The Marketing Playbook We Needed at Business School

Our marketing professor at ESMT Berlin shared a fascinating observation about symbiotic branding: our personal brands were now permanently tagged to the B-school's institutional brand. We had, in essence, paid a significant sum to affiliate ourselves with ESMT's reputation. This created a flywheel effect: positive stories about the school enhances our credentials, while our professional success as alumni strengthens the school's brand equity. The implicit message was clear: it was in our collective interest to publicly celebrate only the positives of the ESMT experience, to protect and amplify our shared brand value. Any bad press for the school was bad for us.

Marketing was, without question, the most disappointing course in ESMT Berlin's entire MBA curriculum. It wasn't just weak, it was fundamentally broken. We had no dedicated marketing faculty, no coherent syllabus, and no clear learning objectives beyond vague notions of "understanding marketing principles."

Instead, we got the fluffiest course any of us took during our MBA. We touched superficially on competitive advantage frameworks that belonged in a strategy course. We learned about types of market research without ever conducting any ourselves or understanding how to design meaningful studies. We spent sessions on tangential topics like product management and CRM systems that had no clear connection to a cohesive marketing narrative. And we endured far too many irrelevant anecdotes that substituted personal stories for substance.

My classmates and I would leave class genuinely confused about what we were supposed to have learned. What does a CMO actually do all day? How do digital campaigns really work behind the scenes? Why do some brands dominate while others with objectively better products fade into obscurity? These questions, the ones that actually matter in practice, were never addressed with any depth or rigor.

What was most frustrating was the complete absence of technical depth. We graduated without understanding what a tracking pixel is, how SEO actually works, how to build a content strategy, how attribution algorithms determine marketing ROI, which advertising and analytics tools professionals actually use, how marketing teams manage data infrastructure, or how to navigate the inevitable conflicts between creative vision and data-driven decision-making. These aren't esoteric details. They're the fundamental mechanics of modern marketing. Our curriculum treated them as if they didn't exist.

So I decided to create the resource ESMT should have provided but didn't.

What I Built

Using Claude, I developed a comprehensive playbook written from the perspective of a Chief Marketing Officer with 20+ years of experience across B2B and B2C industries. This isn't a textbook. It's a field manual. Candid, insider, and deeply practical. It covers the entire marketing lifecycle from founding stage to enterprise scale, without the fluff or motivational clichés that plague most marketing content.

What You'll Get From Reading It

The document takes you on a journey through how marketing actually works:

• The Early Days: Understand how marketing begins when there's no brand, no budget, and no customers. How founders find their first audience through manual, unscalable work that most people want to skip but can't.

• The Technical Backbone: Learn how digital marketing infrastructure really operates - pixels, cookies, attribution models, CDPs, and the complex web of systems that connect advertising platforms to CRM systems. This is the stuff that makes campaigns work but rarely gets explained clearly.

• Channel Strategy: See how companies decide where to invest across paid ads, content, SEO, email, events, and community and why that mix evolves as companies mature.

• Brand Building: Discover what brand actually means beyond logos and color palettes, and why emotional resonance and narrative consistency matter more than most executives realize.

• The Organizational Reality: Get an honest look at how marketing teams actually function. The tensions between brand and performance, the politics of budget allocation, the complicated relationships with sales and product teams.

• Strategic Thinking: Understand the frameworks that separate good marketing from great marketing. Segmentation, ICP design, customer journey mapping, and how positioning becomes a competitive moat.

• The Numbers That Matter: Learn which metrics actually drive decisions. CAC, LTV, conversion funnels, attribution models and why most companies are drowning in data but starving for insight.

If you're a founder trying to figure out marketing, an early marketing hire building a function from scratch, or someone like I was, an MBA student frustrated by the gap between theory and practice, this document might give you the mental models and practical frameworks that textbooks don't.

I'm attaching the full document as a PDF below, along with the complete prompt I used to generate it. Feel free to use it, share it, or adapt it for your own learning.

Download:

Marketing Autobiography.pdf

Download PDF • 202KB

Full Generation Prompt:

"Act as a Chief Marketing Officer with over 20 years of experience leading marketing organizations across B2B and B2C industries. Write a comprehensive, long-form, narrative-style playbook on how marketing actually works in the real world—from the earliest startup stages to large-scale, mature enterprises. The tone should be candid, insider, and deeply informative—like someone who’s lived through hundreds of campaigns, brand launches, product pivots, and boardroom conversations. Avoid fluff, motivational clichés, or textbook theory; focus instead on the real mechanics, decision frameworks, and day-to-day realities that make marketing succeed or fail.

Start with the founding stage: how marketing begins when there’s no brand, no budget, and no customers—how to find the first audience, identify pain points, and craft a simple story that ties the product to real-world need. Then, progress through the growth stages—how companies move from founder-led marketing to building a structured marketing organization, setting measurable goals, and integrating data-driven decision-making. Cover how marketing evolves as a company scales—how roles fragment into Brand, Performance, Product Marketing, Communications, Growth, and Analytics—and how a CMO aligns them under one unified narrative.

Explain the technical backbone of modern marketing: how digital campaigns actually work behind the scenes, how pixels and cookies track conversions, how CRMs and CDPs (Customer Data Platforms) connect to advertising networks, and how attribution models determine what’s driving ROI. Walk through how teams plan, execute, and measure across channels—paid ads, search, email, PR, events, influencer partnerships, and organic content.

Dive deep into brand building—what a brand really means beyond visuals and taglines, how great CMOs shape emotional resonance and trust, and how narrative and positioning evolve with competition and culture. Then unpack the strategic layer: market segmentation, ICP (ideal customer profile) design, customer journey mapping, and how storytelling ties every touchpoint together.

Move into the performance side: explain the hard data of marketing—CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), LTV (Lifetime Value), conversion funnels, retention metrics, and campaign ROI. Discuss the realities of experimentation: A/B testing, attribution challenges, and how good marketers balance creative instinct with analytics discipline. Cover content marketing, community building, SEO, and the emerging intersections of AI, automation, and personalization.

Finally, close with a reflection on how the marketing function matures—how a CMO’s job shifts from campaign execution to shaping corporate strategy, influencing culture, and representing the voice of the customer at the executive table. Discuss leadership: how to structure marketing teams, manage agencies, work with product and sales, and ensure that brand, story, and business results stay tightly aligned. The final report should feel like a lived-in guide—a field manual for how marketing really works when the stakes are high and the markets are competitive.

Write the piece as an immersive narrative, in cohesive paragraphs (no bullet points or lists), weaving in real-world examples, failures, breakthroughs, and cultural insights from different industries."