As one of the founding fathers of B2B – and the first specifically-B2B marketer in the UK – Alan Brandwood has dedicated his 43-year career to raising the profile and improving the standard of B2B marketing
“I was both surprised and honoured to win this award. To be frank I never actually believed an accountant could win it. In the very early days of B2B marketing I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to build something different with IAS Dataserve, supported by a group of clients like ABB, SKF, TAC, Micromass, etc. I still regard this period as one where I achieved my greatest successes.”
Alan, speaking after his People Awards triumph at Ignite 2017
Summary
Alongside his business partner Tim Hazelhurst, Alan Brandwood is the UK’s first practitioner of B2B marketing (as distinct from marketing per se). If there’s a longer practising servant to the cause of B2B, then that’s remarkable. Forty-three years of service to one company is itself an honourable achievement but the innovation and benefit to the wider B2B community is the true hallmark of Alan’s career. He is the first person to develop the practice of B2B data capture and B2B database management and the first to share the idea among the B2B community. He is also the first to form an association of B2B agencies (ABBA) and first and longest to act as treasurer, as well as the first to form a global network of independent B2B agencies. This is the year of Alan’s retirement that caps a career that has seen his financial and management stewardship take Stein IAS from a two-person to a 120-person agency.
About the candidate
Alan Brandwood has been in the engine room of B2B for 43 years. He served Stein IAS as financial and general manager for the duration of that time. About to officially retire at 70 years old, Alan has given dedicated service to one industry and one company that is rare, exemplary and therefore worthy of recognition.
About the company
Stein IAS is an international B2B marketing agency that plans and implements end-to-end strategic, creative and digital marketing. By identifying and acting on what’s most important to B2B marketers’ success globally, Stein IAS will help make clients’ brands the most important in their markets.
Why Alan won this award
The term B2B was yet to be coined when Alan helped found Industrial Art Services (IAS) in 1973. He is one of the UK’s founding fathers of B2B.
For the wider industry, Alan was a founding director of ABBA (now the Business Marketing Club) and the association’s longest serving treasurer. He was a founding (1987) member and FD until 2012 of one of the world’s three international network of independent B2B agencies BBN.
As a practitioner, Alan’s influence is far reaching. The mastermind behind IAS DataServe, in 1989 Alan Brandwood pioneered the concept of segmented data capture and designed and built the UK’s first B2B segmented database.
Alan created the demand for segmented data (industry, job role, budget, turnover etc.) with his clients, created the science of segmented data-capture from DM and then built the database to record and store the data captured.
Big data then meant a big warehouse to store the paper-based DM going out and Business Reply Cards coming in. An investment which enabled Alan’s team of data managers, to dispatch DM, capture and process new data with the vision of ‘individual messaging’. Alan was possibly the first marketer to introduce tailored DM copy, a test for the pre-digital printers.
Always taking a generous ‘expand the category’ approach, through the 80s, 90s and noughties, Alan taught his whole approach to B2B data freely to many practitioners – both agency and client side. With Tim Hazelhurst, he co-created a B2B database marketing course and then lectured at the Management Centre Europe in Brussels, BBN’s multicultural workshop, universities and ABBA meetings.
So Alan’s data discipline is still applied today by many. Analogue data capture forces you to make smart choices.
Despite the limitless digital form, Stein IAS’s still teaches Alan’s Law: ‘Less is More Likely’.
Alan has also been the finance director, general manager and company secretary of Stein IAS in all its forms steering the company through three recessions and in 43 years has only had to post one year of negative growth; 42 years expanding the ranks of practitioners through solid financial, operational and people management.
Adding to that, Alan brokered the sale of IAS in 2004, handled the due diligence and negotiations in the acquisition of Muniere Paris, and the acquisition of Stein Rogan of New York, culminating in the success story of a two-man business in Bollington becoming a global business with a turnover of $26m.
