At one point in my career, between two corporate roles, I ran communications for a parliamentary re-election campaign. The candidate was a sitting member of the Indonesian House of Representatives. She had been first elected several years earlier. She was running for re-election. She had, in the language of the campaign brief, a “communication problem.”

The communication problem was not, in the precise language of the situation, that the candidate had nothing to say. The communication problem was that the things she had to say were not, in the language of the campaign strategy, “landing” with the voters. Her approval ratings were stable. Her name recognition was high. Her messaging was, in the language of the campaign consultants, “on point.” Her social media accounts were, by the metrics of the campaign dashboard, growing.

The communication problem was something else. The communication problem was, in the precise language of the conversation I had with the candidate in our first meeting, that the voters did not know who she was. They knew her name. They knew her party. They knew her talking points. They did not, in the precise language of the situation, know her.

The candidate won the re-election. She won by nearly doubling her vote count from her first election. She went on, in the next government, to hold a senior cabinet role — a position from which she now shapes national communications and digital policy for the country. She is, in the precise language of the situation, one of the most powerful communicators in the Indonesian government.

The campaign taught me things about marketing that twenty years of B2B work had not.

The B2B Habits I Had to Unlearn

I came into the campaign with twenty years of B2B marketing habits. I had built enterprise sales motions. I had run ABM programs. I had optimized funnels. I had reported on CAC, LTV, and pipeline velocity. I had, in the precise language of the B2B profession, every tool the toolkit had to offer.

The toolkit did not work.

The toolkit did not work because the campaign was not a B2B transaction. The campaign was, in the precise language of the situation, an attempt to produce a change in the beliefs of approximately 800,000 voters in a single electoral district over a period of approximately four months. The voters were not, in the language of the B2B funnel, “leads.” The voters were not, in the language of the B2B dashboard, “in the pipeline.” The voters were, in the precise language of the situation, people who had been forming their beliefs about the candidate for years, in the context of their families, their workplaces, their religious communities, their social media feeds, and their own quiet reflections on the kind of country they wanted to live in.

The B2B toolkit is built for transactions. The campaign was not a transaction. The campaign was, in the precise language of the situation, an intervention in a slow-moving belief formation process that had been running for years and would continue to run, in some form, for the rest of the candidate’s life.

The first thing I had to unlearn was the idea that the campaign was a funnel. It was not. The campaign was a series of conversations, in a language the voters already spoke, about things the voters already cared about, with a candidate the voters had not yet been given the opportunity to actually meet.

What the Candidate Was Actually Selling

I want to be careful with this word, “selling,” because I do not want to suggest that political campaigns are cynical transactions. They are not, in my experience. The candidate I worked with believed, with the full depth of her conviction, in the things she was campaigning on. The work was not, in the precise language of the situation, manipulation. The work was, in the precise language of the situation, translation.

The candidate had spent her career in public service. She had, in the language of her resume, “real accomplishments.” She had, in the language of the policy documents she had produced, “real positions.” She had, in the language of the parliamentary record, “real voting history.” The accomplishments, the positions, the voting history were all, by every objective measure, impressive.

The accomplishments, the positions, and the voting history were also, in the precise language of the voter, irrelevant. The voters did not vote for accomplishments. The voters voted, when they voted, for the version of the candidate they had been able to construct, in their own minds, from the fragments of the candidate they had been shown. The version the campaign had been showing them was, in the precise language of the situation, a version that was accurate and unrecognizable.

The campaign had been showing the voter the resume. The voter was looking for the person.

The first decision I made, in the first week of the engagement, was to stop showing the resume. We rebuilt the campaign’s content strategy around the candidate’s actual life — her daily routines, her conversations with constituents, her work on specific issues, her moments of doubt, her moments of conviction, her relationships with the people she served. The content was not, in the language of the campaign strategy, “on message.” The content was, in the precise language of the situation, on the person.

The content worked. The candidate’s social media engagement, in the language of the dashboard, tripled. The content also, in the language of the voter, did something the resume had not been able to do. It gave the voter a person to recognize.

What B2B Cannot Teach You About Belief

I want to make a careful claim here, because I do not want to suggest that B2B marketing is shallow or that political marketing is deep. Both are, in the precise language of the situation, complex work. Both involve the production of belief under conditions of uncertainty. Both require the marketing leader to defend, in language the leadership can hear, a model of value the dashboard is not equipped to capture.

The difference is the time horizon.

B2B marketing operates, in most cases, on a sales cycle measured in weeks or months. The enterprise buyer is making a decision under conditions of uncertainty, but the decision is bounded. The contract has a start date and an end date. The result, whatever it is, will be visible in the next quarterly review. The B2B marketing leader has the luxury, relative to the political marketing leader, of a feedback loop that closes in a defined period.

Political marketing operates on a time horizon that is, in the precise language of the situation, generational. The voter is not making a decision. The voter is, in the precise language of belief formation, slowly updating a model of the candidate, the party, the country, and the future, in a process that has been running for years and will continue to run for decades. The political marketing leader does not have a feedback loop that closes in a defined period. The political marketing leader has, in the precise language of the situation, fragments of evidence, distributed across a population of millions, that can only be read, with confidence, in retrospect.

The B2B leader who tries to apply B2B frameworks to political marketing will produce, in the precise language of the situation, a campaign that is internally coherent and externally irrelevant. The political leader who tries to apply political frameworks to B2B marketing will produce, in the precise language of the situation, a sales motion that is moving at the wrong speed.

The work of a senior marketing leader, in the second decade of the career, is to learn the difference between the two.

What the Work Taught Me

I came out of the campaign with three lessons that I have been trying to apply, in some form, to every marketing function I have led since.

The first lesson is that the artifact is never the product. The resume is not the product. The deck is not the product. The brochure is not the product. The product is the person the customer is able to construct, in their own mind, from the fragments the marketing function has given them. The fragments matter. The fragments are not the product. The product is the construction. The marketing function’s job is to give the customer the fragments that will allow them to construct the version of the institution, the candidate, the product that the marketing function wants them to construct. The construction happens in the customer’s mind, not in the marketing function’s deck.

The second lesson is that the long arc is the asset. The campaign did not begin four months before the election. The campaign began, in the precise language of the situation, the day the candidate first decided to run for office, years before the election. The fragments the voters were using to construct their version of the candidate had been accumulating for years, in the language of the candidate’s public statements, her parliamentary work, her relationships, her quiet presence in the community. The campaign’s job was not to produce the fragments. The campaign’s job was to surface the fragments, in a language the voters could hear, in a context the voters could recognize. The fragments were the asset. The campaign was the operation.

The third lesson is that the most senior marketing work is the work no one has asked you to do. The campaign brief had asked me to manage the communication workforce and the workflow. The campaign brief had not asked me to rebuild the content strategy from scratch. The campaign brief had not asked me to convince the candidate to stop showing her resume. The campaign brief had not asked me to defend, in language the campaign leadership could hear, a model of belief formation that the campaign dashboard was not equipped to capture. The most senior marketing work is, in the precise language of the situation, the work the brief did not ask for. The most senior marketing work is the work the marketing leader has to defend, in the language the leadership can hear, with the data the organization can verify.

What This Means for the Marketing Director

The work of a marketing director, in the second decade of the career, is to learn to operate across the time horizons. The B2B toolkit is a toolkit for transactions. The political toolkit is a toolkit for belief. The marketing director who can operate across both is the marketing director who can lead, in the language of the actual situation, the work the organization needs done.

The marketing director who has only the B2B toolkit will produce, in the long-arc situations, work that is internally coherent and externally irrelevant. The marketing director who has only the political toolkit will produce, in the transactional situations, work that is moving at the wrong speed.

The marketing director who can hold both — who can build the funnel and defend the long arc, who can optimize the CAC and produce the belief, who can run the campaign and rebuild the content strategy when the campaign brief was wrong — is the marketing director who is doing the work.

The candidate won. She doubled her vote count. She is now, in the language of the actual outcome, a cabinet minister. The campaign taught me things that twenty years of B2B work had not.

The most important thing it taught me is that the toolkit is not the work. The work is the belief. The toolkit is just the operations.

I have been trying, in every role since, to remember the difference.