The interviewing process, especially, is often fraught with uncertainty, lacks precision and is highly subjective. The best interviewers realize that capitalizing on that subjectivity is a proven strategy for making informed hiring decisions.

Having worked as both a client-side marketer and in the agency world, I have seen a lot of very different approaches to interviews. From highly structured and formal interviews to more free-form styles; from interviews that focus on practical experience and problem solving to those that try to understand work styles and individual strengths. Given all of these approaches, I have tried to create a way to focus specifically on marketers and the questions that seem to make a difference. 

So there is no confusion: I am not suggesting these questions as a substitute for understanding skills, experience, and other objective qualifications. If you want to hire someone to lead demand generation, it helps if they have done demand generation in the past. (Likewise for any specific discipline within marketing, from creative to social to traditional product marketing.) Make sure you find the most highly qualified people and agencies, and then consider the following to guide your final decision. 

1. What matters most in marketing today?

No. 1 is my “perspective” question, allowing me to understand the breadth of industry knowledge that someone brings to the table. I consider it important for marketers to be able to see that we operate in a very dynamic environment, and many forces outside of traditional marketing channels can shape the work that we do. At the same time—particularly for more junior marketers or those focused on newer channels—an awareness of traditional marketing strategy and tactics is important. 

I am looking for answers to this question that show someone looking outside of their discipline, making connections and seeing trends. Too often, I get answers that are very focused on tactical execution without a nod to the larger strategy and business goals. A more junior marketer gets cut a little slack on this, but every marketer should be able to tie execution to results.

2. How do you deal with failure? 

There are a lot of ways to touch on failure, and I have found approaching it this way avoids a lengthy discussion around the specifics of any particular failure. In today’s “fail fast” execution model, failure is common and every instance is a chance for learning. I use this question to dig a bit deeper, however, and try to find more significant failures and the way in which someone talks about the experience and their response to it.

To me, failure is always an opportunity for growth. Failure can also illuminate personal strengths and weaknesses, especially when someone sees failure as a regular outcome in our business. Talking about failure is also a chance to understand emotional maturity. I always find the way in which people at every level talk about—or don’t talk about—their emotions and the role they play in our business life to be quite telling.

3. Convincingly support both sides of an issue. 

Someone shared this question with me many years ago. This is a critical question for every marketer to be able to think about and address in real time. Marketing is about convincing others that your product or service is worthy of consideration. Being able to take a contrarian point of view helps demonstrate the ability to see all sides of something and to think on your feet.

For more experienced marketers, I tend to pose the question in a more practical manner. I choose a specific social issue they will be familiar with (e.g., soda machines in schools) and ask them to quickly build a marketing campaign in support of it. Once they give a solid answer to that (spending no more than five minutes on this), I then ask them to also build a compelling campaign for the opposing point of view. The insights that come from how effectively someone can argue for both sides and take larger implications into consideration can really illuminate how a marketer thinks.​​

Making good hires is hard work, but investing the effort to build a full picture of each candidate pays dividends later. I look forward to hearing other questions that people rely on to make their hiring decisions.  

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Some experts say that this is an inevitable part of the shift wherein brands are becoming publishers. Others say that the balance between in-house teams and outside creative agencies is a delicate and necessary one. Either way, many top brands are rethinking their strategy. 

Enter Andy Goldberg, the first chief creative officer at Fairfield, Connecticut -based General Electric Co. (GE). He runs GE’s Creative Lab, a department of marketers with the creative license to experiment with new media projects, including a new TV show created for the National Geographic Channel called Breakthrough!, and a serialized, fictional podcast called The Message. Created in partnership with the Slate Group, the podcast was the third most popular podcast on iTunes by its second weekly installment. Goldberg’s GE commercials include “Childlike Imagination,” which was nominated for an Emmy award for outstanding commercial in 2014. Other commercials made under his direction include “The Boy Who Beeps” and the “Owen” series. 

According to Goldberg, the decision to move him from the agency side at Weiden + Kennedy to the brand’s in-house team, and then swiftly move him up to the chief creative officer position, was confirmation that GE is putting more and more emphasis on not just creative works but brand cohesion. Goldberg sat down with Marketing News to talk about how the creative process is changing for global marketing teams, and how thinking of campaigns in terms of B-to-B or B-to-C is quickly becoming outdated.

What led you to marketing?

I majored in marketing, and right out of school, advertising was where I wanted to focus my efforts. I started at a small firm in New York City and was there for almost nine years. It allowed me to get into a lot of different businesses at once. When you’re on the agency side, you learn a lot of other people’s business and because it was a small agency, I had the opportunity to work on a number of the businesses at the same time. I wasn’t stuck on one account for three years. I worked on everything from financial services to the NFL to Godiva chocolate—you name it, it was part of the mix. It was exciting and different. I spent a lot of time with the creatives there, learning production and working with them more than any other account people, but I was also able to learn the business side of how things work. 

From there I went to BBH, which is a great international agency. It was sort of a great time at BBH because when I got there they were just rolling out one of the first epic viral videos, “Tea Partay,” for Smirnoff Spiked Tea. It was incredible to be around that and soak it in.

Then I went to Wieden + Kennedy in New York, then from there went on to be director of product services at a small experiential shop, and that was like an opportunity to run an agency, to be in management. And the past five years have been at GE.

I came into GE as director of creative content. ���������t a year and a half in—and this is where it gets interesting because the rest of my experience was pretty standard agency stuff—I began really working with [GE’s CMO] Beth Comstock and BBDO, our ad agency, defining what our positioning would be going forward, taking a really strategic role in developing what at the time we called GE Works, doing documentary style work and ad work. … After about a year of really working that and coming up with new ideas and evolving what the work really was, I got deeply involved with the creative team at BBDO, really working on new forms and new platforms and new ways to express ourselves. 

What did it mean, at the time, to head up the ‘creative’ department at GE?

I was responsible for the media, and I was truly directing creative and working with the agency and really figuring out the strategy and positioning. Obviously there are creatives working on the ideas themselves from the genesis of it, just like any agency, but I was truly determining which was the best, how to add to it and what was going to make it grow and give it life. More recently I started running a group called the Creative Lab where it was digital content, branding, strategy, experiential, advertising and media working together. That was to round out our whole offering to one system and make it much more cohesive around how we go to market with our strategy and work. That’s how I got into this role recently, being chief creative officer—GE’s first creative officer—to really help define how we go to market. What is our strategic position, but more importantly, how do I up our game creatively to stay ahead of the curve? 

We launched a podcast called “The Message” through our GE Podcast Theater, and it’s a narrative, fictional podcast that, very much like any well-done podcast out there, is an eight-episode story. I had to ask how we do something fundamentally different in storytelling. That’s the type of thing that goes beyond just the advertising. That’s where this next round goes. We just launched a TV show called Breakthrough! on the National Geographic Channel. That’s what this new role is entailing: figuring out how the strategy will marry up to new forms of creative expression and how we guide that through the system, whether it’s through the team here or agencies that we work with.

GE has worked to find that balance between B-to-B and B-to-C messaging and storytelling. While you’re marketing massive commercial verticals, you have a very public-facing image and brand recognition. What was your directive in terms of finding that balance?

It’s not actually about finding a balance in there because while we’re technically a B-to-B brand, we’re a business-to-human brand. At the end of the day I’m talking to people. If you’re a business person, a consumer, a viewer who is watching TV or a tech enthusiast, if you’re following us on Instagram, you’re human. That’s where most brands, especially a brand like GE, have the ability to connect. When people want to engage with a brand, it’s because they’re doing it on a personal level. Everyone in their soul is human. They’re people, and they want to connect, they want to be talked to, they want to be story-told to. That’s how we are, that’s how we’re wired. 

I don’t think about it like, ‘I have to get out my B-to-B message,’ which is different than my B-to-C message, which is different than my broad-based message. The guy who’s sitting in his office is the same guy who’s going to be sitting on his couch watching football. You don’t go home and become a different person. Reach that person, talk to that person that way, be human with them. Connect to them on a regular basis versus trying to define someone differently. That’s been the directive, and that’s how I think about it. When you think about doing a TV show and an ad, something online, a digital content piece, or a podcast, they all are fundamentally different because you think, How is someone going to engage with it in that medium? 

Talk about the commercial ‘Childlike Imagination’ and how it represents that content philosophy. 

GE is a very complex business—lots of different verticals, story lines, lots of different efforts going on. It’s always hard to encapsulate everything GE does into one creative piece, almost impossible. But BBDO came up with the idea for “Childlike” off of the systemic ask to tell the story of all that GE does. And what really works about “Childlike” is in its core, it’s a simple idea. It’s a little girl talking about what her mom does every day. But even closer to that is the DNA that comes through about what GE is. … What she says and what we tried to capture in the spot is what is pure about our tagline, our DNA, which is “Imagination at work.” You could have done that same execution with adults talking about the reality of their work in a very B-to-B setting and corporate world, and it would have lost all of the emotion, all of the connection, all of the essence of why it works. When you capture that emotion, capture that love and true imagination and do it in an unexpected way that isn’t corporate-y, you’ve told the ultimate story of a big corporation in a beautiful, human way. As great as the story is, it also comes down to incredible teamwork, incredible partners, and fantastic production skills. That idea could be so poorly produced, but it was so beautifully produced. And the line there is very fine.

You’re the first chief creative officer of GE. What does that mean about the weight that a company like GE is placing on creative? 

It shows a few things. First, it shows the value of creative work. GE is a powerful, big, important brand. We do big, important things, and to put the value there on something like creativity, and having a chief creative officer to drive that, says that just having great products isn’t enough, or just having great service isn’t enough. Having the ability to tell our story and do it in a way that reaches multiple audiences, [and doing it] in a way that engages people and makes them feel good about the brand … is extremely valuable to the future of the company. 

All too often you can get caught up in the product in front of you versus the story that the product can deliver. And the senior leadership here, especially Jeff Immelt and Beth Comstock, really believe in the story of the brand and the value that creative brings to it, and the value you can put on work that tells that story. This is something we value and something we want to put energy behind. … It’s great to have that confidence coming from the top.

What does this move toward storytelling mean for marketing in general? 

In the next two or three years, the landscape is changing. You need experts in verticals. You need subject matter experts and then you need some experts who can see the bigger picture of a whole landscape. Media and creative are changing. It’s funny, we’ve been in this trajectory of technology and media dictating how stories are told. I feel like were now re-balancing, [and] the story and creative itself are going to help dictate where the technology will go. It’s a balance I’ve seen happen, and it’ll recalibrate. That’s the directive, that’s the goal: staying ahead of the curve and being unexpected and pushing the envelope of what great creative is, what great media is. It’s developing new ways and new pathways that are more than just what’s offered in the marketplace, but creating our way to tell our story. At the end of the day, that’s what I want to do. It’s creative, but it’s creative across everything: across media and brand and the actual storytelling. I don’t look at it as one thing, I look at it as an amalgamation of how you tell the one GE story so that it becomes clear to the marketplace, but do it in the right way so you’re not repeating yourself. 

GE Creative Lab is a team of branding, media, digital content and programming, experiential, and advertising and content development. The lab is a place where people have a directive to tell the story of GE, and bring that to life through those mediums, to experiment and to try new things. I don’t know if that happens unless we call ourselves a lab and have the ability to try things out and test them and see how they work. If you don’t make your team a place of experimentation, then you create strict roles: One person will be in charge of advertising and they’ll only come up with advertising ideas. That is limiting. The lab opens up other possibilities. It also allows different businesses within a larger company like GE to call upon my group to help them out for quick creative projects. Our goal is to incubate new ideas.

What’s in store for the next few months of your new role? You’ve said that you want to be a part of creating the next GE. What does that mean, and how does creativity help with that?

We’re working on some ideas now: There’s the story in the “Owen” commercials out there right now, about us becoming a digital industrial company, so we have to keep telling that story. Also, how do you explain the benefit of the multiple businesses and knowledge share that goes on within GE? Those are the two big initiatives from a strategic standpoint. From a creative standpoint, I don’t know yet. The other goal is to be truly global. We operate on a global mentality, but it’s not fully global yet and we’re working to make our stuff integrated across the board. 

“One GE” is about speaking from a similar voice and knowing that there is one GE. When you think about GE, there’s one GE and then there’re businesses within GE. If someone sees a jet engine or a health care machine or a piece of content, I want them to feel like there’s a creative essence behind it. At our core, we are “imagination at work”: We are inventing and making the world work better. And that story, no matter where you experience it, should come from one GE and not different GEs. You shouldn’t feel like you’re experiencing different brands.​�ċ�ċ

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At a time when our marketing lexicon has turned into techno-speak with terms—content, search optimization,  click-through, impressions, etc.—it seems to have simultaneously given rebirth to a vocabulary of less hardened and more ethereal words, including emotion, authenticity and story.

We have known all along that creative marketing campaigns and a rigorous sales approach are key to generating and closing a sale. We also know that sometimes you can bring a horse to water but you can’t make it drink, or so the saying goes. While our creative content and messaging may successfully stimulate prospects to fill their (online) shopping cart, they will often abandon the sale at the key moment of truth (checkout). While there are myriad reasons for purchase trepidation seeping into the buyer’s consciousness, we do know that if a trusted source has recommended the given product or service, the final purchase probability increases dramatically. In fact, a Nielsen study found that 92% of consumers believe recommendations from friends and family over all other forms of advertising. This phenomenon is the same in the B-to-B market: Ad Age cited that 61% of IT buyers report that a colleague’s recommendation was the most important factor when reaching a purchase decision.

That’s where the customer story comes in. It creates a reverse path to purchase.  Experiential marketing is all about identifying and utilizing the key emotive drivers that will translate into a gratifying customer experience—one that will be retold and positively reinforce your brand promise.

Think about it. In choosing between brand A or brand B, would you rather trust advertising claims, those dubious product review sites, or the word of a respected friend or colleague? We all know that a trusted referral is the most effective buying influence, yet are we doing all that we can to capture, package and amplify our customer stories? In the pre-Internet world, our customer stories, for better or worse, were limited in their reach and, consequentially, in their overall business impact. But today, a crafty marketer has an arsenal of experiential marketing tools at her disposal, including the company’s website, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and a host of other mediums to transmit not just your story in more compelling terms, but the customer’s story as well.

The story is the by-product of the customer experience, retold within a specific emotional context. Storytelling is the interactive art of using words and actions to reveal the elements and images of a story while encouraging the listeners’ imagination. Of course, stories can cut both ways. They can represent a marketer’s dream or worst nightmare. Take, for example, a recent story I heard about senior a executive’s frustrating airline experience. According to her, a certain low-cost airline charged her to select a seat, print a boarding pass at the gate and check an extra bag. The executive was so angry that she cancelled her return trip and booked a flight on another airline. In addition, she’s told dozens of people about her experience and never plans to use the airline’s services again. How would you like to be the head of marketing or customer experience and have to deal with that PR nightmare? 

As marketers and stewards of the company’s brand, we must work with our counterparts across the organization to lay out a journey that will produce positive emotions across the entire customer lifecycle and all interactions. Make the customer the protagonist, and encourage or incent them to engage and manage their experience in a gratifying way. Then let their story unfold and be told, and watch your business prosper. 

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Marketing News caught up with Peterson to discuss her recruiting experience and the skills today’s marketers need to take their careers to the next level.

Q: How did your experience in direct marketing and media planning and buying help you transition into a recruiting role, and, eventually, to starting your own recruiting firm?

A: It helped me to have a background in advertising and marketing, which is my passion. Having the media buying and planning exposure, direct marketing exposure and agency experience—as well as experience on the client side—gave me the background that I needed when I fell into recruiting. When I found that recruiting was the area I wanted to be in, it was extremely helpful to understand our clients’ needs by having my own background in advertising and marketing.

Q: How have the skills that marketing recruiters are looking for changed, or stayed the same, since you launched your firm?

A: Before, it was much broader. When you’re narrowing it down to different disciplines, when I first started, direct response was print, direct mail and direct-response TV, and now it’s about digital and direct marketing calls to action that you’re extending to your audience. My clients now are looking for less of a broad base. They’re looking for someone to have good digital skills, who is dedicated to social. What clients are looking for is much more targeted. They want the candidates to fit those specifications as much as possible. When I first started, it was more about, ‘Get me a warm body with a broad base of marketing skills.’ Now, people want marketers with definite experience in the areas they’re looking for. They’re not always as willing as they were in 1999—when I started my firm—to accept a broader base skill set. 

Q: What career advice do you have for today’s marketers in attracting recruiters or potential employers?

A: Candidates need to do their homework, whether they’re going through a recruiter or doing it on their own. Look at what the competitors are doing. Recruiters may be able to give you some good information, but doing your homework is very important. When you’re on an interview, be professional, be on time. Send thank-you notes, which a lot of people don’t do. Once hired, make sure everyone feels that you’re going to roll up your sleeves and jump in and not be a clock-watcher. 

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Q: Tell me about your experiences in the marketing recruitment field. What has changed throughout the course of your career?

A: I don’t think there’s been a tremendous amount that’s changed in what people have looked for in sales or marketing professionals. Obviously the technology has changed, and what companies are doing has changed at a rapid rate. Recruiting used to be about access. It used to be about a rolodex of contacts that a person has accumulated throughout their career, and, as long as you had access to talent, you provided something of value to your client. Access is still important today, but recruiting isn’t about access anymore. If you have a LinkedIn account, you have the ability to get access to the same tools that every firm in the marketplace is using, whether they want to tell you the truth or not. Access isn’t what our business is about. Our business is about marketing, being able to identify, engage, position and sell our client’s opportunity to the candidate pool. That has changed drastically. Because access is everywhere, there’s so much competition and people have more connectivity and more options. Recruiters have to be really good at crafting the message about who their client is and go out in the marketplace and identify the number of people that match that profile and engage with them. When they do engage, you have to be able to capitalize on that conversation and convert them into interested candidates. That’s the real paradigm shift we’ve seen in the last five to 10 years in the recruiting industry.

Q: What are sales and marketing recruiters looking for in an ideal candidate? 

A: In sales and marketing, the search changes from client to client. A few of the commonalities that always stay the same are that we’re looking for really high-impact individuals: A person who is able to bring both quantitative as well as qualitative data to the conversation. Qualitative data in the sense that they’ve experienced great things in their professional career and they have great accomplishments to talk about, and they can weave that story. Quantitative data is really the results that they’ve been able to drive in their organization. In the world of marketing, that’s become so paramount. With all of the new platforms in the world of marketing, and the ability to measure activity, there’s really no room for fluff anymore. We want to see both a marketer that understands how to connect with their consumer and also knows how to analyze and drive the data that shows what they’ve been able to do. When I say ‘high-impact,’ I mean someone who can tell a really impactful story about what they were asked to do, what the strategy would be, how they pulled through the strategy, and the quantitative results at the end of the day. 

Finding holistic marketers is becoming harder and harder, and the marketing function is fragmenting more every year. There are more technical specializations, and each marketer has to know their specific area of focus, be highly specialized and have great technical aptitude. As they rise up the chain, they need to be able to understand how all of the parts of the system work together. They don’t necessarily have to be an expert in that one particular area, but they definitely have to be able to pull together internal and external teams, and get everybody focused in a common direction and understand how all of these levers have to be pulled in order to effectuate the desired outcome. 

Q: What skills or experience are your clients asking for when it comes to new sales or marketing talent? 

A: Digital [experience] obviously is one of the most common that we run into in the marketplace. The major areas are paid media and paid search, and SEM experts. We hear a tremendous amount about research and analytics roles: Data science, consumer insights and marketing analytics positions are very hot in the marketplace right now. Understanding the digital ecosystem and the full digital stack and how it works together is important. Content and content marketing is something that we’ve seen more and more of in the last 12 months, and it’s because companies don’t know how to distribute their content. They don’t know all of the different channels at their disposal. People have been creating content for years, so that’s not really the problem. It’s how you build a process to understand what your consumer wants to read and how to get it in front of them in an appropriate manner.

Q: What’s your advice for marketers for beefing up their career experience, LinkedIn profiles and résumés to advance their careers and make themselves more attractive to recruiters and potential employers?

A: Anybody who is looking to make a career move has to have a vision of where they want to go. A former CEO told me, ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will take you there.’ If you don’t know where you want to go, then you have no idea how to make decisions based on future career opportunities. You have to have an end goal. It could be long term, a CMO positon or a CEO position, but you have to have an end goal and the steps to get there. You have to be able to have a career mindset that’s not married to title, rank or authority, but more so married to skill sets and opportunity. You have to be on the lookout for opportunity because if you’re not, it will present itself and you won’t respond to that e-mail or take that phone call. You have to put yourself in a position where, no matter what the situation is, you will do your best to engage in an open dialogue with the external world that will allow you to keep your ear on the marketplace and see opportunities. Ultimately, something will come across your desk that gets you excited. Don’t shut yourself off. Have a real idea of where you want to go, and do your best to plan your career in that sense. If you do that, you’ll make more good career decisions than bad. 

Build your résumé around the stories—the things you accomplished—and the numbers. That thing should read like a baseball card. If a person is going into an interview process and they have a technical specialization with paid media, that person needs to have put a lot of thought into what they’ve done in their past, the technical areas they’ve worked to develop, and how the organizations used their technical skills to drive results. When someone goes into an interview, eight times out of 10, they know more about their individual specialization than the person sitting across the table, and if they don’t communicate what they’ve done and how they did it, they could lose their audience. You could be an overachiever in that role, but because there’s an information gap between the interviewer and the person being interviewed, some talent falls between the cracks. So when you’re going into an interview process, take control of your own destiny.

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In fact, 86% of consumers say that personalization impacts whether or not they make a purchase, according to CMO.com. From bricks-and-mortar retailers to e-commerce giants to independent local stores, there’s no denying that personalized engagement can play a huge role in helping marketing teams reach their campaign goals.

Marketers are well aware of the need for personalization. Adobe reports that more than 82% of marketers view personalization as a crucial element to e-mail communication. Yet many are struggling to figure out how to make an otherwise automated process more personal and engaging, relying on static segments and basic demographics. There is a clear disconnect in the digital data sea of social media identities, newsletters, customer information, purchase orders, social shares, product reviews and customer service requests. With many companies storing this information in inaccessible data silos, this disconnect is keeping brands from engaging with their customers on a more personal level.

Simple demographics, such as location, birthday or gender, offer only a one-dimensional view and don’t provide insight into customer behavior. Layering in purchase history helps to create a more complete view, but this two-dimensional view still doesn’t paint a full picture of preferences, needs and opportunities. Frequency of visits, purchase volume, social shares, product reviews, returns and calls to customer service are gathered and analyzed by company departments individually, but brands completely overlook the need to combine this information. Such integration is vital to creating a 360-degree view of your audience. In order to drive meaningful, more personalized marketing campaigns, CMOs need to break down internal department silos that are perpetuating this sea of data fragmentation and create real-time, actionable consumer segments from that unified data to simplify the personalization process. Here’s how. 

1. Rethink internal team structure and bring everyone to the table. 

While 82% of CMOs say that they struggle with cross-channel performance, few are actually doing something to improve their efforts. Adding IT specialists, customer service reps and sales reps into marketing teams is a first step to creating a comprehensive view of who your customers really are and how you should treat them.

Accountability needs to be at the CMO level. Without a doubt, personalized marketing is a necessity for CMOs, but many are missing the mark when it comes to better understanding their customers. The influx of data about a company’s customers is being stored and analyzed in a silo (if at all). Marketers must approach personalized marketing in a more integrated way. Customer service reps, IT teams and marketing execs all need to be at the table to discuss personalized marketing tactics to drive seamless customer experiences and relevant messaging—all factors crucial to transforming a one-time customer into a brand enthusiast. 

2. More relevant marketing. 

As companies better understand their audiences, CMOs and CIOs should work together to create a seamless online experience for their customers. A recent Microsoft study revealed that 46% of consumers use multiple devices to accomplish a single task. Consumers want to make purchases on their laptops but browse products and engage on social media using mobile devices. Brands must provide the same kind of experience and messages for mobile phone or laptop users as they would for an individual using a customer service live chat. Although traditional silos may see each of these interactions separately, they all tie back to the same person. Companies may have many identities for a single customer—an e-mail address, a social follower, a customer, etc.—but that customer sees a single brand, not departments. One weak link or bad experience with a single department can tarnish the brand’s reputation as a whole. As customers increasingly demand seamless brand experiences, now is the time to make smarter marketing decisions. According to MarketingCharts.com, 52% of customers feel that brand messages aren’t relevant to their interests. Who wants to receive an e-mail advertisement about a product they recently returned? And a “Happy Mother’s Day” e-mail is wasted effort on a father. These kinds of automated marketing faux pas can make or break your brand but are avoidable with integrated data and unified customer segments.

As companies implement an integrated approach to personalized marketing, sophisticated consumer information needs to be synced across all marketing tools. It is absolutely crucial that there is a single truth of defining and naming customer segments. Those need to be synced with all of a brand’s marketing solutions. This will help drive more strategic segmentation efforts to improve messaging, content and digital marketing strategies. With a clearer customer view, marketers are able to identify what information is relevant to social media followers, website users, e-mail recipients and store visitors—delivering the right message in the right place at the right time. 

3. Think about the “Starbucks experience.” 

No matter where you go in the world, you can order the same drink the same way, whether you like it with light foam, half the caffeine or a “shot in the dark,” you can get your personalized Starbucks drink from any Starbucks in the world.

Consumers expect the same experience from every company, no matter if they shop digital or make an in-store purchase. Customer service representatives require a comprehensive view of a customer’s history with the brand, corporate messaging and current promotions. Developers need to know what kind of products are being purchased, by whom, at what time and where. No matter what department the customer is interacting with, she must receive the same personalized treatment. Only by calling an end to traditional, siloed marketing departments and creating cohesive consumer experiences can brands truly elevate their marketing efforts to create meaningful, personalized experiences.  

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As a résumé writer and career strategist, I wonder if résumés will evolve to the point that emojis will be acceptable. After all, one of the primary objectives of a résumé is to communicate in a concise manner, and a picture does paint a thousand words. What shows more passion and enthusiasm for a job than the “smiling” emoji? Emojis might also become a tool for hiring managers to evaluate potential employees, since they can be a very direct way of accepting or rejecting candidates, ranging from the “thumbs up” to the “thumbs down” emoji. And should you decide to reject a job offer, there is always the “walking” emoji.  

On the record, I must advise you that as of today, emoji, emoticons and other graphic characters are not acceptable on résumés. Adopting emojis will give the impression that you are immature and not familiar with current résumé standards. If you are serious about getting a job, skip the emoji.

I admit that times are changing. It is not inconceivable that emojis or something similar will make their way into mainstream business communications, including résumés. I will be on stand-by with my “open hands” emoji waiting for that day.

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But for those of us who’ve worked hard to find success, true nuggets of career wisdom are more than just inspirational platitudes—they’re career-defining mantras.

Marketing News tapped 12 in​dustry leaders, from advertisers to academics, to share the advice that’s guided them throughout their careers. Read on for the indispensable wisdoms and hard-won lessons that have formed the foundation of their success. They might just propel you to make the next big career leap.

Diana Smith, Director of Marketing, Segment

 used to comb through customer support call records looking for insights in user frustrations and questions. As a marketer, she knew that customer feedback would be the currency with which she could buy into the user experience conversation. “In marketing you’re always trying to get a certain message to a certain audience, but a lot of people think too much about themselves. […] It’s really important to have empathy.”  

Smith became adept at understanding the interests of her audience when she worked in public relations. Earning media for clients wasn’t a matter of asking for placement in a newspaper, it was about demonstrating value for journalists. The same follows for marketing, she says. “We talk a lot at about how we can write utilitarian content for people.” Smith applied that philosophy when she overhauled the company’s blog. When she found it, the blog was a mixed bag of content, trying to do too many different things at once. She reined it in by figuring out what brought readers to the site, what they wanted to read, and producing more of it.

“Empathy will always come back to interpersonal connections” – Diana Smith

Cathy Davis, Executive Vice President, Leo Burnett

Six years ago,  saw the rise of social media and decided she wanted to learn it, experience it and master it. She didn’t know anyone who was any good at it, so she bought Twitter for Dummies. Today, she has 20,000 followers and has been named on the Forbes Must-follow Marketing Minds list. Although sending her first tweet was scary—“I was horrified. I thought, What if I say something people don’t like? What if I sound stupid?”—Davis followed her own advice and learned by pushing herself to try the things she wasn’t comfortable doing. With the disruption that nearly every industry is facing as the world becomes more mobile, Davis says that stretching your limits will make you better, smarter and more equipped to deal with change.

“Change used to be incremental. It’s exponential now, and you need to get out in front of it.” – Cathy Davis

Chris Wollen, CMO, Droga5

, a self-professed ski bum who hadn’t yet started climbing the corporate ladder, was working in a Colorado hotel when a guest asked him to fax some advertising storyboards to New York. Wollen followed the revisions and iterations of the story throughout the guest’s stay, and by the end, his interest was piqued. Before the guest checked out, Wollen made him an offer: a beer for some candid conversation about the advertising industry. 

After his chat with the guest, Wollen headed east with a plan to make a profession out of answering the questions that mattered to him: What moves people? What makes them get up in the morning? “I found so interesting the fact that [the answers to those questions] could have a business result,” he says.

At BBH New York, Wollen got the chance to answer those questions in a big way when he took over what was, at the time, a flagship account for the agency. His predecessor, who briefed him on the client, gave him perhaps the simplest but truest advice he’d use in this industry: “In a cheeky way, he said, ‘The only thing that matters is that you do great work,’ ” Wollen recalls. At the time, the guidance seemed nebulous, but Wollen came to appreciate how accurate it was and how it has only become truer as the industry has evolved. “We live in a world now where consumers can fast-forward,” he says. “You have to create a brand that people want to pay attention to. If you think about a lot of the ads we see right now, they might be informative … but do they really speak to you? Do you really care? Or is it just a lot of noise? A lot of what we make doesn’t get attention. If you confront that, you’ll hold your work to a much higher standard.”

“The only thing that matters is that you do great work.” – Chris Wollen

Rohit Bhargava, Founder, Influential Marketing Group

In Australia, where  spent two years working for Leo Burnett, it’s common practice to sit in the front seat of a cab—a symbolic way of saying that you and the driver are equals. For Bhargava, this small gesture is just one example of the many daily interactions that can help you build and enforce your ideals, both professional and personal. “Reputation is something you spend a long time building for yourself, and every interaction has the ability to increase it or decrease it,” he says.

Bhargava has earned his reputation as a marketing expert by providing high-level strategy consulting and publishing forward-looking content for business decision making. His 15 Trends book series inspired a workshop, increasing his recognition as a thought leader. After more than 10 years developing the insights and gaining the experience he needed to be a valued advisor, he decided to go into business for himself in 2012. 

Risk-taking is often a practice of the young, but Bhargava says that the older he gets, the more comfortable he’s become with taking smart risks. ’s success would have been a lot more precarious had Bhargava not founded it knowing exactly where his first five clients would come from, and that certainty is the direct result of his commitment to a humble reputation. “I heard someone say, ‘If you meet someone who is nice to you but mean to the waiter, they’re not a nice person,’ ” says Bhargava. “I think the way you treat people—no matter how big you get or how many stages you spend time on—is a big part of the reputation you build for yourself.” 

“Reputation is something you spend a long time building for yourself, and every interaction has the ability to increase it or decrease it.” -Rohit Bhargava

​

Vala Afshar, Chief Digital Evangelist, Salesforce

Afshar’s life changed at a Salesforce conference in 2010. Before he was ever tasked with digital evangelism for the CRM powerhouse, Afshar was one of its clients. He had won awards for sales and customer service, but the day he heard CEO Marc Benioff tout the game-changing advantages of social networking for business made him question how effective he really was at converting operational excellence into customer satisfaction. “I realized as much as I was an accessible manager—I would walk around the office and use traditional communication methods—I didn’t have continuous and long-lasting relationships with customers and partners using technologies or social networks,” Afshar says. To best serve the customer, Benioff had said, Afshar needed a deeper understanding of his internal customers. He needed to be knowledgeable and share that knowledge. 

In less than five years, Afshar went from having no digital footprint to recognition as the most influential CMO on Twitter by Venture Beat, one of InformationWeek’s top 10 social business leaders, and the No. 2 most retweeted digital marketer by TopRank Online Marketing. It may seem like a giant leap, but Afshar says the process was incremental. “I consider myself an introvert, and I needed those baby steps before feeling I could add value to folks outside [my business],” Afshar says. “The only way you can score is if you’re in the game, so you have to have the courage to suit up. If you’re in business, you have to go where the conversation is. In this digital era, your customers are connected [online].” 

In this connected-customer revolution, as Afshar calls it, the challenge for marketers is how to be where the customers are and how to intelligently add value to the conversation. According to Pew Research Center, . For Afshar, that makes the Web the battleground for customer experience, and the only way to gain ground there is to take the first step and seize it. ​

“The only way you can score is if you’re in the game, so you have to have the courage to suit up.” – Vala Afshar

John Young, Senior Vice President of Analytic Consulting,​ Epsilon

When  first interviewed at Epsilon, he was rejected. Coming from an economics background, he foresaw the demand for analytics professionals and knew he could be a valuable part of that. He just had to convince the global marketing company of the same.

What he lacked in a marketing background, he made up for with a clear objective. He made incremental moves to set himself up for his next opportunity with Epsilon, which came in 1994 after he’d spent some time applying quantitative techniques to direct mail campaigns with Digitas (then Bronner Slosberg Humphrey). This time Young got the job, but he found that communicating value would continue to be imperative in his career. “I learned you can’t give up believing in yourself and being your own biggest advocate because no one else will do it for you,” he says.

Young says the ability to tell stories and evangelize your work is a critical enabler that will mean a big difference in marketers’ success, particularly those working in analytics. “Those who thrive in this business can put what they produce in terms customers can understand and get excited about,” he says. “It’s not enough to be a quant jock.”

“You can’t give up believing in yourself and being your own biggest advocate because no one else will do it for you.” – John Young

John Osborn, CEO, BBDO

Growing up, —the CEO of BBDO New York—learned responsibility as the man of his three-person household. “[That experience] imprinted on me … what it means to live in an era of responsibility, what your word truly means and living up to it,” Osborn says.

When defining his personal brand as an adult, it’s important that he lives up to his own product description, so to speak. That means tempering his appetite for purpose-driven work in the interest of following through on a few projects rather than scratching the surface of many. “One of my own learnings has been to be honest with myself and make sure I’m keeping my focus on those things I can influence in the most significant way,” he says. “I’ve learned there are things you can really affect, and things you can’t. As an individual, I can’t be a salve for the world economy, but I can focus my limited energy and time on those things I can influence.”

At BBDO, Osborn has focused his energy on learning from every experience, whether that lesson is how to bounce back from adversity () or that success has no finish line. After nearly 30 years in advertising, Osborn admits he still doesn’t know it all. “Just when you think you’ve wrapped your head around something, the world moves forward,” he says.

“Make sure to be a part of [your] journey in the moment—rather than focusing on the destination—because the journey is everything.” – John Osborn

Gabrielle Martinez, Managing Partner, AgencyEA

 always wanted to find a way to connect with others. She came from a family of entrepreneurs, and whether she was at her grandfather’s cobbler shop or the family restaurant, she learned first-hand to take initiative and write her own success story.

Although her company, , now serves such clients as the Obamas, Target and GE, Martinez’s goals were once less defined and her determination a bit misdirected. She left law school after her first year—an important step that forced her to reaffirm her passions. “Those passions and my natural strengths are the … pillars I have built my business on,” she says. 

Martinez returned to her roots, in a sense. She applied her background in event planning to work as an experiential and event marketer. AgencyEA differentiates itself by pushing the boundaries of creativity, and Martinez reflects that relentless pursuit in her best piece of advice:

“With hard work, grit and a positive mindset, anything can be achieved.” – Gabrielle Martinez

Lauren McCadney, Director of Digital Engagement and Social Media, CDW

Someone said to  recently, “You really love social media.” A harmless enough comment for CDW’s director of digital engagement and social media, but to McCadney that evaluation was short-sighted. “I don’t love social media,” she thought. “I love marketing and the whole idea of persuasion, and I’m going to go wherever the customer in the market takes me.

“One of the things I haven’t done is define my career by just one aspect of what it means to market or persuade,” she says. “Stay curious, and don’t settle.”

One of McCadney’s mottos is “inspect what you expect,” meaning that every assumption deserves to be proven, and proven again if the proof is dated. When she came to CDW, McCadney led marketing for small businesses and was working with lots of one-person IT teams. What she found when she conducted focus groups with them was that they did not want to talk to the moderator, but rather, they talked to one another. “The lightbulb went on for me,” McCadney says. “It was very clear among small businesses that there was a desire to talk to their peers, share stories, gather learnings and offer their perspective to help someone else along.” McCadney predicted that conversation would eventually live online and that CDW would need to think differently about where and how it engaged with customers.

McCadney continues to inspect not just CDW’s customers and how their needs are changing, but the needs of her profession and how she can adjust to meet them. “The industry has changed so incredibly much since I started, and I’ve tried to change along with it.”

“Stay curious, and don’t settle.” – Lauren McCadney

Deborah Small, Professor of Marketing and Psychology, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

 earned her Ph.D. in behavioral decision sciences after studying the science of decision making as an undergrad, at a time when the field was small and relatively unknown. (Her friends and relatives assumed she was trying to be the next Sigmund Freud.) She was intrigued by the application of decision-making insights. “I never intended to end up in marketing, but as I learned more about the field it became increasingly apparent that it was a logical direction to go in.”

Particularly in business, there is a desire for applying action-oriented insights, but those applications are only as sound as the methodology they are based on, Small says.

“There are a lot of marketing gurus and self-help books purporting to tell you how to be a good marketer. Their ideas might be good, but we don’t know unless we test them.” – Deborah Small

Andy Crestodina, Co-founder and Strategic Director, Orbit Media Studios

At 43, one of Crestodina’s biggest regrets is that he didn’t start Facebook. He was in college when the Internet was born. Had he started earlier, he could have 100,000 Twitter followers by now. “I love what I do, but in hindsight, we all could have begun sooner and grown a larger audience more quickly had we been paying attention,” he says. Generation X has some of the biggest regrets because they were all there when social media was born, and any of them could have started it. At the same time, they’re all self-taught, says Crestodina, so they have the confidence to learn new skills. Crestodina has made a practice of identifying the skills he’ll need tomorrow and learning them today. Or in his own words, “I have 2,400 hours this year. Where will I be after 2,400 hours? Last year doesn’t matter. All that matters are the opportunities in front of you.”

 used to be the name of Crestodina’s shuttered comic book business. Today it’s an award-winning Web design and development firm. Initially, Orbit was delivering Web design for clients, but Crestodina realized quickly that he needed to improve SEO and track analytics to truly create value. Half a decade later, he saw his clients’ need for more touchpoints with communication, so he incorporated blogging and newsletters into the business. All these tactics came together as content marketing. “It wasn’t a real plan. I was an early practitioner who … built audiences and evolved as a teacher,” he says. 

A critical element of this evolution has been Crestodina’s willingness to constantly revisit common knowledge, and he recommends that all marketers do the same. “I watch people make decisions based on preference every day without understanding the risk of that,” he says.  

He may not have launched the first great social media platform—admittedly, he showed up late to the social media party even as a user—but Crestodina has built a reputation as a marketing expert and influencer.

“All that matters are opportunities in front of you.” -Andy Crestodina

Kimi Abdullah, Director of Marketing and Operations, Creative Niche

Whenever  has stared down a professional risk, she’s always asked herself one question: What’s the worst that could happen? Abdullah began her career with  working behind the front desk, and through a series of opportunities she took the chances that landed her in the marketing department.

The company had no marketing function when Abdullah joined, which meant everything from e-newsletters to sales enablement was an experiment. “We’re a small company, so a lot of our growth relies on our team’s ability to be resourceful and their willingness to jump in and try new things,” she says. Being something of a perfectionist, Abdullah initially approached her work with an apprehension for tasks she wasn’t sure she’d excel at. “I think fear of not knowing something or not doing it right really holds us back,” she says. “I really had to train myself out of that.”

In just under 10 years, Abdullah has carved out her place at Creative Niche. Along the way, she may have watched her peers in other businesses and industries chase the same goals down different paths or at different speeds, but she’s also shed her anxiety about her progress along the way. “We have a tendency to compare ourselves to other people, but the truth is that everyone’s on their own journey,” she says. “The most important thing is to serve your brand and company by putting in your best effort, finding solutions and making change happen, and all the rest will follow.”

“We have a tendency to compare ourselves to other people, but the truth is that everyone’s on their own journey.” – Kimi Abdullah

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​Customer insights are an essential element in any marketing plan. Insights give rise to innovations, new go-to-market strategies and new business models. They can also produce critical tactical-level improvements in marketing activities.  

So it is disappointing that the February 2016 edition of The , which surveyed 289 U.S.-based marketing leaders, finds that those marketers report a slight reduction in their companies’ development and use of customer insights, compared to data from 2011 to the present. If customer insights are so important, why aren’t these numbers increasing? Here are twelve culprits worth a good look: 

1 Weak theory development skills. 

Developing insights requires strong theory development skills. This means that managers must connect disparate observations and information obtained from various sources and methods to derive novel explanations about customers. 

2 Unreceptive organization.

As much as companies say they want insights, companies are known to suffer from status quo bias. A great deal of research shows that managers reject information that challenges their existing expectations. It’s difficult for insights to penetrate such a mentality. 

3 Same methods, same insights. 

Companies are often entrenched in existing methods for developing insights, including the steps taken, who takes them, when they are taken and how the results are handled. These routines serve a useful purpose in the ongoing production of insights. However, routines are also “sticky” and they can interfere with the development of new methods for producing and using insights. Related, it is easier for vendors to sell existing, off-the-shelf insights tools to firms than to develop new techniques that generate unique insights. Both of these tendencies work companies into a “same methods, same insights cycle” that can dampen performance in this area. 

4 Own-industry bias. 

Managers often believe that they can only learn about marketing from companies in their own industries. There is indeed a great deal to learn there, but there may be even more to learn from firms across other industries. Marketing processes, such as segmentation, targeting, positioning, pricing and market intelligence, can transfer effectively across industries. Likewise, the effective development and leveraging of insights can be learned by studying best practices of firms in a wide range of industries. 

5 Managers don’t observe customers. 

This may sound like Marketing 101 but it’s a good bet that it has been a while since most managers actually observed their customers using products and services. This observation should extend into what Erich Joachimsthaler calls the “demand landscape” to include a customer’s environment that produces, involves or results from the use of products and services. For example, when do I decide to go to a movie at a cinema instead of watching a movie at home? What is happening at home or in my life that prompts this decision? 

6 Insights are difficult to leverage. 

If an insight is not something that can be translated into action, its value is limited. Looking for insights that are closer to choice behavior is one way to improve the translation likelihood. An insight may involve understanding that a certain consumer behavior triggers a purchase. For example, the culture and environment at the Fuqua School of Business is so impressively positive and friendly to prospective students that once they visit campus, they very likely accept an offer to enroll. Why do some students make the decision to visit? What obstacles exist to making that decision? 

7 Companies don’t invest the required time, people and financial resources. 

Creating insights is not like reading a report or crunching numbers. It requires speculation, going down dead ends, metaphors, talking with colleagues … and then reading reports and crunching numbers. It requires time. It also requires money. Often overlooked, companies don’t spend the time to find the right group of people to support insights. To paraphrase Jim Collins, if your “insights” bus doesn’t have the right people on it, your insights will not likely travel far. Develop tools to screen on the  abilities to develop and leverage insights inside and outside the company.  

8 False insights confidence. 

Most companies have boatloads of customer data these days. This may lead managers to believe that they already know their consumers well enough and that the ROI invested in developing additional insights would be low. This is a mistake. Insights are different from data and they rarely jump straight from data. Instead we need multiple looks, broader data and think time to generate a good insight. 

9 Lack of insights metrics. 

Insights are a unique type of knowledge, and most companies lack metrics to assess the quality and quantity of insights. If managers manage what they can measure, insights are going to be left on the sideline. A different metrics problem arises when new insights need new metrics. For example, if the insight is around customer time spent browsing, we may need eye tracking or time-in-aisle metrics to measure performance to see if the insight worked. If the insight is pushing the firm into a new area, metrics may not exist which could hinder whether or not the insight is leveraged. 

10 Weak insights capabilities. 

Capabilities are bundles of marketing skills and accumulated knowledge, exercised through organizational processes, which enable a firm to carry out its marketing activities. Research shows that capabilities can exist in all areas—strategic marketing areas such as planning activities, specialized marketing areas such as pricing or channel management and in learning about markets. However, no research has measured information capabilities focused on insights. My guess, based on these CMO Survey results, is that the capabilities are weak. If companies lack knowledge about how to develop customer insights, is it surprising that customer insight production is flat? 

11 Tunnel vision. 

When Bob Drane, former vice president of innovation for Oscar Meyer, was traveling in Japan, he saw people eating out of bento boxes. This seemingly unconnected observation might have been lost on other meat products companies. Drane, however, turned this observation into the Lunchables line which earned more than $140 million dollars in 2014. Under his reign, Oscar Meyer developed a packaging capability and replaced sushi, rice, and daikon with bologna, crackers, and M&Ms. There are many opportunities like this missed every day around the world.

12 Siloed or no-responsibility organizations. 

Companies often have customer information in different areas of the firm—marketing, finance, sales and information systems. This means, unfortunately, that rarely does one group or individual have easy access to a complete view of customers. This challenges the development and use of insights because developers and users of insights may be missing a critical piece of the puzzle. A different problem occurs when there is no formal group or individual responsible for developing insights. Insights seem like they should be everyone’s responsibility but are likely no one’s. Best to designate a group that is not only responsible for helping to develop metrics, but also to disseminate them to potential adopters and support their use in marketing decision making.

Sponsored by the ���������, Deloitte LLC and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, The CMO Survey collects and disseminates the opinions of top marketers in order to predict the future of markets, track marketing excellence and improve the value of marketing in firms and in society. ​�ċ�ċ

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Today’s focus on culture also directly shows in the way that companies are hiring. Rather than focusing solely on a candidate’s technical skills, hiring managers are paying close attention to whether they’ll bring new and creative ideas to the table, get along with the people around them and help them grow. Here’s how to find this new crop of candidates.

Don’t get caught up in hard skills. 

Finding the right candidate is about a lot more than matching a résumé with a job description. Ask yourself: Are they creative? Are they collaborative? Do they have good communication skills? Are they showing initiative by already taking classes on SEO or design if that’s not their area of expertise? Hard skills can always be taught if the candidate is willing to work hard and learn. It’s important to find people who are willing to put in the work and truly go for what they want.

Know which questions to ask. 

To determine whether a candidate is right for your organization, you have to know what to ask in an interview. These questions help determine whether a candidate will fit into and contribute to the culture of the company:

• What kind of environment do you thrive in? Open work space? Or cubes and closed doors? Is the environment they describe similar to what your company offers? 

• What are you looking for in your next role? Are they looking for work-life balance? Or do they believe in work-life integration? How does that align with the organization’s beliefs?

• Tell me about a job you didn’t enjoy. What did you dislike about it? Was it the manager? The culture? What changes could they make?

• What motivates you? Money? Autonomy? Access to leadership? Flexibility? Are these things that your organization provides?

Set expectations. Be specific. 

Don’t try to paint the company as something it’s not. That will backfire when someone comes on board and realizes the gig isn’t what was described to them. If your organization works beyond the traditional nine-to-five, tell the candidate. Let them know how often they’ll work with other design or production teams within the company. Discuss the small details, like whether employees can listen to headphones at their desk. Paint a picture of what everyday life is like to attract the right person who will be happy in the role.  

Use the “airplane test.” 

A great culture can’t exist if you don’t like the people you work with. During an interview, ask yourself if the candidate passes the airplane test: Could you sit next to this person for three to four hours on a flight and not get sick of them? Marketing roles are very collaborative. You’re going to want to like the people you work with.

Creating an effective workplace culture takes a lot of nurturing, protection and time. Two big factors that go into that are finding people who will help grow and develop the culture, and letting the culture-takers go. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned throughout my career is that you have to be protective of your culture and work alongside people who will help spread your company’s message—not hurt it. That’s how you develop and scale a culture that will help the organization grow.

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