When I moved from consumer marketing at a global beverage company to healthcare transformation, my colleagues assumed I was changing careers entirely. They were wrong.

I was applying the same skills to a different audience.

In marketing, I learned to understand what makes people choose. What shifts perception. What moves someone from awareness to consideration to action. What builds loyalty that persists even when competitors offer something shinier.

In change management, I discovered these same dynamics at work—just with employees instead of consumers, and systems instead of products.

The Parallels Are Striking

In marketing, we create customer personas to understand our audience. In change management, we create stakeholder profiles. The underlying question is identical: Who are these people, what do they care about, and what barriers stand between them and the behaviour we're seeking?

In marketing, we map customer journeys from awareness to purchase to advocacy. In change management, we map adoption journeys from awareness to knowledge to ability to reinforcement. The progression is the same—we're just calling it different names.

In marketing, we craft messages that resonate with specific segments. In change management, we design communications for different stakeholder groups. Same craft, different context.

What Marketing Does Better

Marketing has a few advantages that change management would do well to adopt.

First, marketing takes creativity seriously. The best marketing doesn't just inform—it moves people emotionally. Too much change management communication reads like a policy memo when it should read like a compelling story.

Second, marketing obsesses over the competition. What else is vying for your customer's attention and wallet? Change management often ignores this question, but employees absolutely have competing priorities. The old way of doing things is a competitor. Doing nothing is a competitor.

Third, marketing measures everything. Click rates, conversion rates, brand lift, purchase intent. Change management often settles for completion metrics—training attendance, communication sent—rather than actual behaviour change.

What Change Management Does Better

But change management has its own strengths that marketers would benefit from.

Change management takes resistance seriously as data, not just an obstacle. When employees resist, there's usually a reason worth understanding. Marketing can be too quick to dismiss objections rather than learn from them.

Change management thinks in systems. It considers sponsors, middle managers, front-line employees, and how they interact. Marketing can be overly focused on the end consumer without considering the broader ecosystem.

Change management focuses on sustainability. It asks not just "did they try it?" but "are they still doing it six months later?" Marketing can declare victory too early.

The Synthesis

The best transformation work combines both disciplines. It brings marketing's creativity and measurement rigour to internal audiences. It brings change management's systemic thinking and sustainability focus to external audiences.

At Syd Digi, this synthesis is our foundation. We don't choose between marketing and change management—we practice both, because human behaviour is human behaviour regardless of whether the person is a customer or an employee.