Mick Hegarty
Not only do we have customers with a diverse set of needs, he adds, but we also have a wide portfolio of services and products we need to get across to them. That makes for a complicated engagement. My job is to make sure I don’t stop seeing things from their point of view.
Hegarty’s background isn’t that of a typical marketer: his career began with an engineering degree and a few years in various technical roles at BT, which he joined in 1982. After four years, he says, he realised that the challenges the company faced weren’t technical, but managerial the company was going through plenty of change at that time so he switched the course of his career and moved across to take on managerial roles. Over the next ten years he worked in a number of different roles within BT, including customer service, HR and operations. I progressively moved closer to the customer (always on the business side of things), and I think that working in these areas really helped me recognise what the customer experience can be like in reality and how things impact on the customer.
His stint in HR was also significant in understanding the importance of internal communications, which have been used heavily in conjunction with the company’s current campaign starring Peter Jones and the Gremlins (see B2BM June 08).
While we spend a lot of time making sure our products work together, our proposition is now less about product and more about customer experience. Our vision has changed a few years ago, we positioned ourselves as the ‘UK’s premier provider of IP networking services’, or something along those lines. That’s not relevant to the customer. Now, our vision is simple it’s more service-focused, which is people-delivered, so we are placing more emphasis on getting our message across to those BT employees that touch our customers, from the billing person, to the handling person and the person that deals with a fault, so they fully understand the message and what we’re trying to do, and then pass it on to our customers.
The campaign used employees in local offices around the country. They played a champion role in getting the message across to the other members of the team, which really worked because it, came from within it was a familiar person talking to them with a local voice, rather than someone from ‘marketing’, says Hegarty.
The external element of the campaign uses TV advertising when it was launched last year, it marked a departure and a big step for BT Business. Using celebrities (Gordon Ramsey was last year’s ambassador) was new for BT Business and Hegarty says this seemed the best way to achieve cut-through and create something memorable particularly when people hadn’t seen us on TV before. There are also three new messages: We want to demonstrate three key things firstly, lots of people think of us as a brand for large businesses. Our challenge is to make sure we are recognised as a company that focuses on businesses of all sizes; secondly, we want to help businesses understand that we are there for them and helping them to be successful; and thirdly, we want customers to understand that we offer a wide range of services, beyond the traditional telecoms service.
The SME sector is an area Hegarty is keen to target, saying that it seems particularly underserved. It’s a fragmented market, served by thousands of different companies and our challenge is to engage with those businesses that don’t feel well-supported and offer them our support. This is the whole basis of our ‘Do what you do best’ strapline.
He adds: Although it’s fantastic working with large corporates due to their range and complexity, there’s nothing like dealing with SMEs. It’s the fastest growing sector, and there is a certain vitality about it. It’s usually the decision-maker that we have direct contact with so we’re talking to someone with a strong personal history of making really difficult decisions starting up on their own, surviving early days, and periods of growth, taking risks, getting it right and wrong, and although it sounds clichéd, talking to those people really is a fantastic inspiration.
Hegarty is also inspired by the complexity of business marketing. There is the view that B2B marketing is the poor relation of B2C, but I’ve never understood that. I think people get charmed by the joy of big budgets and big creative campaigns on B2C, and although that does have a role to play in business as well, there is also a completely different set of challenges in B2B, from complex segmentation and channel structure to considering the range of decision-makers that are involved. I just think it’s fantastic if you like complex challenges, B2B marketing is by far and away the most interesting marketing job you can have today.
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