Last night The Marketing Society, the UK’s most influential network of marketers, awarded Fellowships to 12 members who have demonstrated outstanding marketing leadership. The great and the good of the marketing industry gathered to celebrate at a glittering champagne reception at the very top of The Gherkin. Joining an esteemed list of existing Fellows, including Sir Terry Leahy and Sir Martin Sorrell (accounting for less than 5 per cent of our membership) and with a stunning sunset over the city of London as the backdrop, it was the perfect setting to recognise an impressive group.
New Fellows of 2010
Nick Allen, Shell
Andy Beattie, Castrol UK
Mark Critchley, SSL International
John Goldstone, Premier Foods
The Right Honourable The Lord Heseltine
Rupert Howell
Jo Kenrick, Start
Peter Kirkby, GlaxoSmithKline
Peter Markey, More Th>n
Troy Warfield, Kimberly Clark
Claire Whitaker, Serious
And here’s what our new Fellows had to say on the evening about what it means to them to be recognised by The Marketing Society.
This is what Mother New York did for Target’s latest collection. It involved 155 rooms from the New York Standard Hotel, 60 dancers, a new pop symphony from one half of N.A.S.A and original visual programme from Daft Punk’s light designers. Lovely.
Customers don’t have all the answers, especially where technology is developing so fast that no-one knows what will come next, or how we will respond. So marketers need to be brave – they need to have great judgement and they need to use it imaginatively to influence their business’s decisions. They need to be commercial – to understand which thing customers want can be delivered profitably. And finally, they need to be able to turn great ideas into great execution.
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Every year, The Marketing Society awards Fellowships to a small number of marketers who have demonstrated outstanding marketing leadership, chosen by a panel chaired by the President of the Society, Roisin Donnelly, corporate marketing director, P&G. In the second in our series of interviews with this year’s new Fellows, hear from Mark Critchley, marketing director, SSL International.
Congratulations on becoming a Marketing Society Fellow. What’s the secret to your success?
I don’t think there is a magic formula. For me it’s always about trying to create value, how we can grow, do things different and deliver.
Did you think you would end up where you are?
I’ve always written myself five-year personal targets, which include career ambitions so ultimately I always aimed to become a marketing director. I’m very fortunate to have achieved it and lucky that SSL International gave me the opportunity to work on such great brands with brilliant and passionate people.
What do you wish you’d known at the beginning of your career?
The cream rises to the top. Therefore it’s a matter of staying 100% focused, keeping up the hard work, being creative and delivering on what you said you will do. With a bit of luck (some of which you make yourself) you have a good chance to achieve what you want.
What’s the worst job you’ve ever done?
Picking lettuce during my university summer holidays. I actually did it for two summers. Remarkable, as it was back-breaking work. However it did pay for my holiday in Greece in year one, which led directly to me getting my first job after university with Prince Foods and the second year paid for a Peugeot 205, which I bought at auction and then sold two years later for the same price I bought it for!
What do you like most about your job?
Durex is part of our portfolio of brands at SSL, so talking about sex is not a bad way to spend your day. That said we also have Scholl, so I do get into some passionate discussion about shoes and feet. The trick is try and avoid not combining the two!
And least?
Emails.
What advice would you offer to marketing directors looking to become better leaders?
For me it’s about trying to be as clear as possible in terms of what you are trying to achieve, tell the story with good justification why. Then it’s about creating new market space, bringing it to life and engaging with the consumer in the most compelling, creative and relevant way.
What is your guilty pleasure?
Apple pie and ice cream, goes down a treat every time especially when the pie is warm… delicious!
Abi Moore, co- founder of the Pink Stinks campaign, gives her three bits of advice on how to get a campaign started and keep it going.
A short but sweet three bits from Jim Hytner, ex Global Marketing Director of Barclays Bank.
Jaimie Fuller, CEO of Skins, gives us his 3 bits of advice for new Challengers.
3 bits of advice from Kerri Martin (former ‘Guardian of Brand Soul’ at Mini US, now VP of Business at BBDO West) on managing a Challenger brand within a large organisation.
Akala Daley, founder of The Hip Hop Shakespeare Company, gives us his three bits of advice on how to make the boring interesting.
“Anything which relates to the concept of ‘Big Data’ and the expansiveness of the understanding we can get from consumers’ digital and non-digital footprints is fascinating. The Economist is doing some good thinking on the topic in this article, but there’s a lot of good stuff out there to read and think about. Articles like these are reinforcing the messages that we are giving to explode the myths in marketing that it’s difficult to collect behavioural data, difficult to process and interpret what it means for the business, and then difficult to do something about what it is saying.
Customer Engagement, wherever, whenever and however consumers interact with a brand is the new CRM. How to ‘engage’ with customers most effectively is a far better approach than trying to manage a relationship. To that end, the old adage of ‘the customer is king’ is coming back into play. I love this from Amazon’s corporate governance page. Something which has been there from day one is ‘Focus relentlessly on our customers’. I’m not saying this was all they did, but it strikes at the heart of the reason why little Amazon grew big enough from only 100 employees to kick the 30,000 employee Barnes & Noble business into touch.
Moving slightly away from fast cars to a more environmentally friendly fascination, I took up horse riding a couple of years ago and have turned from being scared of horses into a horse nut. My sister has just bought me a day’s Polo training at Ascot so this may be my first and last Magpie missive. A friend from Australia (similarly as nutty about horses) who has been trying to persuade me to do dressage – not going to happen – keeps on sending me links to funny dressage-related stuff on the web. This one is brilliant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuDd4-QKecE
Calling all magpies in the Marketing Society membership to find and share their three favourite, shiny nuggets of wisdom and inspiration with the network for a new, regular feature on the blog – Magpie. From eccentric videos on YouTube to twitterfeeds that inspire you, new models/ways of thinking about marketing and creative ideas – send Amy.Fullalove@marketing-society.org.uk your three favourite things. The more eclectic the better.
In true collaborative fashion I asked my colleagues in the office to input in this latest feature and let me know their favourite sites. What has emerged has been rather eye-opening on my part, you think you know some people! The suggestions range from inspiring, work-related, fun and rather silly. There may be some mileage to feature more than just 3, but anyway I have chosen the following:
The inspiring
I had some great suggestions from the team for sites that inspire them – from thought leaders to sailing forecasting, my favourite was one from the newest member of the team who is a graphic design whizz. Naturally he put forward some design sites, and this one for product design took my breath away – http://www.notcot.org/.
The one for work
http://flowingdata.com/ – this is a cool blog about how people put data to use in creative ways, with a focus on interesting visualisation techniques
And the silly
http://sleeptalkinman.blogspot.com/ - This website is the record of one man’s random, amusing and sometimes outrageous ramblings in his sleep. His wife dutifully records them every night and updates her blog every day, meaning there’s always something amusing to read! Some of my favourites include:
“All I want out of life is ice cream and cuddles. Is it too much to ask? Is it?”
“Put it in an email. Then I can ignore it at my pleasure”
What’s the best tweet you have ever twittered?
Allgreatquotes on Twitter is run and managed by a guy called Tom who finds some brilliant stuff. Just looked on there and the first one is ‘Never write a letter while you are angry – Chinese proverb’. Note to self: need to stop writing letters and emails.
What is your favourite mobile app?
I have been a paper subscriber to the FT for years but been feeling guilty about feeding the Richmond & Twickenham paper recycling bin with read and unread sections of the newspaper for years too. The iPad edition is easy to read, easy to navigate, and it has quite simply changed my life. I can now talk eloquently at dinner parties on many topics, not just about horses.
What should all good marketers know about digital today?
Great digital marketers today are the ones who know that they can listen to their customers via the data they collect from interactions with them, and engage with them better as a result. My apologies if that sounds a little obscure, it’s not meant to be anything other than a statement of fact and a reason why so many businesses who don’t think and act digital – even if their presence is predominantly offline – are being left behind.”
Our challenger friends at The Challenger Project from eatbigfish share their own experience, expertise and advice.
Speaking after Eurostar’s move to St Pancras station Greg Nugent shares his 3 key learnings from the project.
As the co-founder of digital marketing company The Viral Factory Ed Robinson knows plenty about the internet, here’s his three bits of advice on engaging your audience online.
As epic social experiments go, TEDGlobal is science of the highest order. Gather together 750 high achievers from around the world, feed their minds with inspiring 18-minute talks and engagingly intense off-stage conversations, and then watch magical new personal and professional connections form in an atmosphere geared towards creativity, constructive thinking and open-minded investigation. The TED slogan may be “ideas worth spreading” — but the real gift of the four-day experience is the mindset it enables which promotes a sense of possibility and optimism.
For the second consecutive year, the TED conference — that’s Technology, Entertainment, Design — came to Oxford in July, its programme guided by the characteristically upbeat theme of “And now the good news”. That brought together speakers as diverse as the musician Annie Lennox and the comedian Maz Jobrani, the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak and “computational neuroscientist” Sebastian Seung. There were presentations from an astronomer and an ethnic-conflicts scholar, a microlender and the founder of Wikileaks.
Here are some of the random statistics I jotted in my Moleskine notebook:
The journalists and women’s-rights activist Sheryl WuDann explained that 80,000 slaves were traded a year at the peak of the slave trade, but today 800,000 women are trafficked across international borders. I learned from “market transformer” Jason Clay that the average American consumes 43 times as much as the average African; and from the social entrepreneur Zainab Salbi that one year of global military spending equals 2,900 years of the UN budget allocated for women. The blogger and activist Ethan Zuckerman pointed out that international news, as a percentage of US TV newscasts, has fallen from 35 per cent in the 1970s, to 12 percent today. And so on.
The Marketing Society is a brilliant network of senior marketers. Over the past 50 years we have emerged as one of the most influential drivers of marketing and are now a 2600 strong member network with a national programme of approximately 60 events per year.
We challenge our members to think differently and to be bolder marketing leaders by supporting the development of leading-edge thinking and promoting the evidence of effective marketing.
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