And some other necessary behavioral traits for marketers.
I do a fair amount of mentoring of young marketing professionals. Often-times I’m asked my opinion on the behavioral traits needed for success. There’s certainly a long list of traits needed for success; here are just a few that come to mind:
- Curiosity: You have to keep asking “what if” and “why not” and “help me understand”. Marketers have to be consumed with challenging conventional wisdom and always trying to make brands relevant, different and better. That means being curious, restless, inquisitive.
- Humble Confidence: This is not a game for the weak. You need to be self-assured, certain of purpose, believe in your plans and ideas, be prepared to take risks.
- Urgency: Situations change quickly. Competitive encroachment, product innovation, market up-turns and down-turns. You can’t spend months thinking about what to do. You need to act fast…not recklessly but urgently.
- Diplomatically Assertive: There will be many times that will demand that you stand-up, defend a position, counter naysayers and tamp-down hare-brained schemes and lost-cause ideas that make no strategic sense. You’ll need a backbone, you’ll need to be a velvet-sledgehammer.
- Driven by Data: Numbers matter. You have to be consumed with pulling on threads to uncover the stories found in the numbers.
- Commanding: You don’t need to be General Patton but you don’t need to have presence to get your organization and team behind you and prepared to take the hill. A big part of having that presence is being a clear, concise, direct and convincing public speaker.
For those involved in marketing, are there any other traits you’d list?
