How to Build a World Class Marketing Team | Mike Zeman

When your product is built to keep families connected and safe, marketing is so much more than selling a product. It’s about connecting with people on an emotional level and earning trust along the way.

Life360’s CMO, Mike Zeman, gets that. With more than 20 years of marketing leadership at powerhouses including Netflix, Google, and Square, Mike's mindset shapes everything from the people he’d hire first to how he structures his team.

It's also a philosophy any marketing leader can take with them, whether they’re selling a family safety app, banking software, or even something as mundane as a pair of running shoes: people don’t remember product details. They remember how a brand made them feel.

For this installment of our CMO Q&A series, we asked Mike the same three questions we ask every marketing leader about building a modern marketing team. His answers are short on buzzwords and big on fundamentals. He talks about what it takes to cut through a world of endless messages, why some of the best ideas come when the medium and the message are one, and a take on “performance marketing” that might change how you think about every role on your team.

Three Questions. No Script. Honest Opinions.

We always start with the same thought experiment: you’re building a marketing team from scratch. Who comes first? Mike’s answer starts with what he sees as the hardest job in marketing today.

If you were building your marketing team from scratch today, what roles would you hire first, and why?

"People are bombarded with thousands of messages a day, while at the same time, their attention spans are decreasing. This makes the most challenging job a marketing team faces to be “cutting through”. For that reason, I would start with storytellers. People who know how to build an exciting narrative and can really incite an emotional response. Despite all of the changes to the media formats we consume and the technology that delivers them, fundamentally this is what has always mattered most in marketing."

No tech stack, no “AI-native” anything. Mike’s point is that formats and platforms will keep changing, but the job of making someone feel something never does. Of course, hiring the right team is only half of it. How you set them up to work together matters just as much, which is where Mike sees teams go wrong.

What mistake do you see marketers make most often when structuring their marketing team? (brand vs performance, PR vs demand gen, not enough budget, systems & tools, etc?)

"I think a couple of things. Teams and operating models that are built for sequential workflows won’t produce the best output. For example, some organizations have creative teams that produce a “thing” (spot, image, etc.) and then ask the media team to deliver it. Or conversely, a media plan is built, and a creative team is charged with “filling the buckets” being bought. To me, those are far less optimal approaches than medium and message being concocted as one singular idea. One of my favorite examples of this was back in the day when Altoids mints painted “Curiously Strong” alongside their logo on smokestacks. What a way to make your product proposition tangible!"

A lot of teams will recognize the handoff problem. Creative finishes and tosses it over the wall, or media locks a plan and creative scrambles to fill it. Mike’s take is that the idea and the placement should be born together.

That brings us to the last question: what is all of this ultimately in service of? Mike warns us up front that his answer isn’t flashy.

What is the primary objective that shapes how you structure your marketing org?

"Perhaps this is not the most exciting answer but, simply put, it’s business growth. I like to say that every part of a marketing team is “performance marketing”. It is just what element of the performance they are contributing and over what time horizon. Structuring a team that allows for both strong specialization and strong orchestration (across the specialties) is critical. It’s the combination of those things that build your brand and your business."

This is the fourth installment in our ongoing series asking world-class CMOs the same three questions about building modern marketing organizations.