If you are not an engineer, if you specalize in corporate functions, run away. Fast.
Money, resources, support goes into manufacturing and sales. All other corporate functions are wildly immature and even more dysfunctional. There is no CIO, CMO or CHRO. The HR functions are split amongst a variety of leads and yet talk with any business leader and they will tell you they get zero HR assistance (which explains the myriad of HR issues plaguing the teams).
There are multiple “CMO” types all competing against each other with varying visions, needs, purposes. They have accountants acting as marketers. As another poster shared, the team responsible for campaigns is lacking skill (but not connections). They don’t know what a brand campaign is, how to fund, staff or execute one. The C Suite likes to state “what got us here won’t get us there”. They are right but the vast majority do not want to do what is needed to be done to get there. They are stuck in old patterns, refuse to adopt new ways of working and as a result, are indeed stuck. You often hear about removing sand from the gears yet many leaders are swapping the sand for pebbles and in some cases, boulders in the gears. In other cases, employees are being thrown into the gears. Corporate flesh everywhere.
New employees are told not to be vocal, don’t push back, don’t talk about how you did things elsewhere. Sit tight for a year, develop relationships and then well, do nothing, because again, they don’t like change.
Brand leadership needs help. Previous leaders were really good but demoted themselves or left after what can only be assumed to be total and complete burnout with the way they work.
Most recently, they laid off a bunch of long term employees. I suppose they are living the dream that what got us here won’t get us there. Certainly, they now don’t have baggage of the employees who got them to where they are today and can bring in more folks who are willing to work on site and do zoom meetings all day, keep their mouths shut about problems and tow the line.
