B2B marketers, communicators, PA/PR professionals – you are my kinfolk, my tribe. But we have got to do better.
Why do engineering colleagues think we are all fluff? Because many of us are. Why do the hard sciences perceive us as soft science and by extension, a “nice to have” in the business? Because we eschew hard science in our work and compromise to avoid uninformed push-back.
And why on earth are there so many large, industrial firms without a CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) at the big kids table? Because we have allowed ourselves to be defined as promotional order takers, all too eager to scurry off and create the next brochure that looks exactly like our competitor’s. It turns out the soft, boring middle is cozy and safe.
There’s no such thing as a boring industry, only boring marketers.
To be perfectly clear, at various stages throughout my career, I have been as guilty of this as anyone else. I am looking squarely in the mirror on this one. But in that mirror, I see a lot of other people with me, and it breaks my marketing heart.
We have allowed ourselves to be relegated to the fluff corner and once we're stuck there, it’s so hard to get out of it. It feels like this big company, led by people who don’t respect our professional expertise, is an impossibly heavy burden. So we round off the corners and live to fight another day.
But seriously, is this what we signed up for when we joined our profession? How do we get out of this? For one, we need to stop crossing our fingers and hoping that the next CEO is going to "get it". The change has to start with us. And we are a product of our mindset.
We must see the constraints around us not as impossible barriers, but as the necessary ingredients to re-imagine our approach to the work.
Constraints are, in reality, golden opportunities for us to re-imagine everything – your team’s internal brand, the quality and personality of your creative, budget decisions, channel decisions, etc.
If you have not read “A Beautiful Constraint” by Adam Morgan and Mark Barden, please go get it. Read it or listen to it during the holiday break. I promise you it will illuminate all kinds of profound insights. It’s written for people like us. My favorite chapter is called The Fertile Zero which includes this zinger: “We have no money, so we will have to think.” Man, I love that.
If we find ourselves working in a boring industry making boring widgets and surrounded by unbelievers, we each have a choice to make. We can blame our uninspired work on the boring widgets and the unbelievers, or we can embrace them all as beautiful constraints…as motivation to get back to our roots and rediscover the joy of creating something amazing out of so little.
