"In programming, there is a culture of calling people out for their bullshit. In most other business cultures, it's a bit less belligerent."
Marketing can be every bit as confrontational, but it's usually more passive aggressive. You'll rarely get called out in a meeting, but you'll get outmaneuvered or back-channeled after the meeting is over.
The field is incredibly political. When I worked in marketing, I felt like I was a character in "Game of Thrones." The constant alliances, shifts, backstabbings, feints, etc., were exhausting. Obviously, a great deal of this depends on company culture. But as general disciplines, marketing and sales seem to attract political types.
Given the choice between the two styles of confrontation, I'd much rather have it out in the room, all agendas laid bare on the table, than have to play GoT every day. But that's just a personal preference.
Can I also add the following things: the passing of the buck, unnecessary competition, brutal micromanagement, since marketing is "easy" everyone feels they are an expert, having to take responsibility for the failures but rarely getting credit for the wins, fighting for resources (even when you have the numbers on your side)...
I think a company where sales and marketing becomes more about politics and less about analysis and creativity is doomed to fail (or at least not achieve its real potential).
ENTIRELY dependent on company culture and this goes back to the lack of performance measurement for marketers. Everyone involved in the process is looking over their shoulders.
If a company values marketing and gives their marketers "free reign" as it were, all is right in the world. When marketers are micromanaged, that Game of Thrones comparison is spot on.
The passive aggressiveness in the industry is suffocating.
The problem isn't so much that marketers don't have concrete and measurable KPIs. They do. But at many companies, marketers affect those KPIs only indirectly. For instance, if you work in marketing for a B2B sales-driven company, it's very hard for the marketers to quantify their performance (whereas it's fairly easy for the salespeople to do so, even if some credit deserves to be shared). Similarly, if you're working in marketing for a retailer, the buyers or operations people will be able to measure sales, profit margins, operational efficiency, etc. Marketing may have a huge impact on several of those metrics, but the marketer doesn't have his or her hand on the lever as directly as the buyer does. Etc.
The problem with the discipline of marketing is that it's often a complementary discipline. It's sort of like the Steve Nash or Magic Johnson of company operations: if it's performing well, it's enhancing the performance of everyone else on the team.
In certain industries, by contrast, marketing rules the roost. The consumer packaged goods (CPG) business, for instance, is directed by marketing. A marketer at a CPG firm, known commonly as a Brand Manager, is exactly that: he or she is running almost every aspect of a major brand. Accordingly, the performance of brand managers is (relatively) easy to measure. You've got sales, margins, market share, etc., and all of them tie fairly directly to your business decisions. Brand management is akin to general management, and many brand managers would argue that what they do is full-spectrum marketing; everyone in marketing in other industries is just performing a subset of what the brand manager does.
I think Apple is a classic example of tech marketing done extremely well. The engineers and designers build some truly outstanding products, but the marketers figure out how to sell those products to customers in equally impressive ways. There is real (and undervalued) skill in taking the set of all features a product has, and winnowing that set down to the perfectly curated and articulated list of benefits. And vice versa: there's real skill involved in figuring out the unarticulated needs of the marketplace ("the problems people don't even know they have").
>When I worked in marketing, I felt like I was a character in "Game of Thrones." The constant alliances, shifts, backstabbings, feints, etc., were exhausting.
Yeah, it's tough for marketers in a different sense. Good marketing it pervasive, but no in your face and blatant. When a marketer is doing a good job, that "work" is not readily apparent because it could have been as simple as having the right conversation at the right time.
My daily struggle is to quantify my accomplishments, it really is too easy to dismiss the "marketing guy".
In programming, there is a culture of calling people out for their bullshit. In most other business cultures, it's a bit less belligerent.