Marketing leaders need colleagues, not playbooks | MarTech

For those of us who like to cocoon at home with our remote jobs, especially for marketers who have developed digital-first strategies in the wake of the pandemic, the return of in-person meetings and relationships that require social skills is as welcome as unsolicited pineapple to a pizza delivery person.

But whether you like it or not, personal relationships are becoming increasingly valuable, precisely because information is no longer a scarce resource. What is in short supply is trust.

As co-founder of the people-ops startup Gather, Alex Hilleary echoed the same thing to HR leaders: “You really need to talk to so-and-so.” Someone needed advice on remote work policies, so Alex put her in touch with someone who had just sorted it out. Another struggled with equity compensation; Alex knew someone three months before that exact problem.

Hilleary did this for months before realizing he had accidentally built a community. What he did was not something an algorithm could do. He used his judgment about who should meet based on issues that were not easy to categorize. That kind of control – knowing things that no coded program can reveal – is becoming increasingly valuable.

Judgment and strategy

Marketers see the same patterns playing out in their own communities. Practitioners need judgment about strategies, not just information about tactics. Now that AI content is plentiful and cheap, human judgment is a competitive advantage. Nothing can beat the hard-won wisdom of someone who has tried what you are considering and who can tell you about the consequences that no one mentions publicly.

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“The biggest value I get from Pavilion is judgment,” says Kathleen Booth, member and former SVP of marketing at Pavilion, a community for go-to-market professionals. “Not content in the abstract, and not tactics per se, but access to other senior GTM leaders who are struggling with the same messy, high-stakes decisions as I am and who are willing to talk honestly about what works, what doesn’t work and why.”

For marketing leaders who are constantly changing, this peer-to-peer assessment is becoming increasingly important.

The Death of the Generic ‘Middle Way’

Marsha Maxwell connects scientists with companies that want to recruit or sell them. The business development and collaboration leader at the American Physical Society knows that physicists with expertise in fluid dynamics are needed by chipmakers like NVIDIA for real-time CAD simulations, by Mercedes and BMW for braking systems, and by Boeing and Lockheed for aerospace engineering. Her knowledge comes from understanding both the scientific and business problems, and from the judgment developed through years of making connections.

Scientists need in-person conferences. There they build the relationships that lead to research partnerships, job opportunities and major equipment purchases. Browsing suppliers, asking questions and putting new tools into practice is an essential part of life for students and aspiring scientists, who “don’t really network online – they just don’t do that,” says Maxwell.

Marketing leaders face the same challenge: Generic advice floods their feeds, but they need specific guidance from colleagues who have made similar decisions.

Hilleary, now CEO of the online content marketing community Superpath, noted that “posts in public spaces (read: LinkedIn) have an agenda, are filled with AI slop, and are not optimized for the right, nuanced response.” AI can’t tell marketers whether a specific conference is worth attending, or how to handle a messy reorganization, or whether to change strategy mid-quarter.

Generic digital networks and public social media are becoming increasingly noisy. The only truly useful channels are hyper-curated digital communities where people filter every interaction, and in-person meetings where trust can actually increase.

Judgment in practice

Booth said Pavilion conversations “explore second-order effects, tradeoffs, and the human side of leadership. That peer calibration saved me from costly mistakes and gave me the confidence to make bolder decisions.”

Marketers dealing with first-party data strategies, AI integration, or changes in attribution models are most in need of that kind of structured peer support: judgment that requires experience, context, and honesty about what actually happened.

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Maxwell’s pitch to companies isn’t, “Here’s a list of scientists with relevant credentials.” They can get that from LinkedIn. She knows the talent pipeline they will need in two to three years and how to build relationships with those people now. This future-oriented, strategic matching requires an insight that takes years to develop.

“My job is to figure out what their goal is and get them in front of the right audience,” Maxwell said. It sounds simple. It also requires you to know things that you can’t find in any database.

The power of saying no

When Alex Hilleary took over Superpath, he inherited 300 paying members in a space that had once been a free community of 20,000. Most people would immediately try to scale back up. Not Alex.

“Communities are getting too big,” he said. “If you’re successful, they grow, and then it stops working,” like subreddits that decline as they gain more subscribers. The culture becomes diluted and ultimately no one trusts the space.

Maxwell follows the same discipline. The American Physical Society is a 125-year-old organization with 50,000 members, but it doesn’t try to get every company to sponsor every event. She focuses on strategic relationships.

“We have 800 organizations that have been with us for 30 years,” Maxwell said. Some meetings have grown rapidly, such as plasma physics and optics, depending on government funding priorities and new technologies. But the core value proposition hasn’t changed: companies need access to scientists, and scientists need to see what’s available for their work. That requires physical presence.

In a world where AI can scale content infinitely, community builders are becoming more selective. Value comes from curation, not volume. For marketing leaders who choose communities to invest in, this stewardship signals quality.

Trust connections personally

“Personal is where trust is built,” Booth said. “Online spaces are great for information exchange. In person, nuance, empathy and authentic relationships are created.

“The side conversations, the unscripted moments, the ‘Can I take something off your hands?’ chats over coffee – they create a level of candor that is very difficult to replicate digitally,” she explained.

Alex is adding more in-person meetings to Superpath specifically because members told him they need it, starting with events in metropolitan areas with the largest concentrations of community members. Marsha evaluates which companies to pursue based on intuition about whose goals align with the available opportunities.

Booth put it plainly: “Human connection is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s a leadership asset.”

The leadership benefit of intentional communities

Booth described what she’d like to see more from Pavilion: “Structured support for leaders navigating inflection points, not just roles. Things like stepping into a first CMO seat, leading an AI-driven organizational redesign, or managing a team through rapid change. Those are the moments when judgment matters most and shared experience is invaluable.”

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Alex talks about helping Superpath members “understand and stay ahead of the changing content marketing landscape.” The value is not in the information, as everyone has access to the same articles and tools, but in the fact that people who have already tested these tools can tell you which ones are worth it and which problems they actually solve.

The job to be done is no longer spreading information. It’s judgment calibration.

This shift matters, especially for marketing leaders. As AI tools proliferate and digital channels fragment, the marketers who will thrive are those who build strategic judgment through curated communities – both online and in-person.