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Fast Company
05-08-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
The role of a business leader in building a strong marketing culture
Conversations about effective marketing tend to focus on the latest tools and technologies. Many companies devote their time to evaluating CRM platforms, testing SEO techniques, or predicting the impact of AI. However, without effective leadership specifically designed to create a strong marketing culture, these tools and techniques may quickly fall flat and fail to deliver the results your business is looking for. While not every business leader needs to be a marketing expert, it's important for leaders to facilitate an environment where strong marketing teams and successful campaigns can develop and thrive. LEAD EFFECTIVE TEAMS Leading an effective marketing team is more complex than simply hiring marketing experts. In fact, an effective marketing strategy may require collaboration between content specialists, marketing specialists, business stakeholders, SEO specialists, social media specialists, and web developers. Subscribe to the Daily newsletter. Fast Company's trending stories delivered to you every day Privacy Policy | Fast Company Newsletters This means that an effective leader will be able to not only put together the right team, but also facilitate their communication. Preventing a silo structure while still promoting efficiency is one of the main priorities a business leader needs to focus on to build a strong marketing culture. Leading an effective cross-functional marketing team includes hiring the right team, providing the proper training, and encouraging innovation. HIRE THE RIGHT TEAM To hire the right team, it's important to have a clear business strategy and to align your marketing goals with your overall business goals. If your business grows through online leads, you may need to hire SEO specialists or outsource your SEO marketing to an agency. If you are growing through social media, podcast ads, or sales campaigns, you must hire team members with specialized experience and a track record of building brand awareness. PROVIDE THE RIGHT TRAINING As marketing tools and techniques change along with algorithms, AI, and new platforms, it's essential to help your team stay current. Providing the right training opportunities as you introduce new marketing strategies and opportunities will empower your team to stay ahead of the competition. This may involve providing paid training opportunities or setting up meetings dedicated to exploring and learning new platforms and products. ENCOURAGE INNOVATION A cross-functional team with the right training can generate creative marketing strategies and solutions if they are encouraged to think outside the box and innovate. Creating a strong marketing culture involves facilitating an environment where new ideas are recognised, explored, and rewarded. How business leaders encourage and react to new suggestions can set the tone for a team that is willing to take risks and get creative. CREATE AND COMMUNICATE BUSINESS GOALS advertisement There is no one-size-fits-all marketing strategy. For marketing strategies to be effective, they should align with your particular business goals. One of the most important roles of an effective leader is to clearly communicate business goals so that the marketing team can translate them into marketing campaigns. By sharing both short-term and long-term goals with your marketing team, you can ensure that your marketing campaigns use resources as effectively as possible to help your business grow. STAY CURRENT WITH ADVANCING TECHNOLOGY Increasingly, marketing campaigns and their success are determined by their use of and interaction with technology. However, marketing is not just about understanding algorithm updates. For example, technologies like AI raise questions about creative ethics, information bias, research validity, fair work practices, environmental concerns, and more. Staying current with advancing technology and how it may affect your team and your industry is crucial to ensure that your business is not left behind. ENCOURAGE A CUSTOMER-CENTRIC MARKETING CULTURE For marketing strategies to connect with your ideal audience, your marketing campaigns must be customer-centric. To tailor your campaigns to your ideal customer, encourage your team to prioritize customer research, keyword research, and competitor research. This research can help your team create campaigns that build your brand identity as a company that can meet the specific needs of your customers. At the other end of the process, it's important to gather customer feedback. Make sure to keep track of how your new leads are finding you in order to determine which use of marketing resources is the most effective. When you are hiring new team members, look for marketing experts who have helped companies grow their customer base and improve customer retention. FINAL THOUGHTS Being an effective leader is not just about chairing meetings or making the right hiring decisions. A strong marketing culture can be a pivotal factor in the success of your business, but creating that culture requires strategic, consistent leadership.
New York Times
04-08-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Heart-Lifting Magic of a Pop-up Concert
In the South, the school year typically begins in August. By now, the fried-chicken family reunions have come and gone, and the beach trips are fading from memory. And yet, here in the deepest heat of summer, the urge to get out of the city is more powerful than ever. Away from the shadeless streets. Away from the noise. Away from even the ordinarily friendly people, all of them irritable, as tired of the heat and the noise as you are. So when I got an email from the country artist Tyler Childers — or at least from his marketing team — informing me of a 'top secret pop-up show' to be held five days later somewhere in central Kentucky, I promptly registered for the drawing that would determine who could buy tickets. Apparently, I inadvertently joined this mailing list when I preordered a vinyl copy of 'Snipe Hunter,' Mr. Childers's latest record, but I was thrilled to have a shot at buying those tickets. I figured my odds of getting them fell somewhere between low and subterranean — there was room for only 500 people, and Mr. Childers routinely sells out arenas and stadiums — but it was worth a try. A road trip through soybeans and cornfields to see one of my favorite country artists struck me as pretty good recompense for the dog days. In a time when so many country songs are written by committee, Mr. Childers is a one-of-a-kind original — an audacious, innovative songwriter who sings his heart out onstage. One of the best things about having something to look forward to is having something to look forward to, but there is no anticipation involved in most pop-up concerts. There you are, eating your lunch, and suddenly Tyler Childers is standing in your favorite East Nashville sandwich shop, as he was last week, singing every track on his new record. It's hard not to love a pop-up show. The unexpected delight of it. The unearned gift of it. The Oh-My-God-I-Thought-It-Was-Nothing-But-A-Downhill-Slog-Till-Christmas-And-Yet-Look-Here-At-This of it. Suddenly there's a rift in the ordinary, an interruption of patterns that makes you understand how miraculous the ordinary really is, how capricious its imaginary patterns. I couldn't believe it when I got the text telling me I'd hit the ticket lottery. I am just about the luckiest person I know, but for a lot of reasons, mostly existential, I stopped feeling lucky a while back. Here was a bit of luck I'd hardly had the heart to hope for. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Fast Company
01-08-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
The MOps conduit: 7 keys for aligning business with tech
As a marketing operations (MOps) professional, you'll know you've made it when you can successfully use technology to translate the language of the business into the art of the possible. But that's not as simple as it may sound. If you want to be the indispensable conduit between a business and its tech, here are seven foundational areas you need to master. 1. MARKET SEGMENTATION AND TARGETING When the marketing team is building its strategies, you should serve as an advisor when it comes to segmentation and narrowing down a targeted customer persona's qualities. This is because you can understand data architecture and availability, which can differ according to a business' operational model. So once the marketing team has come up with campaign ideas, you can support refinement by identifying opportunities to enhance campaigns. Because audience targeting requires the right information, you'll need access to clean, connected data across platforms. Technologies like CDPs, CRMs, and marketing automation systems allow you to better identify meaningful audience attributes, track behavior, and enable real-time segmentation. Without strong tech underpinnings, segmentation is just guesswork. 2. VALUE PROPOSITION DEVELOPMENT A value proposition is the scaffolding for many efforts, so it must be developed properly. However, it's easy for MOps professionals to blur the lines between supporting a value proposition strategy and owning it. While you're not responsible for creating the value proposition itself, you're a crucial part of validating and optimizing it. A compelling value proposition needs to clearly address customer needs, and you can ensure those messages are tested, measured, and refined based on performance data. Another issue with value proposition development is struggling to align it with business goals. That often happens when value props are created in silos, with little input from data or customer feedback loops. You can add value here by surfacing performance insights that improve messaging over time. Operationalizing analytics tools, A/B testing infrastructure, or AI -driven optimization will support you and the marketing team with elevating value propositions based on real-world feedback and performance. 3. THE MARKETING FUNNEL AND CUSTOMER JOURNEY You know the stages of the marketing funnel: awareness, discovery, consideration, conversion, retention, and advocacy. But do you know how to map customer touchpoints to enhance the journey? Can you make recommendations that improve conversions at each stage? Without clear insight into how buyers progress and where they drop off, you can't improve the journey. Mapping tools, behavioral analytics, and campaign tracking platforms help you visualize and optimize how people move through your funnel. The entire process should be seamless, with efforts directly connected to buyer needs at every phase. By configuring and maintaining integrated martech systems, you can help the team personalize content, trigger next-best actions, and enhance handoffs between teams. This ultimately leads to a smoother, more-effective customer experience. 4. CAMPAIGN PLANNING AND EXECUTION To be an exceptional MOps leader, you must be an expert in enabling and operationalizing multichannel campaign execution, from infrastructure to workflows to measurement. Of course, this starts with an overarching strategy that ties your tactics and approaches to larger organizational goals. You must support this cause-and-effect relationship with data models and automation logic that you design and maintain. Project management tools can also be key to ensuring campaign timelines and resources stay on track. 5. GO-TO-MARKET (GTM) MOTIONS Typically, GTM motions follow the tenets of account-based marketing, account-based experience, demand generation, or inbound marketing. Some teams choose to borrow and implement pieces from two or more strategic approaches. However your current organization chooses to do it, you must understand the nuances of each motion and its greater implications. That includes owning the configuration and maintenance of CRM and MAP systems so you can support GTM strategies, align lead scoring models, and operationalize sales-marketing handoffs. Without the right technology, even the best GTM motion will stall due to poor data sharing, inconsistent lead flow, or unclear attribution. 6. PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT Data is an enormous asset, but only if you know how to gather, interpret, and apply it. Get familiar with KPIs like awareness, engagement, conversion, and retention metrics. You should also know how to measure ROI for marketing activities so you can justify spend later on. Analytics platforms like Google Analytics, Power BI, and Tableau can be an important aspect of your management strategy. Scalable, self-service dashboards help translate findings into operational recommendations that drive business decisions. 7. INTEGRATION OF MARKETING CHANNELS If you want to maximize your results, you need the infrastructure to support integrated, multichannel campaigns. It's your responsibility to ensure the right data flows to the right systems, and that messaging stays aligned across touchpoints. So you'll want to build and manage the automation workflows, data connections, and backend systems that allow marketers to execute cohesive campaigns across online and offline channels. In this area of MOps work, technological fluency is essential. With the right skills, you can unify disconnected tools, ensure data hygiene across platforms, and create truly omnichannel experiences that reflect how people research and buy today. Becoming an expert and making great strides in MOps can set you up for a bright future. To get there, you have to invest in learning all you can about these seven foundational areas. They form the operational backbone of modern marketing organizations and everything you're responsible for as a MOps leader. Once you master these areas, you'll be well on your way to becoming a true conduit between the business and its technology—which is the holy grail of MOps success.
Khaleej Times
29-07-2025
- Business
- Khaleej Times
Enough apologies: How Japan is shaking its price hike phobia
When Japanese ice pop maker Akagi Nyugyo raised its prices a meagre 10 yen in 2016, its sombre-faced management appeared in a one-minute commercial, bowing silently in apology as a melancholy folk song lamented the inevitability of price hikes. Almost a decade later, the Saitama-based company has changed its tune - a tongue-in-cheek advertising campaign last year promised in a series of photos to bow successively deeper for each of its next three price hikes. The lighter-hearted spin comes as Japanese firms, after decades of deflation, find a rare moment that allows them to raise prices without triggering the intense public backlash that once made such moves taboo. "Compared to when we raised prices in 2016, I'd say there's more of a sense now that the public is more accepting of price hikes," the company's marketing team leader Hideyuki Okamoto said. "The sentiment that price hikes are evil is receding." That shift in consumer mindset is driven by the biggest pay hikes in three decades and has given companies more confidence to pass on rising costs - something they long avoided for fear of losing customers. If sustained, the change could embolden the central bank to further raise interest rates, though that is dependent on just how much more households can absorb. The Bank of Japan is expected to keep its benchmark rates unchanged at this week's policy meeting but could signal its intention to resume rate hikes later in the year. Japan's consumer inflation has stayed above 2% for three years, driven largely by rising food prices, a sharp departure from the decades of near-zero inflation that followed the asset bubble collapse in the early 1990s. Nearly 200 major food makers expect to hike prices for 2,105 items in July - up fivefold from year-before levels - by an average 15%, a private think tank survey showed recently. "A few years ago, people would make a fuss over one or two items going up. Now it's dozens, even hundreds. You can't keep track anymore. There are just too many to remember," said Fusako Usuba, a 79-year-old pensioner. "But there's no way around it, because we all need to eat to survive," she added. WAGE GROWTH Japan's wave of price hikes initially began in 2022, triggered by external shocks such as post-pandemic supply chain disruptions, the war in Ukraine and the yen's subsequent depreciation. But economists say it is consumers' greater tolerance for higher prices - underpinned by three straight years of robust wage growth - that has kept the trend going. "Japanese consumers have come to realise they are now living in an era of persistent price increases," said Tsutomu Watanabe, emeritus professor of economics at the University of Tokyo. He said consumers are beginning to shift their focus from low prices to higher wages, as intensifying labour shortages give workers more bargaining power. According to a survey led by Watanabe, Japanese consumers were the most resistant to price hikes among five major countries four years ago, with a majority saying they would switch supermarkets if prices rose by 10%. But in the same survey last year, most said they would continue shopping at the same stores and buying the same items, bringing them in line with consumers in other countries. The key question now is whether the trend is sustainable. Meiji, Japan's top chocolate maker, has launched nine price hikes since 2022, reflecting soaring cocoa costs. "Back in 2022, we met resistance from retailers asking us to hold off a bit longer," said Akira Yoshida, general manager at Meiji's cacao marketing division. "Nowadays, they accept our price hikes more smoothly, so we assume their customers are also reluctantly going along." But Meiji, which holds a 25% market share and effectively sets industry prices, is now seeing signs of price fatigue. A 20% price hike in June, the biggest in recent years, led to a more than 20% drop in sales volume at some retailers, unlike in previous rounds where volume declines were smaller than the scale of price hikes. "We're increasingly concerned. There's only so much more we can raise prices," Yoshida said. "I think we'll need to change how people view chocolate - not as a commodity, but as a luxury." Rei Ihara, food sector analyst at UBS Securities, said the scope for further price hikes is narrowing, as Japan's Engel coefficient, the share of household spending on food, hit 28.3% in 2024, the highest in 43 years. "With prices rising year after year, consumers appear to be adjusting their purchasing habits, opting for less expensive options like chicken instead of beef, for example. For inflation to be sustainable, it must be supported by solid wage growth," he said. Inflation has outpaced nominal pay gains, pushing real wage growth into negative territory for months, fuelling frustration among voters that led to a major defeat of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba's coalition in recent house elections. The outlook for wage growth is increasingly uncertain due to sweeping U.S. tariffs. Japanese exporters have so far avoided major price hikes in the U.S. to stay competitive, sacrificing profits. If that continues, it could limit their ability to raise wages next year. "We're at a turning point now," professor Watanabe said. "If this wage-driven price momentum fails, we may not see another opportunity like this in our lifetime. This moment is that rare."
Fast Company
08-06-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
Why you need a personal brand in a crowded job market
Back in 2023, social media management platform Buffer wrote a blog post about how it had received 1,518 applicants for a single role on its marketing team. While that's a jaw-dropping number, it's a common occurrence for companies with well-paying jobs that boast a great company culture. In the present job market, many job seekers are discouraged knowing they're competing against hundreds (if not thousands) of applicants. For some roles, a résumé will only get you so far. A personal brand helps you stand out before you ever apply for a job, making the application process tip in your favor. You can break out of the résumé mold Résumés often have very prescriptive formats. You've probably heard the common advice: Keep it to one page, highlight your accomplishments, make it easy to read. These days, résumés are often fed directly into an applicant tracking system—so any creativity is stripped, and a résumé reviewer only sees text. Yet many companies have a required field on their applications: the URL of your LinkedIn profile. This is where you can shine. Anyone can have a polished headshot, colorful banner, and interesting headline. But you can set yourself apart with a compelling 'About' section, links to projects in the 'Featured' section, and recommendations from former colleagues. Your LinkedIn profile is like your résumé with a microphone. Instead of passively waiting for someone to review your work, you're amplifying it. Of course, to do this, you need to create content. Start with a small, manageable posting schedule LinkedIn can be a very intimidating place, especially if you've never shared content there before. The feed is full of people who are 'Excited to announce' a new job or want to tell you how to '10x your career.' One Gen Z user referred to LinkedIn as 'the overachievers' Facebook' in an article for the New York Post. Creating content is a way to showcase your personality in a way that your résumé and profile can't. You don't have to set out to be an influencer, but you can share relevant experiences from your career—and even a peek into your personal interests (if you're comfortable doing so). I started with one post per week, sharing anything work-related that popped into my head. I had no particular goal in mind, but recognized that LinkedIn was the platform where work and opportunities happen. Eventually, I started becoming more strategic and shared content that showcased my expertise and personality, but not until my weekly writing habit was well-established. You can bypass gatekeepers and make connections A personal brand will open doors in a way that a résumé won't. In an intense job market, you need anything and everything that distinguishes you from other job seekers. With a personal brand, you can make connections with potential hiring managers and rely on those connections when applying for a job. Do this before you apply. Start connecting with people in your industry or at companies you'd like to work for. Engage with them and continue posting content. When a role opens up, you can apply and also send a DM saying: 'Hey! Just wanted to let you know that I applied for XYZ role. Really excited about the opportunity.' It might move your résumé to the top of the pile. Significant attention A personal brand might also bring offers directly to you—without needing to apply. You might catch the attention of hiring managers or recruiters who will reach out with potential opportunities. I'm self-employed, so my experience isn't the same as a traditional job seeker. Still, I can attest that I get a significant amount of attention on LinkedIn after several years of building a personal brand. Connections have brought opportunities my way that I would not have had otherwise. Because of my content, people know who I am, understand what I do, and trust that my personal brand matches my work ethic.
