I like to call it blandvertising. I’m sure you’ve read it and heard it before.

There are words. Lots of them. They fill a space – in an ad, on a landing page, in a press release, maybe even in a keynote presentation.

You’ve seen these words before if you’re in the target audience. Scalable. Leading. Agile. Enterprise-grade. Full-service. Data-driven. Cross-platform. Seamless.

They seem to say something, but you’re left walking away…not really understanding and certainly not believing anything at all.

I feel like my career is a battle against blandvertising. Which is why I loved this lesson in a recent podcast guest application – ‘marketing goes beyond buzzwords.’ Perhaps I found a fellow traveler on the journey.

So I sat down for an in-depth discussion with Marco Mueller, CMO, AVEVA (https://www.aveva.com/).

AVEVA was a public company until it was acquired by Schneider Electric last year. Schneider Electric is a public company and reported 36 billion euros in revenue in 2023.

Mueller has had up to 800 people reporting to him in his career. Right now, his team is 250, but he says this is the most exciting job he’s ever had.

Stories (with lessons) about what he made in marketing

Here are some lessons from Mueller that emerged in our discussion.

• Leadership Is everywhere
• Marketing goes beyond buzzwords
• Trust is earned, not given
• Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets
• You can make a big career, and still stay human
• Confidence is everything

Discussed in this episode

Innovation Leadership and Coaching: You should almost always do less than you think (podcast episode #46) (https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/innovation)

Customer-First Marketing Strategy: The highest of the five levels of marketing maturity (https://sherpablog.marketingsherpa.com/b2c-marketing-2/5-levels-marketing-maturity/)

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This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages (https://meclabs.com/course/) free digital marketing course.

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