The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader (book summary)

Barta and Barwise’s The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader is a must-read for any professional wishing to reach and/or excel at the field’s top leadership positions.

Why you should read it

This book will give you a comprehensive manual for navigating marketing leadership roles. It will equip you with the knowledge and practical insights to reach and navigate top marketing positions.

Who is it for

Any present or future CMO, VP of Marketing, Head of Marketing or similar would benefit from reading this book. Mid- to senior-level marketers can learn to organise and navigate their jobs for more success and satisfaction at their current level or quicker advancement.

My take

I wish I had read this book much earlier in my career. Why?

1. It would have accelerated my growth and learning
2. It would have helped me be more successful in senior marketing roles

I was impressed with this book because of its insights, practicality, and long-term applicability:

• It provides a valuable framework or a mental model for excelling at top marketing positions
• It is based on robust research and in-depth analysis, making the information credible
• It can be a long-term guide for continuous development in a marketing career

I plan to use it as a key go-to source to ensure I excel in my marketing roles and continue growing professionally.

Introduction

The book is organised around four key areas or mobilisation zones. These are your boss, your peers, your team, and yourself. Each part covers three unique powers in the four major areas. This makes up a total of 12 powers.

Crucially, the book only includes success factors that reached statistical significance in the study. So, these could have a tangible effect on your marketing career success. For simplicity, the book assumes that these 12 powers explain 100% of the variability in marketing leadership success. Therefore, each power is given a percentage relative to its contribution to one’s business impact and career success.

Before we dive into the detailed summary of the book, here are three fundamental truths the authors present.

Truth #1: Your power as a marketing leader lies in the space where customer and company needs overlap.

Truth #2: Success in marketing is about mastering “The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader.”

Truth #3: You weren’t born a marketing leader. Instead, you must become one.

Detailed chapter-by-chapter book summary

Section I – Mobilise your Boss

This section focuses on how you can work effectively with your boss, typically a CEO, to deliver results and grow professionally.

POWER #1: Tackle Only Big Issues

Am I working on the topics that matter most for the V-Zone?

Explains: 10% of business impact and 10% of career success.

What is the V-zone (value zone)? It is the area of overlap between the most critical customer needs and company needs. A central premise of the book is that successful marketing leaders identify, quantify, and focus on solving big marketing issues to maximise the V-zone.

A key differentiator among top marketers is their ability to focus on what matters to business.

• They maintain a top management viewpoint.
• They focus on speaking in business rather than marketing terms.
• They work with the rest of the leadership team to quantify these issues’ impact.

As a starting point, the aim is to identify the top three customer and company needs from meetings with the senior leaders. Have a point of view but stay open-minded. Use these meetings to start forming strategic alliances with other leadership team members.

How to select the issues

1. Win-win: Aim to maximise win-win for the company and its customers.
2. Realism: Be realistic by picking solvable issues within reasonable time and effort.
3. Energy: Select issues with substantial power and support from within the company.
4. Time-to-success: Pick issues where you can succeed within a short timeframe.

 How to quantify the issues

Give the issues an absolute number or a price tag based on the best available data. Aim to link customer issues to company issues when reporting. Crucially, keep your reporting very simple.

Balancing strategy and tactics

Before getting lost in specific tools or tactics, ask yourself how they will help you solve the big problems you’re working on. Next, you can dive into a select few, two or three max, and pilot them.

Key questions:

What are customers’ top needs?

What are the company’s top needs according to the leadership team?

How can you quantify a big issue using a price tag based on credible data?

How can you ask to lead the effort to tackle the big issue?

Are you balancing strategy and tactics to lead the digital strategy debate in your company?

POWER #2: Deliver Returns, No Matter What

 Am I cost or revenue?

Explains: 12% of business impact and 3% of career success.

CEOs care about strategy (where to lead the company), organisation (people, skills, structure), revenue (how to make more money), and cost (how to make money more cheaply). Successful marketing leaders understand this. They talk about and act in ways that align with these objectives. They aim to join the revenue camp and prove that to the rest of the company. Moreover, top marketers explain marketing to the rest of the company using a simple framework like awareness > acquisition> engagement.

Open to books

Influential marketing leaders often collaborate with finance to measure what’s significant and what matters to the top and bottom lines. Getting finance involved usually brings more precision, credibility and balance to measuring return on investment (ROI). An 80/20 approach that tracks the most significant items and activities works well. Combining this with regular returns reporting makes the process even more robust.

Work on influential things

Successful marketing leaders focus on high-impact activities like strategy, product, pricing, and sales versus communications, branding, and promotion, which may be more familiar but less significant. This focus on maximising value can be achieved in three steps:

1. Find the company’s biggest growth levers
2. Focus on a project or two with the largest influence
3. Start small to achieve wins and build momentum, think big to compound long-term growth

Be the customer surplus guardian

Identify what customers truly value. Understand the actual costs of options, features and benefits. Aim to maximise the value that your company delivers to clients most cost-effectively. Be courageous, debate, and protect the customer surplus.

Be an investor

Top marketers treat individual initiatives like investments by seeking to generate and maximise a positive ROI. They are comfortable investing less or not investing at all if a project cannot cover its cost. Conversely, successful marketing leaders find and deploy budget behind tactics that promise high returns. Additionally, budget constraints can force inventiveness and creativity, driving marketing innovation. Finally, focus on a handful of things and execute them exceptionally rather than spreading yourself too thinly. Less diversification can increase risk, but it can also increase returns.

Key questions:

Have you explained to people how marketing works?

What can and can’t they expect from marketing?

How can you open marketing’s books to increase the visibility of the returns you create?

Are you working on what matters most for the V-Zone?

How could you increase your influence on key revenue drivers?

How well-adjusted is the customer surplus your company is offering?

Are you prioritising what creates the most value for the customers relative to cost?

Do you focus on high-ROI opportunities for your current budget?

Or should you return some money to the company?

Are there high-ROI opportunities that would justify a higher budget?

Could you find significantly more effective ways to spend your budget?

Are you laser-focused on high-impact marketing activities rather than many insignificant ones?

POWER #3: Work Only with the Best

Who are the best—and how can I work with them?

Explains: 1% of business impact and 2% of career success.

This power contributes less to overall effectiveness as a marketing leader. Therefore, the corresponding chapter is also shorter. The key is to look for success by doing thorough research, attending relevant industry events, and occasionally talking to new potential partners.

Key questions:

Which partners or agencies have created the most impactful customer results globally in your industry?

Are you in touch with them?

Do you meet enough interesting new potential partners at events or gatherings?

How can you engage with new partners from time to time to calibrate the performance of your current external partners?

Section II - Mobilise your Colleagues/Peers

This section focuses on how to work effectively with your peers and other leadership team members.

POWER #4: Hit the Head and the Heart

How can I win my colleagues’ hearts and minds?

Explains: 3% of business impact and 7% of career success.

To inspire your colleagues, you must win their hearts and minds. You win their heart with an inspiring vision – a story that paints a hopeful but attainable future. You win their head by showing credible evidence – high-quality customer data. Crucially, you must make everything as personally relevant to your colleagues as possible.

Key questions:

What customer story will capture your colleagues’ hearts and minds?

Will it help them understand how they can help increase the V-Zone?

Are you using customer language when you communicate internally?

Are you a true voice of the customer?

POWER #5: Walk the Halls (13%, 13%)

How can I get people moving?

Explains: 13% of business impact and 13% of career success.

This power is all about sharing your customer story repeatedly and consistently. Specifically, the authors introduce the LDC or ‘listen, decide, communicate’ framework to achieve this.

• Listen: Meet with key stakeholders that may affect or be affected by the change, briefly summarise the overall goal and listen for facts, feelings, beliefs, and assumptions.
• Decide: Now that you’ve collected enough relevant facts and views, decide on the course of action and bring the leaders that need to make the formal decision.
• Communicate: Meet again with the key stakeholders, communicate your decision and show them how you’ve done your best to embed their decisions.

In summary, LDC is one of the most potent techniques for mobilising your colleagues and peers behind your vision. However, it is equally important to make your work as cross-functional as possible and willingly share the credit for any successes.

Top marketers name the elephant in the room and never sweep difficult issues under the rug. They step on open and honest conversations, prerequisites for sustainable results. Additionally, they are willing to rent an internal bulldozer – a powerful supporter of their ideas and agendas to make things happen.

Finally, they deal smartly with all those numerous requests and ideas that seem to be coming from all over the organisation since everyone has a view on marketing. How? Thank for the suggestions. Ask for evidence of the likely impact. Either there will be quality evidence, and the idea may be worth implementing, or there will be no evidence, and you can put it to rest.

Above all, remember to share the praise and publicly thank all the people who contributed and helped realise your vision.

Key questions:

Do you repeatedly share a simple, consistent customer story so that colleagues recall it?

Are you walking the hallways—listening, deciding, and communicating (LDC)?

Are you involving other functions in your projects?

Have you named the elephants that hinder your company’s success?

Do you have a “bulldozer” to remove obstacles to your important projects?

Confronted with suggestions, do you politely ask for evidence of relevance and effectiveness?

Are you sharing praise with others, and are you doing so publicly and often?

POWER #6: You Go First

How can I visibly act to increase the V-Zone?

Explains: 6% of business impact and 12% of career success.

Start a movement. Your great business ideas are a solid foundation for starting a movement. It’s simpler than it sounds. Share your idea, show how it works, then—and this is key—find the first followers. Next, you must create quick wins by showing some evidence of success from a small pilot.

Another way to go first is to get to the front line and lead by example. For instance, you can do something yourself to boost revenue. Pick up the phone to speak with a prospect, reach out to a potential partner, you get the idea.

Use the correct language

Many marketers fail because of the words they use. Don’t be one of them. People care about common customer and business issues, not technical marketing terms. 

The best type of language to use is customer language. In other words, talk about what customers say and do so using their words. The second best type is the language that relates to your company’s revenue or profitability: sales leads, market share, product success, gross margins, and so on.

Key questions:

How can you start a movement in your organisation and find the first followers?

Are you creating some quick wins to prove your case?

Are you visible at the front line and in ways that create immediate impact?

Are you using the language of action (as opposed to the language of concepts and theories)?

Section III – Mobilise your Team

This part is about working effectively with your direct reports.

POWER #7: Get the Mix Right

How can I design and build the right team to increase the V-Zone?

Explains: 20% of business impact and 7% of career success.

The right skills mix in marketing should include the following: strategic pricing, tactical pricing, brand definition/positioning, product innovation, marketing strategy, sales promotion, customer retention, customer data mining, media planning and deployment, above-the-line (ATL) advertising, social media deployment, sponsoring and/or events, digital media strategy. And here’s something you probably didn’t expect. These skills are listed in order of importance. Pricing at the top, digital media strategy at the bottom. So, how do you build such a team?

Recruit for distinctiveness

You can simplify the process and reduce it to three key questions:

1. What are the one/two most distinctive functional marketing skills to expand the V-Zone?
2. What are the one or two distinctive personality traits needed to expand the V-Zone?
3. Which personality traits are “no no’s” for our team (fit)?

But don’t underestimate the importance of networks and networking skills. Aim to build a diverse team. Diverse backgrounds mean diverse ideas, leading to more robust decisions that drive better results.

‘Make or buy’

Build a skill in-house if it can become a significant long-term competitive advantage. If you need skills urgently, get going with external partners.

Build your team’s skills

There are two primary considerations here. Build your team’s functional skills and leadership skills. How? By establishing structured marketing skills training paths. Another vital thing to consider is to let your team members rotate in different parts of the business to broaden their knowledge.

Give your team direction

They need to know where they’re going. They need to know what their roles are. They need to know how to focus their time and effort. Your role as a leader is to get them to understand these clearly. Also, let your team own the big V-Zone issues. Create a marketing team mission and watch the team rally around it. Remind people why the team exists and do so frequently, ideally at every team call.

Focus your team externally. Put explicit mechanisms in place to ensure an external focus that drives results and focuses on serving the customer. Crucially, agree on what not to do. This is just as important for focusing on what matters and maximising the V-zone.

Key questions:

Team skills and structure

Does your team have the right mix of creative and analytical skills to enlarge the V-Zone?

When recruiting people, do you consider their network and networking skills?

Are the people you’re recruiting sufficiently diverse?

Are you “building” and “buying” the right skills in the correct order?

Do you enable team members to rotate with other functions?

Are you, the leader, building powerful marketing leadership skills too?

Does your team have a proper skills development plan?

Team direction

Can your team members consistently answer the question, “Why do we exist?”

Do you often remind them why the team exists?

Does your team have a mission that its leaders subscribe to wholeheartedly?

Is your team’s chief focus internal or external?

Have you and your leaders agreed upon what “not to do” as a team?

POWER #8: Cover Them in Trust (4%, 3%)

How do I get my team to ask, not for permission, but for forgiveness?

Explains: 4% of business impact and 3% of career success.

This chapter introduces a key equation you must grasp as a marketing leader. How much people trust you is the product of professionalism multiplied by intimacy and divided by ego.

Foster professionalism

Establishing professionalism as the norm is simple. You must keep your promises and follow the rules. Above all else, don’t pretend to know everything about marketing. No one does. Pretending you do undermines your credibility and erodes trust.

Foster intimacy

Make your corner office a team room. Let other people present in important meetings, including to your boss. Back people up in a crisis. Stick to reasonable call times, especially for people in other time zones. When you receive praise about the team’s work, pass it on to the team itself.

Build team confidence

Set a new team rule and make it explicit: ‘Ask for forgiveness, not permission.’ Make it clear to your team that it is OK to try new things within reason without asking your approval every step of the way. Remember to give a word of confidence in every marketing meeting, reminding your team of your high opinion and trust in them. Crucially, make everybody’s voice heard—even the quiet ones.

In one-to-one meetings, remember the 70-30-0 % rule. 70% should be coaching focused on the other person, their needs, and their views, 30% about your ideas and suggestions as their manager, and 0% cutting and interruptions.

Encourage creative conflict

Contextualise things by emphasising the common goals. Focus on current, factual data rather than opinions. Explore several possible courses of action. Create a balanced power structure. Listen genuinely. Help people think bigger by asking better questions. Use humour to diffuse tension as needed.

On the flipside, call out and aim to resolve deeper interpersonal conflicts. Find ways to create ‘good enough’, functional relationships that align the team. Remember that you’re a CMO – a chief mood officer.

Key questions:

Team trust

Are you leading from the front as a professional role model for your team?

Are you punctual and reliable?

Do you strictly follow the company’s rules?

Have you created a climate of intimacy in your team?

Can people talk about problems and issues openly?

Do you manage your ego in a way that it doesn’t erode trust?

Team confidence

Are you starting meetings with a word of confidence in your team?

Do you ensure all voices in your team are heard?

Are you telling more (focusing on ‘I’) or coaching more (focusing on ‘you’)?

Is your team able to have constructive conflicts to produce better results?

Do you call out deeper interpersonal team conflicts?

Are you developing “good enough” relationships with people you don’t like?

Are you an effective chief mood officer for your team?

POWER #9: Let the Outcomes Speak

How can I be a fair judge?

Explains: 6% of business impact and 9% of career success.

This power is about managing performance standards, enforcing the company’s basic values, and compensating and rewarding people based on real, measurable performance.

Build a performance culture

A good starting point is to set targets and deadlines for every task, even small ones. This establishes standards and builds expectations. But more importantly, follow up on these deadlines to demonstrate you mean what you say, or what you set.

Meeting efficiency

Skip the marketing meeting minutes, as you know them. Instead, have one team member capture the most important agreements, including names, targets, and deadlines. But not who said what or why a decision was made.

At the end of the meeting, ask the note-taker to read the to-do list aloud. During the reading, expect every attendee to capture his or her own to-do’s. When you reconvene, have someone read the to-do’s out loud so that each person is reminded of his or her obligations. This routine is crucial!

Agree with your team how members spend their time

Here’re the two most important questions to get this job done.

1. What’s the most important thing you’ll achieve to help the team increase the V-Zone?
2. How (in broad percentages) will you allocate your time to achieve this?

Key tip: Celebrate success often. Not just once a year around performance reviews.

Hold people accountable

Assess your people frequently and diligently without excuse. Use facts and tangible results to assess performance. Also, consider having other leaders and colleagues evaluate your people. Crucially, create a development map for your team.

Reward results, not just effort

You have to make a case for performance-based rewards to your boss. More importantly, have data about your team’s achievements so you can back up your claims. But equally, be ready to bite the bullet. As a marketing leader, you’ll sometimes have to fire people. Do it quickly and professionally. Do not procrastinate it.

Key questions:

Team performance

Are you consistently setting task deadlines?

Do you consistently follow up on deadlines?

Do you record and follow up on actions agreed to at meetings?

Have you agreed on how your direct reports will roughly allocate their time?

Do you celebrate team successes frequently and publicly?

Team accountability

Do you assess your team regularly without exception?

Are your team’s performance assessments based on facts and results?

Are leaders from other departments helping you with your team assessment?

Have you created a team development map that’s regularly reviewed?

Are your team’s rewards directly linked to success and failure?

If a team member persistently underperforms, will you, if necessary, let them go?

Section IV – Mobilise Yourself

This section focuses on your own interests, passions, and aspirations.

POWER #10: Fall in Love with Your World

How can I inspire others with my expertise?

Explains: 18% of business impact and 9% of career success.

Your knowledge is a powerful source of inspiration. It can be roughly classified into three buckets: customer knowledge, industry knowledge, and product knowledge.

Become a customer insider

To be a customer advocate, you must deeply understand customers. Spend time outside marketing to learn about other departments and how the company works. Talking to customers directly is essential. You can also ask customers for help developing products and turn research results into actionable insights you can use.

Get insights from data

Ask yourself: What are the business issues we’re tackling to expand the V-Zone? Create an information map of your company. Pull out some data manually and play with it. Get several views of potential full-scale data insights projects. Continue with manual insights analysis while you implement an IT solution. Hire some good data analysts of your own.

Become a market insider

Frequently answer the right questions for your top 2-5 competitors:

1. How have our markets grown over time?
2. What are the long-term price and demand trends?
3. What are our main competitors’ strategies?
4. What strategies would we deploy if we were them?

Beyond this, meet the rest of the industry during 2-4 events a year. Step back regularly with your team to discuss and plan how to adapt based on these insights.  

Become a product insider

Above all else, use your own products whenever you can. Work with the product development or operations teams to gain a deeper understanding. Swap team members regularly to deepen cross-functional knowledge. Crucially, get inside the product profit and loss to know which levers to pull.

Key questions:

Customers

How can you spend more time directly interacting with customers?

Can you co-create with your customers to develop insights and better offers?

How can you turn data into insights?

Are you really getting value from your existing market research?

Could you reallocate funds to create better insights?

What’s your strategy to generate insights from your data?

Market

How can you run regular competitive assessments?

How can you understand the market dynamics, trends, and competitors’ strategies?

Are you participating in the most important industry gatherings?

Are you reflecting on where you stand versus the competition and how to adjust?

Products

Could you work more closely with the colleagues developing the product/service?

How could you regularly swap team members with product/service departments?

Could you and your team find ways to spend more time on the ‘shop floor’?

Do you have (and fully understand) your product P&L?

POWER #11: Know How You Inspire

As a marketing leader, how can I leverage what makes me tick?

Explains: 2% of business impact and 12% of career success.

Inspiring others

Marketing leaders are crucial in mobilising their teams to expand the company’s customer base. Inspiration becomes a critical leadership skill since they can’t rely solely on orders or control.

This inspiration comes from two primary sources: knowledge of the market, customers, and products and the leader’s unique personality and values. The good news is that you already inspire others, often in ways you might not even realise. Here are three steps to finding and cultivating your inspiration style as a leader.

Step 1: Know yourself

The first step to becoming a more inspiring leader is self-awareness. Most successful marketing leaders score highly in understanding their strengths and weaknesses. This self-knowledge allows them to develop effective leadership strategies, especially those focused on inspiration.

Next, uncover your “Why” – what makes you tick? People are most passionate and inspiring when doing what they genuinely believe in and value. There are tools and exercises to uncover your core motivations. Psychometric tests and reflecting on your career path are a good starting point.

Eros vs. Logos

Marketing leaders often have an “Eros” personality - creative, passionate, and focused on the future and external market. This contrasts with the typical “Logos” leader, who is more process-oriented, data-driven, and concerned with internal matters. While the Eros perspective brings valuable creativity and customer focus, it can sometimes lack the structure and discipline of Logos leaders. Aim to balance these two.

Step 2: How you inspire

You most likely inspire others daily, even if you don’t realise it. To get a clearer picture, ask colleagues and friends for feedback or look at past performance reviews.

Step 3: Find your authenticity

Once you understand how you inspire others, the key is to use those strengths. Leverage the behaviours that most inspire your team. At the same time, work on minimising or explaining any uninspiring habits that might hold you back.

Becoming a more self-aware and authentic leader can significantly enhance your ability to inspire your marketing team and achieve greater success.

Key questions:

What makes you tick (in a way that inspires both you and others)? In particular:

What drove the big decision(s) that got you to become a marketing leader?

What were the happiest moments in your marketing career?

What most excites and engages you in your current role?

How might you inspire others today?

How could you focus on your actions that most inspire others?

What negative behaviours should you try to stop or at least explain to those around you?

What’s your most effective authentic marketing leadership style?

POWER #12: Aim Higher

What’s your marketing leadership vision?

Explains: 5% of business impact and 13% of career success. 

Crafting your marketing leadership manifesto helps you unleash your inner vision. Ultimately, this is how you achieve more for your employer and career.

Why you need a manifesto

The life of a marketing leader is not easy. Expanding your company’s customer base requires mobilising your team, securing buy-in from your boss, and collaborating effectively with colleagues across other departments. This is a marathon, not a sprint. A clear vision will motivate you and inspire others to join your cause.

Find your “why”

Before drafting your manifesto, take some time for introspection. Reflect on your career path, your values, and your aspirations. What impact do you desire to make on the industry, your customers, and your company? Where do you see yourself in 5 years? Exercises like “Why, Why, Why?” can help find your core motivations.

Crafting your manifesto

Translate your vision into words. Find a quiet space and dedicate 45 uninterrupted minutes to this. Consider these questions:

• What mark do I want to leave on the world? How will my marketing leadership make a difference for customers, the industry, and the company I work for?
• Where is my career headed? What are my long-term professional goals?
• How can I achieve work-life harmony? How will my marketing leadership role integrate with my aspirations and commitments?

There’s no right or wrong format for your manifesto. Embrace your unique voice! Craft a narrative, utilise bullet points, or free-write your thoughts. The key is to be authentic and capture the essence of your aspirations.

Polish through collaboration

Once you’ve poured your heart into your manifesto, don’t just leave it aside. Share it with trusted friends, mentors, or colleagues. Their feedback can provide insights and help refine your vision.

The power of vision

Having a clear vision is essential for inspiring leadership. Your manifesto is a roadmap, a constant reminder of the “why” behind your actions. With a well-defined vision, you’ll stay focused and motivated. This will expand your marketing influence and drive outstanding achievements.

Key questions:

What’s your inspiring vision?

What’s your Marketing Leadership Manifesto?

What mark do I want to leave on the world?

Where is my career headed?

How can I achieve work-life harmony?

Conclusion

Mastering the 12 marketing leadership powers equips you to become an influential leader. This means a win-win: your company expands its customer value zone, and you boost your career.

The key is mobilising yourself and your team. But don’t overwhelm yourself. Start with the 2-3 powers that matter most to you.

Craft an action plan

Reflect on the 12 powers. Pick three that will have the most significant impact for you. Set implementation deadlines for these three “big powers”. Share your big powers with a friend or mentor. Get their feedback and ask them to track your progress.

Mastering these powers makes you a respected leader, shaping decisions and achieving great things.

Dare to shape your marketing leadership future!