Lucinda sat quietly on the rickety old bench perched high on the cliff top. She gazed wistfully across the sun-drenched beach far below and dreamed of what might have been…

The mistral breeze tickled her golden locks, sweeping them backwards and up in reminiscence of Farrah Fawcett.  Why had she not heeded the warning? Sitting up there on the cliff top that day, the truth was laid bare for Lucinda to see.


It was only three months since young Jane had taken on the junior position in the marketing team. Jane with her shiny new marketing degree and devil-may-care Gen Y attitude brought a new face and new ideas to the team. Some thought Jane was a breath of fresh air.


Lucinda had welcomed young Jane, taken her under her wing and helped her settle into the new role. But there was something different about Jane. Something that at first was hard to put your finger on; something that you needed to scratch away at for a while to discover the truth…
 
The first inkling of a problem with Jane was when, at the weekly team meeting (it was only the third one she had ever been to), Jane asked the marketing manager, Michael, if the latest upsell marketing campaign had reached a positive contribution point. Poor Michael was devastated! The campaign had only been running for a couple of days. Such a direct and insensitive question! Such arrogance, and from one so young and inexperienced!


Then, two weeks later, Jane had prepared a comprehensive marketing program plan, highlighting all the online campaigns that she thought would work for the target market, complete with ROI models for each campaign. The level of detail was surprising for one so young but clearly she couldn’t know what she was talking about, she was too young and inexperienced. Wasn’t she?

And then just last a week later, Jane threw the team into a spin by asking how our website traffic compared with our competitors. “How are we supposed to know that?!” Lucinda had exclaimed.

This was the last straw for Lucinda. How dare this young whelp deign to represent value models and return on investment for the marketing team!  How dare she pose questions that might suggest marketing has a responsibility to the company’s bottom line. Marketing is a cost centre – everyone knows that! The team has a budget and tries very hard to maximise the outcomes within the confines imposed by the financial bean counters who don’t understand how hard it is to get the perfect brand campaign out there. She was sure her marketing manager shared her views until three months later…

Lucinda sat quietly today on the rickety old bench perched high on the cliff top and gazed wistfully across the sun-drenched beach far below and dreamed of what may have been…..and then went back to looking at the job classifieds.
 
 


This is my personal blog.  The views expressed here are my own and do not represent those of my employer, Coremetrics.