Marketers are experts at promoting products and services for brands, but when searching for a new job, many have trouble promoting themselves.

“It’s much more personal,” says owner Michelle Robin, a former marketer who now works as a career coach for marketing and sales executives. “They’re just not comfortable promoting themselves or don’t know how to write about their accomplishments in the right way.”

It’s important for marketers to grow comfortable with promoting themselves, as employees in the U.S. now change jobs more readily than ever. The average U.S. worker changes jobs 12 times during their career, lasting a median four years at each job, . One in four workers plan to switch jobs in 2021, according to a . Of the one in five workers who switched jobs in 2020, 33% identified as Gen Z and 25% as millennials.

While real-life networking and social media platforms such as LinkedIn have become more important for job searches, résumés remain the key marketing tool in any job hunt. But very few résumés stand out to recruiters. According to Glassdoor, companies receive an average of ; from this pile, between four and six people are interviewed and one is hired. Additionally, most recruiters don’t give résumés much time—Ladders reports that, on average, .

With attention low and competition high, here are eight steps marketers can take to better promote themselves with their résumés.

1. Be Formulaic but Riveting

Résumés can’t be boring, but they must be formulaic to a point. Wendi Weiner, a career and branding coach for leaders and executives and owner of , says that résumés must have a few things:

While everyone’s résumé should have the basics, Robin says that résumés should also stand out from others in the pile. She coined an acronym to help: TRASH. This stands for targeted, riveting, accomplished, succinct and honest. Few people may think of their résumé as riveting, but Robin says it can be done by showing personality.

“The riveting comes in by weaving in your personal brand,” Robin says. “Add a little spot of color here and there. You don’t even have to get all fancy unless maybe you’re a visual artist, but you can do something to stand out from the sea of gray that human resources sees.”

2. Be Succinct

The biggest problem Robin sees is in marketers who don’t narrow the scope of their résumé.

“They feel like they’re going to miss out on opportunities,” Robin says. “They feel like they’re leaving opportunities on the table when it’s just the opposite. People don’t hire broad experience. They don’t care about that. They hire people to solve problems. You need to be clear on what problems you solve.”

Weiner says that even the most experienced executives need to fit their careers onto a two-page résumé. An executive may have many speaking engagements, articles published or board experience that could extend to a third page, she says, but they’re in the minority.

The most important rule, Robin says, is to let the content dictate the length. A two-page résumé of fluff will always look bad, but a two-page résumé filled with relevant experience can be a great marketing tool in a job search.

3. Talk Accomplishments, Not Activities

Instead of simply listing what you’ve done in each job, Robin says that the linchpin of a résumé should be accomplishments. An activity may be, “I led 20 campaigns,” but an accomplishment would be, “I increased traffic by 20%.”

The problem for many marketers—especially those who have worked at the same job for years—is that they may not remember specific accomplishments from past jobs. Weiner says that even those who are happily employed should keep an ongoing list of what they’ve accomplished to tell the story of their career.

“It used to be a summary of your work history, but today it’s got to be a strategic marketing document that sells your value in a branded way with storytelling,” Weiner says. “You want to make it results- and achievement-oriented rather than just a boring list of job responsibilities.”

4. LinkedIn is a Complement, Not the Centerpiece

LinkedIn will never replace the résumé, Robin says, but job recruiters will always search your name on Google.

“In marketing, it’s important to make sure that your digital brand is out there and that you can be found for what you do best,” she says. “LinkedIn needs to complement your résumé, but don’t ever dump your résumé into LinkedIn. It doesn’t add anything.”

When recruiters click on your LinkedIn profile, they should get a deeper look into your career story and your personality. If there are two candidates who have the same skill set, recruiters may look at each LinkedIn page to see who better fits into the company culture.

Marketers should also have a professional headshot taken for their LinkedIn profile image, Weiner says. Marketers should check that the dates on their résumé and LinkedIn match up. Recruiters will likely see it as a red flag if they don’t.

“Remember: Your LinkedIn profile is your digital footprint,” Weiner says. “Your résumé is only getting seen by a handful of people that you actually send it to, whereas your LinkedIn profile gives you visibility of 500 million users.”

5. Never Lie

Back to Robin’s TRASH acronym: H stands for honest. Never lie on your résumé.

“And people do it,” she says. A 2017 survey by CareerBuilder found that .

“That’s such an easy thing to check,” Robin says. “It’ll come back to bite you at some point.”

6. Get Rid of…

For years, people looking for jobs would insert an “objective” into their résumé, calling out what kind of position they were looking for. But Weiner says that a résumé needs to be more strategic and instead include a branding statement or professional summary.

Robin agrees and adds that professionals should also rid their résumé of the phrase “responsible for.” “Nobody cares,” she says. “And it’s passive.”

She also advises against long paragraphs: “If you’re looking at more than three lines of text, it’s getting hard to read, especially when it goes all the way across the page.”

7. Leave Out Hobbies and Interests, Unless They Fit

Marketers should leave hobbies and interests off their résumé, unless they’re relevant to the career or show an accomplishment, Weiner says.

“I’ve had clients who have hiked the Grand Canyon, rim to rim,” she says. “That is an amazing thing to actually include in the résumé because it shows a type of determination that you’re not going to see every day. But for example, if your hobby is cooking, sewing or knitting and it doesn’t relate to an achievement for the industry that you’re in, it’s not going to be a value-add item to include in the résumé.”

8. To Start, Go Deeper Than the Résumé

The résumé is no longer the only marketing tool in a job search—many jobs are filled before they’re publicly posted.

“People end up spending too much time slaving over their résumé, wanting to get it to perfection when they should be spending more time networking and building relationships that can turn into career advocates,” Robin says.

Instead of starting a job search by rewriting your résumé, job searchers should start by figuring out where they want to go next in their career, how they can get there and who they know. Then, they can figure out how to revamp their résumé and target their search to the job that they want. In 2016, CareerBuilder surveyed recruiters and reported that .

“There’s no magic bullet in your résumé,” Robin says. “You need to be targeted correctly for the right job.”

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Additional Marketing Titles

• Digital Media Manager
• Market Research Analyst
• Social Media Specialist or Coordinator
• SEO Manager or Specialist
• Public Relations Manager or Specialist
• Director of Marketing
• Chief Marketing Officer
• Copywriter
• VP Marketing

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Hard skills, the experience and abilities listed on your résumé, are often what land you an interview. But soft skills are what make you stand out from other candidates in the interview process. Soft skills shine through when you answer the stereotypical but telling questions of, “Where do you see yourself in five years?”, “Can you tell me about a time you overcame a challenge?” or “Do you have any questions for us?”

“Everybody coming in for the interview is qualified,” says , a career coach who helps job seekers market themselves on LinkedIn. “How you separate yourself is your soft skills.”

According to , 80% of surveyed talent professionals say soft skills are increasingly important to the success of a company. Based on the data, the top soft skills in high demand relative to their supply are, in order: creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability and time management. Ninety-two percent of survey respondents also say that soft skills matter as much or more than hard skills and 89% say bad hires typically lack soft skills.

You should be clear about what soft skills you have and how to showcase them before submitting your résumé and heading to an interview. “Most of us wouldn’t have gotten our jobs if we didn’t have the hard skills and relevant experience on our résumés,” says , an executive coach. “The soft skills, however, are what … make you great at your job.”

Self-Awareness

Before you can hype your soft skills, you need to identify what they are. When Merrill works with clients on their personal brands, she suggests they ask their own clients and colleagues to describe their top soft skills. “It’s interesting, they always come back with things they didn’t [originally] have on their list.”

O’Sullivan agrees with asking the people around you. She also suggests keeping a running list of accomplishments. “These can, of course, include hard skills, but most complex projects will include both hard and soft skills,” she says.

There are certain soft skills that O’Sullivan says are key for marketers to exhibit, particularly the ability to tell a great story. “We are all so inundated with ‘buy this, do that’ types of messages, that great storytelling helps you stand apart from the competition,” she says. “I also think it helps to make your message relatable and personal. Stories are a really effective way to do that.”

She also recommends that marketers highlight their ability to influence people—including colleagues and external customers—in a way that caters to what they care about.

It’s worth spending time determining what your soft skills are and how to put them on display. “Your self-awareness of them and your ability to highlight and to tap into them, that’s … maybe why you got the job or moved forward as opposed to someone else,” Merrill says.

How to Showcase Your Soft Skills

The soft skills worth highlighting can typically be pulled directly from a job description or from a company’s mission statement. But be prepared to showcase those skills by example. Soft skills land squarely in the “show, don’t tell” category of your interview. You can’t say you’re a good communicator without being able to communicate well.

“Everything you’re doing should be highlighting the different skills that you possess,” Merrill says. “If you show up late, if you’re not organized, those things are already portraying that you don’t have those kinds of skills. But conversely, if you’re really on top of things and you’re detailed in the way that you communicate back and forth, they’re already thinking that you possess those skills.”

Even the ability to describe the projects you work on can highlight a very important soft skill: communication. Consider how you would explain your approach and execution to someone else. “A really solid example would probably include what you accomplished—the output—and how you got there, which would highlight the soft skills,” O’Sullivan says.

Merrill also recommends coming to an interview with something of your own agenda. You should know what soft skills you want to highlight and answer questions by incorporating stories that reflect those skills. “If they ask you, ‘Tell me about a challenge you had in the workplace —how did you handle that?’ and you know that adaptability is an important skill [for the job], you want to convey in that answer how you adapted to a change that occurred.” Provide a story that demonstrates how you used that skill to solve a problem.

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Last year, U.K. charity set out to transform its 2,500 employees and 9,000 volunteers into dedicated, effective brand ambassadors. The ambitious undertaking launched alongside a new brand, a five-year strategic business plan and a new set of organizational values and behaviors. An internal video provided the rationale behind the changes and Alzheimer’s Society provided public speaking training so employees could speak confidently about their work.

Another company, , surveyed employees on how engaged they were, then responded to the results. Employees of the mobile-only bank now receive free lunches, work-from-home opportunities and free subscriptions to meditation service . Perhaps the most revolutionary outcome of the survey was the creation of a unique management program, in which every Monzo employee has a manager and a team leader—no individual may maintain both responsibilities. The internal marketing work of Alzheimer’s Society and Monzo has been recognized among by the U.K.’s Synergy Creative.

For every exemplary campaign, there are dozens of smaller, yet stellar examples. At , an Atlanta employee benefits technology and communications company, internal marketing falls to 28-year-old marketing manager Paige LeBel. Despite being the company’s sole marketer, responsible for all external engagement, part of her job is to deliver internal, company-wide messages. Quarterly newsletters are the most regularly distributed form of internal content at Hodges-Mace, and LeBel knows to inject information from her client-oriented communications into these newsletters. New product updates and existing product rollouts require an employee messaging strategy and client-support script, which LeBel develops in consultation with the tech team.

Then there are Hodges-Mace’s strategic objectives concerning the company’s employee benefits packages. Rather than blasting out reminder emails, LeBel converted enrollment alerts to push notifications on workers’ devices. She also gamified the enrollment drive by offering a cash reward to the first person to screenshot the notification and email the image.

This may sound like human resources or internal communications work, not a marketer’s job. But if marketers manage the company’s brand, they must also know how the brand looks inside the organization. This internal employer brand affects everything from how employees view their organization to how customers rate their service experience. Consciously tinkering with the employer brand is internal marketing.

“A lot of times, HR has their processes set in place, but they bring in marketing to come up with a more creative solution for their delivery method,” LeBel says. “We have important information to send out. We don’t want it to be full-on serious where readers lose interest on paragraph three.”

Keith Kitani, who has been in the communications business for more than two decades, is CEO of , an employer software communications company. He says interest in engaging with employees using internal marketing principles is at the highest level he’s seen. Like the external marketplace, employers target their internal audience of workers and bring them down the funnel to adopt a program.

“When I think about internal marketing, culture is a program, benefits is a program, they’re all programs that the company is trying to sell,” Kitani says.

Robust internal marketing, like its external counterpart, is facilitated by advances in data analysis. “[Employers] know where you work,” Kitani says. “They know what programs you have. They know your status. They know how much you make. There’s a lot of data that marketers would kill for.” Tapping that data can be a game changer for employers looking to encourage employee responses, related to workload or lifestyle.

“Give Them a Reason to Care”

During his tenure as CEO of a marketing agency, founder Michael DesRochers noticed the office was out of step. He found that departments were too chatty and that sales and support teams were stuck in an infinite loop of trifling customer updates.

“They were catching each other up on, ‘I said this to them, and they said this,’” DesRochers says. “It frustrated me because all that information was there in Outlook. The conversations needed to be opened up so each team could see it.”

DesRochers was determined to end this maddening inefficiency. In time, he helped develop a “kind of sales and service email information tool” that spread message data across internal parties. The tool led to the creation of PoliteMail, a plugin for Microsoft Outlook that allows for internal corporate communications, where DesRochers is now managing director. Working within Outlook, PoliteMail offers analytics capabilities comparable to Marketo, without the need for separate list management. It allows for backend operations—from benefits enrollment to service strategy—to run as a marketing campaign directed exclusively to employees.

Initially launched as both an internal and external communications tool, PoliteMail abandoned the outbound marketing version around 2012, following the increasing popularity of email marketers and . PoliteMail refocused on making internal communications better.

The refocus succeeded; PoliteMail’s 2017 revenue was $3.6 million, per Inc. Magazine. The company grew 490% over three years, good enough to make it the fastest-growing company in New Hampshire in 2018 and one the top 20 fastest-growing companies in Greater Boston.

“We discovered the market opportunity for internal communications more than we intended to be there,” DesRochers admits.

Writing for Forbes last December, DesRochers noted that this external marketing-like approach, focused inward, can have a profound impact on how employees work together and feel about their employer. “For those organizations willing to buy into funding internal marketing campaigns and communications staff, the rewards promise to be engaging,” he wrote.

Internal marketing isn’t just having the right software, though. Tech certainly enhances internal marketing capabilities, but is only a support mechanism for the beating heart of the drive to activate employees.

Kitani and DesRochers are neither internal marketing’s first prophets nor practitioners. Years before PoliteMail existed, Ogilvy & Mather then-senior partner Colin Mitchell highlighted the importance of marketing-minded employee messaging in a 2002 edition of Harvard Business Review, extolling the benefits of “.”

“[It] is a truth of business that if employees do not care about their company, they will in the end contribute to its demise,” Mitchell wrote. “And it’s up to you to give them a reason to care.”

Adjust Your Alignment

Even as employers are eager for new ways to motivate and measure employees, internal marketing itself has something of an image problem with the boardroom set. Agencies that help companies with branding and marketing have learned that clients bristle at the mention of internal marketing.

Christina L. May, managing partner at East Coast consultancy , spends her time touring offices and telling leadership where it’s falling short. A lot of problems she encounters can be fixed with an internal marketing campaign, even if it’s not what owners want to hear. “We found that if we add the word ‘marketing’ to [what we offer], they immediately think that means ad services and ask, ‘Why would I run ads to my workforce?’” May says.

Rather than fight what she calls an educational battle to convince employers to use marketing techniques on their own staff, May repackages the same concepts as “alignment.” Alignment can seem a more precise and tactical goal to businesses, especially when May refers to it is a key differentiator for firms.

There are two branches within internal marketing: pathos and logos. Alignment hews closer to the logos portion, aiming to coordinate internal corporate machinations with customer-facing responses, the way LeBel does at Hodges-Mace. Internally aligned companies will work harmoniously toward collective business outcomes.

“A company that is in alignment can be felt immediately when you walk in,” May says. “For those that are not in alignment, it really shows. Typically, there are a lot of, shall we say, reality issues.”

Misalignment both stems from and feeds into employment engagement problems—the pathos part of internal marketing. How do you convince employees to love their jobs enough to contribute greater amounts of themselves? Gallup tracks workplace engagement and defines engaged employees as “those who are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace.” , released in August 2018, found that 34% of U.S. employees are engaged, while 13% of workers are disengaged. These are near-historic highs and lows, but the lion’s share of the workforce—53%—reports feeling neither engaged nor disengaged, making them likely to perform minimally and quick to jump ship for marginally better employment offers.

Muddled mission statements or incongruent leadership actions also hurt employee engagement. In 2017, that a minority of U.S. employees (41%) say they know what their company stands for. A year before that, about a quarter of workers (27%) reported believing in their company’s values. Internal marketing is the best lever available to combat chronic disengagement, short of sacking the entire staff.

The Customer Comes First

If alignment and engagement still come off as fuzzy distractions rather than clear business objectives, the fact is that these issues will manifest themselves in an area that every executive should care about: customer experience. May says that unaligned companies can exhibit symptoms such as reputation management issues. “Either you have a poor product, or you have poor service,” she says. “It’s not hard to figure that out once you get inside.”

For employees to meet customer needs, companies must meet employee needs. Disengaged employees who interact directly with customers will deliver markedly negative service, says Lisa Morris, a self-described organizational anthropologist, strategist and experience design specialist.

A 25-year veteran of blue-chip consultancies like Accenture and Sparks Grove, Morris recently founded XPLOR, a design and innovation firm focused on improving the experience of work and workplaces through design. Morris endeavors to understand how organizational constraints interact with human behavior.

Every workplace has boundaries—whether financial, strategic or otherwise—that impact employee behavior for better or worse. For instance, limiting worker autonomy will limit worker engagement. Morris recalls when she consulted with health systems and noticed that disaffected staff lost the ability to empathize with patients.

“Your customer isn’t going to get a great experience if the employee doesn’t have a great experience,” she says. But why wait until customer experience issues drag down a company’s reputation? Prudent decision-makers should attend to workforce alignment issues before customer experience takes a hit.

A basic approach is to use a quantitative survey to understand voices within an organization. Morris prefers to incorporate principles of organizational design, which she used to help management consulting firm North Highland develop its own employer brand strategy.

“You don’t just go ask somebody what their needs are,” she says. “That’s really hard for any human to answer.” Instead, ask probing questions that suppose a greater degree of autonomy. Employees should have the opportunity to describe what their work would look like if they had the chance to structure their own projects. Don’t stop at assignment descriptions, but ask questions about how performing the work would make employees feel and why they should want to move in that direction.

At Illumine8, May says that her team will conduct anonymous one-on-one interviews with a cross section of staff to distinguish how leadership’s perception of the company differs from management and rank-and-file workers. Conflicting results are presented to top executives, who can either accept or dismiss the findings. It’s a crucial moment—one that May says has caused her to drop clients who reject her research.

Working for an undisclosed technology company, Morris says that she began by auditing company communications, looking for examples of hypocrisy. “A lot of my initial work is to resolve the disconnect between the brand message and the experience. Either the brand message is not authentic, or the experience needs some degree of improvement.”

The goal is to consider the ideal employee experience and how to reinforce it with employer brand and messaging. It’s not an exact science; corporations are unique. Morris asks leadership to approve pilot programs to determine if an engagement solution meets the needs of the employees.

“There’s nothing worse than building something big and rolling it out, then not realizing until that point that no one finds it desirable or engaging,” she says.

Empower Your Team

As much as companies want to project being one big, happy family, there needs to be some degree of worker segmentation. Millennial employees view retirement, health and life insurance different from Generation X employees or baby boomers. Attention must be paid to how each group is messaged to keep them engaged.

Kitani says that internal marketing as a system can maximize on the promise of digitization. Not all content is relevant for everyone, so tools are required to ensure employees are receiving individually appropriate updates. Internal marketing segmentation has a big impact on engagement: Epilog, a manufacturing company, engaged 90% of its employees with benefits and open enrollment programs when communications were segmented. An identical approach by Nebraska Medicine led to a four-fold increase in its healthcare enrollment.

Kitani says that some companies have gone so far as to develop internal personas for compensation programs. “A combination of different demographics—essentially age, role and performance—allows them to create different personas and send a marketing or communication experience to them to drive higher engagement,” he says.

Campaigns command attention and can build hype. But to create meaningful change, companies need to live up to their side of the bargain. “We live in a very transparent, transactional environment,” May says. “Whether it’s your internal marketing or your external marketing, you cannot say one thing and do another. You will be found out very quickly.”

Be careful to manage expectations. Some of the language of marketing campaigns can lead employees to expect changes that management might not be willing to make.

“Say [a company] has a brand message that says you value empowerment,” Morris says. “But then you walk in on your first day and it feels like you’ve just been through an encyclopedia of policy that doesn’t provide for some autonomy. You almost start to say, ‘Did I sign up for the right organization?’”

These realities often undermine internal brand strategy. Bad internal marketing is distinguished by what May calls “the hokey factor.” One client she works with is unaware of how out of step it is with its internal slogan: “One Team.” It’s a nice idea, she says, but not reflective of the firm’s reality, where multiple departments compete for resources against one another.

“You can’t say that you’re one team and then put quotas against each other,” May says.

Compare that example to another Illumine8 client, this one a commercial painting firm that emphasizes workplace safety as a core value. The company provides workers with apparel and safety equipment to wear on the job, all of it branded to emphasize the company’s commitment.

Elevate Your Internal Marketing Game

Not everyone will welcome obvious internal marketing. The longest-tenured employees likely have memories of previous branding efforts that floundered. A tricky aspect of internal marketing is that everyone in the office not only sees the sausage being made, they help make it.

Following May’s advice to avoid the hokey factor, companies must realize that kumbaya won’t cut it. She believes that acknowledging the detractors can advance an internal campaign’s goals. Her team has developed a protocol for troubleshooting naysayers: The first step is to understand where the resistance is coming from. Include detractors in the internal marketing process early. “Make them part of the solution, not a part of the problem,” she says. In May’s experience, 60-70% of detractors can be converted.

Internal marketing can solve alignment, engagement and customer service issues, but it’s not a panacea. It can’t catch a company in freefall, nor can it clean up a toxic work environment. But internal marketing can work as part of a comprehensive revitalization package. It need not be costly, nor require countless hours of navel-gazing.

New technology can aid this process. Email plugins and segmentation tools are great internal marketing supplements, capable of reaching and responding to employees with a sensitivity unknown to leadership a generation before.

“We’re at the very beginning stages of people applying marketing techniques internally,” Kitani says. “I look forward to a scenario where people can really drive and elevate the employee experience.”

As with external marketing, employers shouldn’t place all of their hope on technology. “Organizations get enamored by shiny objects,” Morris says. “Many are hoping for the silver bullet.” For any internal marketing effort to be effective, employees need to be empowered to lend their voice to the company culture; it’s their brand, too. PoliteMail’s DesRocher acknowledged this in his Forbes piece, calling it “bi-directional buy-in.” Morris echoes him: “All humans want a say in their destiny.”

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What made you the ideal candidate for the Flyers job?

I put in a lot of hours in my first gig here: assistant to the ice painting assistants. They bred me for hard work. I was really born to cheer this team on … silently, of course.

Your popularity skyrocketed since you were first introduced to the public. How have you dealt with the fame?

Meditation, levitation, a brief stint of incarceration. You know, the usual.

It feels like you’ve been in our lives forever, despite this only being your first season. How would you assess your rookie year?

First of all, Allen, I have been in your lives forever. As for this year, I think it was good enough for a nomination but I don’t know if I’ll be taking home any hardware. Always room for improvement.

SIKE. I was trying to be humble. You and I both know I blew it out of the water.

Any plans for the offseason?

Like most hockey players in the offseason, I spend a lot of time on the links, clangin’ some chain. Thank you for reminding me, I have to get my discs buffed soon.

How close are you with other Philadelphia team mascots and do they ever offer any advice?

Well, Lincoln Financial Field is only about a stone’s throw away, Citizen’s Bank Park is going to take me at least three with maybe a soft underhand at the end, and are we talking Sixers practice facility or game night? Getting to Camden requires sea travel because I don’t have money for tolls.

How would you describe the spirit of the Flyers and how do you represent that?

I try not to concern myself with any spirits from the afterlife around here—Ghost has told me some stories. Everyone thinks we call [Gostisbehere] that because of his last name, but no, no, no, no, no. You don’t even know the half of it.

What was your favorite moment of your first season?

Stadium Series, without a doubt. Jumped off a roof; felt the crisp, misty air betwixt my cheeks; and the [Pittsburgh Penguins] so, all in all, best day.

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Goal

launched in 2014 as a dating app that flips the script on most online encounters. Unlike its competitors, such as Tinder and OkCupid, Bumble regulates who can take the initiative. Users swipe right (interested) or left (uninterested) based on other users’ minimal profiles. If there’s a match between people of the opposite sex, the woman has 24 hours to initiate a conversation, which leaves them immune to advances from the man.

But the company also has two lifestyle products that are unrelated to dating: and . Bumble BFF matches users based on common interests to enable new friendships. Users still fill out profiles, which include many of the same questions as the dating portion, such as what they might enjoy doing on a Friday night. The default option limits matches to the same sex, and often the users are married or in a relationship. Bumble Bizz is a professional networking tool that allows users space for a headline, a mini résumé and a bit about their personality in the workplace. It doubles as a safe space for women, who sometimes encounter men trying to force a work situation into a date.

Bumble wanted to bring attention to these two non-romantic ventures through its first Super Bowl ad campaign this year, “to communicate that we’re more than just a dating app,” says Chelsea Maclin, VP of marketing. The Super Bowl broadcast was also an opportunity to reach an underserved female audience. “Half of viewers [of the Super Bowl] are women, but the majority of conversations around the Super Bowl are geared toward men,” says Alex Williamson, Bumble’s chief brand officer. “This was a moment to break through the noise and speak directly to the women.”

And who better to promote feminine power than one of the world’s all-time great athletes, tennis legend Serena Williams?

Action

The idea for Bumble’s partnership with Williams began germinating before the app ever launched. had taken it upon herself to execute a grassroots campaign; she grabbed a handful of pink tennis balls, headed to a nearby court, snapped some photos and posted them on Instagram with the caption, “The ball is in her court on Bumble.” “[Wolfe Herd] said, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could get Bumble off the ground and one day get Serena Williams?’” says Williamson, one of the company’s original employees.

When it came time to run their first Super Bowl ad, the #InHerCourt campaign was the perfect opportunity for Bumble to showcase Williams. “We partnered with Serena because not only is she an incredible global athlete, but she’s more: a mother, partner, business owner and investor,” Maclin says. “This aligns with all three [Bumble] verticals in a meaningful way.”

Williams also served as the co-creative director for the spot alongside Wolfe Herd, meaning she consulted on the initial ideas and how they were executed during the shoot. The crew was composed entirely of women and took place on a tennis court painted with the three colors associated with Bumble’s products: yellow for , aqua green for BFF and orange for Bizz.

The spot includes voiceover from Williams as Rita Ora’s “Soul Survivor” plays in the background. “Don’t wait to be given power,” Williams says in the commercial, “because here’s what they won’t tell you: We already have it.” The line is punctuated with the thwhack of a racquet hitting a tennis ball.

The campaign ventured beyond the TV spot itself. Williamson conducted interviews with women in corporate leadership positions, asking them to describe instances where they made the first move in dating or in business. Video compilations of those, shared on Bumble’s YouTube channel and embedded on the company’s website, acted as companion pieces to the Super Bowl ad. Among those interviewed were Nicole Portwood, VP of marketing at PepsiCo, and Natalie Egan, founder of the workplace inclusion training service Translator.

Other videos were posted on Bumble’s YouTube channel beginning a month prior to the Super Bowl, with new ones available every week or so. Most were from the set of the commercial, about making the first move in love, work and friendship, though one was an at the commercial shoot and conversations with other Bumble employees. The official Super Bowl spot was posted the day before the game.

Results

This year’s Super Bowl had an audience of 98 million, an enormous viewership for the Bumble ad. The commercial has expanded beyond its airdate and has amassed more than 2.3 million views on YouTube. Maclin says the video has been seen 9 million times across all channels. The campaign garnered 7 billion global media impressions, which included pieces in Adweek, CNN and The New York Times. The campaign drew praise from female-focused brands on Twitter. Good American, the body-positive clothing company co-founded by Khloe Kardashian, about the campaign to its more than 25,000 followers and called the spot the “highlight of the evening for us!” The account of the award-winning documentary “Miss Representation,” which boasts nearly 96,000 followers, the fact that the spot had “Women in front of and behind the cameras. A rarity in the #SuperBowl.”

Bumble also dubbed Feb. 4—the day after the Super Bowl—“First Move Monday.” For each “first move” made on the app through Feb. 8, Bumble donated to the Yetunde Price Resource Center, a Los Angeles-based support center for individuals living in violent communities. The company did not disclose the amount per message donated.

Bumble’s relationship with Serena Williams has only deepened. In early March, the company announced that Williams will join as an investor, joining a team that includes actress and singer Priyanka Chopra Jonas. The fund was created in August 2018 to invest in women-owned businesses, particularly those run by people of color. As of this article’s publication, the fund has provided assistance for nine companies, including Translate. While Bumble could not provide figures on the exact dollar amounts they’ve invested, a spokesperson says the average award is $25,000 and the range spans from $5,000 to $250,000.

The fund’s mission complements Williams’ own Serena Ventures, introduced in 2014 and which boasts a portfolio of 30 companies. Williams joined Wolfe Herd in April to field pitches at the Bumble Fund open call—first viewing written proposals then sitting in on a round of live presentations.“We’ve learned as an organization that there’s an appetite for what we’re trying to do,” Maclin says. “Kindness and respect and quality and accountability are what we’re trying to foster.”

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Once a year, I run a half-day MBA program class at the College of William and Mary. I focus on revenue marketing and digital transformation, topics not typically covered in most college core curricula. Last year, I invited my good friend Dan Brown of analytics company Verint Systems, where he works as VP of marketing operations and is a pioneer in building and operationalizing all elements of a mature marketing operations practice.

Brown discussed his charter as a marketing operations group, its history of growth, key roles and responsibilities, its impact on marketing, how he built and now manages his tech stack and career advice for the MBA students. This was followed by a Q&A session, and the first question Brown received was, “How would I get hired to work in marketing operations?” Brown answered, “I would not hire any of you.” At that point, you could hear a pin drop. Even I was caught off-guard. Brown explained that today’s marketer—and especially today’s marketing operations professional—requires a skill set and a career path that is not taught in school. He also noted that he only hires experienced professionals because he does not have time to train employees.

Every day, I work with marketers who are frustrated with the velocity and direction of their careers. And they have good reason to be frustrated, because companies are not investing in holistic training for marketers. Training, at best, is piecemeal and tactically focused. At most companies, training for marketers is completely absent.

Marketing careers can feel like the lottery. If you get the right ticket (work for the right company), you’ll win. If you get the wrong ticket (work for the wrong company), you will lose. I get calls every week from marketers who work in very traditional marketing departments and are looking for digital education and training, which includes everything from marketing automation systems to building customer-centric campaigns. My advice to them is to find a company that values marketing and is a leader in revenue marketing, customer centricity and digital transformation.

Setting a Career Vision

I have a passion for mentoring marketers who are excited about the profession and are hungry to learn, grow, advance and become pioneers. Through the years, I have developed a set of effective career strategies, the first of which may surprise you.

It begins with creating a vision for what you want your career to look like. Christopher Reeve said, “If you don’t have a vision, nothing happens.” As a marketer in today’s dynamic environment, being intentional and planning for your career will accelerate your growth. Do anything less than this and you will miss many opportunities.

Defining Your Passion

Key elements of creating your vision include defining your passion, determining the required skill set for your future and acknowledging the barriers and accelerators to your vision. Passion is incredibly important for a career marketer. My passion is transforming marketing organizations to successfully address the challenges of digital transformation, customer centricity and financial accountability. I’ve built my entire marketing career around that passion. Consider what motivates, delights and challenges you and makes you want to come to work every day. Pinpoint that passion and write a passion statement. This becomes the North Star for your career.

Career Skills Inventory

The next step is to conduct an inventory of your skills and compare it to those you will need for the future. Self-assessment can be challenging, so you might want to talk this through with a trusted colleague. Once you know what skills you are missing, you can calculate your education requirements.

Without this practical list, you will waste both time and opportunities. For example, you might need to develop finance skills or a particular technology fluency. With this knowledge, you can look for internal or external company opportunities to gain these skills. You might even need to find a different company for this skill development.

Career Barriers and Accelerators

As part of your career vision, also consider the barriers and accelerators that will help you with velocity and direction. Barriers might be where you live or the time you have to commit to your career. I have a very good friend who is a brilliant marketer, but it took her almost two years to find the right company to help her accelerate her career path because of her location. Whatever your situation, be very honest about these barriers and address them head-on.

Accelerators are anything that can move you career trajectory forward. Accelerators might be who you know in your network, a special skill you have that gets you placed on a special team or it might simply be your persistence. Identify your career accelerators and leverage them to the hilt.

Conclusion

Marketers now have more career opportunities than at any other time in history. Technology and the customer-driven economy are driving rapid changes in the role of marketing. It is now up to you to manage your career, seek these new opportunities and enjoy an exciting and fulfilling career as a marketer.

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Shawn Askinosie, CEO of Askinosie Chocolate, says getting rich as a chocolate maker is not his focus. I recently spoke with Askinosie on an episode of the “You’ve Been Served” podcast, during which he told me that delivering fair and equitable pay to farmers in his supply chain—from Kenya to Ecuador—is his primary objective. He says Askinosie Chocolate also contributes to childhood education in the communities where it does business.

For example, the company’s experiential learning program, Chocolate University, provided laptops to students in a Tanzanian school and funded the school’s first computer teacher. The company has also sponsored school trips from its Missouri home base to visit farms in various countries, where students taste chocolate and get an inside look at the business.

These initiatives may sound overwhelming if you’re a CMO or entrepreneur, and probably sound downright impossible if you’re a marketing manager trying to positively impact your team members. But it starts by understanding your purpose and why you’re in business. What is your mission? Is it education? Financial empowerment? To create workplace readiness programming?

Before defining your organization’s purpose, the first move is to understand what your purpose is as an individual. I’ve always been drawn to communicating important concepts to audiences through education and awareness. My interests range from financial empowerment to developing programs that demonstrate compassion and service in workplace environments. Whenever I align myself with firms, teams or other individuals with a strong desire to improve our organizations or people, it always results in a powerful community development or employee engagement program.

I serve as co-chair of a women’s business resource group where our aim is to create programs to empower women and engage with customers and community members who share the mission of empowering women in the workplace.

We shifted our energy and resources to girls in STEM and I used my connections as an advisory board member at the Girl Scout Council of Greater New York to determine the best programming to impact girls in our organization. After researching the technical skills and confidence-boosting environments that would best serve teenagers, I sought out relevant colleagues who were interested in helping young people. Many of them had never participated in social impact programs, but they wanted to make a positive difference and were on board with actively creating and implementing the program. We pulled together women from our firm who were data scientists, product managers and technologists. This months-long mentorship program for young women in our Girl Scout Leadership Institute became a superb corporate social responsibility case study.

One of the most fascinating outcomes of the program was the authenticity and vulnerability of the adult mentors. One colleague shared her story of coming to New Jersey from Chile with her family. She reflected on being the only girl in her elementary school class who did not speak English. She had a desire to communicate with the other students and was frustrated as a child because she was not able to verbally share with other kids. Many of the young women in the Leadership Institute were able to relate, and that led to a richer experience for mentor and mentees.

In the years since running that program, we have asked the men and women in our business resource group what they are interested in doing for our community. This initial program sparked creativity and touched on a desire that already existed; people simply needed to see an example of how to carry out this type of initiative. We have since strategized and executed programs around financial empowerment, workplace readiness and United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Our purpose has been to organize around a common goal with measurable performance indicators for ourselves and those we support.

Shawn Askinosie believes that if we do not intertwine service and profit while creating a meaningful workplace for our colleagues, then our economies and products will suffer. Managers and entrepreneurs can work to understand what gets their colleagues excited about their work and how the business can bring its products and services to market to improve the lives of others. From this foundation, we can create a mission that excites us and integrates the best of what we deliver to market with a desire to make our environments better—both inside and outside the organization.

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It’s easy to view software as a product or service. Software instructs hardware how to process data. Data, however, is a product, though it is seldom considered so. Consequently, many data providers have not embraced product management, an integrative discipline capable of driving better results. Career opportunities exist in these firms for young, tech-savvy marketers who are willing to step up and help define the product manager’s role.

Like any product, data can be sold if buyers perceive they have value in satisfying a need. Data has features and characteristics, although these are not always articulated in the language of the customer. Data products are built from raw materials (e.g. bits and bytes), involving successive layers of aggregation to generate something useful, such as insights. Ownership rights are associated with data and have become a major point of contention regarding privacy. Similar to a carton of milk, data has a shelf life and expiration date, at which time it becomes no longer valuable. Data differs in terms of quality, which can be difficult to discern given its highly intangible nature. The business world will face an onslaught of new data with the arrival of 5G high-data-rate networking, the internet of things and autonomous vehicles.

Data is at the epicenter of consumer marketing, from digital customer journeys to voice-based user interfaces, virtual assistants and personalized recommendations. Where data is notably expansive and complex, data analytics rule the roost. Despite this, the notion of data as a product to be managed hasn’t widely caught on. Product management isn’t new, with roots dating back to the 1930s at Procter & Gamble. Within the last decade or so, it has gone through a metamorphosis driven largely by the digital revolution. The tech industry has helped elevate the role of the product manager to that of a mini-CEO, whose job starts and ends with the customer and who is responsible for aligning all the functions necessary to successfully launch and maintain a product—including operations, design and engineering, marketing and sales, and finance and legal.

Data products begin with a novel idea that is often the result of several minds coming together. An information need is identified that might be satisfied through capturing and aggregating data around a phenomenon. (For example, ancestry.com leverages the genealogical records of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.) It is at this point that the discipline of product management should begin because creativity at the concept development phase must be paired with a candid assessment of target markets, the competitive landscape, positioning opportunities, branding options and the business model. The product manager should lead this analysis.

The next major phase involves the design and testing of a prototype. Two issues emerge that require the manager’s close attention. One is assuring the quality and integrity of the data: Does the data accurately and reliably capture characteristics of the phenomenon it claims to measure? To assure this in the prototype phase, assess how the data relates to other measures of the same or similar things. Is the data in some way predictive? For example, does a consumer lifestyle indicator predict openness to a purchase recommendation?

The second issue concerns the methods by which customers may access the data. This is analogous to retail channel decisions in product marketing. While it could be as simple as emailing datafiles, data delivery usually involves some level of bundling of the data with software. That software can enable data governance that rules who can access data for what use, and it can allow the user to download, interrogate and visually display data. Therefore, the user and software interfaces require close examination: Are the steps convenient and foolproof? Is the output easy to understand?

The next phase of the process might be called “scale up and automation.” This is the stage where the manual activities of creating the prototype are streamlined and data is labeled, classified, cleaned and prepared for delivery, often using artificial intelligence methods. Too often, product managers have tossed automation tasks to operations. This can be a huge mistake if data integrity is lost in the data factory. In the end, the product manager is also the data product’s chief quality officer. One of the key lessons of quality assurance is to design and improve processes so they don’t produce defects. The product manager might, at this point, consider implementing a parallel test: manual versus automated. Do the two methods produce the same result at each step in the data factory?

Much can be said about the product manager’s responsibilities around launch and promotion, but there’s a tendency to overlook the product manager’s responsibilities post-launch. These are partly operational and partly strategic. From the operational standpoint, it is critical that the product manager maintains direct dialogue with the customer to understand the customer journey and subjective experience and how to improve them.

On the strategic side, the product manager should also pay close attention to growth opportunities. Is there a chance to enter new markets, such as when Cerner moved from electronic medical records into population health? What about product extension, such as giving Bloomberg Terminal users access to data on firms’ supply chains?

Companies can benefit from conceptualizing data as a product. Borrowing from the software industry, data marketers should adopt the modern view of product management as a multi-functional, continuous-loop, customer-centric discipline. This opens the door for a new breed of product manager, one who blends traditional soft skills, business savvy and an intense customer focus with knowledge of applied statistics, data management and software development.

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Teja Dupree and Liza Goldstone run Jay Way Media, a marketing communications firm that develops, implements and measures the impact of an integrated marketing campaign for a luxury automobile brand. These agency co-CEOs meet weekly with Jay Way Media’s 12 department managers to facilitate interdepartmental communication, oversee the agency’s timeline and budget, and assist with troubleshooting problems. In early February, they assisted their market research department co-managers with a focus group at consumer research firm .

These tasks may sound like typical full-time agency work, but Jay Way Media is Dupree and Goldstone’s creation as part of the Advertising and Integrated Marketing Communications course I teach at Johns Hopkins University. Managers in the class commit 15 hours per week outside of class time to this in-class agency. It’s a lot of work, but it’s the type of experience that goes beyond entry-level internships.

The Student Experience

One of the biggest differences between internship experience and agency-style coursework is the opportunity to take a leadership role and manage a budget, which can also come with serious challenges. Several department managers reporting to Dupree and Goldstone got the flu in the first month of class. Delayed campaign deliverables led to an increased workload over spring break, but the co-CEOs were unfazed. I meet with the leaders weekly and offer the insights I’ve developed in teaching this course for 13 years. Dupree and Goldstone learned about the most common challenges, suggestions on how to manage and motivate their peers, and requirements for communicating with the client, EdVenture Partners, the firm representing the client’s brand, the 2019 Acura ILX. EdVenture Partners is a marketing agency focused on reaching the Gen Z, collegiate and youth markets via experiential learning programs. Two of the ways this program differs from other client-based coursework are the implementation and project-management aspects.

“Problem-solving and communication were key,” Dupree says. “For most of us, this was the first official integrated marketing campaign that we had ever worked on. Aside from our course readings, we had no idea what to expect.” She added that the class took a learn-as-you-go approach to the project. “I quickly learned how interrelated everything that we were working on was and how important that made communication. Liza and I tried to encourage this flow of information.”

Résumé Benefits

Goldstone, a political science major and marketing minor, is interested in social media marketing or consulting and felt the experience would be a “reach” for a sophomore—challenging her in different ways than her ��������� collegiate leadership role and internship experiences. “As soon as a recruiter looks at my résumé, the co-CEO position catches their eye,” she says. “They love to learn that I’ve gained real-world experience through a semester-long, client-based project. Leading the class with Teja has taught me more than any internship I’ve held. I’ve learned to see the big picture, while spearheading class initiatives and serving as an intermediary between 40 students and a Fortune 500 client.”

According to the , the attributes that employers value—other than a strong GPA—include problem-solving skills and the ability to work in a team. Written communication skills were also deemed very important.

Allie Lewis, head of consumer market research at LinkedIn, held a leadership role in the class as an undergraduate and used the opportunity to explore an experience outside of public relations—the field she thought she was destined to pursue. “I learned the value of research in providing the needed insights to develop our integrated marketing campaign,” Lewis says. “It also gave me a leg up with employers as I could speak to actual primary research conducted.”

Mark Presnell, executive director of career advancement at Northwestern University, says that client-based projects can increase a student’s ability to interview well. “Employers are moving beyond majors and focusing on skills and experiences,” he says. “For many students, skill development often begins first with a client-based project and deliverables.”

Another former student of the Johns Hopkins course, Eva Gurfein, says her manager was impressed by her understanding of the importance of connecting communications programs to overall business objectives. Now a managing director at RF|Binder, a global integrated marketing and consulting firm, Gurfein is responsible for developing integrated programs for clients. She recently reached out to me for candidates for an associate position and eventually hired a student who previously served as the co-CEO in last year’s class project.

What Professors and Mentors Should Know

A 2015 study published in the , “Assessing the Value to Client Organizations of Student Practicum Projects,” says that the key to the success of client-based projects is four program design elements: a consulting-based course design, relevant projects, close faculty involvement and regular client feedback.

An integrated client-based curriculum “creates value for students, the clients and the school as a whole,” in the Journal of Public Affairs Education. EdVenture Partners CEO Tony Sgro says many clients directly hire students from these programs. And universities benefit when alumni reach out to their alma mater, seeking students with proven leadership and client-based project experience. Faculty who have mentored students through these experiences can speak to more than just students’ exam or research report abilities.

There’s a tremendous amount of personal satisfaction in mentoring students throughout this course, then seeing them grasp the big picture and really understand what’s involved in developing and implementing a campaign of this scope. It’s also rewarding to see the confidence gained by all the students, but particularly those in manager roles, and how this allows them to more successfully interview with employers.

Because of this experience, I have shared the benefits of the programs with other faculty. I’ve also participated with ��������� and non-��������� faculty colleagues on panels where we’ve shared the challenges and rewards of incorporating client-based projects into the classroom and I’ve co-authored an article with a faculty member whose class, along with mine, was chosen as a finalist for an EdVenture Partners campaign competition.

If you’re a faculty member planning to incorporate this type of client-based project into your course, reach out to a local nonprofit or an organization such as EdVenture Partners at least six months ahead of time; it takes some coordination to outline the parameters of a mutually beneficial project.

Liza Goldstone also contributed to this article.

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