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I've never had a marketing leader I truly looked up to.
Let that sink in.
I spent years climbing the ladder. Learning the tools. Mastering the tactics. But nobody ever taught me the values that make a leader worth following.
So I went looking for answers.
The Values of a Marketing Leader was born from one question I couldn't shake: What does it actually take to become a high-performing marketing leader?
Not the skills. Not the tech stack. The values.
This podcast is based on original research from my MSc dissertation as part of the MSc in Leading Sales Transformation. Through conversations with CMOs, VPs, and senior marketers across the globe, I uncovered four values that matter most: Integrity. Impact. Originality. Empowerment. Together, they form the IIOE framework. A values-driven approach to marketing leadership built from real stories, real struggles, and real breakthroughs.
Each episode, I pull back the curtain on the pivotal moments that shaped how today's best marketing leaders think, decide, and lead. The career-defining failures. The quiet choices that built trust, or broke it. The beliefs they hold when nobody's watching.
I've already spoken to 40+ senior marketing professionals. And I'm just getting started. Every new conversation adds to the research and keeps this framework alive.
If you're tired of leadership advice that sounds good but means nothing, join me.
Subscribe. Reflect. Lead differently.
Hey, and welcome back to the values of a marketing leader podcast. So today's episode is a little different. No guest. It's just me. And I wanted to tell you the story behind all of this, you know, where this podcast came from, why I spent the best part of a year obsessing over one question, and I guess how a fitness methodology called CrossFit somehow ended up shaping a marketing leadership framework.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Stick with me on that one. So if you've listened to the trailer, you'll know the headline already. I've never had a marketing leader I truly looked up to, but I've never really unpacked what that means, where the frustration came from, and actually what I did about it. And so that's what this episode is, the full story.
Speaker 1:So I hope you've got a coffee in hand, and let's get to it. Alright. So let me take you back a bit. I've been in marketing for a number of years now. Started out doing database admin and worked my way up through marketing exec roles and eventually into marketing leadership.
Speaker 1:I've worked in telecoms, tech, SAS, education, different industries, different company sizes, and across all of that, I worked under a fair few marketing leaders. Some were very smart. They knew their stuff technically. They could build a campaign, hit the metrics, present well to the board. But I guess the one thing that bothered me was none of them ever really inspired me.
Speaker 1:You know, none of them made me ever think, yeah, that's who I wanna become. And for ages I thought it was just all in my head. Maybe I was just being too picky, had unrealistic expectations, but the more I reflected on it especially once I started this master's program with Consalia, the more I realized I wasn't being picky at all. There was a gap, a proper gap. The marketing leaders I'd worked under were focused on tactics, on short term results, on looking good in quarterly reviews, and look, I get it.
Speaker 1:There's pressures and targets matter, but there was no depth to it. Not that I saw anyway. There was no sense of what they actually stood for. No values I could see guiding their decisions when things got hard. And weirdly, the leadership I did connect with didn't come from marketing at all.
Speaker 1:From a personal perspective, it came from sport. So just a bit about me, played football for a number of years, coached kids football, even founded a grassroots club to serve a a Filipino community where I grew up. And football taught me a lot about discipline, about showing up, about leading by example when it matters. And then later, CrossFit came into my life. So if you don't know, CrossFit is basically a fitness methodology built around constantly varied high intensity functional movement.
Speaker 1:You rock up to a gym, and there's a workout written on the whiteboard. You don't know what it is until you get there. It could be lifting. It could be cardio. It could be gymnastics.
Speaker 1:Usually, it's a brutal combination of all three. But what really drew me in wasn't the workouts. It was the culture, the values baked into the whole thing. Accountability, resilience, showing up when you don't even feel like it, you know, embracing discomfort because that's where growth happens. And this idea that you're not competing against anyone except yourself.
Speaker 1:And so I started noticing that I was pulling more leadership lessons from CrossFit than I ever had from any marketing job. And I guess that felt wrong or at least it made me curious. Why wasn't anyone in marketing talking about values the way CrossFit talks about values? And that question wouldn't leave me alone. So fast forward to 2022, I'd enrolled in the masters in leading sales transformation program with Consalia.
Speaker 1:It's a work based learning program, which means that your research has to connect to your actual job. You know, you're not just writing theory. You're trying to improve your own professional practice, and this is what executive education is all about. And I knew pretty quickly what I wanted to focus on. I wanted to understand what are the core values required of a high performing marketing leader, and how can I embody those values in my own work?
Speaker 1:Not the skills, not the competencies, values, the stuff that guides how you make decisions, how you treat people, what you fall back on when there's no playbook. And now here's the thing. When I started looking for existing research on this, I couldn't find anything. There's loads of content out there about marketing skills, about what tools you need and what behaviors you should develop, what competencies HR departments want to see, but almost nothing about values, values of marketing leadership. And that felt like a massive gap to me.
Speaker 1:All in all because values drive behavior, and that's not my opinion. There's proper academic literature to back that up. Yet in marketing leadership specifically, nothing. And so I thought, alright. If nobody's researching this, maybe I should.
Speaker 1:And so I decided to use a a mixed method approach, getting a bit academic here, but, you know, it's a bit of a mouthful. It basically meant two things. First, autoethnography, which is a fancy way of saying I use my own lived experience as part of the dataset. My reflections, my career moments, the experiences that shaped my own beliefs about leadership. Secondly, ethnography, which meant going out and talking to other people, specifically marketing leaders, to understand their values and their experiences too.
Speaker 1:And on top of that, I wanted to understand the customer side. How do the people that we're actually marketing to want to be marketed to? And what values do they expect to see from brands? The idea was to see if there was any alignment. Do the values that make great marketing leaders also show up in what customers want from marketing?
Speaker 1:Spoiler, they do, but I'll get to that. And so here's where it got real for me. September 2024. I'm about to start reaching out to senior marketing leaders, CMOs, VPs of marketing, heads of marketing to ask if they'll give me thirty to forty five minutes of their time for an interview, and I was bricking it, properly nervous. I kept thinking why would these people want to talk to me?
Speaker 1:I'm not a CMO. I'm not running marketing at some big name brand. What do I have to offer them? Imposter syndrome hit hard, that little voice going, who are you to be asking these questions? And actually, I wrote about it in my journal at the time, and I'll, you know, I'll read a bit of it to you.
Speaker 1:I wondered why they would want to engage with me. What value could I possibly offer in return? It's the classic imposter syndrome stuff. Right? But then I also wrote this.
Speaker 1:Leadership isn't about waiting for certainty. It's about showing up with conviction even when the doubt is present. And so I pressed send anyway. And here's what surprised me. People replied.
Speaker 1:You know, it wasn't just a few. There were loads of them. And they weren't just politely agreeing to help out some random master's student. They were genuinely interested in the topic. And one of the first people I spoke to actually said to me, you know, this is such an important topic, and more people need to hear about this.
Speaker 1:And that comment struck with me because suddenly it wasn't just my weird obsession. It wasn't just about my project. Other people felt the same gap. And so over the next few months, I ended up interviewing around 40 plus senior marketing leaders, all of them with ten plus years of experience from companies across tech, health care, advertising, software, retail, you name it, both b to b and b to c. And the conversations were incredible.
Speaker 1:I'd asked them to pick a value that they thought was essential for marketing leadership, and then we'd go deep into that. Why that value? What kind of experiences shaped that value? I asked them around telling me about pivotal moments when that value really came to light, and it was great. People opened up and properly opened up.
Speaker 1:And there was something that happens when you give someone space to reflect to you. You see them pause. You see them look up and search for a memory for something that maybe they haven't thought about in years, and they share something real and something honest. And it stopped feeling like interviews pretty quickly. It felt more like two people actually having a proper conversation about what actually matters.
Speaker 1:And so I'm doing these interviews, and I'm collecting a lot of data, like a lot. Over two fifty plus mentions of different values, everything from responsibility to curiosity, trust, creativity, accountability, empathy, you know, the list went on. And at first, it honestly felt overwhelming. Like, how do you make sense of all of that? And luckily, we live in a world of AI, so I used AI to go through thematic analysis where you basically look for patterns and group similar ideas together to see what kind of themes emerge.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, using that initial AI tool for the the initial coding was a practical choice given that I was doing this alongside a a full time job. But I was careful to stay critical. I didn't wanna just, you know, accept the tool and what it spat out. I interrogated it, challenged it, made sure it actually reflected what people were saying. And slowly, patterns started to form.
Speaker 1:Certain values kept coming up again and again, and not the exact same words every time, but the underlying ideas. Know, people talked about honesty, transparency, doing the right thing even when it's hard. That cluster became integrity. People talked about results, moving the needle, making marketing actually matter to the business and that in itself became impact. People talked about creativity, standing out, having the courage to challenge convention and that became the value of originality.
Speaker 1:And lastly, people talked about their teams developing people, giving others the space to lead, and that became empowerment. So four values, impact, originality, empowerment, all governed by integrity as the core value. And this is where CrossFit comes into it. CrossFit is built around three foundational modalities, strength, endurance, and skill. And each one develops a different capability.
Speaker 1:But when they work together, you get something greater than the sum of its parts. And I started seeing parallels. The value of impact, for example, is like strength, your ability to create meaningful results. Empowerment is like endurance, your ability to sustain momentum and build capability in others over time. Originality is like the skill that you've got your ability to do something that others can't, to differentiate, to be distinct.
Speaker 1:And at the center of it all being integrity, and that really is the core, the foundation that everything else is built on. You know, without integrity, the the rest falls apart. And so the IIOE framework, it's a bit of a mouthful, isn't just a list of four values. It's a model, a way of thinking about what high performing marketing leadership actually looks like. But I wasn't done yet after those interviews.
Speaker 1:Remember, the second part of my research question was about how these values show up externally. How can I lead marketing initiatives that align with what our audience actually wants? And so I ran a separate study, sent out surveys to customers. People who'd been on the receiving end of marketing, asked them what they liked, what they hated, what made them pay attention, and the responses came back. You know, not a massive sample, but enough to see patterns yet again.
Speaker 1:And guess what? The values that customers wanted from marketing mapped almost perfectly onto the leadership values. They wanted to see value. Marketing that's actually useful and that helps them solve a problem. You know, that aligns with impact.
Speaker 1:They wanted personalization. Marketing that sees them as individuals and not just leads in a funnel, and that aligns with originality. They wanted innovation, marketing that feels fresh, not the same tired playbook and that aligns with empowerment because innovative marketing teams, usually are innovative because they've been given the freedom to experiment. And at the center of all, all they wanted was authenticity. They wanted marketing that felt real, not salesy, not performative, just genuine.
Speaker 1:And authenticity aligned with integrity. Is that make you a great marketing leader internally are the same values that make your marketing resonate externally. It's not two separate things. It's all connected. How you lead shapes what you create, and what you create shapes how customers experience your brand.
Speaker 1:And that in itself is probably the biggest insight from the whole research process. The framework wasn't just for personal development. For me, I began to see it as a bridge between how I lead internally and how we show up externally. That was the so what. There was another moment I'd I'd like to share.
Speaker 1:Partway through the interviews, I spoke to a leader who who challenged me directly on this. He asked whether values were even necessary for success. He used the example of looking at someone like Elon Musk, who's obviously achieved massive impact with not necessarily embodying what most people would call good values based leadership. And that question really shook me. I I wrote in my reflection journal what you know, am I completely wrong to look at values as an important starting point for leadership?
Speaker 1:But after sitting with it, I I realized something. You know, Elon Musk might be successful, but he's not the kind of leader I wanna be. His approach doesn't align with my values, ultimately, I guess that's the point, isn't it? This framework isn't about what works for everyone. It's about what kind of leader you want to become and what you're willing to stand for.
Speaker 1:And for me, that's integrity first, always. So what did this whole journey actually do for me? Honestly, it it changed how I see myself. At the start, was nervous to reach out to senior leaders. I felt like an outsider, but by the end, I realized I had something to offer.
Speaker 1:The topic I'd been, you know, obsessing over. I found that other people cared about it too. And the questions that I was asking, they were the right questions. I walked into conversations with CMOs differently and I wasn't intimidated by the end of it. I was just present.
Speaker 1:I was confident that my perspective was valid. And that shift didn't happen overnight. I felt like it happened through the repetition of these interviews. Every interview was like a rep in the CrossFit gym. I got a bit better each time, a bit more comfortable asking harder questions, a bit more confident in my own voice.
Speaker 1:You know, it's this thing called deliberate practice, same principles as CrossFit. And that changed how how I thought about leadership. And so I've started using the AIAOE framework as a lens for decisions. When planning a campaign, I'd ask, is this going to have real impact or are we just trying to stay busy? When reviewing work, I'd ask, is this original or are we playing it safe?
Speaker 1:When working with my team, I'd ask, am I empowering them to lead or am I just telling them what to do? And it sounds so simple. I know you're listening to this thinking that's so simple, but having a shared language and those four values made it tangible. It gave me something to hold myself accountable to. And I guess the question to ask is why am I showing this with all of you?
Speaker 1:So a few reasons. First, because a lot of leaders I interviewed said the same thing. This conversation needs to be had more widely and values in marketing leadership isn't something people talk about enough. And if my research can contribute to that conversation, I want it to. Second, because I know I'm not the only one that's felt the gap.
Speaker 1:If you've ever worked under a marketing leader who didn't inspire you, if you've ever wondered what kind of leader you actually want to become, then maybe this resonates. And third, because I'm not done. Every episode of this podcast adds to the research, and every new conversation brings new perspectives, new stories, new insights. The IIOE framework isn't meant to be static. It's meant to evolve and evolve with the times, And I don't have all the answers.
Speaker 1:I just wanna be really clear about that. You know, I'm still figuring this out and still learning and still making mistakes. But ultimately, think I'm asking the right questions now. And I think there's value in doing that out loud in public with other people who care about the same things. And so that is what this podcast is.
Speaker 1:So if any of this has landed with you, I know I've gone on for a bit long, here's what I'd ask. Subscribe, obviously. Share it with other people who might find it interesting, but more importantly, think about your own values. How do you want to stand? What do you actually stand for as a leader?
Speaker 1:What guides your decisions when there's no playbook? And if you're a marketing leader who wants to be part of the conversation, please reach out. I'm always looking to interview new guests, get new perspectives, new stories. And I feel the journey of values based marketing leadership has only begun, so let's figure this out together. So, yeah, thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the episodes to come.