A better marketing culture

Sometimes it takes a sports person or team to remind you what really drives success. I have been criticized for this view in the past. The marvelous Rita Clifton reviewed my book many years ago and was very kind apart from one comment, “if there had been one more sporting analogy I might have screamed”. Sorry Rita here comes another, perhaps the most important.

I saw Brendan Venter speak at an event last week. For the non-rugby crowd he is the former coach of Saracens and the man who helped lay the foundations for the incredible success they have enjoyed. He spoke about values and culture, in fact that is all he spoke about. No anecdotes, no war stories, just one theme. If you want success you have to start with values that bring out the best in people and in a team. The values at Saracens are written in big letters across their stadium – Discipline: Honesty: Work Rate: Humility. Rather than unpack these I will use another successful rugby team built on values to drive home my point and explain their values in more detail. In 2004, after a poor performance in the World Cup where the All Blacks yet again ‘choked’, another rugby leader, Graham Henry set about rebuilding the team by rebuilding the culture. The headline is “A better person makes a better All Black”. Their values are made vivid by a number of key phrases they all believe in:-

Sweep the sheds – the top players literally clean up the changing room after practice, they sweep the floor. That is all about humility.

Follow the spearhead – in Maori ‘whanau’ means spearhead and it is the symbol for the family. A spearhead has three points but one direction. This also talks to the importance of character, people prepared to sacrifice for the common good.

Champions do extra – this is about finding the small incremental improvements that add up to a better overall performance. It also includes the idea of work rate.

Keep the blue head – the ‘red head’ is all fire and passion that can crumble under pressure. The ‘blue head’ is the optimal balance of passion with clarity and accuracy. The top players have little triggers they use like stamping their feet in a game to bring them back to the blue head. The All Blacks no longer choke on big occasions.

Leave the jersey in a better place – this is about the responsibility to the people that came before you and to the wider community. It talks to a higher purpose, not just winning but the purpose of winning.

Coming back to Saracens, they have been very specific about the purpose of winning. Their goal, believe it or not, is not just to win everything. Their purpose is much more motivating  -  “Creating lasting memories”.

I have worked with a lot of marketing and business teams over the years and I have seen very little sincere attention paid to values. Hire great people, use great processes, set stretchy numeric performance goals – that is what it always seems to come down to. If I was being harsh – and I’m going to be – I’d say the real values of a lot of business teams are:

• Greed
• Hubris
• Selfishness
• Assigning/dodging blame

Where this is not the case it is because there are leaders who set a better example but their values often have to be inferred - they are not so explicitly stated as my two examples. By the way, as a break from rugby, I believe from what I have seen and heard, this same sincere, authentic values-led approach lay behind the success of the British Women’s Hockey Team. Why do sports people get this better than we do in business? Because at the top level they compete against people who are just as talented and just as fit. Skills and strength and play books will only get you so far. To reach further you have to look to values.

What kind of values would create a great marketing culture? I think we could do well with the values used by these successful sporting teams, but I will suggest a couple of specifics.

• Curiosity
• Enthusiasm

I never met a good marketer or worked with a good marketing team that were not fundamentally curious and indeed very eclectic in their curiosity. In marketing we are trying to rewrite the rules so you need to look far and wide for inspiration. And I never met a good marketer who was a cynic. I worked with a guy once who was a highly intelligent and very experienced marketer. He was also the most miserable cynic I ever met and for that reason alone he was (and I suspect still is) the most mediocre marketer. But these are just provocations. My point is that values make the difference, values build success, a higher purpose sustains it.

So what are your values, what culture are you trying to create? Write them on the wall in big letters.