108 Advice for 30 Year Old Marketers

In this episode of Lochhead on Marketing, let us talk about some advice for 30 year old marketers. I have been asked this question a bunch of times, so I just put together my response as a LinkedIn post. A lot of people though it was a great list, so I thought I’d share it with you. Making the List As said earlier, this list was originally a LinkedIn post, and it’s a list of practical advice for 30 year old marketers. There were some who asked if it was in a certain order, and one outright challenged me to do so. I did not want to do that because I wanted to present them as ideas. Because what might be important for me might not be for others. Sure enough in the comments, different things on the list resonated with different people. Though there is an argument to be made about creating lists in certain order, so as to elicit something close to a call to action. “It seems we live in a world of prescriptions, where people want to do lists and more and more inane sort of business and marketing advice. You know, the seven things Elon Musk does before breakfast. And we've gotten to a place where a lot of content about business, about self-help, about marketing is very pablumatic and sort of at a prescription level, do this, do that, etc.” – Christopher Lochhead While we do create prescription type articles, mostly on what you should and shouldn’t do, that’s not how we work most of the time. Our job is to give people ideas, and with those ideas, they can come up with different combinations or new ways to approach things. We feel that having something close to a to-do list hinders that process. The Advice for 30 Year Old Marketers That said, here’s the list of Advice for 30 Year Old Marketers, in no particular order: Do legendary work Position yourself or be positioned You're not too young to be a CMO, or start a company Stop giving a shit about what other people think of you, it’s a trap Thinking about thinking is the most important thinking Most marketers have been recruited into the cult of the brand Categories make brands, not the other way around Marketers who create new demand, are most in demand They are called category designers Nobody legendary is working on their “personal brand” The most influential people in the world are not “influencers” Only work on legendary teams If your company is not going to be a category queen, quit Be very careful who’s content you consume 90% of what we get taught about marketing is BS Learn to write Make friends with other Superstar 30 year old’s One day, you might rule the world together It goes by fast, soak up every second Bio Christopher Lochhead is a #1 Apple podcaster and #1 Amazon bestselling co-author of books: Niche Down and Play Bigger. He has been an advisor to over 50 venture-backed startups; a former three-time Silicon Valley public company CMO and an entrepreneur. Furthermore, he has been called “one of the best minds in marketing” by The Marketing Journal, a “Human Exclamation Point” by Fast Company, a “quasar” by NBA legend Bill Walton and “off-putting to some” by The Economist. In addition, he served as a chief marketing officer of software juggernaut Mercury Interactive. Hewlett-Packard acquired the company in 2006, for $4.5 billion. He also co-founded the marketing consulting firm LOCHHEAD; the founding CMO of Internet consulting firm Scient, and served as head of marketing at the CRM software firm Vantive. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Lochhead on MarketingTM! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and subscribe on Apple Podcast! You may also subscribe to his newsletter, The Difference, for some amazing content.