Episode #15. This episode’s technical skill is Agile Marketing – a mindset and process, that is rising in popularity, which is based on creating smaller autonomous cross-functional teams to address customer problems efficiently in a test and improve culture. Abby’s guest is ex Santander Head of Marketing and consultant Rachel Chapman at RBC future focus, who answers my burning questions on the agile marketing approach and it’s benefits, how to recruit the right teams and how to get started.
Host: linkedin.com/in/abigailcdixon/
Guest: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachchapman/
Resources/brands mentioned in this podcast:
www.rbcfuturefocus.co.uk/marketing-services
Jim Bezos
Sponsored by Labyrinth Marketing
FULL TRANSCRIPT (with timecode)
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This podcast is brought to you by Labrinth Marketing. Hello and welcome to the Whole marketer podcast.
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Today’s podcast topic is Agile Marketing, a Technical Skill. Before I introduce you to today’s guest, Rachel Chapman. I’m going to give you an overview as to why I focus on agile marketing today. For me, agile marketing and the awareness of the approach has risen over the last few years, me in particular, initially, when it came out I just thought I’m not sure that’s for me, having spent so much time and energy trying to get businesses to take their long term strategy and then bring those to life. But the more I’ve learned about agile marketing, the more curious I’ve got.
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And shortly I’ll be introducing you to today’s guest, Rachel Chapman, who consults an agile marketing and has led the implementation of agile marketing across her teams in the client-side capacity. So what is agile marketing?
00:00:57:08 – 00:01:31:10
It’s an approach in which marketing teams or businesses as a whole strive to collaborate to get the customer focused work done and active in market. It requires an organization to have clarity on its vision of where the business wants to get to in the long term and in the medium term. But instead of translating that into annual plans with planned key bursts of activity, namely planned communication campaigns or product launches where we look quarter to quarter, this breaks the tasks or activities down into smaller chunks or shorter time boxes, usually two to four week cycles, instead of planning large bursts of key activities.
00:01:31:21 – 00:01:49:13
It looks to expedite the process by launching products, services, communications, et cetera, into market and allowing the customer feedback and insight to inform, suggest improvements or iterative changes, as opposed to following a classic consumer testing or gate process, which, although robust elongates the time process launched into market.
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Today’s guest is Rachel Chapman. She is founder of RBC Future Focus, a marketing consultancy who specialize in mar-com strategy and planning, agile marketing and customer journey measurement analysis. Prior to this, she had a long career at Santander, one of the biggest banks in the world where, amongst other things, she implemented agile marketing across the UK team, as well as launching the bank of Ant and Dec, one of the most successful advertising campaigns the company has ever seen. Rachel is passionate about aligning the customer and the business goals, making sure that a business understands its customers what they want, and uses that understanding to deliver its business objectives.
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In her spare time, Rachel loves making short films to help conservation charities and writes a blog with the aim of inspiring people to care about the world around them and make changes to what they do, no matter how small, to sustain this world and everything in it. Rachel, welcome to the Whole Marketer podcast.
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Thanks, Abigail. Delighted to be here. Thanks for having me.
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So I always start with a big, juicy question up front. In your words, what is agile marketing, huh?
00:02:51:20 – 00:03:01:17
That is a big, juicy question. And it should be easy, shouldn’t it? But there are so many different definitions, so many different views all around the same sort of theme, of course.
00:03:01:26 – 00:03:42:15
But you’d have thought we should be really good at this marketers coming up with a succinct phrase to describe something, but apparently not in this context. And I think one of the issues in articulating agile marketing is that it’s it’s a mindset rather than a thing. It’s an ethos rather than a process which makes it quite tricky to articulate. So, I promise I will answer your question, but I’m just going to do a really quick bit of background for people who don’t know a little bit of history about agile marketing. So, in 2012, a group of 20 really eminent marketers came together in San Francisco and their goal was to establish a shared understanding of the core values and principles of agile marketing.
00:03:42:28 – 00:04:15:20
And the outcome of that was the Agile Marketing Manifesto, which was an absolute gold standard at the time and for quite a few years after that. And that had seven values of agile marketing, which is brilliant and it’s really good. And I still refer to it regularly. But the problem is seven values is too many to whittle down into a into a definition or into a sentence. So then one of the guys who’s in San Francisco, Jim Ewel he rewrote it to have six values, which is a bit better. But actually, still I still think that’s too many.
00:04:15:22 – 00:04:47:04
So I’ve kind of whittled it down to four, which is very presumptuous of me against these eminent marketeers. But this this is my definition, which effectively summarizes those four values into a sentence. So finally, I’m going to answer your question. So agile marketing to me is the coming together of customer focused collaborative teams who have clear, measurable goals, deliver many rapid iterations and small experiments, and use testing and data to make decisions.
00:04:47:28 – 00:04:56:12
So still a bit wordy, but it’s the best I can do, really, to sum up agile marketing ethos in a sentence. And it pretty much covered most of the things you said in the intro, I think.
00:04:56:21 – 00:05:05:29
And it’s funny because I’ve written the six principles in my book, so I’m just wondering now whether I should actually go, oh, six too many.
00:05:06:06 – 00:05:09:23
Should I be more presumptuous and reduce that to four, I think.
00:05:10:06 – 00:05:29:14
Six is still good and still important. I think, I mean, the one that I sort of missed out a little bit out of my definition, which really is still critical, is the whole planning thing. And that comes out in the values, which is critical. But in some ways, I think the rapid iterations and small experiments kind of sums up the need to have a plan that can change.
00:05:29:16 – 00:05:50:27
I think what was interesting to me is when agile marketing first kind of starts to rear its head, I remember thinking, oh, I don’t know if I like that. I don’t know if I like, you know, just being tactically focused. But it’s not, is it? You still have to have the vision in place for where you want to take the organization. And those corporate goals its just the way in which you deliver the day to day.
00:05:51:06 – 00:06:23:19
Absolutely. I mean, it’s critical to have a crystal-clear strategy and a North Star. And I’m a big believer in OKR’s objectives and key results, which is the team, the agile team has a crystal-clear objective, which is ultimately the plan. You know, what are we trying to achieve as an organization? What’s our goal? And then everything they do has to be focused on delivering to that objective and getting key results that that drive that. So, yeah, 100 percent. This is not about just the Wild West, you know, doing whatever they like.
00:06:23:21 – 00:06:26:28
It’s about doing things in a different ways to achieve organizational goals.
00:06:27:12 – 00:06:31:14
So would you say it’s a strategic approach or a tactical approach or both?
00:06:31:22 – 00:07:11:14
It’s an interesting question. I think I’m going to give you a bit of a classic consultant’s answer and say it depends. But I’ll, I’ll give you a couple of examples on what I think it depends on. So, when I was at Santander, our strategy as a business was to help more customers have the home they want than any other bank. That was how we decided we were going to differentiate ourselves against the competition, and that was what we were all there to do, help more customers have the home they want. And then we implemented agile marketing and we called we call the team an agile customer engagement squad who had crystal-clear objectives and key results to deliver to that corporate strategy, that UK retail strategy.
00:07:11:26 – 00:07:51:11
So therefore, in that context, I’d say agile marketing was a tactical approach. The squad was delivering amazing tactical marketing to deliver to the strategy, which was to help more customers have the home they want. But on the other side, I recently heard a fantastic presentation from Gousto, the number one recipe box. Hey, great company. Amazing. And for them, I’d say being agile is a strategy because it gives them competitive advantage. And Rosie, who presented gave an amazing example of when covid-19 hit, they pivoted in one day from their goal being acquisition, to managing far too much demand because, of course, everybody wanted
00:07:51:13 – 00:08:11:18
Recipe box as soon as covid-19 heads. And so they nine o’clock in the morning they met and five o’clock they launched their new strategy, which was about how to manage demand and still keep customers happy. So, I would argue that agile marketing therefore is strategic for them. It’s a fundamental part of the company’s blueprint and it will makes them difference in the markets.
00:08:12:01 – 00:08:24:23
Listening to that sounds to me that because those teams are already formed, because they’re already in place as cross-functional, customer focused teams, your ability to pivot and respond is a lot quicker. Is that fair to say?
00:08:25:15 – 00:08:43:17
Oh, yeah, definitely. And there’s no question that an outcome of agile marketing is being able to pivot and respond more quickly. I think there’s a bit of a danger that people think that’s the only benefits of agile, that they think it’s all about doing things faster. But it’s certainly one one benefit.
00:08:43:24 – 00:08:46:00
What are those other benefits or limitations?
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Yeah. So in terms of benefits, I can’t do any better than Jim Ewel.
00:08:51:15 – 00:09:22:14
I think in describing the benefits of Agile because he puts it really well. But I do want to put my own spin on it and put it in a different order because as I just said, I think there’s a real danger people think agile marketing is just about getting stuff done more quickly, which is, you know, there’s reactive marketing and that’s a different thing, that’s about getting stuff done to react to what happens to the market. So, in this order, which is a bit of a different order than Jim Ewell puts it, I think the benefits are firstly improved communication, everything about agile marketing is open, it’s collaborative.
00:09:22:16 – 00:10:01:15
Everybody can view what’s going on, everybody has access to the backlog, everybody talks. All the relevant people talk about what order we should do things in. And the whole collaborative team means it’s fantastic communication across all the different functions that need to come together to deliver for the customer. The second thing is getting the right things done, which is possibly I maybe I should have put first possibly the most critical. So we’ve talked a lot about that objective and making sure that the teams are aligned to deliver to it’s and agile marketing just gives a framework to make sure that every single thing the teams do delivers to that strategy, that goal.
00:10:01:24 – 00:10:35:09
They have a prioritized backlog that everybody’s input to, that everybody agrees what the right order is. And that’s all about how it delivers to that goal. Then the third thing is adapt to change, which is, again, we talked about a little bit earlier, the whole structure means that the teams are set up so that they can be incredibly flexible. And when new information comes in, if the competitor launched the new product or something changes for the customer, they can adapt to change. But in a very structured way, that’s not an oxymoron because they’ve got these processes in this approach and this definition and this backlog.
00:10:35:19 – 00:10:43:19
And they can pivot and change really, really easily to deliver what the right thing is for the customer and the business. And then the fourth thing is get more done.
00:10:43:26 – 00:11:14:14
So an outcome of that is things get done more quickly, you know, and the collaboration, the fact that everybody is is there together working on the same thing means stuff gets done much more quickly. I mean, when I think about the rounds of amend’s we used to have on our marketing material at Santander, you know, it could take literally six weeks to get something signed off because you’d send something out and compliance would have one view and the product team would have another. And then they’d come back with different views and you’d mark them up and send it out again.
00:11:14:23 – 00:11:21:00
Now everybody gets in a room together and sign off can be done in an hour. It’s a huge, huge difference.
00:11:21:12 – 00:11:38:12
Now for the marketers there listening, going, oh, my God, yes, please. Anything that’s going to focus my team to get things done and stop that iterative process of getting signed off on comms, where do they start to try and upscale or enable thinking about taking the agile marketing approach internally?
00:11:38:27 – 00:11:43:25
Yeah, I mean, I think it partly it partly depends on sort of where where they are as a business.
00:11:43:27 – 00:12:16:10
But as a general rule, you know, if they haven’t really done much of this before, but the business is sort of quite open to it, then I would say sort of start small, don’t don’t try and restructure the entire marketing and comms departments first. So start small, pick a customer issue that needs to be solved because customer focus is critical here and preferably one that’s not too enormous. That should allow for some short-term wins to really prove that it works and that it can deliver to the business goal of senior leaders.
00:12:16:19 – 00:12:52:28
When we started at Santander, we picked and we set up a squad that was all about helping customers have the home they want, which was part which was the strategic goal, and that was the right thing to do at the time. But actually, that was a bit of a problem because that’s a very, very long-term goal for a customer. It takes months, if not years, for them to buy a house. And so for that to be translated to mortgage completions or something that would add profit to the bottom line would take a long time. So actually, if I had my time again, I’d probably pick something a bit smaller, something that you can get a clear objective and you can really see some key results quite quickly.
00:12:53:14 – 00:13:34:12
So first thing is pick a customer issue that needs to be solved and that you believe you can do something about. Then the second thing is to pick a group of people no more than 10, if you possibly can, who can solve that issue, who critically have the right agile mindset. So they’re collaborative, they’re focused on delivering value. They love change. They can adapt to change. And they’re really great at putting themselves in the customer’s shoes. Ideally, at least one of them would have agile experience. So at Santander, what we did was we employed one person externally, which is a real luxury and really important, I thought, who’d run the agile marketing teams before and everybody else we picked based on the mindset.
00:13:34:14 – 00:14:07:19
So we had a mar-coms expert, a customer database analyst, website builder, customer journey experts, and we brought them all together, put them in a squad. Then the third thing is set really clear and measurable goals, as we talked about, and make sure they’re all clear. What are they trying to achieve and then let them go for it. Let them put together a backlog of all the things they think might deliver the goal of they’ve picked and get going, use test and learn AB testing small iterations and just demonstrate and test and analyse how they can help solve the customer problem.
00:14:08:04 – 00:14:25:23
So it sounds like having that clarity of goal is really fundamental. Absolutely. And they are obviously smart goals as well, because I know you said you had a strategic goal about kind of being that that choice for having the home they want. So, yeah. Who defines those smart goals for that squad?
00:14:26:18 – 00:14:33:27
Yeah, I mean, there could be a whole a whole different podcast and chapter on objectiveness that certainly.
00:14:34:23 – 00:14:45:03
But it’s and I love it is one of my favourite topics. I think it’s such a brilliant framework that all the big tech companies use Google and Spotify and Twitter and Netflix and they all use OKR’s.
00:14:45:28 – 00:14:47:01
So, yeah.
00:14:47:03 – 00:15:09:17
So the objective is a big, difficult but, you know, inspiring objective. OK, which which may not be totally smart, but it does need to be measurable. So Santander, for example, I’m slightly paraphrasing this, but for example, Santander’s objective was to, let’s say, double the number of customers who.
00:15:09:24 – 00:15:42:29
They helped to have the home they want within two years by giving them a mortgage, so mortgage is the ultimate outcome of that. So it’s measurable, but then the key results absolutely have to be smart. So the key results definitely, you know, specific, measurable, achievable, but stretching, you know, all of those things. So a key result might be for the team, double the number of customers who visit the websites in the next quarter. That is critical for the squads because then that’s that’s the only way they can decide what activities should they start to work on by having those OKR’s.
00:15:43:01 – 00:15:55:25
So we have selected the squad, we’ve got a clear goal, we’ve got somebody external who’s either run agile marketing teams or been part of them to kind of advise, anything else we need?
00:15:56:08 – 00:16:29:18
I think the thing that is really critical in this and it’s a bit of a watch out is sometimes you can get so caught up in the excitement of setting up this really cool new thing. You just forget about the people involved, because actually the people that go in and sit on this squad, it’s a radical change for them. And that’s why it’s so critical, at least for the first squads, and make sure they’ve got the right mindset that they that they’re going to thrive in this environment because, you know, it’s so important to make sure that they are happy and fulfilled.
00:16:29:20 – 00:16:59:24
So, you know, previously that my team at Santander, they all had a Crystal-Clear career in mark-comms. They sat in the mark-comms function. They knew who their line manager was. They knew he was managing their performance. They could see what their next step was. Now, you take them out of that, you put them in a cross-functional team, they’ve got a product owner or a marketing owner, depending on what you want to call it, that isn’t their line manager. What’s the career path? You know, do they develop into a product owner or are they still a marketing comms professional? Who’s who’s the line manager?
00:16:59:26 – 00:17:17:18
Who decides what their performance rating is? Who decides what their bonus is? So I just think, although it sort of seems a bit anti-agile, some of those processes are so critical to make sure that the people kind of know how all these things are going to work for them and that they’re happy and fulfilled as part of the team.
00:17:17:21 – 00:17:50:28
I’m so glad you said that, you know, because the whole premise of the Whole Marketer is to support the people behind the brands and business. And only one thing I was thinking while you were describing with this was, you know, we’ve all been there where we’ve had to work long hours or bursts to get things done. And I suppose I’m just imagining you do one burst. You get to the end, you deliver that result and go up again. And so does it work like that? Is it back to back to week bursts or is it two week bursts, regroup, gather, and then off we go again.
00:17:52:05 – 00:18:22:23
That is such an important point. And I was I was going to sort of talk about that in terms of some of the watch outs or the the limitations really is in traditional marketing, you know, you develop this big campaign, it would launch, you need to go oh, wow, that’s amazing. You know, we all work like lunatics to get this out the door. Now, we’ve got a week or two where we can just chill and wait for the results to come in. Whereas you’re right normal, agile marketing. It’s let’s say if you happen to be using the scrum model, it’s two week or three-week sprints and it’s never ending.
00:18:22:25 – 00:18:52:25
You know, you just it’s like an absolute treadmill. And the human strain of that can be quite tricky. So I think it is really important and what we ended up doing in Santander was doing what we call leap Sprint. So we’d have a week or two weeks every so often, so maybe every four or five sprints where the squad could just stop and take a breath and spend a week just reflecting, planning, thinking about things to just try and stop that kind of never ending churn.
00:18:52:28 – 00:19:07:28
But, you know, don’t get me wrong, of course, it’s incredibly exciting. And if you’ve got the right people in the right mindset, they absolutely love this feeling of delivering all the time, getting things out the door, being able to measure them, working out what’s working and what isn’t. But I do think you need to stop and take a breath every so often.
00:19:08:06 – 00:19:23:00
Yeah, that’s really good advice. And recruiting the right people, because as you say, you know, people that strive off that adrenalin and focus and kind of that excitement and team collaboration is going to be key to make sure you’re selecting the right people, isn’t it?
00:19:23:23 – 00:19:26:19
Yeah. Yeah, that’s absolutely, absolutely true.
00:19:26:21 – 00:19:58:00
And I think, interestingly, I was at a presentation or a meetup last night with somebody from IBM who was talking about implementing agile marketing in IBM and he was talking about recruitment. And actually, he said it’s pretty difficult to recruit agile marketeers because there aren’t that many of them. So what you have to do is recruit the mindset because you can teach anybody the principles of agile. You know, how does a scrum work? How does a stand-up work? What’s come on board? You know, anybody can learn that stuff, but the mindset is critical.
00:19:58:02 – 00:20:05:11
So people who love change, who love pace, who are really customer focused, you know, that’s that’s what you’re recruiting for.
00:20:06:05 – 00:20:17:16
That’s fantastic advice. So obviously, you’ve implemented this in Santander and lots of other organisations as consultant, what have been the biggest challenges in bringing this approach to life?
00:20:17:23 – 00:20:49:27
So I think we’ve touched on one of them, so I won’t go over it again, which is people management and the impact on people and how you handle that, which, of course, has solutions, but it’s just one to remember. So I’d say the other one is the engagement and the behaviour of senior leadership. So one of the principles of agile marketing is no hippo’s so no highest paid person’s opinion, which I love that phrase. That is so because the squad’s used data to make decisions and they’re autonomous.
00:20:50:04 – 00:21:20:27
And I found time and again, really, even if the senior leadership are really bought in and they really believe it and they you know, they’re right behind implementing agile marketing, it’s such a radical change for them, some of them, not all of them, not to be very directive. So they really need coaching and help to allow them to set the strategic goals. Of course, I think you ask the early who sets the strategy. Well, normally, the senior leaders would still set the overall strategy and the business goals, and that’s their job.
00:21:21:07 – 00:21:52:05
But then they have to try and find a way to then allow the squads to be autonomous and work through themselves. How are they going to deliver to that goal? So I think it’s a big change for them and that can’t be underestimated. Try and help these senior leaders change their behaviour and not kind of dive in and direct, but just set the strategy and let the squads go forward and, you know, they will fail at times and whilst I wouldn’t necessarily say you should celebrate failure. It’s a fact. You should expect it. And certain things they do will fail.
00:21:52:07 – 00:22:05:11
And that’s fine. There’s a great video that’s got Jeff Bezos from Amazon and talking about how failure is critical. You know, you can’t grow as a business without things failing. And I think that’s a tough message for senior leaders to to genuinely believe that.
00:22:05:18 – 00:22:08:07
Yes, never failing as long as the learning is what I say.
00:22:08:16 – 00:22:10:18
Yeah, that’s a great way to put it. Yeah.
00:22:11:24 – 00:22:30:04
And I can imagine how senior leaders would find that really difficult thinking when I was leading teams. And, you know, you’re commercially, unaccountably responsible for the delivery of that brand or business, setting the goal and then kind of just leaving your team to roll with it. Yeah, but almost maybe taking a different role to management.
00:22:30:06 – 00:22:33:22
Maybe you go and I’m here when you need me.
00:22:34:18 – 00:23:11:01
Yeah, definitely. I think sort of on a short-term basis, that’s a really, really good thing and they’re definitely the right thing. I think the other thing is also each organisation is different, but just working out what that governance structure is and it depends on the senior leaders and how the organisation works. Governance sounds like such a boring word, but it’s so important that the squads do regularly updates whoever the key stakeholders are. And it’s part of the product owner or marketing owner’s job to help keep those senior leaders confident and comfortable.
00:23:11:06 – 00:23:32:03
And again, that’s where OKR’s come in, because if everybody’s agreed, this is the objective. And here’s the key results we’re going for, then the squad can be open and say, look, this experiment didn’t work. You know, we were trying to double the number of customers that came to the website, but actually it didn’t work. But what we’re going to do now is try this, because we’ve learned, as you rightly say, we’ve learnt from this. We understand why we think it didn’t work. And we’re going to try this test now.
00:23:32:10 – 00:23:45:12
And that’s the way to try. And on the whole, keep the senior leaders happy and realizing that the squad is moving in the right direction and and is absolutely focused on delivering to the senior leaders objectives and the business goals.
00:23:46:00 – 00:23:47:21
Well, let me ask the next question then.
00:23:49:17 – 00:23:51:09
Careers and highs and lows.
00:23:52:21 – 00:24:25:26
Yes, career highs and lows. So highs, so I honestly think I don’t want to sound like twee or I sort of do gooder because I’m really not that. But I honestly think my highs have been when I’ve been involved in a project that genuinely helps both the customer and the organisation, which actually fundamentally is really what agile marketing is all about. It’s putting the customer first to deliver to the organisation goals. But just just as another example, back when I managed a service quality team in the bank and we identified one of the biggest drivers of customer dissatisfaction was branch queues.
00:24:26:04 – 00:24:56:27
And so actually, looking back, we didn’t know we were being agile at the time. But but looking back, I think we probably were because we set up a project team, which was totally cross-functional because we needed every department to help with this. We needed IT to make the systems quicker. We need operations to improve the processing speed. We need the branch teams to look at stuff, scheduling. We needed marketing to look at the customer comms. So we got the project team together cross-functional. We had a very, very clear objective, which was to reduce branch queue time that we could measure and the results were great.
00:24:57:04 – 00:25:08:29
Not only did queue time reduce significantly in customer satisfaction really improved, but we also managed to implement some cost savings due to efficiency improvements. And I’ve literally only just realized as I was talking now that we.
00:25:09:08 – 00:25:22:27
Kind of did that in an agile way all those years ago, I was just about to say it was probably the first thing that kind of wet your appetite, that building, that focus and cross-functional teams to deliver a goal that you had identified, putting the customers first.
00:25:23:03 – 00:25:30:04
Maybe, you know, maybe that was the start of agile marketing. Maybe that maybe you maybe it was maybe it was you, because it was quite a long time ago now.
00:25:30:25 – 00:25:35:26
Love it. Love, love, love. And any lows you’d like to share is are tricky, aren’t they?
00:25:35:28 – 00:26:06:13
I’ve been incredibly lucky. I’ve generally loved everything I’ve done. But I think the lows come when I’m having to do things that that go against my principles for whatever reason. So, for example, having to implement a course of action that might deliver very short-term profit for the business, but I believe it will be detrimental to the customer. And ultimately, in the long term, I believe that means it will damage the brand and damage the business. Luckily, it’s hardly ever happened to me, but when it does, it’s not a good situation. And I think it’s a watch out for anyone.
00:26:06:15 – 00:26:15:02
If you’re in a situation where you feel people are asking you to do things that are against your core principles, then it’s pretty difficult to be happy in that situation.
00:26:15:04 – 00:26:27:13
It’s so true. You’ve got to know your values and they’ve got to align with the organization and work with. And if they’re jarring or the people you work with a jarring against those that it’s definitely time to listen to your inner voice.
00:26:28:01 – 00:26:30:05
One hundred percent, 100 percent.
00:26:30:23 – 00:26:41:00
So thank you so much for coming on and talking to us about your marketing today. What one piece of advice would you give to market is off today? Can I have two quick ones?
00:26:41:02 – 00:26:46:17
You can have two. You know, you’re not the only one who asked for to you can have two quick ones. Thank you.
00:26:46:24 – 00:27:17:13
So the first one actually links really well to my career, although it was a piece of advice I received from a fantastic female entrepreneur, wonderful lady. And she said, if you’re not happy with the situation, you’ve got three choices in there, three A’s. So they’re easy to remember. You can either avoid the situation. So basically, I suppose leave if you with a company you don’t like or you can adapt the situation if you possibly can. So maybe that’s a bit of role or influence people to do something different or you can accept it. And that’s your three choices.
00:27:17:21 – 00:27:31:07
So I’d say it’s people always remember that don’t don’t sort of moan and worry about things. Just remember, you can only do three things avoid, adapt or accept. And I’ve really applied that since then. And it’s been great and very simple advice.
00:27:31:14 – 00:27:34:17
That’s a lovely piece of advice and love that, isn’t it? I love it.
00:27:34:19 – 00:28:13:23
I love it. Yeah, really good. And then the second thing is this is more sort of marketing and career focused, I suppose, is to try, if possible, in this mad, crazy, changing world to constantly learn. And this is advice I give myself because I am actually terrible at putting aside time to read stuff and, you know, to do stuff. And if your client side don’t just rely on your agencies, do it yourself, read Marketing Week or the drum headlines every day, or put aside an hour a week to read a marketing book or just make sure whatever it is that’s in your personal development, just just try.
00:28:13:25 – 00:28:38:07
I know the world’s crazy busy somehow try and put aside some time, let’s say an hour, a week to do it because the world is changing so fast. As a marketer, you just have to find a way to keep abreast of the latest thinking and trends, the latest channels, the latest customer views and how the world is changing. So, as I say, this is advice to me. I’m sure other people out there are better at it than me.
00:28:38:09 – 00:29:07:15
But just just try and find a way to constantly learn that is such a good solution to the current feeling of how marketers feel. You know, they feel overwhelmed because of the stretch and breadth of role that they now carry and also because of the ever-changing needs. So if you can almost so one of the two by saying, OK, in order to keep ahead of the approaches, I’m going to set one hour a week to almost tick that box, that that feels manageable. So thank you for sharing that. You’re welcome.
00:29:07:24 – 00:29:10:06
I appreciate not everyone’s like a marketing geek like me and
00:29:12:02 – 00:29:24:03
and reads books just. Yeah. Audible life changing, you know, podcasts. I can’t even I can’t even walk the dog without learning something. So yeah. I tell you what I this is so terrible to me.
00:29:24:05 – 00:29:37:16
I’m such a late adopter of Spotify podcasts. They’ve been like a revelation to me. So now when I go for a run or a walk, I just search agile marketing in Spotify and just listen to a podcast.
00:29:37:24 – 00:29:40:18
So once again, thank you so much for joining the Whole Marketer podcast.
00:29:40:20 – 00:29:47:26
Thank you so much. It’s been really great talking to you and I can’t wait to hear the future ones and read your book when it comes out.
00:29:48:02 – 00:29:59:06
Oh, thank you so much. Thank you for tuning in to the Whole Marketer podcast. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, please do click follow below for more weekly podcasts. Thank you.