🛣️ How to turn up as your best self at work with James Peach – Marketer and Adventurer.
Read time: 4 minutes
It’s hard not to describe every TMM guest speaker as inspiring, informative, thought-provoking, and entertaining, because they all are, but James Peach is all of that multiplied by 100.
This webinar combines James’ years of experience leading world-famous brands like Vinted, Google, Uber and Innocent over periods of huge growth, with his passions for adventure, cycling, and travelling the world. He shares his thoughts on how to turn up as your best self at work. This session covers:
🚴♂️ The marketing lessons learned whilst cycling through 38 countries (and clocking up 41,000 kms)
🏗️ How to build brands and businesses that matter to people
🌳 The meaning of life (yes… you read that right!)
As promised, it’s an inspiring, informative, thought-provoking, and entertaining hour.
Watch the full webinar back above, or read on for the key takeaways.
Three ways to approach marketing
Matter
First up is a fight against some of the language we use as marketers. When we focus on ‘marketing to consumers’, it becomes very easy to create a gap between us – human beings – and the people we are marketing to (also human beings). When we position our customers as ‘others’, we can forget that marketing is actually about mattering to people.
Ultimately, we’re trying to influence how people make decisions and how they behave. In order to influence how a human behaves, we have to matter to them. In order to matter to someone, we need to be in their lives. As marketers our job is to work out how to make our brand or business important to the people we care about, and not get lost in jargon along the way.
Be clear enough
We’ve all heard that marketing is storytelling, but James reminds us that stories are pointless if no one can understand them. Whatever we’re trying to communicate, it is essential to prioritise clarity. Clear messaging is more important than trying to be clever.
If the people we’re trying to talk to don’t understand what we’re trying to say, then we’re not going to be able to influence them, which will mean that we don’t matter to them. Make sure you’re being clear enough.
Watch the full webinar to listen to examples from James’ career where ego got in the way of clarity and affected performance.
Love strategy
Strategy is utterly critical to everything we do as marketers. From the way we interact with customers, to our brand identity, and everything in between, good marketing has to start from a place of logic.
Once we have a strategy in place, marketing is then a game of prioritisation.
A good way to work out the order in which things need to be done, is to map out the value of something vs the effort it takes to achieve it.
Three ways to approach working in a business
Champion empathy
Wherever he has travelled, James has been met with warmth and kindness. Experiencing such endless care first hand is a lesson James has gone on to apply to the many businesses and organisations that he’s worked in.
James believes that when we treat everyone as if they’re trying their best, and value listening and champion empathy, we are able to show up as our true selves at work, and encourage others to do the same.
Manage your energy, not your time
Time is a finite resource that we can’t control. What we do have control over is our energy. James recommends getting to know when in the day you feel most energised, what fires you up, and what tires you out. And then, write your schedule and plans accordingly.
Now, not then
It is easy to spend our time thinking about how great it will be when we hit the next milestone like; hiring that person to solve problem X, or relaxing in January after the Christmas rush has ended. The reality is, that when we spend all of our time thinking ahead, we forget to make the most of where we’re at now. Then, when those milestones eventually roll around, we’ll already be focused on the next ones.
James strongly believes in making things happen now. Don’t wait. Make now matter.
(BONUS) The meaning of life – ‘have our bark weathered’
From doing the job himself and speaking to marketers every day, James believes that marketers have a difficult task on our hands. Marketing is the engine room of so many businesses, and it requires great skill, management, and risk-taking.
It also requires that marketers are resilient people who are prepared and invested in growing through the ups and the downs.
And this, for James, is the point of it all. The meaning of life, marketing, and working, is to ‘have our bark weathered’ – in other words, to be resilient, to tackle life head on and get stronger and stronger in the process.