Most recently, that quote’s playback button was hit by an unlikely source: the 363rd issue of the Dense Discovery newsletter. I learned to cherish this inspiring and curious dispatch as a secondary reader for some time, and more recently as a direct subscriber.

The curator and author Kai Brach—a German living in Australia (relevant here only because I assume he may be aware of Adorno’s quote)—writes in his opening words to issue 363:

“The mental health crisis, the manosphere, the rise in addiction and the lean towards strongman politics – young men’s struggle for identity manifests in so many troubling ways these days. Yet naming it explicitly remains fraught. We’re often reminded that doing so redirects attention from women’s ongoing battles for equality.”

What follows is a short article about the work of Richard Reeves on helping young men find their identity—as men. The main angle is that this can and should happen in a way that doesn’t contradict feminism:

“The work towards gender equality for women is vital and unfinished.”

Reeves is quoted further:

“I honestly believe that the way to beat the online world is offline, is in real life, by having male teachers, male coaches, fathers, uncles, neighbours, etc., just being a living and breathing version of what it means to be a man.”

“But we have to be really careful not to treat men like defective women, or vice versa.”

For me, the controversial part is the reduction of someone’s identity to their sex assigned at birth. Of course, Reeves heads up the American Institute for Boys and Men—the binary hint is in the name.

As a biological man who identifies as non-binary, I stopped asking myself how to be a man some time ago, because it felt like a futile battle I couldn’t win anyway. Why would I let something as limiting and charged as “manhood” define me? Realising that giving up this fight and instead simply being myself was the path to liberation—and to breaking repeating patterns—was pivotal.

I welcome anyone who wants to support others in finding their way. But I am alarmed when I read that the goal or mould of their support is just an updated version of the same binary gender concept, instead of empowering people to free themselves from the burden and pressure of complying with the social construct of binary gender.

If this is a step too far for you, I’ll ask you to follow a little experiment. Let’s pretend we are not talking about the mental health crisis of men, but of all humans with blood type A+.

For this experiment, we claim to find a significant percentage of those with A+ struggling with depression, suicidal thoughts, and addiction. And we therefore suggest that they spend time in the company of other folks with blood type A+ so they can see a “better version” of being A+ to look up to. Walks in the forest. Fishing. (Preferably no eye contact because A+ folks struggle with that…)

This, by the way, does not take away from the struggles B+ people have with being B+. It’s carefully separated and segregated—out of utmost respect, of course—to allow each group to find their identity in their blood type.

How do we feel about the idea that your blood should have such a major impact on your identity? Or the notion that all A+ people share enough that other A+ subjects are best suited to support them? Would we not call this utter nonsense and seek common environmental or contextual patterns rather than a biological marker? And would we not eventually realise that millennia of suggesting that A+ are this way and B+ are the other way created the mental health crisis and inequality in the first place?

No solution, no matter how well meant, is a good solution if it fails to challenge the fundamental system that caused the issue we’re trying to fix. This is the essence of Adorno’s quote.

An approach to improve the mental health of those suffering under an outdated, binary concept of gender—when that approach is based on the very idea of binary gender—will only perpetuate the damage done and deepen the mental health crisis.

Or: an updated version of the gender binary won’t fix the damage done by the patriarchy. And the patriarchy relies on the gender binary. If you want your right life, you have to unsubscribe from the entirety of the wrong one.

So what can we say to young people who find comfort in Reeves’s narrative? Find and know yourself. The original. The authentic, unaltered version of you. Or as Kae Tempest puts it:

“When I was young, I sought help from my older self
I came into my head, I told me know yourself”

The “older self” can be others who are genuinely on the same journey. But forget about their gender or genitals when you wonder if you should relate to them. When you stop classifying people as A+ and B+ and instead as humans with different life experiences, we may find more healing in acknowledging the specifics that really matter than in the false differences and commonalities of forced-upon social constructs.

Kai closes his article with:

“The future can’t be gendered – it has to work for everyone.”

I totally agree—our future can’t be gendered - nor can it be binary!

Today, I think hope needs a reset. Trump just won a 2nd term. The Netherlands, my current home, have a dysfunctional right to far-right coalition government. Germany is on the brink of political collapse and will likely fall into the hands of the center to far-right. We still have war in Ukraine and Gaza. And our climate is very soon beyond hope. Refugees are drowning and starving while seeking a life worth living. Billions of lives are very literally at stake.

Am I annoyed? Very much. Am I surprised or even shocked? No, because I ran out of that capacity a long time ago.

If I learned anything since 2016 (the infamous year of the Brexit referendum and the first Trump victory), then it is this:

If things can end badly, they will.

I used to preach that hope is not an emotion, but a rational, inevitable and unshakable foundation of my existence. The moment I stop hoping, I stop living. And this hasn’t changed the slightest. This may be different for others, but for me, the alternative to hope is just too frightening and unempowered to consider. And the worse things get, the worse the perspective of giving up hope.  

But recent events on the large political stage and in my personal environment mean that this hope needs readjustment, both around objectives and timelines. And while I remain hopeful, I am also under no illusion that hard times are ahead. 

On a personal level, I had to face open, hateful and unfiltered queerphobia for the first time in my admittedly sheltered life of very liberal upbringing and cis-het passing for years.

Our next door neighbour decided to respond to us displaying the pride flag on our own property (during the local pride celebration period) with an openly hateful and threatening set of text messages. He then went to allow his reactive and uncontrollable dog to lunge at us.

This came out of the blue and ended 5 years of peaceful neighbourly relationships. We weren’t friends, because we knew we would not see eye to eye on almost everything, but you don’t need to in order to have pleasant neighbourhoods. He put an end to what benefitted all of us in favour of something that is very unpleasant, just because he was unable to regulate his behaviour. Hate is that irrational.

One of my favourite quotes is:

"If people act in an unexpected way, ask yourself what they are afraid of."

It is pretty clear that he finds social change in the world threatening, and he finds a lot of things utterly threatening. He is a frightened person who hides behind strong statements. The fact that he calls woke people weak is a clear giveaway that his world consists of strong and weak people. His armour are fences, security cameras, 2 big petrol-guzzling SUVs, rip off business models and, of course, right wing ideologies.

And just like most right wing voters, he isn’t well educated. Unlike most of them, though, he seems to do economically rather well. But that just makes him the real right wing benefactor. Small state, low taxes, no solidarity. The individualist, narcissist dream of a society where the few winners reign over the less fortunate. 

The common link between our neighbour, Trump voters, Brexiteers and other right wing agenda peddlers is that they are caught in a circular mental model of the world. Every attempt to argue with them has been predicted and a narrative has been implanted that makes any conversation futile.

Yet, for years, the center and left argue that we need to seek conversations, encounters, understanding and reasoning with these people in order to win their hearts and minds. All of this, while the level of open hate on social media platforms and in our real lives keeps increasing - and the bar for what is acceptable to say out loud keeps dropping daily. 

Social media and other tech is not just a random outlet. Meta, X, TikTok are either directly or indirectly part of the global system change. They are owned by those in favour of fascism. Or their economical interests make them happy co-conspirators. All too often, both is the case.

So what can we do?

My take: Abandon them. For your own sanity. Cut ties that hurt you and validate them. Seek the company of like minded people. Consciously build bubbles. Connect bubbles. Build community. Set examples not by how smart and sensible our arguments are, but how we treat each other. How we care for each other. How we show solidarity with those who suffer. The inflationary use of "Love is the answer” makes it a statement easy to discard, but it’s true. Just in a far more practical way than we may have understood so far.

This also means we have to let go of the illusion that quick solutions are possible. They aren’t, I believe. Things will get considerably worse before they can get better. The main reason is that more than half of the population in those “democracies” at risk won’t change their mind until they realise their own mistakes. This will eventually happen, but likely requires more than a generation. As one of the main goals of right wing system change is making as much profit ahead of the advent of climate meltdown, in order to be among the elite who can survive a global catastrophe, this also means little hope for large scale human survival on this planet. 

Yes, we owe it to future generations, but so do those who ignore this basic human responsibility, and we can’t balance their lack of giving a fuck by giving extra fucks to the point where eco-anxiety and depression eats us alive. Because when that happens, we can’t set examples in love and caring anymore. And this is our only hope: living the idea of a better world. 

we can’t balance their lack of giving a fuck by giving extra fucks to the point where eco anxiety and depression eats us alive

So my new flavour of hope will focus on relationships, communities, humaning with those who care. Relationships first. It is a much more inwardly looking perspective. One that seeks meaningful connections over meaningless campaigning. 

We can’t beat their closed ideologies, tech multipliers and billionaire funding. We can't rely on the executive and judiciary either, because they can all be bought or rendered meaningless. 

But money and hate can’t produce human connection and love. And love will win in the long run.

Time is on our side.

For my early work, see Music 1995 - 2001

In 2001 I wrote and produced music for Stadtheather Heidelberg and its dance theatre production Wahnsinnsjung, directed by Irina Pauls. There is no streamig source for the music, I may make it available some day.

The Truth About Lies

In Ireland in 2009, A few colleagues and I formed a indie/alt rock cover band called The Truth About Lies. We toured local pubs and had a great time. Here is a demo medley on Soundcloud. I played bass, after the rest of the band decided that my voice wasn't quite what they had in mind. They used different words. Still proud that the only song I ever sang as a lead singer was Placebo's Nancy Boy!

Here are two full-lenght songs:

Solo projects and demos

As the rest of the band was not quite as much into dark stuff as I was and didn't fancy writing own material, I created a few instrumentals on my own

Cover version of Joy Division's New Dawn Fades:

While in the UK

in 2017 I embarked on joint project with my partner Sabine Harnau for the UK-based writer's collective 26. This project:

Here is our co-creation for the Letter I. We picked IKEA, Reading, which had to be closed just after its opening, due to tragic work accident. Here is Sabine's vilanelle. And below my track, both inspired by Swedens 2nd best pop group and major to minor videos.

I also continued my own dark guitar music experiments:

2018 onwards

Moving back into more electronic/less guitar heavy territory. Many demos, but not a lot finished. Hopefully, the next years will provide more focus on music.

The first album, Bluetronic - Electronic Worship is a selection of Trance and Techno tracks, some produced for the _Planet Lif_e Techno services I used to co-organise back in Munich with a local protestant church.

The second, Mylk - Fork Follows Fiction is a trip-hop/chillout album with more acoustic and psychodelic influence and came a bit later (meta data in Spotify is incorrect!) and was co-written and produced with Stefan Schaller (who I sadly lost contact with over the years, despite a few attempts to reconnect).

Enjoy the trip down my (4MB sample ram) memory lane.

After all, a standard hotel’s most valuable asset is its location, followed by the actual building.

Does your own unique selling proposition help people make the best choice?

For large parts of the hotel market, ironically, a unique selling point (aka ‘USP’; these terms are sometimes used interchangeably with ‘unique value proposition’) is designed to attract everyone. The limiting factor is that only your hotel has it, but you hope it attracts the masses.

In this understanding, if you need a bed, you’re part of the audience. No-one’s excluded, except by their budget. What is more, most of us feel attracted by something we want but can’t afford — which increases the attraction for prospective customers who can afford it.

I believe this meaning of ‘unique’ is a total misunderstanding because it is egocentric. Uniqueness doesn’t start with you, or your location, or your building. It has to start with what makes your customers unique — their unique problems and desires.

Example of a strong unique selling proposition: Seehotel Moldan

In September, we embarked to lower Bavaria for our annual holiday, which is where my mother’s family is from. We spent a wonderful week at Seehotel Moldan in Postmünster. Even though we were taking time off work, this hotel was such a great case of a brand with a strong USP that I can’t help but share it to inspire others.

This year, we decided to make an extra effort to respect the needs of all family members in our planning. Almost 2 years ago we became double Galgo parents.

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE WHEN A COMPANY’S USP FITS ITS TARGET AUDIENCE LIKE A GLOVE

Yes, Seehotel Moldan is a hotel. Crucially, though, guests need to bring dogs — which makes it a unique experience.

Dogs are allowed everywhere, even during breakfast & dinner (on a lead). This means they are free to make dog friends throughout the hotel and outdoor areas. There is a nice pool for humans and dogs (but ours hate water). Humans can enjoy the Finnish outdoor sauna and their dogs can stay in the enclosed garden nearby. And for our fast girls, the absolute highlight was a fenced-in dog field for running and playing, which was used daily.

Our girls settled in very quickly and it was great to see how they enjoyed the constant socialising. Particularly when another pair of Galgo boys arrived a few days into our stay. It was love at first sight(hound). Our hopes of most other dog parents coming with a good level of awareness and education on dog behaviour were mostly fulfilled, so the dogs had the ability to mostly sort out their needs and communication without human interference, something that doesn’t happen very often in our suburbia.

And the humans? We found it very easy to connect with other guests. It’s easy to make good conversations, because everyone has their own furry conversation starter or ice breaker with them. And if the fur babies are happy and relaxed, it’s very easy to for their people to feel happy and relaxed, too.

SEEHOTEL MOLDAN’S OBSTACLES TO BUILDING A SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS

As a result of being a bit of a misfit in the area, Seehotel Moldan has an interesting history. Built in the early 1980s, its architecture doesn’t quite suit most people’s romantic idea of a hotel in the Bavarian countryside. It’s not modern enough to be avant-garde, or daringly brutalist to be interesting. It’s a bit bland; certainly not evocative of a luxury resort. The decor was at best utilitarian until the Moldan family started to refurbish and restyle the property a few years ago, an effort that is still ongoing.

The hotel had changing owners over the years, including — allegedly — a business owner who spent time in prison during his hotel ownership and served airline-branded biscuits with coffees. (This is based on stories of my local relatives. My great-cousin and his wife incidentally had their wedding reception at the hotel in 1999)

The location is OK, but not exactly prime. It’s near, albeit not directly by, a lake, and that lake is artificial and backed up by a small dam. Pfarrkirchen, the nearest town, is 3km away. Larger cities like Munich or Passau require a train or car journey of 45–90 minutes.

I mention these factors because they are most certainly the reasons for the hotel’s mixed success in the past. I choose to call them ‘constraints’ because Seehotel Moldan clearly used them as creative fuel — to stay focused and grounded.

DOES YOUR COMPANY’S USP HELP PEOPLE SOLVE A PROBLEM?

Our main reason for even searching for a dog hotel was that our previous holidays with the dogs had been spoiled by bad hotel service and annoying experiences. Large Hotel brands may have adapted their pet policies, but extra payment in return for mere disgruntled tolerance is still a bad deal. So pet parents are still wildly underserved by hotels.

Let’s take our stopovers on the way to Postmünster, for example.

In other hotels, bringing your (up-to, for the sake of avoiding ableism) four-legged family members along is a pain. You are faced with rejection (mostly) or extortionate extra fees. Looking at you, Hilton Cologne, where a fee of €40 per dog per night is high enough to pay for a budget hotel room (as long as it’s used by humans). And even after coughing up that fee, severe customer service limitations remain. Because after spending more than €200 for a double room, you still can’t enjoy breakfast with your partner. Instead, you have to take turns at dog sitting because you can’t bring them into the breakfast area (and there is no alternative area either).

Or take our experience in Würzburg, where we paid the extra pet fee of €20 per night — but then the receptionist realised she’d rather wanted to charge that fee per dog, running after us to grab another €20 as we were already getting into the car… inferring that we had tried to defraud the hotel by not being explicit enough about having 2 dogs.

So, as you might imagine, we really had enough of being the inconvenient exception.

And it seems we are not alone.

Choose your value proposition in service of your target audience

The dog hotel example shows that a successful unique selling point starts with radically (re-)defining your target market. You want to be in a position to meet that specific audience’s needs better than others. Whether you sell a service or products, this means all aspects of your own unique selling proposition help your audience live their best lives in different ways. And just like your overall business and marketing strategy, defining your audience strategically includes saying no.

For Seehotel Moldan, it’s a no to people without dogs. That means excluding quite a large demographic group of consumers. Also, there’s no grey area: They don’t compromise to accept guests that identify as aspiring future dog owners, cat owners or people who like to dress up as dogs. While they push away some potential customers, this laser focus constitutes a specific benefit that increases the pull for their core audience.

SO, LET’S LOOK AT ALL THE ASPECTS AND ANGLES OF SEEHOTEL MOLDAN’S BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION:

• They are now in the family experience & wellbeing business — not in the overnight accommodation business.
• They turn the experience of using hotels with dogs from ‘tolerated but expensive’ (at best!) to ‘exclusive’ (in every sense of the word!)
• They’ve reinterpreted the potential disadvantages of their location (a bit too remote, near but not next to an artificial lake) into advantages (great area for walking!)
• They’ve decided to operate an all-inclusive business model, which further removes their location constraints (no need to leave the hotel complex in search of other restaurants)
• Their kitchen operation creates synergies with their catering company which is based at the same kitchen
• For their new audience of dog owners, other hotels in the area do not count as competition. Like many other guests, we picked this hotel specifically, although it meant driving 900 km one way.
• Guests’ loyalty is based on wanting to repeat the experience. No need for a tedious points scheme and artificial benefits.
• Staff demonstrate genuine care and hospitality, most being dog owners themselves or genuinely enjoying dog company. Which creates a satisfying sense of authenticity.
• Most guests don’t mind a few aspects of the hotel still undergoing renovation and updates. After all, they’re not here for the architecture.
• Perhaps most importantly for Seehotel Moldan, they seem to have largely removed many typical hotel market pressures and challenges. They are booked out irrespective of seasons, and well into the following year.

To sum up, when defining the differentiating benefit of the product ‘hotel stay’, the Moldan family did not pick something that only they could give to everyone. Instead, they perfectly embraced the concept of a minimum viable audience by choosing to create an experience that would create a strong pull for a strictly defined, limited group of prospective customers.

Which means that their story can teach us more than an endless list of examples of unique selling propositions. They typically include inspiring brands like Death Wish Coffee (”The World’s Strongest Coffee”) or Toms Shoes (Buy one, give one) — but no evidence of how these USPs respond to the concrete needs of their specific audience.

A FOCUS ON CUSTOMER NEEDS UNITES ALL SUCCESSFUL EXAMPLES OF UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITIONS

The more radically a brand or business owner defines their audience, and the more clearly they communicate this in their marketing messages, the more they will get heard by new customers who love them for the right reasons.

Whether you’re in a small business or at the helm of a brand owned by a corporation, the key is that this audience has to be capable of sustaining your business.

That’s why it’s called a ‘minimum’ viable audience. Unlike the minimum viable product (a term that’s debatable, because ‘viable’ can also be defined egocentrically, ignoring customer needs), it’s not about defining a viable starting point for your marketing strategies.

Once your minimum audience is viable, there’s no need to expand it. Instead, your most immediate and sustainable scaling opportunities are all about serving this audience in different ways.

Unique selling proposition examples like Seehotel Moldan also show us that inclusion and diversity aren’t just good for humans — they’re also good for business. If you bring new perspectives from underserved audiences into creating your products or services, you may well find the golden key to creating your very own market.

Similar products to yours might still exist. If they were created in service of a completely different audience, though, you’ll probably coexist comfortably with those other businesses — and even find ways to collaborate.

Summary: your specific audience’s needs are the most important part of your marketing strategy

So, what’s required for such a transformation? If we believed in blueprints, this is where you’d find a free business plan template. But we don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all answer to that question.

Nevertheless, all successful marketing strategies we’ve created or executed had a few things in common:

• Research your market
• Get clarity on your constraints & capabilities
• Build a clear and decisive strategy to eradicate distracting opportunism

— and muster the courage and conviction to operate outside your market’s existing status quo.

Because there’s a dog hotel version for every business sector.

Written by Holger Schueler | Edited by Sabine Harnau

Embracing ethical marketing to treat your customers, the market, society and the planet with integrity is one example. But ethical marketing is impossible without one important meaning of ‘integrity’ that regularly gets overlooked: the relationship between Product, Marketing and Sales in the organisation.

At From Scratch, we use the term ‘functional integrity’ to describe a successful relationship between these three areas of business.

Throughout this article I’ll use a few short-hand terms for departments. In my experience, different companies use them in different ways. So let’s start with definitions for a few keywords to help make sure we’re all on the same page.

The meaning of ‘Product’

I use the the word ‘Product’ to refer to product management teams and product owners — people and groups who have power over the direction of your products and services.

What is a sales team?

For the purpose of this article, a sales team includes everyone who

• generates new revenue,
• grows existing revenue,
• looks after customer relationships and partnerships, or
• renews contracts.

A lot of companies use words like hunters, farmers, new logos, existing logos, SDRs, BDRs, Sales Executives, Account Managers, Customer Success etc. to separate specific functions within their sales department. However, the best way to get to grips with functional integrity is to disregard those distinctions (at least for now).

Where does the marketing function begin and end?

Many people in marketing work within the limited scope of branding, content and campaigns — whether it’s strategic planning for social media, attracting potential customers via a website, or creating video advertisement campaigns.

Our own definition of marketing is much more in line with Seth Godin’s:

The product. The warranty. The team. The color choices. The pricing. The way it feels in your hand. The urgency we have to tell our friends…

And his assertion

If it touches the market, it’s marketing.

For a catchy, jargon-free summary, Allan Dib beautifully sums up the close relationship between Marketing and Sales in his book, The 1-Page Marketing Plan (hat tip to Jeffrey Shiau):

If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying “Circus Coming to the Showground Saturday,” that’s advertising. If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it into town, that’s promotion. If the elephant walks through the mayor’s flower bed and the local newspaper writes a story about it, that’s publicity. And if you get the mayor to laugh about it, that’s public relations. If the town’s citizens go to the circus, you show them the many entertainment booths, explain how much fun they’ll have spending money at the booths, answer their questions and ultimately, they spend a lot at the circus, that’s sales. And if you planned the whole thing, that’s marketing.

A more aligned relationship between separate functions: the final frontier?

In science fiction stories, you’ll sometimes hear about hull integrity. It’s usually during a nail-biting moment in a battle with hostile aliens or villains, when an attack has damaged the ship to the point where the dark, cold and deadly vacuum of space is no longer kept outside. The ship’s hull has lost its integrity. A freezing and suffocating death is the inevitable consequence.

Used in this sense, the word ‘integrity’ doesn’t make a moral judgement, but a purely functional one. It means that materials, structures and components no longer work together to do their job effectively.

In businesses, the absence of functional integrity may appear less dramatic and lethal. But only slightly. Strong collaborative relationships between Product, Marketing and Sales create the materials, structures and components that protect the business. Without such a super-tight working relationship, the business will disintegrate — confusing customers, spouting unclear messages and reducing conversion rates as a result.

In contrast, Brainshark reports that companies that align product, sales and marketing to buyers’ needs can grow their revenue by 25–50% per year.

WHAT’S THE CURRENT RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SALES TEAMS, MARKETING FOLKS AND PRODUCT PEOPLE?

After working with different types of companies since the early 2000s, here’s the sad truth: We haven’t seen functional integrity as a consistent feature or systematic effort anywhere yet — not even in successful small businesses, where team sizes help create a more closely aligned relationship (at least, in theory).

WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST OBSTACLES TO ALIGNING OVERALL MARKETING AND SALES FUNCTIONS?

Studies corroborate our personal experience. A 2018 survey by InsideViewlists the six biggest obstacles to sales and marketing alignment in B2B as

• Lack of accurate/shared data on target accounts and prospects (43%)
• Communication (43%)
• Lack of shared metrics (41%)
• Broken/flawed processes (37%)
• Lack of accountability on both sides (25%)
• Reporting challenges (21%)

Big headlines like these can distract from the concrete behaviour changes required to create functional integrity in a business. From salespeople to marketing stakeholders and product managers, all three groups of your organisation have the power to compromise the relationship between Product, Marketing and Sales:

• Time and time again, I’ve seen ambitious sales enablement managers or sales leaders come up with elevator pitch competitions to rephrase the version Marketing had defined for the company. Or individual sales teams decided to ditch central value proposition wording for their own versions because they felt it would sell better. Sometimes, the sales department may even come up with their own pricing. To generate short-term sales, some salespeople focus their pitch on use cases and features that are not considered a priority by the product team — and as a result, not a focus of innovation.
• Many marketing teams still develop content and campaigns without making Sales, Product or flesh-and-bone customers part of their regular meetings. Consequently, a study conducted by the Content Marketing Institute and LinkedIn shows that 80% of content created by marketing goes unused by sales. We see brilliant ads produced by external agencies that don’t increase sales and sometimes even lead to social media outrage — because they don’t accurately reflect the capabilities of the product or the customer experience. In some companies, Marketing deprioritises fundamental customer education and self-qualification, so Sales end up having to educate and qualify prospective customers all alone, which extends the sales cycle.
• Individual product teams may rework existing personas, messaging and brand attributes created by their company’s marketing function to suit their specific product line. In this process, they lose track of customers experiencing the entire company, not just their specific product niche. This leads to a confusing product/service landscape, so product managers need to step in and help the sales force understand the product and its use cases. More often than not, the more gaps Product has to plug, the more the product itself loses momentum and as a result, the company loses market share.

SHOULD YOU CREATE MORE INTERCONNECTION? (AKA WHAT DOES A PRODUCT MARKETER DO? — INHABITING THE NO-MANS-LAND)

In a 2006 article for Harvard Business Review, Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham and Suj Krishnaswamy analysed common struggles between the marketing function and the sales team. Some of the actions, such as disciplined communication, joint assignments and improving sales force feedback, will help create a more productive relationship for most groups. But appointing a dedicated liaison from marketing to work with the Sales team (or vice versa) requires a certain level of organisational maturity, or companies risk solidifying the problem.

Many problem-aware companies try to manufacture functional integrity by creating border roles that are supposed to connect the silos. Instead of asking Sales, Marketing and Product groups to do the difficult, complex and necessary work of collaborating around core messaging and the customer, they create Product Marketing, Account-Based Marketing and Pre-Sales roles, to name but a few. These roles can be important manifestations and envoys of functional integrity, but launched into the void of missing connectedness, they tend to increase the separation between their parent departments. With the new conduit role in place, it seems less important to share performance metrics, devise shared go-to-market plans or cooperate on strategic planning. It’s easy to adopt a “The product marketers will fix it” mindset. The conduits’ job grows more and more overwhelming as the departments that need connecting drift apart. Accordingly, they are less likely to provide a feedback loop for customer facing teams as a whole. These roles can become the stop gaps for company-wide tension, customer frustration — and as a result, prime burnout candidates.

Collaborative relationships are based on shared resources

A lot of innovative, design-led companies realise that breaking up silos, sharing assets and agreeing on single sources of truth are vital elements to their business success. Applying this to Product, Marketing and Sales creates integrity.

HOW PRODUCT, MARKETING AND SALES CAN ESTABLISH FUNCTIONAL INTEGRITY

When core teams establish a system of collaboration and respect for each other’s competence domains, they soon discover that solving problems can no longer stop at their own department doors. First and foremost, it means they need to create a shared understanding and expression of what the company stands for, rather than each team formulating their own. This also requires making each team’s research readily available to all others, at the right time — from information about sales cycles and sales playbooks to go-to-market processes. This kind of collaboration requires conscious changes in habit and company culture. Successful product marketing and sales depend on relinquishing siloed control and sharing accountability for the results. Of course, full involvement and buy-in from your executive team and investors is vital, too. This is where thorough research and engaging storytelling come in. These practices support your decisions in a way that ultimately increases your company value and success.

FROM SALES PIPELINES TO THE STATE OF PRODUCT MARKETING REPORT: INTERRELATED KPIS PROMOTE FUNCTIONAL INTEGRITY

Working with functional integrity means that every touch point with the market needs to be assessed by how well it performs for the entire company.

• Do marketing team members hit their targets for lead generation, but your BDRs and Account Executives end up disqualifying them because they’re a poor fit for the product or service?
• Do your salespeople exceed their targets using opportunistic but unsustainable pricing that they made up on the spot? It’s not worth paying commissions to salespeople who use tactics which will hurt your retention rates and frustrate your customer success team.
• Does your product team launch features and add-ons that suggest you’re not focusing on your core customer personas and their problems? If product management embraces a new customer base without liaising with the wider marketing organization and your sales force, they’ll undo the work of their colleagues and rip your funnels apart.

THIS EXERCISE WILL HELP YOU MORE CLOSELY ALIGN SALES, MARKETING AND PRODUCT

If you want to test your own organisation for functional integrity and see the reality/aspiration gap, try this simple exercise. Get 5 members (all seniority levels) of your sales, marketing and product team in a room. Their task is to write a sentence or two in response to the following questions:

1. What does our company or organisation do?
2. What values does our company or organisation stand for?
3. What value does our company or organisation provide to our market and our customers?

Compare and discuss the results as a group. How do the other versions provide valuable insights to each participant’s area of work?

While there aren’t any shortcuts to functional integrity, accelerators exist

When you set out to improve functional integrity in your organisation, you’ll probably find that you need work more thoroughly. However, the results of your efforts will be more sustainable, too. Achieving consensus and building shared practices may feel like slow drudgery at first. Once established, the fruit of your labour will save you countless hours and resources. What is more, you’ll produce a consistent customer experience, no matter if your customer interacts with your website, emails, calls, sales decks, contracts, technical documentation, events, social media activity, or invoices. Your customers will realise that you care enough to consciously design their experience.

Everything your company does is marketing. So all customer-facing teams need to own it together.

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Yet, we see a familiar pattern emerge — men feel the need to be defensive to the point where #notallmen becomes a trending hashtag. Suddenly, individual men feel the need to defend 50% of humanity of their own sex instead of at least accepting that the other 50% of humanity has a point to make.

Loyalty can be a powerful, positive thing. But loyalty can become toxic when it makes us blind for the dynamics of loyalty. If us men are hesitant to call out other men for sexist behaviour, loyalty becomes an accomplice. And how quickly men flock to defend the collective show us how strong male loyalty is.

The mechanisms and twisted logic that created #notallmen is the same that gave us #alllivesmatter. It’s privilege being called out. As Kübra Gümüşay points out in her book ‘Sprache und Sein’, it is those who used to label others being labeled. And suddenly it gets personal. If you also feel discomfort from collective responsibility, I suggest you try to channel it into fixing the problem.

What I need fellow men to understand and practice is that it is not enough to state that there are men who do not kill women. We need anti-racism from everyone to combat racism. And we need anti-sexism from everyone to combat sexism.

To think being neutral is being on the right side is empowering the wrong side. Sexism and Racism are cancers. And no doctor would say ‘I see there’s a cancer but I am doing my part because I did not add more cancer’.

Being anti-sexist involves educating children from an early age. But unless adults deeply investigate their own biases and influences, the kids are bound to repeat the same patterns. So education requires deep examination and productive, regular and ongoing discomfort. For men. We have to understand the dynamics of the male tribalism that creates #notallmen because it is in the way of making anti-sexist behaviour normative and sexism socially unacceptable. But we are still far away from that point because male identity is largely formed by belonging to this tribe.

Another traditional source of male identity is the assumed purpose of protecting the family, or more specifically, protecting female members of the family. Often, younger male family members will soon take on the role of co- defenders. This leads to absurd scenarios like fathers tasking their 4 year old sons to ‘look after mommy’ while they are away from home. We accept there is a threat to defend from, but we seem to feed off the purpose and status that protection provides. To the point where we may subconsciously welcome the threat to provide purpose and status. This is like a firefighter turned arsonist. And we have to start to uncover how subtly this identity kicks in and leaves its impression when we treat male and female children differently. Toxic behaviour often starts as an innocent habit.

The fact that women are under permanent threat from men is a male problem. It is the responsibility of men to address. Men can’t expect women to take on the emotional labour of ensuring that men are not offended by being called out as a collective. We have to sort this shit out, guys! And while we can tackle the habits and behaviours close to and leading to violence and aggression, there is something we can do right now, in our homes, at work, with friends. (Hint: it does not involve running neighbourhood watch patrols.)

Objectification leads to violence. So we have to fight objectification. Objectification is often understood as reducing a person to their sexually relevant body parts. But objectification really means reducing a person to a restricted, narrow role or function. The first step to empowering women is to see them without the filter of objectification. And that filter can often take the shape of innocent, seemingly lovely gestures with uncomfortable undercurrents.

During Women’s day and Women’s History Month I have seen many good intentions to honour strong and inspiring women. As my colleague Sarah Mills points out, why do we only recognise strong women? Is strength a requirement for equal rights?

But also, many posts of well-meaning men wanting to contribute follow the same pattern: men will often talk about their own wives or mothers as examples of inspiring women. When asked about inspiring business leaders, artists, athletes or politicians, most men will come up with a list of men.

You can blame our culture and media, but given the gravity of the problem, we have to change our culture now. Men, please make a habit of looking for inspiring women and knowing them for their work and wisdom, not for their motherhood or care. Because we are not interested in Elon Musk’s (potentially questionable) qualities as a father either. This means shattering the filter of stereotypes and objectification and enforcing a feeling of belonging to the tribe of humanity.

Until no man threatens, hurts or kills a woman for being a woman, all men have their work cut out.

Many featured ideas in this article are the result of breakfast and dog walk conversations with my partner Sabine Harnau.