Charge your earbuds people! This month’s newsletter is podcast party zone 🥳 We love podcasts, so take this as our reminder to you to make time for the things you know will bring you some joy right now ❤️ That might mean scrolling straight down to our nostalgic Jessica Simpson post…
Podcasts not your thing? Well try a couple of these out to see if we can change your mind, or scroll past all the pods to the Twitter thread or the article promising the key to creativity.
For our first audio feature: The North & Now crew made our podcast debut!
We were guests on a new podcast called Capitalize sharing our marketing career advice and we inadvertently circle all our answers around the theme of building your career support system—no surprise!
We met the host Jenna Matthews on #MarketingTwitter (this hashtag became a very real and supportive thing in December thanks to this tweet from Christina Garnett in case you want to join the club!) and turns out she’s a marketer based in Calgary—it’s truly a small world!
We won’t summarize our takeaways because we’d love you to give Jenna’s podcast a listen, but a few themes include:
Career risks (where one of us recounts a career switch and another reflects on being in over her head)
How to network with people at all levels in an org (we give actual advice on how to find ppl and get in touch)
How to take ownership over your career if you want a project, raise, or promotion (advice tried and tested by us)
What lies below
Lessons from five ‘successful biz ppl’
Jootsing: What is it and can I have it?
You’re wrong about Jessica Simpson
Why Peloton is winning
🤑 Business and life lessons from five billionaires
3ish mins
//Moly: I shared this with the group, and for the record I like reflecting on reflections and don’t really care about the billionaire part—let’s say ‘successful business ppl!’ reflections.
My favourite lesson was: Likeable people win. People sense those good vibes. It does wonders for your startup, career or life.
I think that the easier you are to work with the more you’ll get done faster because you and the project team are enjoying yourselves vs dealing with conflict and resentment. That doesn’t mean being a pushover. To me it means understanding what it takes to get buy-in, which is a topic I enjoy discussing and something I consciously work on.
//Moirae: Sometimes it's just so satisfying reading some good advice, from a few billionaires, you know? A few of my favourite quotes from this thread:
“You will doubt yourself a million times, it’s only natural.” This is refreshing to know even people who have built great things still feel this way, I guess I am in great company 😏
“Constantly cut your losses.” I have been here a few times in 2020, and it’s a great reminder that short term gain IS NOT WORTH long term pain!
“A satisfying life doesn't require much, wonderful health, enjoyable work & a caring family & friends.” Truer words have never been spoken in my opinion.
//Faaiza: This one is my favourite because it's how I have made decisions in the past. I recognize you have to be really lucky and privileged to do this (which is acknowledged in the tweet) but it's still a good internal metric:
Career advice:
Quit your job if it makes you exhausted (if you can)
Be grateful for your job if it fills you up with energy
It’s not necessarily about following your passion, which is unrealistic, it’s about getting good energy from your work.
🗝 Jootsing: The key to creativity
5 mins
Give it a read
//Faaiza: Teachers favour less creative children “because people who are more creative also tend to be more playful, unconventional, and unpredictable, and all of this makes them harder to control. No matter how much we say we value creation, deep down, most of us value control more. And so we fear change and favour familiarity. Rejecting is a reflex.”
Replace teacher with ‘manager,’ ‘client,’ ‘executive’... It's almost like we need to unlearn ‘creativity’ and then relearn it as adults. I also found it interesting to think of creativity as being most valuable when you understand the current system and its constraints, and that only then can you truly create something different that has value. Doesn't it feel like we do a lot of that in marketing?
//Moirae: I was in a bad mood when I started reading this and then I I got ½ of the way through and the article only annoyed me more, so I quit it all together. No Comments.
//Moly: Hello, context, my dear friend. Before you go in and burn things down to rebuild something even better, I personally feel it’s important to understand constraints, history, and realities—aka context. This is the comms person in me speaking fer sher.
In particular, who the people you’re building for are, what they value (so you don’t waste time making them something that doesn’t resonate with them), and why something has been done the way it’s been done in the past. Sometimes you’ll learn valuable info you should fold into your new creative idea, and sometimes you’ll learn there’s no reason and you have even more freedom than you think to build something new.
In either case, this context will help you sell your new idea more easily than just declaring you want to shake things up with no logic supporting your decisions.
📕 You’re Wrong About: Jessica Simpson’s “Open Book”
We all got addicted to this podcast—and you will too if you grew up in the 90s. It’s a four part deep-dive into Jessica Simpson’s autobiography chronicling how so much of what you saw in the news about her wasn’t at all her intention (remember how you thought she was obsessed with marketing her abstinence—yeah, she wasn’t 😣 ), plus there’s a whole section on how obsessed John Mayer was with her that’s just… weird. Did we mention it’s hosted by two super smart and funny journalists?
Due to four hours of nostalgic podcast listening we didn’t share as many links as we usually do, which made us realize we should definitely share it with all of you for a couple reasons:
This is your reminder to take time to decompress whether that’s with a podcast, a walk, cleaning, cooking, whatevs.
It’s fun to appreciate when you encounter good storytelling! Cheers to Jessica for her book and the hosts for their examination.
🚴♂️ Making the Brand: Peloton's Pop Culture Brilliance w/ Christina Garnett & Adam Pierno
/Faaiza: Everything I learned in this podcast about the way Peloton has incorporated gamification, community, pop culture and customer experience is just amazing. It’s clear that not only do they know their customer inside and out, they have done their homework on understanding their top three to four user personas equally well. Obviously the pandemic came at the right time for them to shine, but they clearly had a lot of this figured out long before 2020. 👏👏👏
/Moly: What this conversation reinforced for me is to find out who the heck the people in your community are from a 360 degree perspective. Their users are more than just exercise peeps—they’re #pelotonmoms, they’re Beatles fans, they love Michael Jordan and the Last Dance documentary, they like 60 minute workouts, and some like 10 minute workouts. Ask yourself: Are you providing ways for all the members of your community to get involved based on all their different preferences and perspectives?
Side note that as a marketer it was cool to hear non-Peloton employees talk about the value the community brings them. I can imagine their team listening to this and doing a happy dance that all the work they’re putting in is working and their messaging is resonating.
A little background
North & Now started as an idea for a conference in 2016, and though we shelved that, we’ve continued to gather around these beliefs:
1. Look at leaders in other industries in order to be leaders in your own
2. Identifying opportunities is a learned skill (this one’s our favourite)
3. A fresh perspective on something familiar to you can be a game changer
If you want to send us links you think we’d like or want to discuss a fun idea, hit reply or send us a note:
Faaiza → Twitter (most active) / Instagram (infrequent posts, frequent scrolls)
Moirae → Instagram (her stories are 🔥) / Twitter (all business, no play)
Moly →Instagram (follow for wine/podcast recs) / Twitter (all things community)