Experience

B2B, B2C, Professional Services & multiple industries

25 years living and breathing marketing

You would think that an entire career working in marketing might yield some interesting experience. It has.

I started my career with six years as brand guardian to the Sony & Trinitron brands across Europe. In that time, I produced marketing campaigns across 23 European countries and launched Widescreen TV with one of the biggest and most successful pan-euro marketing campaigns in history.

It was my next role at London Energy (now EDF) that changed me as a marketer forever. My five years in the energy industry for EDF & Virgin taught me that the most interesting marketing challenges are often found in the least interesting products and services.

Anybody can produce great marketing with a popular brand or big budgets. Try doing that with a product that people rarely think about.

Since then, propelled by my belief that marketing principles are the same whatever the industry or country, I have worked in many industries, including: Consumer Electronics, Energy, Legal, Retail, IT, SaaS & Talent Management.

I love that my recent experience has been in smaller businesses and startups, where good business strategy and judicious spend of tiny budgets will make or break a company.

I have consulted in between some of these client roles, working with both small businesses and famous brands like GAP, Microsoft and David Jones, always aiming to provide that all important helping hand to my very busy client.

I am driven by the maxim ‘how hard can it be?’

Because I don’t believe anything is that hard, it just needs discipline. It is frustrating to me when businesses and marketing professionals over-complicate marketing but under-develop business strategy. There is little point in developing a marketing strategy unless you are clear about where you want to take your business, who you want to sell to and how much? If you don’t know this, how can you plan a marketing strategy that will get you what you want?

Marketing isn’t rocket science. But to be effective, marketing strategies should address a business need. Even big brands and large corporations can let business planning take a back seat in favour of getting something new & shiny produced. I am all for being pragmatic and uncomplicated about marketing delivery, but passionate that we should all be a little more discerning about the business needs it should address.