I’ve led marketing strategy and growth. I’ve worked on propositions, positioning and brands. I’ve built demand programmes and account-based marketing. I’ve led major clients, pitches and integrated campaigns. I’ve worked on CRM, automation and the less glamorous systems that determine whether a good marketing idea survives contact with the real world.
Quite often, the work has started in one of those places and ended up somewhere else.
The boundaries get less useful after a while.
Marketing is usually divided into disciplines because organisations need departments, job descriptions and agency scopes.
The problems themselves are less cooperative.
A demand-generation problem can actually be a proposition problem. A brand issue can turn out to be a commercial one. A perfectly sensible marketing strategy can fail because sales is working to a different version of the story. Sometimes the campaign is fine and the operating model underneath it is the thing getting in the way.
Working across different parts of marketing for a long time means I tend to notice those connections quite quickly.
It also means I’m less interested in defending the boundaries.
If the problem starts with go-to-market and ends up requiring some proposition work, that’s where the work should go. If a strategy needs a first campaign, sales narrative or working system before anyone can tell whether it’s useful, I’m quite happy to help build that too.
A significant part of my career has been spent in agencies, leading strategy, clients and teams.
That teaches you some useful things.
You learn how to get up to speed on unfamiliar businesses quickly. You learn to ask better questions because you rarely have the luxury of knowing everything. You see different sectors, commercial models, marketing teams and leadership styles in fairly rapid succession.
You also learn that the cleverest recommendation in the room isn’t much use if nobody can actually do anything with it.
Working in-house teaches you something slightly different.
You live with the decisions after the presentation is over.
Budgets are real. Teams have finite capacity. Sales has its own priorities. Technology does not always behave as advertised. A sensible plan sometimes has to survive three other important things happening at once.
I value both perspectives. The agency experience made me broader. The in-house experience made me more pragmatic.
Not every piece of marketing has to produce an immediate sales number. Brand matters. Positioning matters. Understanding a market properly matters.
But they need to matter for a reason.
I’m comfortable working with founders and leadership teams, sales teams, marketers, agencies and specialists. I can challenge something when I think it needs challenging, but I don’t believe every imperfect marketing function requires a six-month transformation programme and a new diagram.
Sometimes the answer is a bigger strategic change.
Sometimes it’s three decisions that have been avoided for too long.
Sometimes the existing team is perfectly capable and simply needs someone experienced to take ownership of a difficult piece of work, give it some direction and get the first useful version moving.
That suits me.
I don’t need to build an empire around myself to feel I’ve done the job properly.
Tucker Marketing is the shape that makes sense now.
After doing this for long enough, becoming narrower would have been slightly artificial.
Tucker Marketing exists because businesses don’t always need another permanent senior hire, and they don’t always need a large consultancy either.
There’s a useful space between the two.
Sometimes a business needs an experienced person who can understand the problem quickly, work across the boundaries, make some decisions and stay close enough to the work to make sure something actually happens.
Where specialist expertise is needed, I’m happy to work with the people who already have it or bring the right people in. Where there’s a capable internal team, I’d rather strengthen it than create parallel machinery around it.
The exact shape can vary because the problems do. What matters is having enough experienced capacity to cross the boundaries, take responsibility where it’s needed and work alongside the people already there.
The common thread is fairly simple: get clear about what matters, make sensible decisions and turn enough of them into reality that the business moves forward.
Tucker Marketing is based in Bristol and works with B2B businesses and agencies across the UK and beyond.