The future of marketing is here. It may not include you.

I expected to get some backlash over my book Marketing Rebellion. In fact, I thought a lot of people would hate it because it presents some hard truths about the future of marketing — loyalty is in decline, the sales funnel is gone, and our customers are in control.

But perhaps no comment in the book raised more eyebrows than this one from Olga Andrienko, head of global marketing for SEMrush:

“In our field of marketing, experience is a burden. In other disciplines, the world hasn’t really changed all that much. Take sales, for example. There are certain cold call skills, emotional appeals, sales triggers … and then you’re done. It’s been that way for ages. But in marketing, if you’re not embracing the rapid changes and constantly refining your vision, you will fail completely. If you were successful in marketing 10 years ago, that does not mean you will be successful now.”

As a “person of experience” myself, I can see why somebody would be alarmed by this statement. But the fact is, this new economic world demands an entirely new mindset … and established mindsets forged by years of experience are very hard to change.

To make this transformation, we need to be humble and learn from the digital natives re-inventing our field. In fact, if you don’t, you might be left behind.

Wake-up call

Many seasoned marketers I know are asleep and don’t know they’re asleep. They were hired many years ago to do a job and they’ll do that job to the best of their ability based on their experience. Problem is, most of us are so busy, we haven’t had time to look up and notice that the marketing world has been turned on its head and that our experience may not be relevant any more. Or, perhaps we’re afraid to look up.

For the young people coming into the business, the digital world is all they’ve known. It’s business as usual. Digital natives entering the space look at “traditional” marketing that annoys, intercepts, and interrupts and think, “Why would you do that? People don’t want that.”

I read somewhere that this is the first time where a younger generation is teaching an older generation. The world is changing so fast that older people could be apprenticed to…