This is How Marketers Build Great Brands from Within

Leadership lessons from world-class marketers

When people think of marketing, people would think somewhere along the lines of advertising or brand-building. Then there are those on the other side of the spectrum who may just see it as nothing more than a boon to consumerism and modern-day capitalism.

As a marketer, I’m not here to defend or glorify the discipline. While I’ve always been drawn to marketing for being the perfect marriage between art and science, there’s one more thing that impresses me about it.

Great marketers are also great leaders. I’ve always found myself inspired by how they think, what they say, and how they manage people and situations — may they be college professors, brand managers, trade marketers, or company directors.

Not a lot of people see what it really takes to launch or sustain a great brand and drive real business results.

Lucky for me, I’ve had the privilege of working in a multinational CPG and learn from world-class marketers. But they didn’t just teach me how to build brands and sell products. They taught me what it means to be a leader who can effectively steer the organization and inspire people.

Whether or not you appreciate marketing as a discipline or see it as a pesky way to “put products in your face all day long” (I actually read this as a response to a question on Quora “Do marketing people do anything useful?” Harsh.), I hope this story shows that you can learn a thing or two from marketers when it comes to effective leadership.

Here are four characteristics of marketers that show not only world-class marketing skills but essential leadership traits.

1. They strive for meaningful differentiation.

At the time I was in the CPG, the company was a new entrant in the market. We were going against a long-standing local monopoly, with consumption of their products being practically cultural or even hereditary. Add to that our positioning that was such a stark contrast to theirs. Despite our strong global name, people had little to no incentive to buy us.

The question was always this: How do we disrupt the market? How do we stand out but stay relevant to the target consumer? How do we become different but familiar? New but relatable?

The goal was to stand out not for the sake of it, but to communicate what we could offer that the competitor couldn’t. That’s what our company director meant when he said “meaningful differentiation.”

It’s a hard case to crack. But operating and leading from the lens of a marketer means you continuously seek to put purpose behind your decisions. You don’t innovate to excite, you innovate to solve a problem or a need. What you put out there always needs to be insightful. It’s the only way to provide real value to consumers, change their minds over the long-term, and show that your organization can make an impact.

2. They inspire thoughtful decision-making.

In one of our meetings with the director, he sensed that there were still a lot of things on the ground that we couldn’t explain. Thankfully, he wasn’t mad. At the end of the meeting, he calmly concluded our five priorities. He advised us to pause, go back to our data and observations, and work hard to extract the insights that would guide our decisions moving forward. He wanted us to practice “thoughtful leadership”.

Thoughtfulness, according to Disney Chairman Bob Iger, “is the process of gaining knowledge, so an opinion rendered or decision made is more credible and more likely to be correct. It’s simply about taking the time to develop informed opinions.”

Leaders provide grounded direction. And they carry the burden of explaining why this is the way forward. They’re not expected to always be right. But they are expected to make decisions with good reason.

Strong leaders take pains to understand the root of the problem, look into considerations, and be able to weigh them. More importantly, they inspire other people to be pragmatic and thoughtful about their decisions, too.

3. They stretch people and resources.

In a meeting with our boss, we aligned what was in the pipeline for next year — Cool, new programs, sexy assets, better ways of working. He didn’t tell us exactly what was wrong or what was missing. He simply challenged us to “make our investments sweat harder”, knowing that our resources were significantly less compared to the competitor.

Marketers are commercial managers. They take a holistic view of the business so they can make decisions that will effectively optimize resources and allow them to work around restraints. This is the less glamorous part of the job that not a lot of people know about. But it’s the part that actually enables brands to do what they do and products to be where they need to be.

That’s why as leaders, they push people. They push the right buttons to make them work harder. And they push those hardworking people to make resources work harder for the organization.

That means squeezing the value out of every cent, exploring different ways to achieve your objective, and helping people believe that they can do more with less if they think out of the box. Leaders know that you can outsmart the competitor if you play your resources right.

4. They get everybody on board.

When it comes to setting targets, Sales & Marketing wear very different hats: Marketing will push for higher growth. Sales will fight for a more realistic figure.

In a planning session with both functions, the brand manager led the discussion on target-setting and presented possible scenarios. Before opening the floor for comments, he said that whatever figure we would agree on, the most important thing was that we would “go in there as a team.”

Marketers and leaders need to be ambitious. But it doesn’t matter if they call the shots if their people aren’t willing to pull the trigger.

The only way to move forward is to make sure people are on board and rowing in the same direction. At one point the brand manager even said, “We’re all in this together” and I was half-expecting he’d burst into a song and dance.

But going in there as a team is less about showing a united front than inspiring real unity. Leaders rally people behind their vision. They display confidence, encourage collaboration, and spur people’s imagination of what could be. Making an impact outside starts with winning over people on the inside.

Great marketers create meaningful solutions, practice thoughtful decision-making, challenge their team to do better, and unite people to achieve a common goal.

I don’t know about you, but this looks a lot like inspiring leadership to me.