Diversify your Marketing mindset
Looking outside Marketing.
To kick off Looking Outside we’re joined in Episode 1 by talented and bold marketer Rose Jia, Head of Growth Marketing at Amazon Grocery. Together Jo and Rose explore the tried and true practice of Marketing, and how organizations can stretch beyond familiar predefined pathways (and results) from marketing by employing a new mindset.
They discuss what kind of benefits await from embracing your prior roots and knowledge base (banking in Rose’s case) in approaching your current field, the advantage of collaborating with surprising functions, how we should be tapping into our natural curiosity to discipline our minds in multiple fields in order to better accomplish what we need to in our chosen one, why scaring your company with probable future disruptions is necessary to build a culture of risk taking and therein learning.
Jo’s take.
Marketing is a fairly linear path and certainly you may find some people move to marketing from sales or insights but it’s less common to hear of a financial expert, an ex-banker doing that. Actually good marketing is all about the right investment choices, about a strong ROI, even when you’re creating something artistic, and so it’s refreshing that when rose was pulled into marketing she didn’t try to overcompensate for her banking-brain, she’s leant into it.
What Rose does within Amazon and through her Renaissance Marketing initiative is really refreshing for the marketing field, for me because it asks us to approach the marketing practice like a student, taking in multiple disciplines just like great thinkers of today and from history.
Leonardo Davinci - a favorite from the Renaissance period of Rose’s and certainly mine too - said “study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses – especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.” Davinci was driven by curiosity; he approached the world like a student and left it a teacher.
Is there another Renaissance coming? Not likely. Though what the start of this decade and seeming collapse of our predictable (not always civilized) way of life has shown us is that just like a Renaissance, we are seeing a boom of creativity, adaptability in people’s mindsets and a growth of multi-disciplinary thinking. In fact, we see multi-everything. In our search for simplicity and control we are also searching of flexibility, to be able to adjust the needs of a product, a lifestyle, a career in any way it needs to flex in order to suit a multitude of goals. It makes you wonder who the creative thinkers born out of this decade, post-COVID, will be.
5 ways Rose looks outside marketing.
1 | You can’t grow without failing.
The way I like to reposition is you'll never know what's going to work if you don't at least fail a couple of times. Failing just means you found out which pathways not to take. Not failing means you didn't try.
2 | Lean into your natural curiosity.
I wanted to use the word Renaissance because of what the Renaissance means to so many people and when we think back to that old day but that bright period of time, all of those Renaissance thinkers were multi-disciplined. None of them would just be an artist, or just be an architect, or just a scientist. They literally were all parts. My favorite Renaissance person is Davinci. He very much was, you know, trying to do everything because he had that, what you called, natural curiosity for all things. He just wanted to learn more. Like why is anatomy a certain way, and he then used that in his paintings for drawing horses, for drawing people and hands. He looked at architecture. He looked at kind of the science of inventions and he says, ‘Why can't I make those things?’ And he levers that in a lot of the things that he created.
3 | A new mindset isn’t a shift it’s a daily practice
It's never good to just lean on either the art or the science. I think in the last couple of years with a lot of these digital app platforms, people have moved more and more towards quote unquote performance marketing, and some of that art has been lost. But in the olden days of Mad Men, you know it was all art, no science, and that also doesn't work in the modern day that we live in. And so having that balance is part of this mindset. One of the things that I talk about quite often is with any mindset, including this, it's not just you do it once and you're done. It's something that you have to keep practicing. How do you think long term, how do you do multi discipline, how do you do the balance of art and science? how should a marketer talk to finance in a way that shows the power of marketing - it means using the language of your finance partners, right? They're going to be talking about how does this contribute to their top line, how can you prove that awareness drives brand loyalty and therefore retention.
4 | Apply curiosity to your vertical.
A lot of times we talk about innovation and marketing oftentimes is equated with trying to be innovative. People get lost in this idea that innovation should be completely net new. So it's like we're trying to build the car. But the car has already been built. The way I think about innovation is you're you're taking that curiosity of everything else that's happening in the world, and you're saying, how can this be applied to my current vertical, my current industry, my current category, and even my current discipline of marketing - but in a different way.
5 | Bring other disciplines into yours.
The things that we build today are based on things that we find in nature, right? Airplanes based on birds, how we're thinking about computers and processing based on the human brain. And so there's so much of other disciplines that other industries and functions already used to innovate. Why wouldn't we do that in marketing? Why can't we bring in some historical storytelling into marketing? There's so much that we could be learning.
Check out Rose’s podcast recommendations when exploring beyond the typical norm:
Imaginary Worlds https://open.spotify.com/show/2EnzZOFIxRvDxGZ2PBdMMq
Reply All https://open.spotify.com/show/7gozmLqbcbr6PScMjc0Zl4
Planet Money https://open.spotify.com/show/4FYpq3lSeQMAhqNI81O0Cn
About Rose.
Rose Jia is an award-winning leader who currently heads up growth marketing for Amazon’s grocery division, including brands like Amazon Fresh. She and her team drive profitable growth through awareness, discovery, conversion, partnerships, and go-to-market initiatives.
She is also considered a "Renaissance Marketer" — a multi-disciplined leader who leverages her wide and differing industry knowledge to build patented innovative products and solutions.
Find out more about Rose’s passion project, developing the next generation of marketers through www.RenaissanceMarketer.com.
Follow Rose on Medium https://medium.com/@rjianetwork
