Anthea Christie, head of marketing, adviser and investments at Standard Life, goes into more detail about the case study she’ll be presenting at this year’s B2B Summit
“Everything is better in heels,” Anthea Christie, head of marketing, adviser and investment at Standard Life, tells me as she changes out of her flats after arriving in London from Edinburgh. I knew we’d be fine from then on; she is clearly a woman after my own heart.
Christie begins by explaining how she ended up in marketing with no qualifications and without spending years in a marketing role: “Marketing isn’t a dark art, at its heart it’s about knowing your customer and understanding your audience, and engaging with them.”
She elaborates: “I didn’t know it was marketing I wanted to do, I arrived in a marketing role because it’s a natural fit for what I’m interested in, what I’m good at, how I like to work and my experience.”
Standard Life, a job for life
She joined Standard Life an impressive 22 years ago on its graduate training scheme and has since worked across several areas of the business including, HR, internal comms, customer service and product development. This wealth of insight into how the business works and, more importantly, how its customers think is the key to her success.
“My grounding in customer service, being on the frontline, right through to product and proposition development to take to market activities means I feel very at home in marketing. So while I never studied it formally, it’s part of who I am, I did English so I’ve got an inherent interest and passion for language and how writing can engage people. I also studied psychology and that’s a big part of marketing.”
While she doesn’t feel the lack of qualifications hinders her, Christie did highlight it can shape how other people perceive her until they get to know her: “I don’t feel it hinders me because I’m head of marketing. Some colleagues who are pure marketers have been quite surprised at the role I do have knowing I haven’t come from an agency or pure marketing background.”
She’s also grown an unorthodox but effective team who, like her, don’t all come from a traditional marketing background. She explains: “This is part of why I love my team, I’ve built a team with such a cross-section of people. From product experts and really technical financial services people right through to ex agency who have never worked in the sector. They all bring completely different skill sets but that’s what we need.”
However, marketing also needs to be innovative and strong enough to push ahead with ideas when they are met with skepticism. Christie is presenting a case study session at our Summit event later this month about Standard Life’s re-engagement with an audience of SMEs and financial advisers and is an example of just that. She tells me using social as one of the many channels for this campaign was fairly new for the brand and this was met with some skepticism: “To begin with, some colleagues didn’t believe our market interacted on social because they are all very ‘respectable’ financial advisors.”
But they were soon proven wrong as Christie’s approach to social centered around a spokesperson instead of just the brand. She says: “We had a really strong spokesperson so got him to start blogging on a third party site that had a lot of credibility in the industry and that just snowballed.”
Social success
The social spokesperson was Jamie Jenkins, head of workplace strategy at Standard Life, and he managed to create a lot of online connections with advisers and industry influencers. He’s developed such a good profile in the market, he has in turn been asked to speak at various industry events. Christie says: “I think the key for us was having someone that was so engaging and able to communicate and there was no sales push there. It was genuine. He’s passionate about the market and about helping people save for the future.”
She puts the success down to: “the power of personality” and this is something she also wanted to channel in the brand’s presence on Twitter. “We made a conscious decision that we wouldn’t be a shiny corporate Twitter feed, its function was to engage and not to push out sales messages. To advisors who weren’t business clients, Standard Life was a bit of a faceless corporate so we wanted to break into the wider market and give it more of a human face.
While the Twitter handle is not a named person, it’s run by some very obvious personalities within the team, there’s a lot of business content but there’s banter on there as well.”
Success breeds enthusiasm. Christie is now fielding requests from people within the company who also want to have presence on social. Saying: “It’s a great problem to have,” Christie reveals her challenge now is to put more of a structure together in order for her to contain the momentum as it has to be the right people with the right content who have a social presence.
Bringing the best out of people is an enviable skill, and one I have no doubt Chrisitie posses. Her customer grounding and personable skills – she’s instantly likeable and the conversation between us flows easily – mean she’ll have no problem in nurturing the next social spokesperson for the brand.
