Deane McIntyre, director of marketing and product innovation at Thus, is a crowdsourcing advocate who’s unafraid of challenging industry convention. Victoria Paley reports
When Deane McIntyre, director of marketing and product innovation at B2B telecomms provider Thus, arrived on the scene in March 2011, its brand refresh plans had already been in discussion for five months. Two weeks later, McIntyre had closed the debate. After spending a relatively short period of time in McIntyre’s company, I’m not altogether surprised by this result. He’s a straight-talking, no-messing Kiwi who tells it like it is and gets the job done. No messing; no excuses. I’m sure it’s the same attitude that saw him to sporting success as part of the New Zealand kayaking team. While marketing’s a different kettle of fish to kayaking, it can still present an unpredictable torrent to master. And like any thrill seeker, I’ve no doubt McIntyre loves a challenge.
In the few months McIntyre has been in his current role, his strategic review of the Thus brand has been nothing short of remarkable. Not just because of the usual challenges of leading a rebrand project, but because of the unconventional route McIntyre decided to embark on. The project overhauled the old Thus brand, not only introducing a new colour palette and logo, but clarifying and cementing brand vision, USP and values. Nothing too out of the ordinary there. However, rather than enlist the help of a branding specialist, McIntyre embraced the power of crowdsourcing – no doubt to the raised eyebrows and disjointed noses of many an agency or creative purist.
So what does McIntyre have to say for himself?
“I’m a massive fan of ensuring you use all the emotional brand benefits that you have. That’s a criticism I have of B2B marketers. I’m a B2B marketer and I’m proud to be one, but I absolutely know I should keep as much creativity inhouse because it means competitive advantage. Unless an agency is so close to our customer base, they’ll come up with the wrong answer, it’ll cost us a fortune and we won’t get it right.”
Marketing takes guts
McIntyre might be a bit maverick, but he’s neither naïve nor petulant. He admits he’s no branding expert and that in fact he did use an agency to polish Thus’ final brand design after the crowdsourcing activity. “This is where an agency added the most value,” he says.
So would he recommend crowdsourcing to other B2B marketers? Without a doubt yes.
“Crowdsourcing was a great experience,” he reveals. “Three hundred pounds. What can go wrong with £300? It was hard. You have to keep a lot of stuff inhouse and spend a lot of time learning and talking about it. But there are so many great resources out there to guide you.
“I’m a massive advocate of ‘Guys, you’ve got to get out and learn by experience in life.’ You’ve got to know it to understand it, and you should be given permission to make mistakes. I’m sure we’ve made mistakes – I don’t know at this stage. We’ll have to wait and see. But I’d rather have my head above the parapet and give it a nudge.”
I ask McIntyre if he’s been involved in rebrand projects before. He reveals he’s “been on the edge of rebrand stuff” in the past but never had full flexibility to undertake this kind of activity because usually the brand is “owned by the corporate machine.”
Online thrill
A distinct market advantage, as well as flexibility, is helping McIntyre’s rebrand efforts take off. He explains, “We’ll never beat our competitors offline. They have large consumer market scale and deep pockets. But online it depends on how sophisticated you are and how much you know, so from this perspective, we believe we can outperform the best teams in the UK. But that’s because we have a really great inhouse team and carefully chosen partners in our ecosystem.”
Online is definitely the channel that McIntyre gets most fired up about. “Social media is about getting your customers to walk down your business’ corridors,” he says. “The UK invented industrialisation – with all the talent in this country, why can’t we bring talent into the market place and industrialise information?” But it’s not just about doing digital for the sake of it, he adds, marketers have got to have their customers’ front of mind, “Whatever channels you’re using, you’ve got to understand your customers’ preferences and digital maturity to engage with your brand and people. In the past, marketers forgot about customers. We had an economic downturn. And it was a shock. People found out their systems were poor, they didn’t understand customers, and they’ve now gone through a stage of naval gazing wondering why they missed their targets. But it’s become screamingly apparent in hindsight.”
So what does the future hold for Thus? McIntyre’s got a few tricks up his sleeve – namely a photo competition that ties in with Thus’ new smiley face logo design. The logo, and no doubt the competition, aims to cement Thus as a social, customer-focused brand. McIntyre comments, “I think the ‘smiles @ Thus’ competition could go viral, personally I’d love to win the top prize and spend a weekend in a tree hotel.”
McIntyre’s recognition of the weaknesses of the B2B sector combined with his unyielding advocacy of innovation and ‘give-it-a-go’ attitude will help drive Thus to take more market share – certainly in the online space. It’ll be an ongoing challenge of course – but one McIntyre will no doubt nail.
