Credit: United States Coast Guard.

The motto for the United States Coast Guard is Always Ready (Semper Paratus).

It’s a good mindset for marketers, too.

The best are ready to adapt, change and adjust as needed, guided by a solid business strategy.  Of course, sometimes you also have to be ready to change the strategy.

Top performers are ready and able to:

• Experiment
• View and process things from a different lens (e.g., competitors, markets, colleagues)
• Explore new ways to work better with their team
• Understand that maybe the other guy is right (at least sometimes)
• Embrace a new challenge or initiative

A now famous example of being ready led to the Oreo team’s real-time marketing success in the 2013 Super Bowl

Being ready usually means you’re in a position to be successful.  Consider one of my favorite quotes:  Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.

So I posed the following question to members of MENG, the Marketing Executives Networking Group:

What would you say is the number one most important thing for marketers to be ready about/ready for in 2015?

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