Hindsight is 20/20.
Today, when I look back at my career, I realize it took me eight companies and countless roles to understand which marketing jobs brought out my best and which didn’t.
Starting Out
When we’re starting out, we have no skills. The first company we work for teaches us the ropes. These skills get us to our next job, and so on.
Gaining Experience
Cut to 10-15 years later, we’ve polished and named our skills and are in demand. We might even have two or three job offers to choose from.
Which one should we accept?
Now’s the time to be strategic. The best job isn’t always the one with the highest salary, the best location, or the flashy title.
It’s the one that provides the best skill-to-sport fit.
Why Sport? Business is nothing but a sport all functions play together.
Also, because it’s Olympics season, I share a sports-inspired framework.
- Relay Race: Do you hand the baton over or are you the race finisher?
- Synchronised Swimming: Are you a part of a synchronised swimming team?
- Boxing: Are you the boxer, or do you administer first aid to the boxer?
- Wood Chopping: Are you chopping wood in a forest close to the lumber yard?
- Run a mile when sports become games.
Let’s go.
The framework: Impact and Agency
All businesses are systems of interconnected functions- Supply Chain, Production, Sourcing, Sales, Logistics, R&D, IT, Legal, Finance, Legal, HR, PR, Marketing, and more.
But one or two functions have more ‘impact’ and ‘agency’ than others.
What is Impact?
‘Impact’ is whatever the business defines as impact – profit, revenue, great products, lowest price, lowest cost, innovation, design, relationships, differentiated brand, loyalty, or patents.
For example, in a D2C startup that values fast growth, a performance marketing role that delivers a measurable ROAS of 3.5 on a monthly spend of Rs.1 crore is high-impact. On the other hand, a brand marketing role that cannot prove ROI from a one crore ad film is low-impact.
High-impact roles get more respect, are paid more, and are promoted faster.
What is Agency?
‘Agency’ means what I want to do, I can; what I want, I get.
High agency functions set and lead agendas. Not just for themselves, but for the whole company. They also get quicker approvals for bigger teams, and higher budgets.
For example, if the Finance function cuts the marketing budget in the last quarter of the year, it reduces the marketer’s agency because no money means no marketing.
It’s not all black and white. Not all high-impact roles enjoy high agency.
The four-sports framework
1. Relay race: Do you hand the baton over, or are you the race finisher?
Unilever’s moat is its brands and distribution, built over decades.
Since FMCG marketers manage the brand, they have high agency and high-impact across the value chain, which runs like a relay race. The marketer starts the race. All other functions (packaging, R&D, finance, and production) pass the baton from one stage to the next. Then marketing, as the penultimate runner, hands over the baton, i.e. the complete mix to the sales team, that finishes the race.
If you like to balance business with brand, logic with magic, and vision with project management, this role might be right for you.
There are roles where even though brand is not the moat, functions other than pure marketing occupy high-impact/high-agency responsibilities.
Take Google, Givaudan and a D2C startup as examples.
B2B: Without its engineers, Google could not have wrested leadership of the search market. Neither could it have scaled to a trillion-dollar valuation without its ad sales team. Engineers and ad sales both hold high impact/high agency responsibilities and they run a relay race very much like the FMCG one.
B2B2C: It’s the same at Givaudan, only with perfume. the perfumers make fragrances for consumer goods clients, and the sales team sells them. The ‘nose’ and the sales team have high-impact and high agency.
If you are a marketer with the innate strength to build relationships and consultative selling, ad sales or perfume sales roles might be right for you.
D2C: They value speed and efficiency – speed in launching products that fill market need gaps and efficiency in converting funding dollars to clicks.
If you are a performance marketer or an entrepreneur at heart, willing to do what it takes to grow the business efficiently and fast, a D2C role is perfect for you.
2. Synchronised Swimming: Are you a part of a synchronised swimming team?
Consumer tech companies have flywheels. Whether it is two-sided network-based flywheels that Uber, Ola, AirBnB, Zomato, Blinkit have, or marketplace flywheels that Amazon, Flipkart, or Big Basket have, many functions work in sync to keep the business running smoothly.
All functions have high impact, but only if they work together. That’s why, low agency.
If you love scale and you thrive in complex, multi team-oriented workplaces, this could be your role.
3. Boxing: Are you the boxer, or do you administer first aid to the boxer?
In some companies, marketing is more of a support function, helping the revenue-generating functions. For example, at Givaudan, marketers support the “nose” (perfumers) and sales teams by helping them craft a fragrance story and by keeping track of fragrance trends.
These are great lifestyles roles. There’s no pressure to deliver numbers and are suited for you if you enjoy project management and working with people. These roles are not for you if you are a Type A marketer who wants to grow businesses through brands.
4. Chopping wood: Are you chopping wood in a forest?
Small businesses at large companies enjoy very high agency because even if they were to succeed beyond everyone’s wildest expectations, their total impact would be a decimal point in the overall P&L.
When I ran the Lipton Ice Tea business or launched the iron fortified biscuits in rural India, I had a lot of freedom. And because I had the freedom to experiment, I learnt the most there.
If you are an intrapreneur at heart, and want to hone your leadership skills, take those small roles that come with big responsibilities.
There’s more.
Finally, run a mile when sports become games.
The measure of impact should be black and white. But it isn’t. This is because when we put more than one human on a field, they don’t just play sports, they start playing games.
Sports we can see. Games are played beneath the layer of visibility, disguised as sports.
Unless you are wired to handle these games (I wasn’t), run a mile from these cultures.
- “Look, mom, I’m a king!” – Personality-focused companies: Whatever the leader acknowledges impact is, becomes impact. ‘Impact’ here degrades less into doing the actual work and more into ‘showcasing work’ and seocnd guessing the leader.
- “Look, mom, my piggy bank!” – Cost-focussed companies: If the company is bottom line focussed, then it cuts topline to feed the bottom line. 3G Capital is an example. Their excessive cost cutting has ended up destroying value.
- “Look, mom, I made a unicorn!”—Mimesis-focussed companies. Founders who want to get big fast so they can exit with $100 million call themselves angel investors. A giveaway is when they start asking you why sales did not grow the day after you launch your ad campaign.
Thanks for reading, I hope this gave you a framework to filter marketing roles that coem your way.
I’ll see you next week.