Archives for December 2021

Choosing a good first employer can be a huge boost and help direct your career in the right direction. But how do you know if an employer – and specifically their marketing department – is any good?

I like to think of employers as fitting into four categories:

1. Big and first rate. Here you learn from excellent colleagues who are ahead of you, where the culture is ambitious, and where you also learn how to navigate and successful in big organisations. There are probably some nice perks, too, like private health insurance.
2. Small and first rate. You won’t learn how big organisations work, and there are fewer formal process, policies and departments. The upside is that you might end up doing more senior and varied work because there are fewer people around.
3. Big and second rate. There’s still a lot you can learn from these, but the organisation has lost its way and is in decline. If it’s an agency, there may still be some good, prestigious clients to work on, but which the agency is struggling to retain.
4. Small and second rate. Working here will teach you little about how to be successful as a marketer and it probably won’t sound prestigious on the CV. There are higher risks here to your wellbeing and careers, such as having to deal with the emotions of a manager whose business is stalling, and there’s a much higher risk of unexpected “termination”.

Someone early in his career asked me for some advice, after he’d been let go from a couple of PR agencies in quick succession. Incongruously, he was clearly bright and a good communicator. The issue, I concluded, was that his employers had been in categories 3 and 4, and he probably needed a different environment and someone to take him under their wing. I helped him get some some-short work, and he has subsequently worked for in the world of category 2 (small and first-rate) and been successful.

How to categorise a prospective employer

Of course, this is all well and good in theory, but how do you know in advance what an employer is really like behind the façade of a good-looking website? The answer is that it’s actually quite difficult to know. However, here are some ideas:

1. Obviously, famous brands can be great options – it’s why so many people apply to work at Microsoft, Unilever and Nestle. They will normally be in category one, but a brand like BHS would have been in category 3. You can determine the category through annual reports or coverage in the business sections of newspapers. However, all big companies have stronger periods than others, and a weak period where a company grasps the nettle and puts in place a turnaround plan (like John Lewis) doesn’t stop it being in category 1.
2. Go to industry events before you graduate and talk to people a few years ahead of you about who they recommend.
3. Do summer internships to get an inside look. If a summer job is at an employer you like, it could be perfect for a graduate job. Internships are also a useful vantage point to learn about employers in the sector generally, and to make connections.
4. If you’re planning to work in an agency, look up the client list. The agency may not be a prominent brand, but do its clients look like companies with significant budgets? The ability to say you worked at an agency on its Sainsbury’s account is much better than saying you handled the local hairdresser’s account.
5. Check out employer review sites such as Glassdoor.
6. If they have a team page on their site, think about whether there’s sufficient experience and gravitas among the team for you to learn from. An agency shouldn’t just be fresh-faced new graduates plus the boss.
7. If not applying for an official graduate training programme, ask potential employers what their commitment to personal development and training is.

How I chose my first employer

Of course, I didn’t know all the above when I started out in my career, but it is a codified reflection of what I learned along the way.

My first proper job was in my gap year before university (and went back to the same employer afterwards). The Adam Smith Institute was (and is) a small but first-rate organisation. My boss had been described in John Major’s official biography as one of only two intellects that Major had respected. He had been a syndicated newspaper columnist in the United States and on the editorial board of a British national newspaper, a professor of logic at a US university, Secretary of the high-IQ society Mensa, and had degrees from Edinburgh, St Andrews and Cambridge.

I had a really interesting gap year as a result, helping to place stories in newspapers, develop ideas for the website and, around a month after leaving school, made my first appearance on BBC Radio 4. Unlike a large organisation, there was no formal HR-led training programme (there was no HR department, either). But there was plenty of learning how to do stuff from someone with expertise.

To take the role, I had turned down an offer to spend my gap year in the Press Office of the Conservative Party, working for someone who is now the eminent Executive Director for Government Communications. That would have been a great learning experience too. Hate to be mercenary, but the deciding factor was simply financial.

How did I know the employer I was choosing was good? I went to a range of the organisation’s events and spent a good half hour talking to someone who was part-way through a gap year job there. It was a small outfit but I understood the internal dynamics and what the job was going to entail.

The thing about first-rate organisations is that they are not afraid of change; it’s the constant iterative process in how they function that makes them first rate. Once a week, my line manager would take me for lunch and the idea was that I would pitch ideas for new activities and tweaks – actually, that might not have been the idea, but it is what I did.

In The Matrix, the most notable movie of 1999, the lead character Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) is able to acquire new skills that would normally take years to learn – including martial arts – by being plugged into a computer and receiving a digital download that takes mere seconds. This sort of learning ability was an attribute that one of the best hires I have made seemed to have

Jack (not his real name) was working on a reception desk but kept rapidly adding new skills in all the Adobe applications and in design. He didn’t actually have Neo’s rapid downloading capability, just a hunger to learn and he spent his evenings doing online learning. During quiet spots during the day, he started volunteering his skills. With passion like that, Jack deserved to be in a marketing team and I was able to make it happen for him.

Why hunger to learn accelerates your effectiveness

Hunger to learn is the most important attribute that affects if someone is going to be a top marketer. This is the case for three reasons.

Firstly, there is a body of marketing knowledge that has been built up over the past century, in areas such as copywriting, advertising and psychology that can fast-track your marketing abilities. The best copywriters are the ones who have read the classics such as books by Joseph Sugarman and Drayton Bird, which give techniques for using words to convince and sell, and read novels and poetry, which show how to use words with style. There is a huge body of knowledge out there – such as why a photo including someone’s face works better than a pretty scene – which can be learned faster by studying than through your own work. 

Secondly, the pace of change in marketing is speeding up. While you can learn plenty from personal experience, it’s much better to also learn from other people’s experience – such as by watching online videos about Photoshop, attending seminars, listening to experts on Audible or watching Ted talks. Sometimes people think that they only need to talk strategy and don’t need technical knowledge. In fact, a good level of technical knowledge is necessary to be a senior marketer. That’s why the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s Professional Marketing Competencies framework, even for CIM Fellows, incorporates a Technical capabilities section.

Finally, hunger to learn advances your career because a proven commitment to continuing professional development tells a powerful story. People will see your skills are growing and give you more opportunities to work on bigger, and perhaps more interesting, projects. Most marketers underinvest in the time needed for learning, but for those who take their development seriously, it can be surprisingly easy to become a top performer.

Imposter syndrome – the idea that you might be found out as a fake – is a commonplace feeling among high achievers. The marketing world probably has an above average amount of it because PR is one of those subjects that everyone has an opinion about. This can make practitioners worry about the judgment calls they are making.

So how do you build confidence as a comms practitioner?

Firstly, recognise that you don’t need to a deity to be an outstanding PR pro. Whether in working relationships or trying to deliver a great headline when tired, no one is perfect. But people who never make mistakes achieve nothing.

If you’re worried about whether you are good enough, ironically you’re probably on the right path. This puts you in an advantageous position compared poor performers who are convinced they have nothing new to learn. It’s unlikely that anyone else regards you as an imposter, especially if they have a close view of your abilities and output. The trick is to channel any negative feelings into a hunger to learn.

Secondly, work on building compassion for yourself. It’s OK to be imperfect as this doesn’t need to affect the overall picture. While it’s important to take ownership of mistakes and to learn from them, you don’t need to spend days beating yourself up.

Thirdly, talk to people who are ahead of you in their careers. Although doing this has helped me in countless ways over the past 20 years, two specific examples stand out. The first was when I was in my 20s and struggling to work out what to do next. I was in Brussels and invited to a party hosted by newspaper correspondent. I was definitely the odd one out as everyone was either a newspaper reporter or married to one, but it helped me understand what I needed to do and I soon started working at The Telegraph. The result has positively impacted my work as marketer as I experienced a large-scale digital transformation, and also became much more advanced in copywriting. The second example was when I was in my mid-30s and wanted to become a head of department. I was sitting opposite someone who was describing to me their experiences of doing an MBA, and I thought to myself: I’m going to do one of those, thank you very much – and signing up helped transform my positioning.

Fourthly, read copiously and take part in as much training as you can. Most PR practitioners and marketers don’t study the great practitioners of the past century, such as David Ogilvy, Howard Gossage and Rosser Reeves, or recent research on marketing effectiveness, such as that by Les Binet and Peter Field. They just approach marketing by doing whatever they feel like. The truth is that, with some studying, it’s relatively easy to become a top practitioner.

At the European Academy of Direct and Interactive Marketing in 2012, I saw the legendary copywriter Drayton Bird look around the room and, knowing quite a few of delegates already, commented that it is always the already good marketers who sign up for training. They always want to improve by a few percent.

Fifthly, gain a marketing qualification or certification. This gives you a credential showing your knowledge base and you can remind yourself about it when you’re worried about your status.

Finally, consider having a mentor or accountability partner to talk these things through. I have once had an official mentor – organised for me by the PRCA – who I would meet up with once a month or so. But there are people without formal mentoring roles whose advice I have found to be invaluable.

An accountability partner is on a more equal basis than a mentor-mentee relationship. Here both partners discuss what they want to improve or work towards, and check in for a one-to-one regularly on progress.

You might think you’re the only person around to have feelings of self-doubt, but all good marketers have to work on their confidence at times, and it’s a natural part of the road to high achievement.