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What are we all afraid of?

An abstract image featuring smooth, overlapping curved shapes with glossy, reflective surfaces. The colors transition from vibrant reds and oranges on the left to bright yellows, greens, and deep blues on the right. An abstract image featuring smooth, overlapping curved shapes with glossy, reflective surfaces. The colors transition from vibrant reds and oranges on the left to bright yellows, greens, and deep blues on the right.
Deane Barker
VP, Consultant, DXP, Valtech

October 30, 2024

We don’t talk enough about fear.

In business – and in marketing especially – no one is “afraid” of anything. We’re “frustrated in our ability to execute” or we’re “concerned for changing market conditions. 

We speak in the detached patois of the insider; but we’re not afraid of anything. That’s a such a … pedestrian emotion. 

And, anyway, why would we be afraid? MarTech marketing is always telling us how great we are. 

We’re “Rockstar CMOs” or “Change Agents” or “LeadGen Ninjas” or whatever our last LinkedIn blurb read. We call ourselves this because that’s what we’re told by ironically the marketing of companies who want us to spend our money with them. 

(You’d think people who worked in marketing would be less susceptible to marketing. You’d be wrong.) 

But inescapably, underneath the posturing, we’re all afraid of something. 

In 2014, Harvard Business Review asked 114 CEOs what they were afraid of. I expected to hear things about “disruptive technology” or “market displacement” – things they didn’t cause but could only react to, heroically, even in defeat. One pictures them, back against the wall, valiantly swinging their swords against the advancing hordes, standing courageously between their org chart and the abyss. 

But, refreshingly, the number one fear was: “being found incompetent.” 

That was followed by underachievement and feeling vulnerable.  

Someone finally told the truth. CEOs, even. 

I think fear is even more deeply seated in marketing because the field is, by nature, all about the appearance of value and fit. I’m trying to avoid using the word “pretention” here, but let’s be honest – marketing is about creating a mood, a feeling, a brand. In few worlds is being afraid of something a good look, and in marketing we tend to turn our campaigns back on ourselves. We want to embody what we espouse, so we buy into our own press releases. 

And this is where it gets personal.

Marketing is often viewed as “art,” at some level. Accounting or operations is so easily separable from us as people – we can keep it at arm’s length, because it’s just numbers or processes. But marketing requires … interpretation, emotion, and subjective judgments about beauty and the human condition. There’s vulnerability in the exercise of that. 

In the aptly titled Art and Fear, David Barnes and Ted Orland says this: 

The chasm widens even further when your work isn’t going well, when happy accidents aren’t happening or hunches aren’t paying off. If you buy into the premise that art can be made only by people who are extra-ordinary, such down periods only serve to confirm that you aren’t.

Screwing up finance might mean you don’t understand numbers. Screwing up marketing implies you don’t understand humans.  

Compounding this is that our failures are inherently public. Marketing is meant to be seen, so if we fall flat on our faces, it’s not in some backroom accounting process or private warehouse operation or intranet implementation. No, if marketing goes sideways, everyone sees it. You can hide an internal process that doesn’t work, but crappy marketing campaigns are everyone’s business. 

And there are just so many moving parts in the average MarTech suite. The “right” answer seems to be just around the corner. 

TK Rader did a brilliant (if satirical) write-up on LinkedIn about how a bad CMO can keep their job for way too long, just because it’s so easy to get caught up and camouflaged by the constant eddy of technologies, stacks, suites, and methodologies in the marketing space. 

Month 1: Tell the CEO that the MarTech stack is brokenMonth 3: Marketo implementation is going well. It should come together any moment now.But wait. Nothing is converting. I know WHY. Our BRAND is totally off. The website and the look and feel needs a re-design and our messaging needs a reboot.Bounce rates up? It wasn't our ICP traffic anyway so don't worry.Ok. Sure. We'll do this. But listen, I really think we need to re-think how we capture demand and take a PLG approach.Month 15: It's not my fault. The Product just can't support the PLG motion.

This is likely why CMO tenure is the lowest in the C-Suite. You can find a lot of statistics about this, so I’m hesitant to cite just one, but the average tenure of a CMO is about three years, and for a CMO in technology it’s even lower than that – less than two years, according to some studies. 

So, we posture. We pretend. We swallow our fears as if none of that mattered. 

But we all know there are things that keep us awake at night. There are things lurking out there past the light of the campfire that threaten to carry us off into the darkness. 

What are those things?

Here are some ideas:

  • “Our content underperforms. It’s so repetitive. It seems like we haven’t had an original thought in a long time.”

  • “Our metrics are probably wrong. I'm not tracking the right things. I know how many people visited the website, but not what they did, what they liked, or how any of this even matters. What even is a ‘customer journey’?”

  • “Our content process is poorly architected. Campaigns take way too long to get started, and small changes turn into big messes.”

  • “We aren't using the tools we paid for, and my boss is eventually going to notice. I promised that buying Tool X would make things better, but I can't show that we've even been able to integrate it.”

Do any of those sound familiar?

They certainly sound familiar to me, and I’m not even in marketing, technically.

I’m the guy people in marketing talk to about their problems and their fears. I’m the guy people ask to come in and help them with those problems.

Sometimes they’re honest about them. Often, they’re not. A lot of times, I have to read between the lines.

But I always ask myself: “What is this person afraid of?”

In the next few weeks, we’re going to throw off the shackles of pretention and get really honest about what worries us and what we can do about any of it. There are solutions, but a lot of them are disguised under layers of posturing and assumption that you know exactly what your problems are and can find the corresponding solution to any of them.

Let’s turn the lights on:

Dive into our first topic (with more to come) — what if the content is not good enough? 

An abstract image featuring smooth, curved shapes with a glossy, reflective surface. The design transitions from rich, deep blues on the left to warm reds, oranges, and yellows on the right, creating a sense of fluid motion. The light highlights and reflections give the shapes a futuristic and dynamic feel, with the dark background adding depth and contrast. The combination of vibrant colors and sleek curves evokes innovation and cutting-edge technology.

I don’t think we’re tracking the right things

Coming soon

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