Marketing in Real Life

As a parent of a toddler boy, I've often found myself getting so frustrated, to a place I don't like, that I started doing some real self hard thinking about the causes (it’s the research background!). One of the major realizations I've had is that the frustration is in part because "working" with a toddler goes completely against how I spend most of my day as a marketer. And I know I'm not alone. In fact, I've seen lots of friends and colleagues who work with data struggle with toddler thinking. Don't get me wrong, parenting is obviously hard for everyone, but I wonder if it feels even harder for the modern marketer (or researcher) because of the way we are trained. We take pride in using data to identify what works and modifying what doesn’t. Unfortunately, my little dude seems to fall outside the realm of data integrity. Below are four things that are particularly confounding in our dual roles as parent and professional. 1) It's the journ...

As you probably may saw, Facebook turned ten this week and they've been thanking everyone they can reach for helping them get this far.  Businesses got a thank you note and every user got a cool look back video of their own experience with site.  Kudos on both! As a marketing professional, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Facebook.  Without it I would not be where I am today, and that's a fact.  In truth, lots of my friends wouldn't be and we are all grateful as users and as marketers. When I set up my first Facebook Page for Chadwick Martin Bailey I was just checking it out.  A year later we published research on why people like brands on Facebook and began making our way onto sites like Mashable , eMarketer and Wall Street Journal Online .   As a company we started doing more and more around the evolution of marketing and as a marketing team we were out in front of the whole market research industry. As an individual I secured speakin...

There are lots of great articles about how to be a "modern" marketer and even more about how to hire one.  The challenge is that everyone looking for a great job thinks they fit the bill and are eager to spout off catch phrases like Inbound Marketing, Demand Generation, and Content Marketing to impress the uninitiated. While lots of executives at companies of all sizes understand that the marketing landscape is changing, many of them don’t know exactly what they need or what they are looking for. So, how do you know if you or your interviewee fit the bill?     1.      The modern marketer looks at the whole funnel, not just the top of it.   They know the numbers and see acquisition, conversion and retention as their job (note the eMarketer data showing a focus on lead generation).  They think about lead quality not jut lead volume.  And they see working cross-functionally as a blessing, not a hassle. 2. ...