Going Back to Marketing School After 15 Years

This week I started the Mini MBA in Marketing with Mark Ritson, and it feels slightly strange writing that after working in marketing for more than 15 years. Notepad out, headphones in, I have taken to my home office in the evenings and tried to make sense of it all.

I've run my own marketing business since 2015, worked in-house at small and large businesses, worked with football clubs, created websites, events, sponsorship, digital campaigns and worked with plenty of businesses where marketing means something completely different depending on who you ask. You would therefore think I would know what marketing is by now, but the first week has already reminded me how dangerous that assumption can be.

One of the biggest themes has been customer orientation. It sounds incredibly obvious that marketing should start with the customer, yet the more I have thought about it this week, the more I have realised how easily organisations can convince themselves they are customer-focused while making decisions almost entirely from an internal perspective. We see a problem inside the organisation, develop a solution and then assume the customer will value it because it makes sense to us.

That has made me think much more about research. I am naturally someone who likes ideas and, if I think something has potential, my instinct is often to build it, push it and see how far it can go. I still think there is an important place for instinct in marketing, because research should not become an excuse for never doing anything bold, but there is a big difference between having a strong idea and knowing customers actually need it.

That means asking better questions. Instead of showing somebody an idea and asking, “Do you like this?”, perhaps we should first understand how they currently behave, what they are trying to achieve, what frustrates them and what alternatives they are already using. Most importantly, we should probably ask whether the problem we are trying to solve is even a problem from their perspective.

It also means being careful not to use research simply to prove ourselves right. If you have already spent weeks developing an idea, it is incredibly tempting to ask questions that validate it, especially when everyone internally is already excited about the concept. The more valuable research might actually be the research that tells you something you did not want to hear, because that is the point where you are learning rather than simply collecting reassurance.

Another thing I have found myself thinking about is the difference between what customers say and what they actually do. Someone telling you they would use a product is very different from them changing their behaviour, downloading it, paying for it or returning to it. That gap between claimed behaviour and actual behaviour is something I have experienced many times in marketing, but I am now thinking about it in a much more deliberate way.

After one week, I certainly do not feel as though everything I previously believed was wrong. Quite the opposite, because a lot of the theory connects with things I have experienced throughout my career, but it is giving me a stronger framework for understanding why some things worked and why others perhaps did not. What is changing is the way I am thinking about those experiences, and that is probably exactly why I signed up in the first place.

I am going to try to write something each week about the ideas that make me stop, question something or look differently at marketing I have done in the past. I do not want these to become lecture summaries or weekly lists of things I have learned. I think it could be much more interesting to treat them as a marketing diary from someone who has been doing the job for a long time and is discovering that there is still an enormous amount worth questioning.