← The Marketing Millennials
The Marketing Millennials
What Marketers Get Wrong About Success with Harvey Lee, Founder at Product Marketing Career Accelerator | Ep. 364
00:42:07
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- [00:01]
Podcast Announcer
Tired of robotic marketing Customer IO helps turn cold hard data into real human connection. Email, SMS, push, webhooks, and more. Join 7,800 brands using AI powered journeys that connect, convert and don't annoy. Visit Customer IO to start your free trial today.
- [00:23]
Tamara Gorminski
Hi, besties. Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials. Tamara I'm Tamara Gorminski and I'm stepping in as your guest host while Daniel's out on paternity leave. I'm a career product marketing leader and the former VP of PMM at high growth startups like Kajabi and Unbounds. Now I'm the founder of PMM Camp, a community and newsletter for product marketing leaders. And while Daniel's off doing dad things, I'll be here bringing you fun conversations with some of the smartest marketers I know. Today's guest has had one of the most unconventional marketing careers you'll ever hear about. Harvey Lee went from touring the world with literal rock stars to launching the first version of the Xbox. And along the way, he's built a career entirely on his own terms. In a world that tells marketers to climb the ladder step by step, Harvey's story is proof that there's another way. We're talking about how to define what success looks like for you, how to design a career path that actually gets you there, and why thinking beyond the standard path might just be your biggest advantage.
- [01:29]
Podcast Announcer
Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the car.
- [01:55]
Tamara Gorminski
Harvey. Welcome to the pod.
- [01:57]
Harvey Lee
Yeah, thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
- [01:59]
Tamara Gorminski
Super excited to have you here because I think there's so many things that our listeners are going to be able to learn from you today. One of the things I've always loved about you is that your career does not follow a straight line. You started by literally traveling the road with rock stars, and you've also launched the first Xbox and done a ton of stuff in between. And so I was wondering if we could start today by maybe just you sharing a little bit about what was the through line of that journey.
- [02:31]
Harvey Lee
Yeah, it has been a crazy ride and it continues to be a crazy ride after all these years. And the through line question, it's a great question because I always get this, either the sentiment or the question directly from recruiters. When I used to look for Jobs in corporate or jobs in startups. I always got the same question, which was, I've been looking at your cv, I've been looking at your resume and it doesn't make any sense to me. And I would be scratching my head, it's like, well, why? Because of course it makes sense to me because it's my lived in experience. But through recruiter's eyes, they would see that I moved from the music industry to video games to cybersecurity, to print, back to cybersecurity, to community, to consulting. And they're like, there's no consistency here, so why are you interested in this job? And the more I got that question, the more it actually forced me to look within myself and be able to answer it. And there's two key attributes to the answer. One is I'm inherently curious. Everything I look at is through the eyes of curiosity. And I look at everything the same way, whether it's music or tech. And that is, how can I make this better? Right? And I mean, with that curiosity, it just breeds things popping off in my head and all the possibilities and let's see the possibilities. And the second part is my ability to translate those possibilities into market outcomes. Right? So whether it's complicated tech or something difficult to be able to articulate to a customer that may not have ever heard of your product before, I'm able to translate it into language that they can understand. And that's not just about copywriting, but it's about defining and articulating the value proposition, working on the copy, working cross stakeholder, so on and so forth. So there's that translation piece. And where those two attributes have always landed me is the through line. And that is, I've always ended up in organizations in need of innovation. So I always end up in organizations that need either help with innovation or help rescuing where they're at right now, because they've got a big pivot coming. Not everyone's an innovator. Some people have been in the market for decades and they're like, the market's moved. We have no idea how to shift with it. In a way, that's their own innovation. They have to innovate their way out of it, but they're not used to it. They have to unlearn how to do it. So I've always found myself going into organizations that are in need of that kind of help. For example, in my music days, I launched the first interactive single from there from my music career in record business, I went into marketing, into product marketing, and from there, long story short, I ended up at Microsoft launching the first Xbox. Microsoft were going head to head with Nintendo and Sony, and they were at the beginning as well. So they were at that juncture too. The next job after that, 12 years later, albeit, whereas at Kaspersky Lab, where there was a massive market shift and they found that there was no demand for their products anymore and they needed to pivot. So I found myself at the juncture of always starting with something new, because I could always see the possibilities. And the reason that I could see the possibilities is I had this in order of curiosity. It was like an itch that I just had to scratch. But I was able to package it for organizations so they understood the value. So once I started articulating this with recruiters, they were like, oh, yeah, of course, I get that. But when you look at the actual resume itself, just because of the way resumes and CVS are listed, it's just a list, right? They look at the list and go, there's no sequential order to this, but they don't see it. But if you look at it retrospectively and understand the virtues of curiosity and translation, then all of a sudden the penny drops and we move on to the next question.
- [06:40]
Tamara Gorminski
Yeah, I love that. And I think you just mentioned there at the end, it's like, yeah, in retrospect, and I think in hindsight, you can clearly see the through line, I'm going to assume that while you were actually moving through that journey, perhaps it was less clear in the moment. But I'm curious, was there an actual moment in your career maybe earlier on when you realized you didn't have to follow kind of the standard marketing path? Because as you mentioned, you've really explored a bunch of different roles in marketing.
- [07:11]
Harvey Lee
Yeah, well, there was two. But actually, just to your previous point about retrospective, it's always easy to look at your career retrospectively and have that epiphany moment of, well, of course it was that way. But you actually just touched on something that's really, really important because when you're in it, it's never clear. So when you're looking forward, you can't see it. When you look back, it seems blindingly obvious. Right. So being able to get to a point where you can see things looking forward is incredibly empowering. Right. But anyway, we'll come back to that. Anyway, so the question is understanding that I didn't have a traditional path in marketing. Well, there's two answers to that question. Right. The first one's somewhat not hilarious, but it is what it is. I Left School in 1984 and I'm sure that some people listening to this are thinking my parents weren't even born then. I Left school in 1984 and it was a very, very different world, right? And so I left at 15. Most people didn't go to university when they left school, about 10%, now I think it's 50%. But I left school not covered in clover or glory, but I left school with very little in terms of qualifications or glory. So I, I didn't have a choice. There was no offer of a standard career available to me. So I had a choice. I could either fight or flight. It was either. I was just going to be able to take what was available for someone in my situation, a teenage school leaver with very few qualifications and not much hope, or I could try to forge something for myself. And I spent a few years, not many, but a few years and I wrote about this in my first book, Backstage Pass, about trying to forge my way and try to conform to what was expected of me in society by no less my parents at the time as well. And I took jobs and training schemes at the department store Marks Spencer, which in the UK is a huge institution. And it was okay, but it just didn't light me up. And I spent maybe two or three years doing that. And by the time I was 17 I had this calling of a realization really that I am not going to conform. I'm clear I'm not going to conform to the standard path that all my friends were on or my peers. But I wasn't quite sure what it was going to be. But I knew what I wanted it to be and that was a career in music. But being a 17 year old living at home with your parents in Manchester, 200 miles away from London, makes it somewhat challenging. Anyhow, long story short, I set out on the path in music, as many people know. But there was a major moment that I think most people probably will identify and it was in a meeting actually when I was at Microsoft in the Xbox team and we were sitting around in the boardroom and the executives were talking about challenges they were having with our messaging, reaching an audience. In Germany, for example, everybody was looking at frameworks and trying to look at the problem through the same lens and no one was getting any answers because we'd already tried that and failed. So it's like, well, what else you got? And I came up with, well, you know what? And I came up with some very human based facts, human behavioral, factual ways to Address the messaging challenge to the teenage audience in Germany. And it came out of my human behavior background in the music industry, studying audiences, studying record buying, public. And what I did is that I transferred my knowledge from that industry sideways to a different industry and not rubber stamped it, but imprinted it on this problem. And the execs were like, that's exactly how we should be handling this. And from that moment onwards I realized that actually skills can work upwards, they can work vertically, but they can be more effective if they work laterally or sideways. So taking your skills and being able to put them and transfer them sideways to a different situation, different problem, same solution was incredibly enlightening. And I realized that actually if I think the same as everyone else, not only am I no better than anyone else, and I don't think I'm better than anyone else, I'm not that kind of person. But it's not going to differentiate my career or my prospects. So I can make a choice to think differently. And sometimes it's going to work for me and maybe sometimes it's not. And I've got both experiences, but more than less, it served me really, really well and it's differentiated me and it's helped me position into all the positions and all the opportunities that I've had ever since. So I stayed with it.
- [12:18]
Tamara Gorminski
I love that. And I like that you mentioned conformity and almost conforming to what you mentioned society had in mind for you or your parents or who probably even originally your own, once you got into a career, your own vision of like, this is what success might look like.
- [12:36]
Harvey Lee
Yeah, yeah.
- [12:37]
Tamara Gorminski
And I know because we've talked about this before that you've kind of had to go on that journey of redefining what success has looked like, you know, when you started out in your career to where you are now. I'd love to hear just a little bit more about that journey. And specifically within the lens of. For marketers listening today who are trying to figure out what their version of success is, not what society wants to define a success for them, not what their parents do, maybe not even what their boss wants to define for them, like how can they start to really get down to what does success look like for me? Not just what looks good on paper.
- [13:11]
Harvey Lee
Well, I think that we've got to actually accept some of the facts in today's world. Right. And today's world doesn't match yesterday's world. Let me explain briefly. The standard path for careers is frankly pretty much extinct. It doesn't exist anymore. So if you Think about the marketing ladder as maybe we've come to accept it or we've been come to be taught. It actually was for a different world. It was for a world 20, 30, 40 years ago where you'd follow the educational path. You would leave university, you'd have your marketing degree, you'd go and work at Enormo Corp, or whoever it was, and you'd be there forever. And then you'd get your gold watch, you'd go fishing and happy ever after. But that world doesn't exist anymore. That world hasn't existed for a very, very long time. In fact, that world is dead. Right? It's dead. It has been dead for a while, but lockdown killed it off once and for all, really. Today's marketing careers really requires people who understand nuance, understands audiences, community, micro audiences, cultural nuance. And really, it's an exercise in the humanities more than anything. And it's less about understanding metrics, it's understanding human behavior. Because fundamentally, marketing is human behavior. It's the study of human. Could call it marketing psychology, really. And actually, Roy Sutherland makes a great point that actually, marketing shouldn't even be called marketing. It should just be called customer psychology, because that's fundamentally what it is. So we're all students of customer psychology, but we call it marketing, and we measure ourselves with hard numbers. But actually, even though that does have a place, the best marketers understand all these sort of collective experiences that we all have as part of the human condition. And the best marketing and the messages that resonate the greatest with people are fundamentally deeply human traits. Right? So if you want to get on the ladder, and I hate that word, I've used it a thousand times on LinkedIn. I hate myself for using it. If you want to get on the marketing ladder, the reinvented one, then start studying the human condition. That is the path that will take you far. And from there, you will be able to niche out or specialize or generalize in any direction you want to. But without that, you're going to find it very, very difficult to progress, and you'll just be stuck in the old world that unfortunately is already dead.
- [15:53]
Tamara Gorminski
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned a couple interesting things there. I want to talk about niching down, but maybe we can talk about that in just a bit, because I want to just dig a little deeper into this idea of defining success and then kind of designing your own path to get there. So let's say that someone recognizes what you've just said, which is, you know what we're really Focusing here on customer psychology, I have an understanding of what success looks like to me. How do you start to actually even build a plan that lets you figure out, like, what roles should you be applying for, what projects should you take on or not? Because I think in my experience, talking with people on all stages of their career, even like director level folks feel like they just need to take the first job offer that comes to them. And I don't feel like there is a lot of intentionality around saying, you know, all of the things you just said, which is like, what impact do I want to be having? What ladder do I want to be climbing, first of all? And then what's the best way for me to do that? So I'd love to just hear your perspective on that and how people should be thinking about that.
- [17:02]
Harvey Lee
Yeah, you know what, it's a great question. And there's so many layers to this. The thing is, when I was maybe 25, I moved to London. I got a job at record label and I thought that I'd hit the jackpot in relative terms. I had because I left school 10 years earlier with like nothing. And that was my dream. So I hit my dream and success looked like a corner office, a location on the Kings Road in Chelsea in London, which, if anybody listening knows London is quite the postcode. A company car, expense account, all the glory hunting and the title, right? And also my parents could stop asking me when I was going to get a proper job, which for 10 years, that was the only question they ever asked me. Hello, Harvey, how are you? Have you got a proper job yet? So finally I was able to lay that to rest after 10 years. But guess what? All these decades later, success looks completely different, right? So how does it look now? It looks like working with the people that I really, really want to work with, it's taking on projects that not just empower me, but energize me. It's allowing me to take a whole month off and take a vacation with my family. That's wealth, that's real wealth. That's life wealth, Right? It's not just about money. And that's the shift that happens gradually for most people, if it actually ever happens. But fundamentally, it really comes down to two things, right? What people think success is and what success actually is. So what people think success actually is is called acquisition. And what I mean by that is, what can I get? Can I get the title? Can I get the salary band? Can I get the office? You know, all these things, all the stuff, can I get it Right. So people approach their careers from an acquisition point of view, but the reality of the matter is that they should be approaching it from an alignment point of view. And that alignment is, does this align with my values? Does it create the kind of life that I and or my family want to have? Does it allow me to do what I would like to do in and out of work? I've heard you talk about this on stage as well. Right. It's like, what is wealth? And the fundamental part of this, even though it's about impact and autonomy, is that that alignment really has, is really an individual thing. So society and careers and everybody has an opinion about what success looks like. But the reality of it is, it's a very, very personal question. Right. Success is what you as the individual define it to be. And it doesn't necessarily have to be tied to acquisition. It doesn't mean the title, it doesn't mean the salary bounding. It means what you want to build, the values that you want to put down and live by and stick to. Some people put values down and then fall back into the acquisition mode and go, well, this job came up and it had this huge title and I thought I would take it. Guess what? Six months later, they're back in the market for another role again. It never works out. So for me, defining your own success is about moving away from acquisition and moving towards alignment and defining that alignment on values that are key for you. And don't worry about what anybody else thinks.
- [20:33]
Tamara Gorminski
That framing makes so much sense for me and I like how concrete you've made it, because I would agree, I think most of us are taught to acquire things. That's literally how we're grown up.
- [20:45]
Harvey Lee
And I've been there as well. Yeah, you think it makes you happy and it does for about 10 minutes. It's like a sugar rush. And then you get the blood sugar crash. It's like the reality. It's like, well, I got the office, I got the salary. And then, you know, your boss or the cmo, whoever it is, comes in with this huge stack of papers and goes, there's your workload. And all of a sudden you get this sinking feeling going, I'm empty inside. Right. That's because you're not aligned to your values.
- [21:12]
Podcast Announcer
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- [21:43]
Tamara Gorminski
And I think earlier in your career there is some value in acquiring different experiences.
- [21:49]
Harvey Lee
I agree, I agree, I agree. Yeah. I think time plays a huge part of it. And I think, you know, from the age of 20 to 30, go and experiment, right. You're not, your career is not going to be defined in those 10 years. Go make the money, get the promotions, do, you know, do whatever you have to do. Right. But by the time you get into your 30s or 40s, that alignment part is going to be, whether you feel it or not is going to be at the back of your head screaming at you going, this is not working, this is not working, this is not working. And you will feel extremely conflicted. I think anybody who's been working 15, 20 years plus will recognize that sort of inner wrench inside them going, this is leaving me empty inside. Or this is very conflicting and that's because they're not aligned to their values.
- [22:34]
Tamara Gorminski
Exactly. I think one great book for that is Sahil Bloom's new book, the Five Types of Wealth. It talks the nuance of what you were saying there, which is, I think again, in our careers we often think that money is the main type of wealth. And again, when you're starting out and you're like, oh, I need to pay my rent and I need to be able to do these things, it is the most important thing. But as we kind of progress, we start to realize, okay, well, maybe my health is equally important or where are the dials and do I need to dial one thing up or down to accommodate for the other?
- [23:07]
Harvey Lee
I can tell you that after multiple trips and it's not a badge of honor in any way. Anybody who's been burnt out will know this. Right. They will feel it and they will have been through it. Once you've had a BP of 171 and a doctor phoning you to tell you to go to the emergency room, straight away, you suddenly realize that you've got it all wrong.
- [23:27]
Tamara Gorminski
Yeah.
- [23:28]
Harvey Lee
You know, whether. And I hope that never comes for anybody. Right. But unfortunately, you know, I've had the learned in experience and many of my coaching clients have too.
- [23:37]
Tamara Gorminski
Yeah. Or it's sometimes it's not even your health, but it can be your relationships. Like, I even remember climbing the ladder myself. Getting to. I was the chief strategy officer at Unbounce, which was you know, something that I. I thought about my entire career. I thought I wanted to be a CEO, actually. So I was like, this is perfect. And then I got there and, like, parts of me loved the job. Like, there are parts of my job I loved. I loved my team, but I didn't realize that I was actually taking on a different job even, you know, So I was like, oh, I get to spend way less time building things, creating things, and. And then of course, you're so busy, it's like all these other things in your life start to fall apart. And so for me, you kind of have to feel it. And then you're like, okay, something is out of alignment. That was a great word to use. I need to pull back. And so for me, I actually, like, left that role to go back to a VP level role, which I remember at the time being really anxious and being like, are people gonna think I'm a failure? I couldn't hack it. But I was like, honestly, at the end of the day, as long as I feel good about the decision, and I knew that was the role I wanted to take on. I wanted to be in the weeds with my team again. I wanted to actually be doing launch plans. Alignment.
- [24:45]
Harvey Lee
Alignment. You moved from acquisition back to alignment. And that's what you were feeling when you're in your C level job. Right. There's one other point just to add to that briefly before we move on, and that is if you look at your boss's role, let's say your boss is the CMO in your case, Chief Strategy Officer, in this case. And you look at their role and you think, never in a month of Sundays do I want that job. What that's actually telling you is that you're on the wrong ladder. You're walking the wrong path, because that path only leads in one direction. It's either stuck or in your boss's role. Right. So that's actually a flag. That's a signal in the noise, and the signal is change direction.
- [25:33]
Tamara Gorminski
That is a great little question to ask yourself. And I think one that we probably don't ask enough. Again, people just let themselves. Oh, get promoted to that role without ever asking, is that actually what I want?
- [25:44]
Harvey Lee
Yeah. Yeah.
- [25:45]
Tamara Gorminski
So you had mentioned earlier this concept of niching down, and I did want to spend a bit of time there today because I hear a lot of conflicting advice. Some people say, find your niche. Find your niche. Other people say, you know, it's best to be a marketing generalist. Whatever that means.
- [26:05]
Harvey Lee
It changes. Yeah.
- [26:07]
Tamara Gorminski
In your perspective, when it comes to this conversation and the framing of, you know, designing a career you love.
- [26:13]
Harvey Lee
Yeah.
- [26:13]
Tamara Gorminski
What approach do you think our listeners should be taking?
- [26:18]
Harvey Lee
Well, I think that there's more nuance to this than people give credit for. It almost feels cliche to say find your niche actually, doesn't it, these days? Because what does it mean anymore? Right? Empty. Empty words. So for me, there's two types. If you're thinking about it in the context of career development, there's two types of niching. There's good niching and there's bad niching. Right. You've never heard this before, Right? Bad news. What does terrible niching look like? Terrible niching is when you do something or position yourself in a place where you box yourself into a corner and you become unemployable. Right. I'll give you an example. Terrible niching. I do email marketing for SAS companies, for companies of 50 to 100 headcount based out of the Nordic region. Right. Outside of that definition of your niche, who the hell is going to employ you? You are boxed into record. It's great if you've got a lifetime of work in that niche, but the chances you won't. A good niching is if you've become well known for a problem that exists, but it spans across multiple industries. That makes you transferable. So that when one opportunity finishes, let's say you work in a certain category and you're well known for solving a specific problem. Let's say it's messaging or positioning or whatever it would be. Brand, you name it and then you can move that across to. From cyber security to digital retail. I don't know, I'm just picking words out of the air. But your niche is a good niche because you can transfer it and you can still grow. And you know, in the movie world they'd call this typecasting, right? So. So it's really about typecasting for me. If you pick the wrong niche and you niche down too far, you typecast yourself and you are not available to be casted in any other role. So leave it a little bit loose. I think you mentioned about specialists and generalists. I think specialist generalist is where it's at. I don't know if that kind of makes sense or I'm bottling on the question, but I think that you need to be able to do a bit of everything. You need to understand 80% of everybody else's job so you understand where you fit. But you need to be able to specialize within the values and within the Framework in which you work for yourself. So for example, what's the framework you work for yourself? Let's say it's around messaging and positioning. You can still niche down within that, but it's still messaging positioning. And you can still move it from. As long as you can move it from one category to another or one kind of context to another, then it's high enough to be generalist, but it's specialized enough to make you valuable and to be the name on the hiring manager's lips that they want to hire. Right. And it's just hitting it right in the crosshairs is where you need to be.
- [29:22]
Tamara Gorminski
Yeah, I buy into that and I actually view things fairly similar as well. I had this aha moment maybe once I after my first director level role. So, you know, mid to senior where I started to realize, you know what, the jobs that I liked the most, even the projects I liked the most, all started to have things in common and it was me solving specific problems. So now when I chat with folks, marketers who are looking to grow in their career or even to our earlier conversations, just describe what they're good at and the through line of their career. I always say, what are the problems that you are uniquely qualified to solve? The problems that light you up, that you can solve better, faster in a different way than others and really just articulate those problems. For me, I've always said like I'm great at helping companies identify their best customers, understand those customers and then like price package and position the value that those customers are looking for. Now the great thing about starting with problems is that typically it will lend itself to a certain type of company because a lot of people, I'll get this feedback too. It's like, well, anyone could find me useful. And that's not quite true. Like yes, you can be transferable, but there's probably a type of company that needs you more, that would be willing to pay more for you. Right. And I think that's what I love about this approach is you can say, well, maybe the problems I solve are really important for growth stage businesses. Right. For me that's, that's the case. My whole career has been built around growth stage and that means different things to different people. But the company's at a certain stage where they really need that problem solved. Doesn't mean I can't go solve that problem for someone else. It just means these people find me the most valuable.
- [31:04]
Harvey Lee
Yeah, most of my consulting clients tend to be mid market. And the reason that I fall into mid market and it's kind of happy accident really is that. And it's not because I'm too expensive for startups, it's not the case. It's just I don't solve their problems. It's to your point, it's like they don't need me. They've got different problems. The enterprise guys, they got agencies at their back pockets, huge teams of people throwing money at it. But the mid market guys have a pain point and that is we know how to get where we want to go. We don't have the resources, we don't necessarily have the specialized expertise, but we do have enough budget to bring in the expertise to execute if we needed to. So to your point, absolutely. Totally relevant. But to your experience and to your specialist generalization is that you are perfectly positioned to move from one category to another. And that's really, really empowering because if ever opportunity A came to an end, you can find opportunity B and C and you'll have options. It won't just be I have to take the first job that comes. You'll have options.
- [32:09]
Tamara Gorminski
Yeah, and that's been in my experience as well. So a lot of people are probably listening and they're saying, well maybe now I could go back and articulate the problems I'm great at solving. But that doesn't help the last 10 years of my career. And maybe they're starting to feel a bit anxious like, well, I did jump between some different niches or maybe they're looking at their CV and feeling like it looks a little skinny, scattered. Can you leave the audience today with just a few actionable pieces of advice of like how to start to make sense of their career story if they're feeling they're in this position.
- [32:43]
Harvey Lee
Yeah, you know what, there's more people out there with a messy CV than there are with a tidy one. So if that's you, you're not alone, right? You are absolutely not alone. It's not just me. There's millions of people like me with a messy cv. And whether it be through my coaching clients or just being in and around people who have had a similar problem, it's not a unique problem. But a lot of people think the same way about themselves and they think that it is in itself a problem. Well, I'm here to tell you it's actually not. And you can turn that messy past into a future proof career just by following a few steps, right? That messy past, what you think is a competitive disadvantages actually could be your competitive advantage in what is a sanitized vanilla ized world, Right? Well, it is, isn't it? Let me just call it what it is. And I think one of the biggest parts about, I mean, we've already spoken about quite a bit of this already. One of the biggest parts is about taking that messy past and reframing it, right? So again, how do we reframe it? So if I just use myself as a case study. But for anybody listening, just think about all the. How the analogies relate to you, right? So music industry, Music industry taught me how to deal with difficult internal customers, promoters, artists, which now are coders, development teams, how to talk to audiences, how to refer to audiences, how to deal under pressure, Tor logistics. And I transferred those sideways into the corporate environment. It's like TOR logistics became launch planning, right? Audiences became segmentation. So think about it in those contexts, it's like, well, I've got all these things over here and it's all big, horrible mess. It's like, no, it isn't. Reframe it into your new context. Move it sideways, right? Video games. My time at Xbox, I learned how to build a brand from nothing whilst taking on huge incumbent competition. That taught me how to scale massively. So how to scale a tech product massively with and without budget, because we had both scenarios going on. So again, what is your equivalent of how you reframe it and then how you transfer it into your new context? That's a really, really big one, right? The other one is just moving away from acquisition and defining your values, I would say. And if I was going to give marketers listening, like one piece of advice, one piece of advice, it's this, stop waiting for permission, right? You're waiting for the promotion, you're waiting for your annual review. You're waiting for people to tell you how amaz that last campaign or that last brand thing that you did, or how amazing the logo looked in blue, whatever it is, it kind of doesn't really matter, right? Because you have to stop waiting. Maybe it'll come, maybe it won't. Even if it comes, it might actually be meaningless, right? So you have to stop waiting. A lot of people say to me, but I want to work in strategy, I want to do this. And no one's giving me a chance. And I look at them with cold, steely eyes and I think, they probably think I'm going to kill them. And I look at them and I look like, so what's the problem? They're like, well, the way that you're framing the problem is that other people are the problem. And actually, that's not the problem. You've got the wrong problem. The problem is you're doing nothing and you're waiting for permission. So if you want to be a writer, start writing, right? If you want to be a designer, start designing evenings and weekends. Just take the first step to the future that you want in your current reality. If you want to be strategic, and I hear this again over and over again, you've heard it loads as well, right? It's like, well, my company just wants go to market, or they just want brand or they just want execution and they just want digital performance markets. They don't want strategy. So I'm not going to try. It's like, again, it's waiting for permission. And I say, you know what? With one question, you can change that. And they say to me, what do you mean? And I say, the next time you're in a monthly business review or whatever meeting it is with someone vaguely important, right? Rather than just say, this is what we did, reframe the question to this is what I think we should do and why, right? And start asking strategic led questions, showing your insight. And the more times you do that, the more consistent you are across multiple people. People will start to see you as a strategic thinker, right? Be the role that you want in the future. It doesn't mean you have to change jobs. It just means you have to start asking different questions, right? So stop asking for permission.
- [38:00]
Tamara Gorminski
I love that. I think that's the perfect way to wrap up today's conversation. And we like to end every episode of the Marketing Millennials the same way, which is, Harvey, what is one marketing hill you would die on?
- [38:14]
Harvey Lee
I love this question. I had to think over and over and over about this question because I had quite a few answers. So here's my answer, right? The marketing hill that I would die on is that human connection beats optimization every single time. So when you're looking at your KPIs, you're looking at your growth, you're looking at this, that and the other, that's fine. But we work with real humans, with real human problems. And those real humans internally need to trust you. And those humans that you're selling to that you're marketing to also need to trust what you're communicating to them as well. So we've all seen teams of marketers obsessing about conversion rates and what's the data and what am I going to put in my okrs and this, that and the other, and it's all well and good. It has its place. It's not a takedown. Right, it has its place. But real marketing, if we want to call it marketing, real marketing is built on genuine human insight. And that genuine human insight is not algorithmic optimization. So position yourself in the humanities, not in the sciences. So we all get quite hot under the collar about STEM based stuff. Again, it has its place. But actually, and I'll leave you on this as well, one of the most interesting books that I read in the past few years is called Sensemaking and it's written by a guy out of Denmark who I actually worked with many, many about 12 years ago. And it's about deep listening, deep human listening for research. And one of my key takeaways from that book, sense making and working with the Red Agency, actually it was, was that the top CEOs, the top CEOs, the CEO of Ford, the CEO of Samsung, I mean, you name them, none of them have STEM based backgrounds. They all have backgrounds in the humanities. And the reason for that is that we live in a very human conditioned world. And as marketers, we must never ever forget that.
- [40:20]
Tamara Gorminski
I love that. I'm a big believer in human connection as well, so I'll accept that. Marketing Hill.
- [40:26]
Harvey Lee
I'm very pleased to hear it.
- [40:28]
Tamara Gorminski
Exactly. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people follow you, learn more about your work?
- [40:34]
Harvey Lee
You'll find me on LinkedIn, obviously, like everybody else. So come, come say hi on LinkedIn. But you'll be able to contact me directly through my website, harvey-lee.com and there you can learn more about the work that I do and sign up for my free newsletter.
- [40:52]
Tamara Gorminski
Amazing. Thanks again for coming on the show.
- [40:54]
Harvey Lee
My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
- [40:57]
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