Unsubscribing from toxic marketing culture community over competition

In 2018, I attended a meetup (remember when we used to do that in person?) about content marketing. Led by  Carrie King , who was currently working at  Blinkist  at the time, the kick-off session was meant to set the tone for the meetups to come. Carrie wanted to change something that she observed and disliked about marketing culture:

Marketers are often so fixated on their own success, they don’t spend much time helping others around them. Unlike some other professional communities, we are often trying to outsmart each other. Carrie wondered if the smartest thing to do was to work  against  this instinct and work  together.

And she’s not alone in this thought. Collaboration has always been the best way to work smart (not hard). Many hands make light work and all that jazz. So why have marketers been so slow on the uptake for collaborating better?

This phenomenon of hoarding learnings is something I’ve observed in other circles of my life. Like any good startup worker, I have a side hustle — I’m a  crochet designer . Whether or not you’d believe it, this world of yarn, craftiness, and over-exposed photography is actually quite cut-throat.

I often watch the women in my crafty world tear each other down, figuring that this is a surefire way to securing what they likely envision as limited resources (customers). In response, there’s been a rise of the hashtag #communityovercompetition, explicitly combating this aggressive atmosphere and working against an age-old lesson that women should view influential women as threats, not allies.

Be wary of thy neighbor is pretty persistent in my professional circles, and it’s getting old. That’s why this trend of “we rise by lifting others” in crafting gives me the warm and fuzzies. It also gives me a hell of a lot of hope that we can apply this mentality elsewhere. Frankly, the lack of communication from marketer to marketer is what largely contributes to tired tactics and worn-out strategies.

Niche communities like  my crafty corner  are not the only places where people are starting to realize competitive attitudes just hold everyone back. In fact, a group of people that blow my mind when it comes to cooperation are developers and software engineers.

While some people may cite laziness, devs have just learned that there’s no point in re-learning the same lesson thousands of times when you can just share solutions and collectively benefit from that knowledge. They’ve got bigger fish to fry, and a couple of lines of code or workaround for a problem won’t make or break their career.

Marketing is also known quite well for attracting and developing big egos. In many ways, I’d almost believe this would lend itself more toward oversharing than under-sharing (gotta be the first one to do it and brag about it later!). This is probably why aside from a few key examples, most marketers tend to humblebrag about campaigns rather than break down tactics and help each other out.

It’s why platforms like Marketing Examples or  Kieran Flanagan’s “Growth TL;DR”  are such valuable resources. There are very few, central places where you can vulnerably share and learn from other marketers without ending up in some sort of self-promotion hole where the value is low and the self-righteousness is through the roof.

Unless you’re literally speaking to a direct photo-copy competitor, it’s very unlikely that sharing your learnings around marketing will have any noticeable consequences. More often than not, the people most eager for all that experience you’re keeping to yourself are young, ambitious professionals who want to  learn  not to steal from you.

More importantly, by the time that you’re in a place where you  could  share, you’re already at an advantage. It’s old news to you and you’re on to bigger and brighter horizons. If sharing the solution to last month’s challenge will risk-taking you or your company down… you’ve got bigger problems.

If you’re like me, you’d like to UNO reverse this “me-first” culture. I’m more interested in developing meaningful professional relationships with people who are so capable of winning they don’t mind tipping their hand on how they got where they are.

Here are 3 ways that you can start fostering better growth habits around marketing with me:

• Find 3 people you can advise or have a random coffee with in the next month. Connect with them and offer to help.
• Host a meetup (Clubhouse, Zoom, whatever) on a marketing topic you enjoy sharing about or join a panel that you could provide an expert opinion on.

Some other ideas for people who aren’t as comfortable with putting themself out there…

• Write a Medium article about something you tried recently — even if it failed — and dig into the learnings behind what you did.
• Share a problem and a solution on Twitter every other day.
• Create a group chat with marketers you trust and share learnings via chat.

In the rise of community-led growth and the abundance of social media platforms to choose from, there’s a demand for human connection like never before. Even before the pandemic, it wasn’t hard to see that people craved real, genuine community. Opportunities to connect, learn from each other, and grow together.

Your capacity to support others is one of your most infinite resources. We all need to stop acting like it’s completely depleted. Nurturing a collective mindset around how we bring value to the world (marketing, by my definition) is only every a win-win-win. Join me in the winner’s circle.