More curious cultures in marketing teams can create vastly increased impact and reverse an industry-wide crisis in creative effectiveness.

The most common theme we heard at Creativebrief from brand marketing leaders in 2023, was a sense of being stuck in the metaphorical vortex.

In one breath, due to industry complexity and pace of change, senior marketers report (almost unanimously) a need for their teams to be more curious, outward looking and connected to the ebbs and flows of the landscape around them.

There is undoubtedly a collective recognition of this as a more important element of the modern marketer’s role today than perhaps it has ever been in our industry’s history.

Yet, in another breath, the same group of leaders lament what they view as an increasingly impossible scenario – that their teams are ever-leaner and the model for marketing more ‘always-on’. Time, to put it bluntly, is short.

Against this backdrop, simply finding a few minutes to raise one’s head, look around, and gain inspiration from outside their own organisations, categories or sectors feels almost an impossibility.

Let alone absorbing and processing that, taking learnings, building capability, then applying and activating all this in a different setting for their own brand’s gain.

Shit, even breathing feels like a luxury if you buy the narrative coming from most client marketing functions and leadership teams right now. Life it seems, is tough.

But importantly, you needn’t look far for (often emphatic) evidence of the value of a more searching and open mindset – if only you can find the time to source it!

2020’s much-lauded Excerpts from Experts (billed as ‘a compendium of insights from marketing’s best and brightest’), saw 43% of brand leaders identify ‘curiosity’ as an essential trait required in the successful modern marketer.

Numerous think-tanks, academic institutions and publications, from Harvard Business Review to McKinsey, evidence clear links between increased curiosity in teams, growing creativity and innovation in output, and improved business impact.

The theme is not a new one. Yet despite this, many brand leaders are failing to heed the evidence - instead allowing today's challenging conditions to dictate marketing cultures that with growing regularity breed a concerningly detectable air of curiosity inertia and torpor.

This in turn points to an industry (and many of its senior marketing figureheads) on the brink of overseeing an era in which marketing functions retrench towards becoming more parochial and inward looking than ever before.

Clearly this position needs reversing - and urgently, before we all find it has gone too far on our watch. For numerous reasons it feels particularly self-destructive in the marketing landscape that we all inhabit today.

Firstly, we exist in an undeniably squeezed economic environment; all brands are under pressure to do ‘more with less’ (depressingly, the second most common theme we hear!)

In this climate, every marketer is expected to act smart, innovate and out-think (rather than outspend) the competition. An easy thing to say, a much harder thing to execute in reality.

Second, we live in a world of growing complexity. One of more choices, more fragmented media landscapes, more elusive audiences, diminishing returns and declining effectiveness.

Amidst these conditions, the range of knowledge, skills and peripheral vision that marketers are expected to build and keep current are transformed from worlds we used to know.

And third, in a post-Covid world we’re all still getting out less, networking less and making fewer connections in the way the rhythm of daily work used to actively encourage.

Marketers are ‘at large’ less, at fewer events, less commonly in agency offices or surrounded by other brand peers. This means fewer relationships, less mind-opening serendipity, more myopia.

Against this backdrop then, arguably THE most important factor in determining how successfully brands maximise competitive advantage in future is how informed, inspired and motivated their teams are to set-in-motion brilliant, impactful work, on limited spend in challenging conditions.

But few will succeed without fostering cultures that value, celebrate and reward curious mindsets and behaviours. Ones that strive to recognise modern-day commercial creativity elsewhere, celebrate it, soak-it-up, then emulate it in the context of their own brands and challenges.

On these grounds marketing leadership teams need to find a way to break through the fog. To lose the defeatist attitude and the all-too-common sense of resignation that ‘this is just the way of the world today’ and that ‘we’re all too stretched to be curious anymore.’

It must be a re-set bred from the very top - brand leaders re-engendering that curious, connected, in-touch cultures are an absolute non-negotiable for progressive and relevant brands today.

But they must also fight hard to create space and time for it in marketers’ daily roles; making substantial moves towards this being something considered fun, rewarding and an imperative for personal and business impact - not just another painful chore on the 'to do list'.

Many brands we know who are beginning to do this well are now creating some of the best and most commercially effective work of their recent histories; whilst also reporting happier and more dynamic teams with momentum and direction.

This is no coincidence.

Fail to prioritise this at your peril as a modern marketing leader. If we don’t all make more like curious cats in 2024, the industry will be poorer for it and less well-equipped to cement a vibrant and dynamic future. The race is on.

First published on LinkedIn.