Unilever CEO predicts marketers will become specialists, not generalists

Industry Contributor 22 Jul 2019 - 1 min read

Unilever CEO predicts marketers will become specialists, not generalists

By Paul McIntyre - Executive Editor

Market Voice 3 min read

Retail media: Key lessons to avoid repeating programmatic ‘gold rush’ mistakes, hollowing out brand budgets

By Rory Heffernan - Chief Executive Officer, Atomic 212º | Partner Content

Retail media’s rise comes as marketers are being told to do even more with even less, says Atomic 212º Chief Executive Officer, Rory Heffernan, and puts brand budgets under further pressure.

Market Voice 4 min read

Airports are back bigger and better: why they are the next frontier for incredibly human brand connection

By Jemma Enright - General Manager, Airport, JCDecaux ANZ | Partner Content

In the next 5 years, brands will be reaching 85m passengers a year in the transformed terminals of Sydney, Adelaide, and Perth airports. That’s a massive opportunity to engage an emotionally charged audience in a context of curiosity and discovery, says JCDecaux’s Jemma Enright.

Market Voice 3 min read

The best relationships are personal – regional strategies should be too

By Phil Leyshon - Director of Digital, ACM | Partner Content

Mi3 sat down with ACM Director of Digital Phil Leyshon to discuss how first party data and enriched targeting is bringing brands closer to the regions – and notching upwards of 30 per cent growth.

Tags: Unilever, marketing, CMO, Alan Jope

Unilever CEO Alan Jope says the direction of travel for marketing roles is specialisation over generalisation – with senior marketing positions more likely to go to those that can draw on experience of several specialisations (The Drum)

Key points

Whereas brand teams used to be made up of many generalists – product manager, brand manager, marketing manager etc. - Jope says functions becoming more niche
“Nowadays we will increasingly specialise on business management experts, communications experts, and innovation experts, and within communications expertise you will have audience segmentation analysts, pure data analysts, programmatic media people” - Jope
Jope says there will be further specialisation in roles, with marketers that move around to hone multiple specialisms best positioned for “bigger” jobs

A clear message for marketers that want to make it to the top from one of the world’s largest brand marketing companies: Take the Renaissance man approach.

Jope made the switch from marketing to CEO at one of the world’s largest brand marketers, working though numerous roles and regions since joining the company in 1985 as a marketing trainee.

Six months into the top job, he is suggesting that perfection of technical disciplines should be given more weight by marketers aiming to climb the food chain. That could require marketers to take several sideways steps before moving up to the next level.