Headhunted and challenged with growing an unknown brand locally and internationally, Kelly Herrick, head of marketing at Lietcorp, reveals how she’s doing to Maxine-Laurie Marshall
Genuine passion, and simply repeating lines from your press training course are very easy to distinguish between. And it’s infinitely more interesting speaking to someone of the first disposition. At points during the interview Kelly Herrick, head of marketing at LED technology business Lietcorp, gets visibly excited about her work. She doesn’t bounce around like a small child who has been promised an extra slice of cake, but does beam and smile when talking about an average day that would make most marketers cry.
She was headhunted by Lietcorp and in saying ‘yes’ to her current position, her marketing team went from a team of 12 at Thorn, where she was director of marketing, to a team of two, including her, at Lietcorp. This revelation is accompanied by genuine laughter, not a fearful titter, from Herrick. She explains: “It’s almost better than having a big team because it feels as though marketing is part of everyone’s day-to-day activity, everyone knows what marketing is about in the business, everyone understands how they have to feed in to my activity or how their customer engagement/contact affects the brand. If you have a big team, like at Thorn, some people might say, ‘oh that’s marketing’s problem’, and you can build yourself quite an isolated ivory tower.”
Again proving that a small marketing team isn’t a problem, Herrick’s allies in the business include people who are notoriously difficult to engage with.
“Because we’re small we tend to work across teams. I work really closely with the technical director and with the production and purchasing director, the CEO, MD and board and the sales director of course. So they are my key partners in crime.”
Herrick’s top tips
Ensure you have a cross-functional team that works along with everyone else, you tend to find that everybody gets engaged and gets on. I think integration is the way to go rather than building a massive team.
Your sales team should be one of your strongest marketing tools, it’s about trying to make those guys understand they are the biggest shop window you’re ever going to have. If they don’t know what they’re selling, what the products are, the benefits/features then it’s going to fall flat on its face.
It’s vital to have a good, solid brand if you are going to succeed in your industry. It needs to be understood and valued internally as well as externally.
Entrepreneurial spirit
Calling her old working environment stifling, the reasons behind Herrick’s decision to cross over to a small, fast-moving company are made clear when she explains her professional background. She originally had her heart set on performing arts: “I wanted to end up at the Royal Shakespeare Company.” But she found her way into visual arts and studied marketing with a view of getting into advertising. After spending 10 years agency side she had to move: “I had my first little boy and realised I couldn’t stay with agency life. I couldn’t be there every night ordering pizza the night before a pitch, so I looked to go client-side.”
Her background in fast-moving and creative industries suites her entrepreneurial personality, this is partly why she decided to join a company she hadn’t heard of.
“I could be at Thorn and say right we’ve just earned £90 million this year, let’s really go for it next year and go to £92 [million]. Or I could join a business that was around the six or seven mark and was wanting to grow to £100 million in the next three years.
“I’d never heard of them but then started to look into the business plan and thought that’s a much more exciting and dynamic opportunity than trying to take a big dinosaur forward.”

Brand power
The first place Herrick began in Lietcorp’s growth strategy was with the brand. She felt most people within the business didn’t understand what the company was trying to do commercially. It had a weak brand identity and all the things that go along with that; sales collateral, website and outward-facing communications.
“I realised very quickly if we wanted to push these growth plans we needed a really good solid brand to hang our hat off, something that would achieve stand-out, that would communicate technical excellence and innovation.”
Not one to hang around, Herrick identified the need for a rebrand in November last year and launched the new brand and website in January this year. As well as seeing just over a 100 per cent increase in web traffic and an increase in conversion rates, she says: “We’ve had some really great names join us from big companies. Our new sales director is also from Thorn, so it’s really helping with recruitment, which is fantastic.”
Despite being excited and passionate about making an impact, Herrick doesn’t rush into anything and has a logical reason for acting, and on occasions not acting. She’s made a conscious decision to target her existing customers and focus on lead nurturing rather than lead generation. She explains: “We’ve only got a small sales team, of seven or eight, so for me to go out and spend all of our marketing budget and all my time and effort generating a huge amount of enquires is pointless.
“What we have done is tried to engage with the customer pool we have, really get them to understand where we’re coming from, why we’re different and try to increase the conversion of leads to quotation.”
While she isn’t targeting new prospects in the UK, Herrick has been working on Lietcorp’s international presence. The business started to move into Dubai in early 2012 and in February it lit the Dubai Festival Mall, the second or third largest mall in the state. Lietcorp currently has a team of four people in Dubai, five in Germany and two in Spain. There’s no marketing function within those teams yet, although the newly appointed MD in Dubai is very marketing aware.
Going against what a lot of best practice says, Herrick doesn’t use agencies on the ground in any of those international territories. “We give the country agent a collateral pack, we work through the branding and everything we need for the sales and marketing collateral. They get all of that centrally from me, here in the UK. If they want to localise it I’ll support them.”
Herrick’s theory is based around first impressions being just that, first. “You won’t get a second chance. When you’re starting up you might have more sales-orientated people out on the ground who just want to ‘quickly do a flyer’ and put the logo in pink and this and that. You need to really try and control that first impact into the market.”
The two seemingly conflicting elements of Herrick’s personality, her passion and desire to control, are what ground her and give her the confidence she exudes.