March 11, 2022
Hello all,
Over the past few weeks, we’ve quietly rolled out a public change to how we think about our work at Part and Sum and our position in the market. We’ve always been (and still are!) the team that bolts on to bring ideas to market and grow them with data. As we help business grow across industries, we’ve begun to see the unique value of working at the nexus of customer-focused, innovative thinking and deep growth marketing technical expertise. We’ve realized that we really do see things that others don’t, at a time when CMOs, teams and leaders across disciplines increasingly need this kind of visibility. Our ability to dig in and figure things out is a core reason why we are able to bring what we see to life.
On Twitter, Jim goes deeper into his thought process around unlocking our updated Part and Sum positioning. As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts.
All the best,
Amelia
Tech and War (Stratechery)
From Oracle to Netflix, businesses have been imposing their own sanctions on Russia in response to the Ukrainian War. As historic sanctions (2PM) continue to ripple across the globe, we’ll start to see real-time impact on how and where users engage with the technology and platforms we use every day. For example, this may be the world’s first TikTok war (The New Yorker).
[what we’re talking about]
‘More self-sufficient’ The changing (yet again) and increasingly challenging role of the CMO (Digiday)
A CMO’s response to swift political changes is just one of the many things on a CMO’s plate these days. Part and Sum has talked at length about the difficulty of the role as it converges with product and sales disciplines. Layer on changes to data privacy, inflation, and challenging cross-platform measurement, and you have an ever-steepening curve.
Ways to be a better communicator
Taking action on new ways of thinking is hard, collaborative work. Part and Sum strategist Sally Zhang’s recently shared her learnings on communication in business from her NYU executive education course (here’s the deck, too). What did we learn? Good communicators must meet different levels of basic human need. Good communication is as emotional as it is logical. And, yes, team meetings are still important.
Bonus link: Your smartphone is bigger than your brain.