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Why marketers have a love-hate relationship with complexity

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Henk-jan ter Brugge is director, global digital marketing and e-commerce for consumer- and healthcare-tech giant Philips in Amsterdam. We caught up with him about his experience with marketing and technology.

So how did you wind up in marketing? What brought you to where you are today

I didn’t specifically study marketing, but I see people of all backgrounds and trades in marketing nowadays. So, I’m not a classical marketeer as a lot of graduates think of it.

I started at a startup, but seven years ago I started working for Philips and I started in the global digital team. Then I worked for six months in the Chinese market in Shanghai. Then I worked in new business development. So, really to sell a solution of Philips in the market. And that’s basically where my interest started for digital marketing and everything around it. 


2022 MarTech replacement survey

What happened?

I saw I couldn’t do my job as I wanted to do. I wanted to make a simple website. [I couldn’t] partly because I was relatively young starting in the big company. I just didn’t know how the company worked, right? But partly the ways [to do that] were not yet in place at that time, but that has improved significantly as they say.

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[After that] I moved back to the global digital marketing commerce team. And I really got a love for the backbone of marketing. It has been a good choice so far. I get a lot of energy from it … I love the newness. I love the complexity, which is something you like but also hate. 

Why is that?

With a lot of big companies, they almost show off with all the technology they have and I don’t think it’s something per se to show off with. Less technology can be better, depending on whether you take it from a global or local market perspective. 

Complexity means a lot and it means nothing. It’s making sense of that complexity that matters. Getting understanding from the data you have, getting the right teams behind it, letting teams understand the value of the technology. Doing that means not putting technology first, but putting the use case first, what you deliver with it. 


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By managing that complexity you learn about the complete marketing chain. And now it’s not only marketing anymore. It’s marketing with e-commerce, and e-commerce becomes the sales channel, right? It’s change management. It’s education. It’s working with the IT teams, with the whole organization basically. And you’re the spider in the web and that’s the beauty of the job I have.

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[It’s] managing that complexity by bringing IT or tech closer to the business and vice versa, where they can immensely impact each other. Getting more people on board with how technology can help in all that. But also the understanding of having the right people, the right ways of working, of really getting that enterprise mindset. 

Is there something that you can’t do that you wish you could? 

Often what you see, especially in the big corporations, is that you don’t have all the information. and there are some functions that have a bit more information than others. Because of that, sometimes you have a meeting, you talk different languages. You think you understand each other, but you don’t. I wish that was something we could connect in the company to make sure that everybody talks the same language.

Read next: Data and confused: The increasing complexity of digital ad targeting


About The Author

App users visit brick and mortar 41 more often thanApp users visit brick and mortar 41 more often than
Constantine von Hoffman is managing editor of MarTech. A veteran journalist, Con has covered business, finance, marketing and tech for CBSNews.com, Brandweek, CMO, and Inc. He has been city editor of the Boston Herald, news producer at NPR, and has written for Harvard Business Review, Boston Magazine, Sierra, and many other publications. He has also been a professional stand-up comedian, given talks at anime and gaming conventions on everything from My Neighbor Totoro to the history of dice and boardgames, and is author of the magical realist novel John Henry the Revelator. He lives in Boston with his wife, Jennifer, and either too many or too few dogs.

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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More promotions and more layoffs

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More promotions and more layoffs

For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.

The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.

Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes

Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643. 

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Here are the median salaries by role:

  • Senior management $199,653
  • Director $157,776
  • Manager $99,510
  • Staff $89,126

Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.

One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%). 

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Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.

Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams

Employee turnover 

In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”

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Men and Women

Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540

This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.

In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.

Methodology

The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents. 

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Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.

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