Why is this topic even coming up? Women marketers? Men marketers? It’s not about gender! It’s about people! Those who have legal marketing skills and (importantly) motivation, and those who don’t!
And I can assure you, in my experience as a marketer in BigLaw for nearly two decades, I had the pleasure of working with very successful rainmakers of both sexes. Unfortunately, I also knew plenty of partners and associates of both genders who just assumed the work would always be there. Thus, marketing was very low on their “To Do” lists.
The “why are we talking about this?” question hit me when I ran across a transcript of an interview conducted by William Arruda at MarketingProfs.com with Patricia Hume, a global VP with Avaya, a business software company. The title “A View From the Top: Why Some of the Best Marketers Are Women” is a little misleading since only two of eleven questions dealt with the issue of women as marketers. Nonetheless, Pat has some very good pointers for marketers in general. She also shares her reasons as to why women are successful at marketing, and they are: women are more emotional (an important side to marketing) and better multi-taskers (also important in marketing) than men, according to Pat.
Whether she is right or not isn’t my point. I have had the fantastic experience of dealing with male and female lawyers who get it, and gender has nothing to do with it in my opinion.