I’m really worried about the future. More specifically, I’m really worried about the future of marketing.
A vague sense of uneasiness morphed into full-blown agita when I read something called, “The New Marketing Leader“. I don’t know who this guy is. (Sorry, ladies. I’m assuming he’s a man, since women would be generally more sensible than to fall for this kind of gibberish.) But he has to suffer from some kind of responsibility confusion, if not a morbid identity crisis.
It’s bad enough that he has to decide if he’s a COCO (Chief OmniChannel Officer), a CCO (Chief Customer Officer), a CCEO (Chief Customer Experience Officer), a CDO (Chief Digital Officer), or a COMA (Chief Omnipotent Marketing Ace). But it’s worse that he has to contend with this:
By becoming more agile, marketing leaders will be able to take back holistic ownership of the function … By being flexible … [they’ll] be able to master the disruption, complexity and growing challenges inherent in marketing today … including the growing complexity of the business environment, the communication landscape, customers’ expectations and the innovation cycle.
In addition to all of the acronyms and abbreviations above, the new marketing leader apparently has to be some kind of yogi — adroitly athletic as a ninja and extensibly supple enough to touch his toes without bending his knees. And he has to be linguistically adept enough to detect and deflect buzzwords like disruption and innovation.
And then, after untold hours in the gym, pushing his body to the very limits of endurance and adaptability, our fearless leader and his all-powerful peers will have to pick up their swords and shields to tilt at an endless army of artificial windmills in quixotic attempts to move the needle, to boil the ocean, to create new paradigms, and to vanquish every other vapid variation of meaningless nonsense he and his colleagues might imagine, encounter, and (rightly) dread. Like this:
[They] must push the boundaries of marketing with breakthrough thinking to create value across the business … move beyond their traditional roles as “the voice of the customer” and the brand ambassador, and provide strategic leadership, lead change management … unafraid to challenge the status quo, innovate and purposefully take on challenging situations, [they] can serve as business-oriented catalysts.
Wow. Talk about a tall order. This poor bastard has to be all things to all people all the time — and he can’t have any idea who’s winding up to throw him the next terminological curve ball.
Rule of thumb: If the demands of your new job’s vocabulary exceed the demands of the job, quit the job.
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Image by Torriatte, courtesy of pixabay.com.