The Time I Messed Up: Cancer Research UK’s top marketer Philip Almond
In the latest of a series exploring marketing leaders’ mistakes, Cancer Research’s Philip Almond describes an incident where acting in a “naïve and idealistic” way came at the cost of commercial success.
Idealism at the expense of realism is a path to mistakes. Many marketers strive to implement marketing theory in their work but doing so without considering the commercial realities of a business is a dangerous path.
A marketer’s success will not be judged by the rest of the business by the excellent brand-building work they have done, but rather by the commercial results that work yields. Therefore, marketers should be applying theory to reach goals rather than dogmatically applying it without taking note of the business context.
The importance of being realistic and conscious of business context is something that Philip Almond knows well.
