Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO, delighted you are here. I’m Ian Truscott, and I intend to share a mix of what’s caught my eye from the Rockstar CMO community, the latest discussions from the podcast and our street knowledge blog.

Yo yo yeah!

This week we’ve returned to the roots of this publication as when I registered the Rockstar CMO domain, I was inspired by N.E.R.D’s song “Rock Star” and the line “you can’t be me I’m a rockstar”.

I’m about as far away from a rock star as you can get, and, of course, you can be a rock star, and we founded Rockstar CMO as a play on this to have some fun, celebrate the rock star CMOs and share content that would help marketers become them - and as you’ll read a few things brought that back this week.

Enjoy!

Ian

Ian Truscott | Chief Bottle Washer | Rockstar CMO

Pharrell Williams is an assembler, and so should you be

On the podcast this week, I chatted with Emmanuel Probst, the Global Lead, Brand Thought-Leadership at Ipsos, and, aside from being an adjunct professor, he’s a Wall Street Journal and USA Today best-selling author, and we talked about his book Assemblage - The Art and Science of Brand Transformation.

One of the points he made is that we, as marketers are assemblers, bringing things together to create change in the minds of our consumers and to the culture.

It turns out that Pharrell Williams, lead singer of N.E.R.D - who sang “Rock Star” admitted during depositions in April 2014 in a plagiarism lawsuit with the family of Marvin Gaye that he could not read music. As Emmuanel says (and I am paraphrasing), many of the artists we admire, like Pharrell, and many of the brands we admire didn’t start from scratch, they assemble, inspired by other work and genres.

In our conversation, Emmanual shares a bunch of analogies like this, including how good brandy is made (which comes across way better with his French accent) to explain this “Assemblage” concept. Great artists, are assemblers and as marketers, we should do the same.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, we should look for inspiration in products that already exist in categories that are unrelated to the brand we’re trying to create. Then remix this into what he calls an assemblage of those different elements.

A fascinating idea, click on the link below to listen to more.

High-five your rock stars

I was called out on LinkedIn.

You’ve probably seen the super bowl ad from Workday that questions whether we can call our colleagues “rock stars” with actual rock stars, saying we can’t - only a rock star musician who’s done the work, the touring, and the partying can be called a rock star.

And one of my previous podcast guests, a friend of the show and now Principal Analyst at Forrester, Simon Daniels, shared it, saying, “Haha, Ian Truscott/Rockstar CMO, you’ve been busted! 😆”.

But as I responded on LinkedIn, it took a rock star CMO to create such an awesome ad, I also did some digging, and it seems their CMO shares our view about being rock stars - from the Wordday blog:

So, rock stars driving transformation, high five and go be you!

Creating your executive rock stars

And back to the podcast, Jeff Clark (our resident Strategy Advisor) and I discussed how we turn our executives into rock stars, as executives or any engaged employees with strong personal brands can give you some great material for your content marketing.

Especially if you have a strong founder story, but also if a new executive shows a fresh direction for the business or if they bring credibility to your product or service. A great example of the latter in B2B is hiring an industry analyst from Forrester or Gartner, but we also share a number of other examples and how your marketing team can support them.

Jeff shares 5 tips - good stuff, as usual, a second reason to listen to this weeks podcast!

Turn Your PB up to 11

On the topic of personal brand, a rummage in our back catalogues pulls out this excellent article from personal branding expert Jane Scandurra. While it was written during the pandemic, and we are back in person, the world has become more virtual, and the three tips she shares to crank your personal brand up to 11 have stayed relevant.

Marketing Street Knowledge

More good stuff from around the interwebs…

Monday Marketing Mojo

Finally…

Here is something to get your Monday marketing mojo working, and we don;t care if he can read music or not - the inspiration behind Rockstar CMO - N.E.R.D.

New Podcast Review!

The image of the rock star in the header of the web version was created using A.I. through NightCafe Creator.