work: “The biggest benefit for me is being able to look back on my life and say that I made my own work,” Volkin says, adding that he’s happy to be free of office politics. In the Freelancing in America report, 75% list choosing their own projects as a top reason they freelance full time, while 77% cited independence from office dynamics.

freelancers updated their career skills in the past six months, the report found, compared with 49% of non-freelancers.

When workers were asked whether their job “provides appropriate pay for my skill-level,” 77% of freelancers agreed, compared with 62% of nonfreelancers. In addition, the report says that the number of high-earning freelancers—those who earn $75,000 annually or more—is up 15 points since 2014.

“I think that the millennial generation especially is really excited about the opportunity to work remotely and to get a lot of travel,” Goliger says.

The Freelancing in America report echoes this, reporting that 42% of people ages 18 to 34 freelance full time, compared with 29% of people ages 45 to 54. “These are becoming really big priorities for our generation. I think that the more people realize that this is an option and figure out how to make freelance work, more people will take advantage.”

But not everyone likes this kind of self-created freedom at work—some people aren’t cut out for

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the constant grind of working for themselves, for having an uncertain schedule and not knowing when, exactly, their next check will come. Volkin says that when he’s coaching entrepreneurs, he’ll ask two questions to see if they’re “freelancers at heart”: • “Do you require the structure of knowing where your next paycheck is going to come from?” Volkin says that freelancers may make $10,000 one month and $2,000 the next—some people can plan for that, others get freaked out.

Case in point: The Freelancing in America report finds that 63% of freelancers feel anxious because of the unpredictable nature of their work.

• “Do you like to go to an office every day?” If someone dislikes going into an office, Volkin says that they’d likely have the determination to work on their own.

Working alone is one of the biggest changes Goliger experienced when she started freelancing full time. She’s not alone: 56% of freelancers say their work makes them feel isolated, according to the Freelancing in America report. Most of Goliger’s jobs have been remote, save for a couple of companies that have asked her to come in to build a closer relationship, and she only has a couple other friends who also work as full-time freelancers in marketing.

“The social aspect is definitely the big one for me—not having people to bounce ideas off or grab coffee with,” Goliger says. “But I think the flipside of that is that you’re able to be as efficient as you want. You can say, ‘I work from home, so I have all these distractions around me,’ or you can say, ‘I work for myself and I don’t have team members popping by my desk to interrupt with questions.’ … It creates a very different workflow where when you need to get work done, you do. And when you don’t, you don’t.”

A Strong Network Makes the Transition Easier

A good network makes the often-solitary nature of freelance a bit less lonely. Jennifer Perna worked in sales for about 25 years; by the end, in her role as vice president of sales for Blue Plate, she managed 32 people and was constantly networking. Now, in her second year as principal and owner of Fulton Market Consulting—Perna’s consulting business for sales and management in the catering, events and hospitality industry—she only manages herself, but has cultivated and relied on her network to fill gaps

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in her knowledge. Perna has found an accountant, a lawyer, business insurance and other skill positions through her network.

“Part of owning your own business is being humble, asking questions and not being embarrassed,” Perna says. “When people are [moving into freelance], I always help them out. I say, ‘OK, let me save a year of your life here and tell you what I learned in my first two years.’”

Just as competitive lawyers will send referrals to one another when they have a full case load, Goliger says that she’ll refer work to others when she’s too busy. Perna says that she’ll ask for help and give help to competition. “I was always a considerate professional and a good friend of my competitors,” Perna says. “It’s paid off, because you never know who in the local market will end up being someone you need in the future.”

Zach Weismann turned potential competitors into collaborators when he founded a group called MAG Impact Collective, a membership agency of consultants across the U.S. who work in marketing, strategy and design. The group of independent consultants will team up on pitches and projects, bringing in others from the group when the client needs certain specialties. The group, founded in 2018, has already pitched and won projects with brands such as Google, Chobani and Exxon.

“Work gets lonely,” Weismann says. “I think that we need collaboration and we need teaming up. We’re looking at things like pooling resources where we can invest in a project manager or a business development person together or even share simple things like accounting software where you get five licenses. Why should everybody have to pay for that on their own just because they’re part of the gig economy?”

Downsides to Full-time Freelance

Many outsiders look at full-time freelance and worry about finding work, but as Matt Umbro wrote on MarketingLand in 2017, having too much work is often a bigger problem for creatives who survive on their reputation.

“People hire freelancers because they don’t want to pay agency prices, but they expect agencyquality work,” he writes.

Umbro says that this leads to freelancers who have fewer hours to complete projects and less time to communicate with clients. They sometimes find themselves needing to do unpaid work to complete

drawbacks Skepticism from others: Becoming a full-time freelancer still feels like a big risk to many people. Goliger says that her parents were nervous when she first told them she was becoming a full-time freelancer. “They were pretty baffled by it,” she says, adding that both parents were used to stable, long-running jobs. Those who want to thrive will likely have to ignore some skepticism from others.

Goliger says that she didn’t allow her parents’ concern to bother her: “I was really confident going in.”

Paychecks and benefits aren’t consistent: People who choose to freelance enjoy certain aspects of losing their benefits package— for example, no longer having to request vacation time—but the Freelancing in America report found that 63% of full-time freelancers are anxious about managing money, healthcare and other parts of a typical company benefits package. Freelancers Union, a nonprofit organization, provides 401ks and healthcare options to members, but losing company contributions to blunt the price of healthcare and bolster retirement savings may make many freelancers realize the gravity of healthcare costs and long-term savings.

Always on: The other side of freedom and being your own boss is struggling with the expectation of being “always on” and never being able to truly put work out of mind. “If you are on vacation, you’re still working and looking at things because you’re your own boss,” Perna says. “We don’t have backup. You work a lot more and you have to be really disciplined in everything you do.” Those who love weekends and vacations without any thought of work may not love the grind of full-time freelance.

What happens if there’s a recession? While people working full-time jobs—especially those in at-will employment states—aren’t protected from cuts and layoffs during a recession, a freelancer’s market could dry up overnight if the economy sours. Owyang says that a recession would increase the supply-side of the economy—in this case, the number of freelance workers—and drive prices down. “You may see that as a way to increase demand from marketers who might want to hire freelancers because it’s cheaper, which in turn would cause more layoffs,” he says. “You can see all the economic impacts.”

projects. “If you choose to do freelance work, understand that your personal brand is at stake,” Umbro writes. “You don’t have your agency as a shield.”

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‘Consultants Aren’t Miracle Workers’ Neil Patel, a digital marketing consultant and founder of Neil Patel Digital and Crazy Egg, wrote in a post on Quick Sprout that “you shouldn’t hire me, or any consultant for that matter, to help you with your marketing.” Businesses can’t rely solely on outsiders to fix their business problems, he writes.

“A lot of small and medium businesses hire consultants because they are looking for miracles,” Patel writes. “I hate to break it to you, but no consultant is going to take a business that is doing very little in revenue and quickly turn it around. … [If] you have a bad product, a low-converting site, or an offer that just doesn’t make sense, driving thousands of visitors to your website won’t fix your business. In other words, you need to figure out how to create a sustainable business on your own.”

story mentioned that this means they are, to some extent, always thinking about work. Freelancers are expected to quickly respond to emails, answer calls and turn in great work on each project. Some people excel at this, while others wish they could return to the security of a cubicle.

Despite the downsides, those who seem to be made for freelancing appreciate the benefits. The Freelancing in America report found that 51% of freelancers say that no amount of money could get them to work a traditional full-time job. As Perna put it: “What’s the worst thing that can happen? I have to get a job.”

About Hiring Freelancers

When Volkin hires freelancers, he’ll test them.

The test won’t be on any skill, nor will it be apparent to the freelancer, but he’ll watch how they communicate in the first exchanges—how quickly do they respond? Are they open and honest? Can they have a good relationship? But Volkin says that it’s just as important for marketing managers to communicate well—they must know what they want from a project from the start and set parameters. Doing so early will save time and avoid miscommunication.

“SEO, for example, is a task you have to break down … because there are many different types,”

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he says. “Also: What’s your timeline? What’s your budget? All that stuff has to be clearly outlined from the beginning.”

Managers can also look at freelancers’ ratings and reviews on platforms such as Upwork, Crowdspring and 99designs. If one freelancer has a series of critiques on his communication, for example, Volkin says that it may be best to avoid that freelancer. Outside of these rating systems, Owyang says that companies often internally pass around names of well-liked freelancers they trust to do good work for other parts of the organization.

But for marketing managers who have yet to employ freelancers, Owyang says that it’s best to start small. Many creative agencies, for example, farm out ideas for a campaign on freelance platforms, then hone the ideas in-house before bringing the fleshed-out ideas to a client, who likely never knew that freelancers were involved. “That happens a lot,” he says. “The crowd can provide far more variability and more creative offerings. We will only see this grow.”

Volkin says that he often finds these outside voices more valuable than perspectives within the company. “A lot of the employers within a company are too close to their product or service,” he says.

“People outside the company that are just familiar with the basics provide some really good insight into how the company is perceived.”

The biggest fear marketing mangers have in hiring outsiders is protecting intellectual property, Owyang says. “If you have some people working on a secret project, there’s always the risk that they’ll spill the beans or they’re working for a competitor,”

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What Kind of Marketers Can Freelance?

Upwork lists its most in-demand marketing professionals as: SEO specialist, search engine marketers, social media marketers, email marketers, marketing strategists and lead generators.

But there’s no limit to what kind of marketers can work as fulltime freelancers. Owyang says that it’s best to outsource creative functions—graphic design, copywriting, product design—and any position that performs a repeatable process that can be trained, while retaining in-house cornerstone positions such as strategists, directors and relations specialists. Then there are fractional CMOs like Volkin and fractional sales consultants like Perna, both of whom show that it’s more about finding your niche and selling your service

he says. Owyang says that Lexus worked with an agency that only allowed freelancers to work onsite on a computer not connected to the internet when working on a campaign for a new car model.

“There are secret pictures of the new cars that, if those leaked to car blogs, would ruin the launch.”

How to Succeed as a Freelancer

When Goliger first started freelancing full time, she branded herself as a full-stack marketer. Very quickly, she developed a niche in paid advertising, similar to her last role at HubSpot.

“It just so happened that [paid advertising] is a really great spot to focus as a freelancer because if a company is running [a paid campaign], it means that they have a budget, which is a good sign for me, and it also means that it’s high risk for them because they want to get it right,” she says. “They don’t want to be wasting all that budget on ads that aren’t working well.”

Freelancers often debate whether they should be generalists or specialists, but Goliger says that she believes that having the skills of a generalist while focusing on a marketing niche is best. “You’re able to talk about that channel specifically, your experience and the results that you’ve delivered,” she says.

Volkin found his niche as a marketing strategist.

When he hires freelancers, he doesn’t look for generalists, but the niche he needs for a company or project. For a marketer to find a niche, Volkin says that they must start by defining their goals.

than trying to fit into a box.

These goals must go beyond freelance and into what they want from life—some may want to make six figures, others may just want a bit of money but a lot of freedom. Once freelancers find their niche, Owyang says that their work must be wellreviewed, they must start building a portfolio and should have repeat customers they can rely on for some semblance of consistency. “You should really strive for the best customer ratings you can get,” he says. “You [should] build up that solid reputation to be the one that everybody wants to hire.”

Perna, who stressed the benefits of a strong network, says that the most important things for any full-time freelancer are focus and discipline.

“If someone shows interest in wanting my services, I follow up with them,” she says. “But that’s what I love about it: You’re working for yourself. But it’s a different kind of work—it’s a very rewarding kind of work because you have to be extremely disciplined.”

For those who find their niche, can work well alone and don’t mind waiting for the next check, Perna says that the rewards of working for yourself can be immense.

“I really did love my previous job; I loved every part of it,” she says. “I was there almost nine years and I wanted to give my team growth opportunities. But I hit a point [where] I wanted growth for myself. I wanted to try something new and that’s what I did. And I have loved every minute of it.” m MAY 2019 | MARKETING NEWS

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THE MARKETING IS COMING FROM

INSIDE THE HOUSE COMPANIES ARE USING EXTERNAL MARKETING STRATEGIES—INCLUDING COMMUNICATION SOFTWARE—TO STRENGTHEN INTERNAL EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT AND BRAND BUY-IN

BY ZACH BROOKE

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ast year, U.K. charity Alzheimer’s Society set out to transform its

2,500 employees and 9,000 volunteers into dedicated, effective brand ambassadors.

The ambitious undertaking launched alongside a new brand, a five-year strategic business plan and a new set of organizational values and behaviors. An internal video provided the rationale behind the changes and Alzheimer’s Society provided public speaking training so employees could speak confidently about their work.

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Another company, Monzo, surveyed employees on how engaged they were, then responded to the results.

Employees of the mobile-only bank now receive free lunches, work-from-home opportunities and free subscriptions to meditation service Headspace.

Perhaps the most revolutionary outcome of the survey was the creation of a unique management program, in which every Monzo employee has a manager and a team leader—no individual may maintain both responsibilities. The internal marketing work of Alzheimer’s Society and Monzo has been recognized among Europe’s best communications case studies of 2018 by the U.K.’s Synergy Creative.

For every exemplary campaign, there are dozens of smaller, yet stellar examples.

At Hodges-Mace, an Atlanta employee benefits technology and communications company,

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internal marketing falls to 28-year-old marketing manager Paige LeBel. Despite being the company’s sole marketer, responsible for all external engagement, part of her job is to deliver internal, companywide messages. Quarterly newsletters are the most regularly distributed form of internal content at HodgesMace, and LeBel knows to inject information from her clientoriented communications into these newsletters. New product updates and existing product rollouts require an employee messaging strategy and clientsupport script, which LeBel develops in consultation with the tech team.

Then there are Hodges-Mace’s strategic objectives concerning the company’s employee benefits packages. Rather than blasting out reminder emails, LeBel converted enrollment alerts to push notifications on workers’ devices. She also gamified the

enrollment drive by offering a cash reward to the first person to screenshot the notification and email the image.

This may sound like human resources or internal communications work, not a marketer’s job. But if marketers manage the company’s brand, they must also know how the brand looks inside the organization. This internal employer brand affects everything from how employees view their organization to how customers rate their service experience. Consciously tinkering with the employer brand is internal marketing.

“A lot of times, HR has their processes set in place, but they bring in marketing to come up with a more creative solution for their delivery method,” LeBel says. “We have important information to send out. We don’t want it to be full-on serious where readers lose interest on paragraph three.”

Keith Kitani, who has been in the communications business for more than two decades, is CEO of GuideSpark, an employer software communications company.

He says interest in engaging with employees using internal marketing principles is at the highest level he’s seen. Like the external marketplace, employers target their internal audience of workers and bring them down the funnel to adopt a program.

“When I think about internal marketing, culture is a program, benefits is a program, they’re all programs that the company is trying to sell,” Kitani says.

Robust internal marketing, like its external counterpart, is facilitated by advances in data analysis. “[Employers] know where you work,” Kitani says.

“They know what programs you have. They know your status. They know how much you make. There’s a lot of data that marketers would kill for.”

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Tapping that data can be a gamechanger for employers looking to encourage employee responses, related to workload or lifestyle.

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uring his tenure as CEO of a marketing agency, PoliteMail founder Michael DesRochers noticed the office was out of step. He found that departments were too chatty and that sales and support teams were stuck in an infinite loop of trifling customer updates.

“They were catching each other up on, ‘I said this to them, and they said this,’” DesRochers says. “It frustrated me because all that information was there in Outlook. The conversations needed to be opened up so each team could see it.”

DesRochers was determined to end this maddening inefficiency. In time, he helped develop a “kind of sales and service email information tool” that spread message data across internal parties. The tool led to the creation of PoliteMail, a plugin for Microsoft Outlook that allows for internal corporate communications, where DesRochers is now managing director. Working within Outlook, PoliteMail offers analytics capabilities comparable to Marketo, without the need for separate list management. It allows for backend operations—from benefits enrollment to service strategy—to run as a marketing campaign directed exclusively to employees.

Initially launched as both an internal and external communications tool, PoliteMail abandoned the

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outbound marketing version around 2012, following the increasing popularity of email marketers MailChimp and Constant Contact. PoliteMail refocused on making internal communications better.

The refocus succeeded; PoliteMail’s 2017 revenue was $3.6 million, per Inc. Magazine.

The company grew 490% over three years, good enough to make it the fastest-growing company in New Hampshire in 2018 and one the top 20 fastestgrowing companies in Greater Boston.

“We discovered the market opportunity for internal communications more than we intended to be there,” DesRochers admits.

Writing for Forbes last December, DesRochers noted that this external marketinglike approach, focused inward, can have a profound impact on how employees work together and feel about their employer.

“For those organizations willing to buy into funding internal marketing campaigns and communications staff, the rewards promise to be engaging,” he wrote.

Internal marketing isn’t just having the right software, though. Tech certainly enhances internal marketing capabilities, but is only a support mechanism for the beating heart of the drive to activate employees.

Kitani and DesRochers are neither internal marketing’s first prophets nor practitioners. Years before PoliteMail existed, Ogilvy & Mather then-senior partner Colin Mitchell highlighted the importance of marketingminded employee messaging in a 2002 edition of Harvard Business Review, extolling the

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benefits of “Selling the Brand Inside.” “[It] is a truth of business that if employees do not care about their company, they will in the end contribute to its demise,” Mitchell wrote. “And it’s up to you to give them a reason to care.”

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ven as employers are eager for new ways to motivate and measure employees, internal marketing itself has something of an image problem with the boardroom set.

Agencies that help companies with branding and marketing have learned that clients bristle at the mention of internal marketing.

Christina L. May, managing partner at East Coast consultancy Illumine8, spends her time touring offices and telling leadership where it’s falling short. A lot of problems she encounters can be fixed with an internal marketing campaign, even if it’s not what owners want to hear. “We found that if we add the word ‘marketing’ to [what we offer], they immediately think that means ad services and ask, ‘Why would I run ads to my workforce?’” May says.

Rather than fight what she calls an educational battle to convince employers to use marketing techniques on their own staff, May repackages the same concepts as “alignment.”

Alignment can seem a more precise and tactical goal to businesses, especially when May refers to it is a key differentiator for firms.

There are two branches within internal marketing: pathos and logos. Alignment hews closer to the logos portion, aiming to

coordinate internal corporate machinations with customerfacing responses, the way LeBel does at Hodges-Mace. Internally aligned companies will work harmoniously toward collective business outcomes.

“A company that is in alignment can be felt immediately when you walk in,” May says. “For those that are not in alignment, it really shows.

Typically, there are a lot of, shall we say, reality issues.”

Misalignment both stems from and feeds into employment engagement problems—the pathos part of internal marketing. How do you convince employees to love their jobs enough to contribute greater amounts of themselves? Gallup tracks workplace engagement and defines engaged employees as “those who are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace.” Gallup’s most recent workplace survey, released in August 2018, found that 34% of U.S. employees are engaged, while 13% of workers are disengaged. These are near-historic highs and lows, but the lion’s share of the workforce—53%—reports feeling neither engaged nor disengaged, making them likely to perform minimally and quick to jump ship for marginally better employment offers.

Muddled mission statements or incongruent leadership actions also hurt employee engagement. In 2017, Gallup found that a minority of U.S. employees (41%) say they know what their company stands for. A year before that, about a quarter of workers (27%)

reported believing in their company’s values. Internal marketing is the best lever available to combat chronic disengagement, short of sacking the entire staff.

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f alignment and engagement still come off as fuzzy distractions rather than clear business objectives, the fact is that these issues will manifest themselves in an area that every executive should care about: customer experience. May says that unaligned companies can exhibit symptoms such as reputation management issues. “Either you have a poor product, or you have poor service,” she says. “It’s not hard to figure that out once you get inside.”

For employees to meet customer needs, companies must meet employee needs.

Disengaged employees who interact directly with customers will deliver markedly negative service, says Lisa Morris, a self-described organizational anthropologist, strategist and experience design specialist.

A 25-year veteran of blue-chip consultancies like Accenture and Sparks Grove, Morris recently founded XPLOR, a design and innovation firm focused on improving the experience of work and workplaces through design. Morris endeavors to understand how organizational constraints interact with human behavior.

Every workplace has boundaries—whether financial, strategic or otherwise—that impact employee behavior for better or worse. For instance, limiting worker autonomy will limit worker engagement.

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Morris recalls when she consulted with health systems and noticed that disaffected staff lost the ability to empathize with patients.

“Your customer isn’t going to get a great experience if the employee doesn’t have a great experience,” she says.

But why wait until customer experience issues drag down a company’s reputation? Prudent decision-makers should attend to workforce alignment issues before customer experience takes a hit.

A basic approach is to use a quantitative survey to understand voices within an organization. Morris prefers to incorporate principles of organizational design, which she used to help management consulting firm North Highland develop its own employer brand strategy.

“You don’t just go ask somebody what their needs are,” she says. “That’s really hard for any human to answer.”

Instead, ask probing questions that suppose a greater degree of autonomy. Employees should have the opportunity to describe what their work would look like if they had the chance to structure their own projects.

Don’t stop at assignment descriptions, but ask questions about how performing the work would make employees feel and why they should want to move in that direction.

At Illumine8, May says that her team will conduct anonymous one-on-one interviews with a cross section of staff to distinguish how leadership’s perception of the company differs from management and rank-and-file workers. Conflicting results are

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presented to top executives, who can either accept or dismiss the findings. It’s a crucial moment— one that May says has caused her to drop clients who reject her research.

Working for an undisclosed technology company, Morris says that she began by auditing company communications, looking for examples of hypocrisy. “A lot of my initial work is to resolve the disconnect between the brand message and the experience. Either the brand message is not authentic, or the experience needs some degree of improvement.”

The goal is to consider the ideal employee experience and how to reinforce it with employer brand and messaging.

It’s not an exact science; corporations are unique. Morris asks leadership to approve pilot programs to determine if an engagement solution meets the needs of the employees.

“There’s nothing worse than building something big and rolling it out, then not realizing until that point that no one finds it desirable or engaging,” she says.

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s much as companies want to project being one big, happy family, there needs to be some degree of worker segmentation. Millennial employees view retirement, health and life insurance different from Generation X employees or baby boomers.

Attention must be paid to how each group is messaged to keep them engaged.

Kitani says that internal marketing as a system can maximize on the promise of digitization. Not all content is relevant for everyone, so tools

are required to ensure employees are receiving individually appropriate updates. Internal marketing segmentation has a big impact on engagement: Epilog, a manufacturing company, engaged 90% of its employees with benefits and open enrollment programs when communications were segmented. An identical approach by Nebraska Medicine led to a four-fold increase in its healthcare enrollment.

Kitani says that some companies have gone so far as to develop internal personas for compensation programs.

“A combination of different demographics—essentially age, role and performance— allows them to create different personas and send a marketing or communication experience to them to drive higher engagement,” he says.

Campaigns command attention and can build hype.

But to create meaningful change, companies need to live up to their side of the bargain.

“We live in a very transparent, transactional environment,” May says. “Whether it’s your internal marketing or your external marketing, you cannot say one thing and do another. You will be found out very quickly.”

Be careful to manage expectations. Some of the language of marketing campaigns can lead employees to expect changes that management might not be willing to make.

“Say [a company] has a brand message that says you value empowerment,” Morris says. “But then you walk in on your first day and it feels like you’ve just been through an encyclopedia of policy that doesn’t provide for

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some autonomy. You almost start to say, ‘Did I sign up for the right organization?’”

These realities often undermine internal brand strategy. Bad internal marketing is distinguished by what May calls “the hokey factor.” One client she works with is unaware of how out of step it is with its internal slogan: “One Team.”

It’s a nice idea, she says, but not reflective of the firm’s reality, where multiple departments compete for resources against one another.

“You can’t say that you’re one team and then put quotas against each other,” May says.

Compare that example to another Illumine8 client, this one a commercial painting firm that emphasizes workplace safety as a core value. The company provides workers with apparel and safety equipment to wear on the job, all of it branded to emphasize the company’s commitment.

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ot everyone will welcome obvious internal marketing. The longesttenured employees likely have memories of previous branding efforts that floundered. A tricky aspect of internal marketing is that everyone in the office not only sees the sausage being made, they help make it.

Following May’s advice to avoid the hokey factor, companies must realize that kumbaya won’t cut it. She believes that acknowledging the detractors can advance an internal campaign’s goals. Her team has developed a protocol for troubleshooting naysayers: The first step is to understand where the resistance is coming

from. Include detractors in the internal marketing process early.

“Make them part of the solution, not a part of the problem,” she says. In May’s experience, 60-70% of detractors can be converted.

Internal marketing can solve alignment, engagement and customer service issues, but it’s not a panacea. Internal marketing cannot catch a company in freefall, nor can it clean up a toxic work environment. But internal marketing can work as part of a comprehensive revitalization package. It need not be costly, nor require countless hours of navel-gazing.

New technology can aid this process. Email plugins and segmentation tools are great internal marketing supplements, capable of reaching and responding to employees with a sensitivity unknown to leadership a generation before.

“We’re at the very beginning stages of people applying marketing techniques internally,” Kitani says. “I look forward to a scenario where people can really drive and elevate the employee experience.”

As with external marketing, employers shouldn’t place all of their hope on technology.

“Organizations get enamored by shiny objects,” Morris says. “Many are hoping for the silver bullet.” For any internal marketing effort to be effective, employees need to be empowered to lend their voice to the company culture; it’s their brand, too. PoliteMail’s DesRocher acknowledged this in his Forbes piece, calling it “bi-directional buy-in.” Morris echoes him: “All humans want a say in their destiny.” m

[Internal marketing campaigns] command attention and can build hype. But to create meaningful change, companies need to live up to their side of the bargain.

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CAREER MANAGEMENT

How to Take Control of Your Marketing Career Setting a vision for the future starts by defining your passion, taking a skills inventory and realizing your career barriers and accelerators

BY DEBBIE QAQISH

debbie@pedowitzgroup.com

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nce a year, I run a half-day MBA program class at the College of William and Mary. I focus on revenue marketing and digital transformation, topics not typically covered in most college core curricula.

Last year, I invited my good friend Dan Brown of analytics company Verint Systems, where he works as VP of marketing operations and is a pioneer in building and operationalizing all elements

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of a mature marketing operations practice.

Brown discussed his charter as a marketing operations group, its history of growth, key roles and responsibilities, its impact on marketing, how he built and now manages his tech stack and career advice for the MBA students. This was followed by a Q&A session, and the first question Brown received was, “How would I get hired to work in marketing

operations?” Brown answered, “I would not hire any of you.” At that point, you could hear a pin drop. Even I was caught off-guard. Brown explained that today’s marketer—and especially today’s marketing operations professional— requires a skill set and a career path that is not taught in school. He also noted that he only hires experienced professionals because he does not have time to train employees.

Every day, I work with marketers who are frustrated with the velocity and direction of their careers. And they have good reason to be frustrated, because companies are not investing in holistic training for marketers. Training, at best, is piecemeal and tactically focused. At most companies, training for marketers is completely absent.

Marketing careers can feel like the lottery. If you get the right ticket (work for the right company), you’ll win. If you get the wrong ticket (work for the

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CAREER MANAGEMENT

wrong company), you will lose. I get calls every week from marketers who work in very traditional marketing departments and are looking for digital education and training, which includes everything from marketing automation systems to building customer-centric campaigns.

My advice to them is to find a company that values marketing and is a leader in revenue marketing, customer centricity and digital transformation.

Setting a Career Vision I have a passion for mentoring marketers who are excited about the profession and are hungry to learn, grow, advance and become pioneers. Through the years, I have developed a set of effective career strategies, the first of which may surprise you.

It begins with creating a vision for what you want your career to look like.

Christopher Reeve said, “If you don’t have a vision, nothing happens.” As a marketer in today’s dynamic environment, being intentional and planning for your career will accelerate your growth. Do anything less than this and you will miss many opportunities.

Defining Your Passion Key elements of creating your vision include defining your passion, determining the required skill set for your future and acknowledging the barriers and accelerators to your vision. Passion is incredibly important for a career marketer. My passion is transforming marketing organizations to successfully address the challenges of digital transformation, customer centricity and financial accountability. I’ve built my entire marketing career around that passion. Consider what motivates, delights and challenges you and makes you want to come to work every day.

Pinpoint that passion and write a passion statement. This becomes the North Star for your career.

can be challenging, so you might want to talk this through with a trusted colleague.

Once you know what skills you are missing, you can calculate your education requirements.

Without this practical list, you will waste both time and opportunities. For example, you might need to develop finance skills or a particular technology fluency. With this knowledge, you can look for internal or external company opportunities to gain these skills. You might even need to find a different company for this skill development.

Career Barriers and Accelerators As part of your career vision, also consider the barriers and accelerators that will help you with velocity and direction.

Barriers might be where you live or the time you have to commit to your career. I have a very good friend who is a brilliant marketer, but it took her almost two years to find the right company to help her accelerate her career path because of her location. Whatever your situation, be very honest about these barriers and address them head-on.

Accelerators are anything that can move you career trajectory forward.

Accelerators might be who you know in your network, a special skill you have that gets you placed on a special team or it might simply be your persistence. Identify your career accelerators and leverage them to the hilt.

career advancement

Consider what motivates, delights and challenges you and makes you want to come to work every day. Pinpoint that passion and write a passion statement.

This becomes the North Star for your career.

Conclusion Marketers now have more career opportunities than at any other time in history. Technology and the customerdriven economy are driving rapid changes in the role of marketing. It is now up to you to manage your career, seek these new opportunities and enjoy an exciting and fulfilling career as a marketer. m DEBBIE QAQISH, PH.D. , is principal partner and chief strategy officer of The Pedowitz Group. She manages global client

Career Skills Inventory The next step is to conduct an inventory of your skills and compare it to those you will need for the future. Self-assessment

relationships and leads the firm’s thought leadership initiatives. She has been helping B2B companies drive revenue growth for more than 35 years.

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CLIENT-BASED LEARNING

The Value of StudentIntegrated Practicum Projects Client-oriented learning in higher education boosts résumés and leadership skills

BY LESLIE KENDRICK

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eja Dupree and Liza Goldstone run Jay Way Media, a marketing communications firm that develops, implements and measures the impact of an integrated marketing campaign for a luxury automobile brand.

These agency co-CEOs meet weekly with Jay Way Media’s 12 department managers to facilitate interdepartmental communication, oversee the agency’s timeline and budget, and assist with

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troubleshooting problems. In early February, they assisted their market research department co-managers with a focus group at consumer research firm Observation Baltimore.

These tasks may sound like typical full-time agency work, but Jay Way Media is Dupree and Goldstone’s creation as part of the Advertising and Integrated Marketing Communications course I teach at Johns Hopkins University.

Managers in the class commit 15 hours per week outside of class time to this in-class agency. It’s a lot of work, but it’s the type of experience that goes beyond entry-level internships.

The Student Experience One of the biggest differences between internship experience and agency-style coursework is the opportunity to take a leadership role and manage a budget, which can also come with serious challenges. Several department managers reporting to Dupree and Goldstone got the flu in the first month of class. Delayed campaign deliverables led to an increased workload over spring break, but the co-CEOs were unfazed. I meet with the leaders weekly and offer the insights I’ve developed in teaching this course for 13 years. Dupree and Goldstone learned about the most common challenges, suggestions on how to manage and motivate their peers, and requirements

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for communicating with the client, EdVenture Partners, the firm representing the client’s brand, the 2019 Acura ILX. EdVenture Partners is a marketing agency focused on reaching the Gen Z, collegiate and youth markets via experiential learning programs. Two of the ways this program differs from other client-based coursework are the implementation and project-management aspects.

“Problem-solving and communication were key,” Dupree says. “For most of us, this was the first official integrated marketing campaign that we had ever worked on. Aside from our course readings, we had no idea what to expect.”

She added that the class took a learn-asyou-go approach to the project. “I quickly learned how interrelated everything that we were working on was and how important that made communication.

Liza and I tried to encourage this flow of information.”

Résumé Benefits Goldstone, a political science major and marketing minor, is interested in social media marketing or consulting and felt the experience would be a “reach” for a sophomore—challenging her in different ways than her AMA collegiate leadership role and internship experiences. “As soon as a recruiter looks at my résumé, the co-CEO position catches their eye,” she says. “They love to learn that I’ve gained real-world experience through a semester-long, client-based project.

Leading the class with Teja has taught me more than any internship I’ve held.

I’ve learned to see the big picture, while spearheading class initiatives and serving as an intermediary between 40 students and a Fortune 500 client.”

According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ Job Outlook 2018 survey, the attributes that employers value—other than a strong GPA—include problem-solving skills and the ability to work in a team. Written communication skills were also deemed very important.

Allie Lewis, head of consumer market research at LinkedIn, held a leadership role in the class as an undergraduate and used the opportunity to explore an

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[A recruiter] loves to learn that I’ve gained real-world experience through a semesterlong, client-based project. experience outside of public relations— the field she thought she was destined to pursue. “I learned the value of research in providing the needed insights to develop our integrated marketing campaign,” Lewis says. “It also gave me a leg up with employers as I could speak to actual primary research conducted.”

Mark Presnell, executive director of career advancement at Northwestern University, says that client-based projects can increase a student’s ability to interview well. “Employers are moving beyond majors and focusing on skills and experiences,” he says. “For many students, skill development often begins first with a client-based project and deliverables.”

Another former student of the Johns Hopkins course, Eva Gurfein, says her manager was impressed by her understanding of the importance of connecting communications programs to overall business objectives. Now a managing director at RF|Binder, a global integrated marketing and consulting firm, Gurfein is responsible for developing integrated programs for clients. She recently reached out to me for candidates for an associate position and eventually hired a student who previously served as the co-CEO in last year’s class project.

What Professors and Mentors Should Know A 2015 study published in the Journal of Public Affairs Education, “Assessing the Value to Client Organizations of Student Practicum Projects,” says that the key to the success of client-based projects is four program design elements: a consultingbased course design, relevant projects, close faculty involvement and regular client feedback.

An integrated client-based curriculum “creates value for students, the clients and the school as a whole,” according to research published in 2013 in the Journal of Public Affairs Education. EdVenture

Partners CEO Tony Sgro says many clients directly hire students from these programs. And universities benefit when alumni reach out to their alma mater, seeking students with proven leadership and client-based project experience.

Faculty who have mentored students through these experiences can speak to more than just students’ exam or research report abilities.

There’s a tremendous amount of personal satisfaction in mentoring students throughout this course, then seeing them grasp the big picture and really understand what’s involved in developing and implementing a campaign of this scope. It’s also rewarding to see the confidence gained by all the students, but particularly those in manager roles, and how this allows them to more successfully interview with employers.

Because of this experience, I have shared the benefits of the programs with other faculty. I’ve also participated with AMA and non-AMA faculty colleagues on panels where we’ve shared the challenges and rewards of incorporating client-based projects into the classroom and I’ve co-authored an article with a faculty member whose class, along with mine, was chosen as a finalist for an EdVenture Partners campaign competition.

If you’re a faculty member planning to incorporate this type of client-based project into your course, reach out to a local nonprofit or an organization such as EdVenture Partners at least six months ahead of time; it takes some coordination to outline the parameters of a mutually beneficial project. m LESLIE KENDRICK is a senior lecturer in the Center for Leadership Education in the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

LIZA GOLDSTONE also contributed to this article.

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advertisers’index

ADVERTISERS’ INDEX Quick source for contacting the suppliers in the May 2019 issue of Marketing News.

2019 AMA Marketing + Public Policy Conference ....................................... p. 15 URL: a ma.marketing/MPPC 2019 AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education Conference ............................................ p. 13 URL: a ma.marketing/highered2019 AMA Bootcamp — Digital Marketing .................. p. 54 URL: a ma.marketing/bootcamp19 AMA Bootcamp — Marketing Management . ...................................inside front cover URL: a ma.marketing/bootcamp19

AMA Professional Certified Marketer® Program ........................ inside back cover URL: ama.org/PCM AMA’s Marketing Resource Directory ................. p. 55 URL: marketingresourcedirectory.ama.org Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies ................................ back cover URL: scs.georgetown.edu/ama Marketing News ...................................................... p. 55 Email: sales@ama.org URL: mediakit.ama.org Thank You to the AMA Collegiate Conference Sponsors & Exhibitors ............................................. p. 7 URL: ama.org/AMAICC

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STATS

Organization Marie Kondo, typically Age

Height 0.010606 furlongs, roughly Skate-out song “Chacarron” by El Chombo Most liked tweet There are over 200 billion tweets sent per year and you expect me to pick just one?

And now a word from …

GRITTY

Mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers What made you the ideal candidate for the Flyers job?

I put in a lot of hours in my first gig here: assistant to the ice painting assistants. They bred me for hard work. I was really born to cheer this team on … silently, of course.

Your popularity skyrocketed since you were first introduced to the public. How have you dealt with the fame?

Meditation, levitation, a brief stint of incarceration. You know, the usual.

It feels like you’ve been in our lives forever, despite this only being your first season. How would you assess your rookie year?

First of all, Allen, I have been in your lives forever. As for this year, I think it was good enough for a nomination but I don’t know if I’ll be taking home any hardware. Always room for improvement.

SIKE. I was trying to be humble. You and I both know I blew it out of the water.

Any plans for the offseason?

Like most hockey players in the offseason, I spend a lot of time on the links, clangin’ some chain. Thank you for reminding me, I have to get my discs buffed soon.

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How close are you with other Philadelphia team mascots and do they ever offer any advice?

Well, Lincoln Financial Field is only about a stone’s throw away, Citizen’s Bank Park is going to take me at least three with maybe a soft underhand at the end, and are we talking Sixers practice facility or game night? Getting to Camden requires sea travel because I don’t have money for tolls.

How would you describe the spirit of the Flyers and how do you represent that?

I try not to concern myself with any spirits from the afterlife around here—Ghost has told me some stories. Everyone thinks we call Shayne [Gostisbehere] that because of his last name, but no, no, no, no, no.

You don’t even know the half of it.

What’s been your favorite moment of your first season?

Stadium Series, without a doubt. Jumped off a roof; felt the crisp, misty air betwixt my cheeks; and the Flyers beat those pesky birds [Pittsburgh Penguins] so, all in all, best day.

—JULIAN ZENG

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