Marketing is like the equestrian sport of dressage

With the 2021 Olympics just around the corner and my newsfeed filling with images of excited athletes embarking on their journeys to Tokyo, I’ve come to a realisation - Marketing is like the Equestrian  sport of Dressage.  (a sport that I have admired since running around in the Adelaide Hills chasing ponies in gumboots from a young age).

Wait! Let me explain.

I suppose I really mean marketing skills are like dressage skills.
In dressage, there are distinct types of capabilities and skills to be mastered for each of the six main areas of the training scale – from Rhythm, Connection to Collection. To be a great dressage rider you need excellent capabilities and skills from start to finish (from end to end) but equally there are specialists that focus on just one dressage area. In dressage, it can take years to learn a skill and progress through the training scale, you’re always learning and, in the case of the Olympics, to win you need the whole team to perform.

So if I swap horses and hay for martech and creative, it’s a pretty similar picture.

But marketing has one additional challenge. The skills needed for marketing change constantly while the core rules of dressage have been the same for 100+ years.

So, as a marketing leader how do you keep pace, align and bring your team on the journey and still deliver a gold medal performance? Remove some of the uncertainty by trusting in the collective wisdom of industry. It’s what ADMA has been doing for much of its 50+ years – bringing the industry together to agree on industry needs and then acting to help close any gaps.

In 2021 we’re living up to our heritage with the ADMA Marketing Skills Assessment. Based on industry input, the Assessment provides an industry’s reassurance in terms of skills needed for tomorrow and how you might bridge any gap between today and tomorrow. From high level quadrants for ability in Discovery, Strategy, Planning and Execution; through to more than 35 individual skills, your team will not only understand where their current skills place them personally but also within their team, organisation and most importantly, within the marketing industry. By knowing how you place you know your starting point for the learning and development journey that builds careers and opportunity – and we’ll give you some help on that L&D path as well.

Simone Pearce - Australian Olympic Team , Equestrian Dressage and her horse Destano