The Reforms I Need: Public School Teachers And Those Who “Know Better”

By Romi Mahajan

31 October, 2015
Countercurrents.org

I got a call from one of my children’s teacher last year. She was very vocal with me about my marketing practice and about my lack of deftness with new varieties of digital advertising and social media. She went further indicating that I needed to spend more time in the office, suggesting in unambiguous terms that I was lazy and incompetent to boot. She topped it off with a cherry- that I was poor in dealing with clients and universally unrespected in the community.

I was patient at first but ultimately decided that I’d complain about her call to my Board of Directors. Is it fair for someone from the outside to berate me in this fashion, I asked. The members’ response added insult to injury- I was told to remain calm in the face of adversity; I was also told that I had no right to ever pushback on a prospective customer.

So I scheduled time with the teacher to understand her concerns; in the meeting, she continued to pound away at me suggesting that I might consider going to get an MBA and threatening to badmouth my practice if I didn’t reform my methods.

I inquired as to her credentials for making such sweeping statements. She mentioned her degree in education and award-winning years as a literature and social studies teacher. She also mentioned the kudos she won as one of the first teachers to introduce statistics into the social studies 6th grade curriculum.

I had to hand it to her. She was clearly more adept at running a marketing business than I was.

I hear that about a week after our marketer-teacher conference, she was at a wine and cheese party and was telling other teachers the story of our encounter; apparently, the other teachers nodded knowingly, suggesting that they too had been having issues with the way marketing agencies are run; she did rise to my defense once, saying that I was “clearly a nice guy” but just wasn’t particularly good at what I did for a living. “Nice people are great but I just don’t like incompetent folks; they anger me,” she was overheard saying.

Turns out that her perspective was amplified. A local refrigeration and cold storage magnate heard her case and funded a movement around the reformation of marketing. He named it “MARKETing: Future States and Future Goals.” He put in a lot of money and hired several successful, intelligent people. In their annual fund-raiser, my child’s teacher was invited to give an address. I was aghast that she used our story to illustrate what was wrong with marketing businesses. She thundered about the ability marketing people have of continuing to do bad marketing, never getting fired by customers, always seeking other marketers with whom to make common cause and so on. She even suggested that Pacific Rim countries were making leaps in marketing that were in effect leaving American marketers behind. She proposed a “Marketing Regulation Council” that would monitor the pay marketer received and would give bonuses if individual marketers were able to run the same marketing campaigns for every single customer.

Her speech paid off; she is now the Director of Marketing Reform for the MRC and hobnobs with the deans of the booming cold storage space.

I’m desperately trying to rebuild my marketing practice. What a journey. But I continue to smile and serve. That’s my job after all.

Romi Mahajan is the founder of KKM Group a marketing firm, an author, an investor, and an activist. His career is a storied one, including spending 9 years at Microsoft and being the first CMO of Ascentium, an award-winning digital agency. Romi has also authored two books on marketing- the latest one can be found here . A prolific writer and speaker, Mahajan lives in Bellevue, WA, with his wife and two kids. Mahajan graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, at the age of 19. He can be reached at [email protected]