UNTANGLING MARKETING

I have spent my career in advertising agencies, working my way up from graduate trainee at Grey to Chief Client Officer at M&C Saatchi. My experience is broad-based across multiple sectors and categories, ranging from blue chip brands such as BMW and British Airways, to retail businesses Currys PC World, Halfords and Debenhams to international alcoholic drinks group Pernod Ricard to government business through the Department of International Trade.

My breadth and depth of experience is extensive and I apply the skills I have developed over the years with energy and enthusiasm to a diverse range of communications challenges.

Recently this has led to a number of projects with leading academic publisher Springer Nature, encompassing strategic positioning, product launch and brand creation.

For me, this is less about when, how and where I work and more about challenging the marcomms conventions around role demarcation.

Convention says you need a planner to write strategy, an account handler to manage the client, a creative team to generate ideas, a project director to manage process and a finance bod to manage the money.  But this round-the-houses way of working, with strict baton-passing between roles, slows down project momentum and adds considerable time and money because of the multiplication of conversations and increasing number of mouths to feed.

So we don’t do this.

Just as there has been considerable convergence across marketing disciplines over time, so there has been a growing need for multi-skilled working methodologies to keep pace.

Our mantra is to involve as few people as is necessary rather than employ as many as possible, to achieve a concentration of effort, speed of analysis and response and quality of result.  For our most successful projects, I have managed strategy, client handling, project management and financial control personally, only involving senior partners where their skillsets are needed for specialist contribution, such as research, creative generation and production.

There is no room for any passengers on our projects, and everyone is compelled to make a contribution of real value – valuable in our clients’ eyes.  There are no legacy models and bloated overhead infrastructure to feed with the way we work.

As we move into a new era of brand marketing forced upon us by the global pandemic, ‘less is more’ rings truer than ever.

An increasing number of small to medium-sized businesses are finding themselves needing the input of an experienced CMO but not requiring the time or being able to justify the expense of a full time role.  This is where outsourcing CMO responsibilities becomes a very practical solution.

A ‘fractional CMO’ role requires typically 10-40 hours of commitment a month.  It provides top-level strategic input for everything from brand proposition and awareness building to customer acquisition and SEO optimisation.  The efficiency of this ‘plug & play’ model is that it leaves enough budget left to reinvest into the marketing talent necessary to implement marketing plans, building, deploying, testing and scaling them.

I am having an increasing number of conversations with clients about this practical and fluid way of working and I am able to offer this service if required.