First Published: 11 September, 2026
Why Tall Poppy Syndrome is New Zealand marketing's biggest enemy.
In 2017 I took a job as lead strategist at a brand strategy consultancy in the US. I turned up with my full New Zealand toolkit packed and ready: self-deprecating humour, an instinct to downplay my own expertise, and a deep discomfort with taking up space in a room. I used all of it, walking into meetings with senior marketing and business leaders and cracking the classic Kiwi self-deprecating line before anyone else could get in first.
About six weeks in, the Director pulled me aside. He was kind about it, but he wasn't shy either. Clients paid us to be the experts in the room, he told me. The moment I undercut myself, I handed my expertise away and turned myself into the punchline instead. That's it. Game over.
That conversation changed a lot for me. It started a journey of understanding that if you don’t take yourself seriously, then no one else will.
When I returned home to New Zealand, I found myself embedded in this self-deprecating culture again. It got me reflecting on New Zealand culture.
The Great Averaging Machine
Tall Poppy Syndrome, our tendency to quietly cut down anyone who stands out, is a pervasive facet of New Zealand culture, and one of the most damaging. Researchers describe it as a cultural habit of levelling high achievers back to the group norm, with young Kiwis and their parents raised to see modesty and self-deprecation as core social values (Tapper, 2014).
The costs show up everywhere: paralysed decision-making while we wait for consensus, big ideas quietly shelved rather than bravely backed, or putting off decisions altogether (Kirkwood, 2007). A University of Auckland survey of New Zealand entrepreneurs found the toll goes further still, with respondents reporting self-doubt, anxiety, and in some cases suicidal thoughts, and describing how it pushed them to stay under the radar, or leave the country altogether (University of Auckland, 2022).
I can't fix New Zealand's culture, But I can try and influence my Marketing peers. I'd argue marketing is one of the professions that is hit hardest in corporate culture.
The Stress of Being a Marketer
Marketing is an essential business function and we bring expertise that is criminally undervalued. CEOs who put marketing at the centre of their growth strategy are twice as likely to post above 5 percent annual growth than their peers (McKinsey & Company, 2023).
New Zealand brands have never needed the voice of the customer more, either: Accenture Song found 72 percent of Kiwi consumers see a meaningful gap between what a brand promises and what they actually experience, and that gap is widening, not closing (Accenture Song, 2024).
New Zealand needs Marketing to be strong at the moment. I am not so sure we are right now
Studies show that this profession attracts a particular kind of person: expressive, visible, comfortable being watched. Extraversion is the single strongest predictor of choosing marketing as a specialisation over any other business discipline (Kothari & Pingle, 2015). That's the whole job, putting ideas, brands and yourself in front of a room full of peers and standing behind them.
Which is precisely the problem in New Zealand. Tall Poppy Syndrome is a visibility tax. It punishes standing out, self-promoting, being seen; something that marketing as a discipline requires.
That's before you even get to the boardroom maths. Only around 4 percent of Fortune 250 CEOs come from a marketing background (McKinsey, via Eton Bridge Partners, 2023), and average CMO tenure sits at just two to three years, often the shortest of any C-suite role and the first head to roll when growth targets are missed (The Marketing Society, n.d.). Getting from CMO to CEO usually means a "double transition": changing function and changing company at the same time, a harder jump than our operations or finance companions have to make. Marketing doesn't just struggle to be heard. Structurally, it's set up to struggle.
Marketing has a short-tenure, high-blame, self-promotion problem getting into the C-suite. Here, we add a culture that actively punishes the self-promotion part. Across the Tasman, the head of The Marketing Academy has called Australian marketing and media culture "horrific", actively suppressing brave, visible work before it ever reaches an audience (mi-3, 2019).
I don't think we're any kinder.
The Colouring-In Department
In the face of both these cultural and business contexts, it’s no wonder we start self-deprecating. We call ourselves "the colouring-in department." We lead with the caveat instead of the conviction.
WARC's 2026 "Twin Pace" study surveyed senior marketers and agency leaders across nine APAC markets, including New Zealand. The study found that the gap isn't in what we know, it's in what we're allowed to act on. Nearly nine in ten marketers agree that consistent brand platforms drive sustainable growth, yet only 47 percent of agency briefs actually align with one, and fewer than a quarter of campaigns are measured against both short- and long-term outcomes (WARC, 2026).
We are also seeing this in System 1 testing. The Global Benchmark is 3.4, while the New Zealand benchmark is a paltry 2.4.
We believe in the work. We just aren't backing ourselves to fight for it. Or we are settling for the average execution of the idea just to get it across the line.
We are underselling ourselves at the exact moment the business needs us to be loud. We aren’t positioning ourselves as the experts and influencing the business. How do we expect business leaders to listen to us as experts, if we don’t position ourselves as one?
What We Can Actually Do About It
We can't rewire New Zealand's culture in a single article. But we can rewire how marketers show up. Six starting points:
1. Shift your mentality. See an speak of yourself as the expert you are. Notice self-deprecation in yourself and your team, and cut it, on the spot.
2. Understand your audience. Get closer to your CEO. Understand what role they expect you to play and their biggest priorities. If you influence the CEO, They will help you a lot with the CFO.
3. Find your value zone. Once you understand what leadership genuinely wants from marketing, build your value proposition around it, and bring it to life relentlessly. Thomas Barta has some great tips on this in ‘The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader’
4. Train your team. Give your team a shared, expert language for talking about marketing. Only 31 percent of New Zealand marketers report being formally trained, some of the lowest in the world.
5. Celebrate results. Track them. Talk about them. Be your own biggest cheerleader, because nobody else is going to do it for you.
6. Accept failure, and rebound with evidence. Courage is a growth strategy, not a creative indulgence. Safe work rarely builds future demand. When brave work doesn't land, come back with the learnings and the next move, not an apology.
New Zealand built its reputation on being fearless: on rugby fields, on film sets, in boardrooms overseas. Somewhere along the way, marketing forgot it was allowed to be part of that story. It's time we remembered it.
Be the tallest poppy in the room. The business needs you to be.
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