Follow the leaders

22 July 2010 | By Lucy Handley

Great marketing leaders can make consumers love and buy more of their brands, influence their chief executives and ensure businesses focus ruthlessly on the customer. But what qualities make a top marketer and how do they achieve these goals?

Leadership and training consultancy Brand Learning and AstraZeneca have gone in search of the magic formula for marketing leadership, asking a range of marketers at the top of their game what it means to be a chief marketer and how they make their roles central to their companies (see viewpoints, below).

Foremost, it is essential that people holding senior marketing roles are seen internally as strategic thinkers. Brand Learning founder and managing director Andy Bird says: “You can develop brilliant communication and generate demand in a one-dimensional way. But to lift it up so that you are helping to shape and drive what a company is doing, then you have to bring the entire organisation with you.”

For Bird, leadership is a combination of art and science. “It’s not just to do with vision and relationships. It’s also about a hard-nosed commitment to practical delivery, a focus on the commercial and being resilient under pressure,” he warns.

It is their focus on the consumer that enables marketers to set the agenda of the business and engage other teams, he argues. “On what basis does a marketing leader have the right to influence and drive the agenda of any business? Why would anyone in research and development or sales give the marketer the licence to do that?” By talking to other departments about the customer, rather than the marketing, answers Bird.

Tim Kaner, founder of Kancha Consulting and former director of marketing strategy office at Sony Europe, agrees, saying: “The really outstanding marketers are those who have an intuitive understanding of what customers want. They’re also able, through their influencing, leadership and coaching skills, to bring that vision to others.”

Insight into consumers is what gives marketers authority, adds Bird. “Marketers that can identify and bring to life what the business needs to do for its consumers will have greater authority and influence.”

And rather than thinking about “marketing leadership” as a concept, senior brand guardians must talk about the strategic agenda set by the consumer in order to be influential. Research that helps to build a more insightful understanding of a target market is what will help a marketer become a leader, not time spent in meetings or producing spreadsheets.

Getting the insight right is particularly important for the pharmaceuticals sector. It costs $800m to $1bn (£528m to £660m) to get a new product to market, but once the patent expires, sales can decline by 90% overnight, claims AstraZeneca director of marketing strategy, global marketing Tim Bailey. “To counteract this, you have to keep reinventing your portfolio every few years,” he says.

Bird agrees that it is marketers’ responsibility to work out what consumers want and then shape the company’s offering on that basis, rather than waste time in activities that aim to create demand for products and services that already exist.

What differentiates world-class companies is a genuine culture of insightfulness

Tim Bailey, AstraZeneca

In the case of AstraZeneca, Bailey says this is achieved by learning from marketing leaders outside the pharmaceuticals industry. Instead of thinking about what drugs could be developed next, it now looks at how it can best meet the needs of its customers, he says. “What differentiates world-class companies is a genuine culture of insightfulness. Our change of strategy is about bringing the customer into the organisation on a scale far beyond that which we’ve previously done and taking really powerful brand ideas from that,” he says.

Part of this is developing single-minded propositions for its medicines, which include oncology, neuroscience and cardiovascular drugs. “Unilever’s Helen Lewis told us that marketers want to work on a powerful brand idea and then they are much more likely to execute it in a way that is consistent. We hadn’t worked with that clarity of branding before. It was an entirely new concept that we took from the consumer goods world,” Bailey says.

While great marketers have to have technical skill, such as being able to find market opportunities, they also have a certain style in how they work. “It’s not just about what you are doing, it’s also about who you are being,” says Bird. “Leaders inspire with a vision of the future, they have courage, conviction and insight about what is possible,” he says.

Bird says that marketing leaders also need to ensure their own values and sense of purpose match the aims of the business.

“There has to be a link between what a marketing leader believes in and what the company is trying to achieve. That is when leaders are at their best, when they are trying to inspire and move the organisation to a place where it can do something they believe in,” he says.

Leaders draw their strength from a deep-seated will or purpose, says Bird. However, Nick Fell, group marketing director at alcohol company SAB Miller, warns that sometimes egos can get in the way of achieving the company’s goals. “Given a choice between a brand that is global but is executed in 15 different ways in 15 different markets and growing at 20% in all of them, and one that is executed the same way everywhere and is standing still, you’d have to be a dummy not to go for the first case,” he says.

“But it is the natural traction of global marketers to go for the commonality everywhere so they can say: ‘I did that’. There’s vanity in all managers – maybe in marketing people more than most – and that’s one of their downfalls.”

Marketers can develop brilliant communication and generate demand. But to lift it up so that you are helping to shape and drive what a company is doing, you have to bring the entire organisation with you

Andy Bird, Brand Learning

Great marketers need to be able to leave their egos behind and create genuine value for consumers as well as for the business, and to connect measurement of consumer attitudes and behaviour with measurement of business performance, says Bird.

“It’s quite easy to create value for consumers in the short term – you can just cut prices or improve product quality – but that might undermine the commercial viability of the business. Equally, you can do the opposite and create value for the business, but then you’ll lose customers as they will get a better deal elsewhere. So finding ways to create value for consumers in ways that will also generate commercial value for the company is what it’s all about,” he explains.

Having a firm grasp on the figures is another way to gain the attention of the chief executive. It is vital that marketers balance their intuitive side with a focus on the numbers, the margins, and the delivery of results.

Bird says: “If a marketer can excite a CEO with a vision of where growth will come from and the commercial opportunity associated with it, then he or she will build influence and connection with the senior members of the company.”

What marketing leaders say: Viewpoint

Clare Sheikh, group director of strategy, marketing & customer, RSA (formally Royal and Sun Alliance)

World-class marketing is about creating something that has a distinct personality replicated in a sensitive way across the world.

A real global brand is when you prompt people to say broadly the same thing, whether they live in Latin America or Latvia – and that is a big challenge in a service business.

When I first arrived at RSA in 2007, if you’d asked what marketing was about, people would have talked about advertising or logos – which is common in financial services businesses. Marketers can get very excited about their trade, rather than what the business actually wants and needs.

I did get spectacularly lucky with a great boss [group chief executive Andy Haste] and after two weeks in the business, I was offered the chance to present to 100 internal leaders.

I wanted to try to get across the idea that a brand is about what happens on the inside of the business rather than the outside. The most pressing thing was to figure out what it was that we wanted to be and what we stood for.

The other problem I’d been handed was that Royal and Sun Alliance was clearly a product of a merger and the existing name clearly wasn’t a very elegant solution.

We had been told that RSA was a name we couldn’t use [because of perceived copyright issues, as other organisations were already using the same acronym]. But by challenging some things that looked as though they were set in stone, we discovered that wasn’t the case at all. That is one thing that good marketers do: challenge things that might be the perceived wisdom within a company, but aren’t necessarily true.

Mark Gilmour, brand director, Virgin Management

The lifeblood of this company is growth, new ideas and new businesses, so my role is about helping to start those businesses, making sure we have the right propositions and that we execute them well.

As a top-level marketer, you’ve got to be intrigued; you’ve got to have a naturally inquiring mind. It involves talking to frontline people and to consumers in order to understand them.

It’s also about determination and focus. Through being in the business for 20 years, I’ve come to realise that the greatest marketing is when you have a compelling, single-minded vision, and you drive it through an organisation. Sometimes you have to put your head above the parapet to keep it going. It’s all too easy to give up and try something else because people are being a bit wobbly about it. 

I think it’s also important to stop the “colouring-in” agenda: a lot of chief marketers go back to talking about tone of voice, colours and images. These are important for the brand, but we should be talking the language of the people we’re dealing with, understanding the commercial side of the organisation, what makes it tick and how we can add value.

It’s human nature to want to stick to routine and your comfort zones. But if you stay there, guess who’s going to be moving beyond you? Your customer. Unless we constantly re-evaluate and think ahead, we will get stuck.

Great marketing leaders must be the total embodiment of their brand. They must provide an utter clarity, focus and determination in the way they deliver their messages. And finally, if they promise something, they need to deliver it. There’s nothing more frustrating than non-delivery.

Helen Lewis, consumer insight and marketing strategy director, Unilever

We don’t call ourselves marketers; we’re brand developers or brand builders. The whole business is dependent on us establishing consumer preference for our brands.

It’s very easy in a big organisation to become so internally focused, managing complexity or managing each other, that you have to make an effort to break out of the office. You have to remind people and institutionalise the fact that they must connect directly and regularly with consumers. 

Every few years we have a big drive to reconnect with consumers. And I observe that the best leaders in our business play a central role in leading and inspiring that. You have to make an effort to make sure that everybody is thinking about the consumer all the time. The best way to do this is to go to people’s homes. We have something called a “consumer passport”, where staff have to do a certain number of hours in any given month visiting homes and taking in consumer experiences. If they don’t do those hours, they’re not allowed to attend key meetings.

If any brand is to have a very sharp point of view on the world, there has to be clarity over its consumer target. And the whole team involved in the brand must have empathy for that consumer. Just because you might be fantastic at marketing food, you may be lousy at beauty. And what you don’t want is a sort of technocratic situation where people hop from brand to brand without having a real passion for what they do. 

Great marketing leaders must have fantastic vision and a passion for what they’re doing. The people I admire most are those who engage at the big picture level without forgetting the day-to-day. 

Phil Chapman, group marketing director, Kerry Foods

World-class marketing is nearly always based on insight, whether it be from structured research, knowledge within the department or visits to the field.

It nearly always starts with an idea that comes from your customers and that you can link to your brand. And that insight is often very hard to capture in quantified research. Often it’s something intuitive – you listen in on a focus group and you suddenly pick up on something that’s special.

Then it’s the job of the marketer to convince everyone that it’s as exciting as you think it is, and drive it to delivery through all the obstacles that come up. If you want to make organisational change, you really must get the chief executive behind you, and they must let people know that they’re behind you.

One of the big challenges is the balance between international and local. When you get the phone call from Austria, saying, “my market’s different, it just won’t work here”, you have to decide quickly whether it’s important enough to get on a plane and persuade them.

To be a great marketer, you have to be comfortable with both the art and the science of your job. Marketing is about being logical and structured, but also about allowing yourself to be completely creative.

People have to trust you. You’ve got to like meeting people and listening to their points of view. It doesn’t mean being weak – when they’re wrong, tell them, making it clear you’re doing it genuinely for the best of the business.

And when they’ve had ideas, make it clear where they came from when you’re taking those around the world. Don’t pretend they’re your ideas – you might get five minutes of glory but you’ll have lost the team.

Tim Hawley, global marketing director, Bacardi

Great marketing is about getting the overall strategy right, being ruthlessly focused on the consumer and making money at the end of it.

There are two key leadership requirements. The first is strategic ability. Being able to plot the journey to the future. Setting a course. Making informed choices. To do this, you need to look outside and far ahead into the coming years to be able to identify the key drivers that will shape the future.

The second is about salesmanship. Leadership is about achieving goals through others. Any great marketing leader must be able to sell the plan, mission and future vision. Not just to the board, but throughout the organisation.

The ability to simplify messages to provide clear, straightforward direction, is key. A brilliant plan that no one understands or believes in will simply become a failed strategy.

The end-game is to win hearts and minds: one-on-one with senior managers and key decision makers is important. It humanises the plan and it gives staff members the opportunity to ask questions.

When employees understand where their work fits in, they are more likely to feel valued and motivated, to actively contribute, and the organisation starts to unite as a single unit. This means implementation of a strategy is more likely to be successful.

Implementation is the graveyard of

many strategies. You have to have the helicopter vision and you have to be obsessed by the implementation. If that doesn’t happen, then the strategy is doomed. Most marketers in senior roles probably don’t think about this side of things, and that is where they fail.

Ian Armstrong, marketing communications director, Honda

Great marketing leaders understand the commercial realities of the business and it’s not just about holding out for the brand. There’s a sense that we’re here to make money, we’re here to make profit. Marketing leaders must also have a good sense of what direction the company is best taking forward for the future.

They then need to be able to create compelling arguments to engage the organisation and bring its people behind their vision. And then they must have the ability to deliver their vision through the teams that are around them.

World-class marketing is something that touches you emotionally much more than rationally. Your brain makes an emotional decision long before it makes a rational one. And, therefore, world-class marketing is something that allows you to do that a lot more effectively than just giving people ten reasons why they should buy your product. 

At Honda, we do that by trying to extract stories. So, we tell people about our philosophy and we tell them about what we’ve been doing in various walks of life, for many years. Hopefully, they’ll respond to that thinking.

Insight comes from all sorts of places. It fuel an awful lot of what we do, but there is also a point at which we have to start shaping the future for people, to improve their lives.

So, you could ask someone: “Would you like a robot that helps you around the house? Or radar technology that allows you to stop cars crashing into each other on the motorway?” But without our prompting, people are probably not going to come up with these ideas themselves.