How to Become a Marketing Unicorn

[caption id="attachment_73427" align="alignright" width="200"] Patrick McLeanExecutive Vice-President and Chief Marketing Officer, TD Bank – America's Most Convenient Bank[/caption] What does it take to succeed in marketing today? I recently had a chat with TD Bank CMO Patrick McLean about marketing's changing roles, responsibilities and leadership. And he joked that at his bank, they're looking for nothing less than "Marketing Unicorns." Here's what that means, and his advice on how to become a unicorn in your own career. "I joke that we're looking for unicorns in these roles," said McLean. "We're asking them to do a lot. We're asking them to think strategically. We're asking them to be sound fundamentally from an analytics perspective. We want them to be creative leaders." Change Starts at the Top That expansion of expectations doesn't just go for the marketers who work for Patrick. It's true of his role as CMO as well, and for the leaders working for him. We were discussing the recent research on marketing strategy and leadership, which shows that marketers are being asked to do more in 11 different areas than they were just 5 years ago, and he saw exactly what our survey respondents did, especially when it comes to taking responsibility for technology and data. Here's a piece of what he had to say about that: [video width="1280" height="720" mp4="https://www.adweek.com/wp-content/tm-uploads/2018/07/Clip1_final_tech-responsibility.mp4"][/video] Technology and data are things he feels leaders need to understand first-hand, not just have somebody else take care of. "The landscape changes so quickly that not only do you need some people on your team that are immersed in it and get it and are continuing to challenge the status quo. ... But you yourself have to immerse yourself as a leader so that, first of all, you don't personally get left behind, but also so you can understand what that technology can do." But even beyond MarTech and data, which are responsibilities I think everyone expects to have expanded, McLean sees other new and important facets to the role of marketing leader: "The role of the chief marketing officer is so complex now, and there's so many different dimensions to it," said McLean. It "has evolved significantly in terms of the role they play across the business. And I think being a good relationship person, and being collaborative, and influencing across the organization is a really important role that the marketer plays." A Full 'Stack' Development That applies all the way down the marketing personnel "stack" (to borrow the tech term we all use and respect so much). When I was a young marketer growing up in the early part of my career, there were the functional disciplines of marketing, and you wanted to make sure you were learning all the aspects," said McLean. "Fast forward to today ... and in a lot of ways the role that analytics plays now, in particular, and the changing dynamics of customer behavior now, and they just demand that you have a really good sense of everything from analytics to strategy to creative. The marketer used to be the person coming up with the advertising and maybe executing tactically on a few acquisition tactics. But in a lot of ways, the marketer now is the driver of growth, the voice of the customer, the analytics leader, in a lot of ways, across the business to understand what's going on in the market place. And I just think that responsibility to be all those things has never been more complex or more important. How to Become a Marketing Unicorn So that's the view from the top of what marketers need to be able to do today. But managing your own career, how can you build those hard and soft skills to become a rare and in-demand Marketing Unicorn? Here was some of McLean's advice for that: [video width="1280" height="720" mp4="https://www.adweek.com/wp-content/tm-uploads/2018/07/Clip3-career-advice-unicorn.mp4"][/video] "We're looking for unicorns these days," he said. So, "think about what it would take to turn yourself into a unicorn, at least directionally." Patrick went on to describe how he developed his own unicorn skills (Should we call it his "horn"? Maybe not.) and the techniques he used are more like what you see tech workers doing than what you'd traditionally do in marketing. He went out of his way to work in companies and on projects that would give him the skills he needed to develop: What I did early in my career is I got into an e-commerce role. I took on roles that challenged me from a technology perspective ... And having done that, first of all, I had a passion for it. And second of all, I gained an appreciation early for the value of it. I would encourage anybody to do a tour of duty in one of those jobs, whether it's completely in your wheelhouse or not. Whether you work for your digital team, or get into a product development kind of job where you're forced to get into technology and forced to understand it. Patrick also advised ambitious marketers to develop their understanding of business strategy. "While I've always been relatively confident and engaged in marketing strategy," he said "I think what's changed for me [as a CMO] has been elevating my game to the point where I'm connecting marketing strategy and business strategy, and therefore influencing business strategy. And that's been an eye-opener for me." That was a challenge at first, and something he had to work on. He closed that gap by spending more and more time with business leaders across the bank. "Again, it's this idea of getting out of your functional positions and becoming more a part of the broader business leadership team that's driving the business forward. And when you move into a chief marketing officer type seat, that becomes the expectation. So the more you can think that way earlier in your career, the better equipped you're going to be when you get there; and I would say the more likely that you're going to wind up in one of those seats." While some of that may sound daunting, it opens up a lot of opportunities for marketers to move up and into more rewarding positions in the company. "It makes it that much more fun, too, honestly," he said. "You're not just playing your position, but I think we all should be aspiring to move the business forward and lean into it." If you to hear more of Patrick McLean's advice on building your career and becoming a marketing leader, you can click here to see the compete interview on demand over at AADM. How are you working to develop your own career? What advice would you give to more junior marketers coming up themselves? Let me know in the comments.

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How to Become a Marketing Unicorn

Thorin McGee

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