There are some for whom a job is just a job they turn up at the office, bash out some emails, make some calls and then go home, satisfied a day’s work is done. It’s obvious Neil Thompson is not one of those people. Since leaving university he has thrown himself into a variety of jobs, building up an array of skills and making his way up the career ladder to take on the role of group brand manager at FTSE250 tool and equipment hire firm, Speedy Hire, and lead an award-winning marketing campaign. What makes it even more impressive is that he’s done it in only seven years.
I like to think I’ve got an entrepreneurial background, he says of his roots, which are placed firmly in the north of England with a business degree at Leeds University. Specialising in marketing during his final year led to a string of achievements such as winning the Manchester Award for the Most Enterprising Student; securing his, dream job a place on the European Graduate Development programme at ICI after graduating (no mean feat 792 people applied for only two places); and managing to complete that programme within one and a half years (it usually takes four).
Thompson is down to earth despite his success, pointing out that his first position at ICI as product manager for its beverages division was not only an achievement he was proud of, but that working in the beer industry was, very attractive to a 21-year-old graduate just out of university. Within three years he had taken on a sales role within ICI as regional sales manager for north UK and Russia, which presented a further challenge. I’m not a chemist so I had to learn and develop my skills set within the market I was looking after so I could have a credible conversation with a scientist, he says, admitting it was hard, but adding, the good news was that I do enjoy reading about how beer is made.
It is his varied background that is key to his current role at tools and equipment hire company Speedy Hire, which he was offered in October 2004. Taken on to grow, develop and lead a marketing communications team as well as build awareness of the brand was a challenge Thompson relished. It was a young, small marketing team and I was its first brand manager, he says. My key objectives were to develop the Speedy Hire brand and its core values and then establish a communications platform for positioning the brand in the market places we operate in. Prior to this, the company was predominantly sales driven and marketing was happening on a tactical level with regional marketing campaigns. We needed to grow and develop our communications so it cut across all levels.
He adds that when he started, although there was a strong set of brand values, arguably these were not being consistently implemented. We needed to identify those values; understand how we were perceived and positioned in the market place; identify what ideally we would like to be; establish whether this was viable; undertake research; and then deliver a communications platform. Which is what he did.
The core values of Speedy Hire were identified as customer service, health & safety, efficiency and effectiveness and CSR. Thompson was aware that to unify the brand and create a strong message, the campaign needed to cut across all of the company’s different businesses which includes Speedy Tools, Speedy Lifting, Speedy Space, Speedy Survey and Speedy Power [see panel on p32]. It was also an important campaign for positioning the group and global brand, as well as delivering on a tactical level to deliver regional campaigns.
Thompson was certainly well-placed for this challenge. My work experience so far was a real help. I’d been in a selling environment which I think is very important when launching a campaign because of its impact on the sales people. I’d had plenty of practice in negotiation, and in marketing you need these skills to sell ideas, and also fight for budget. And my ICI grounding had put me in good stead for managing campaigns, as well as improving my organisational skills and time management.
He adds that he has a postgraduate diploma from the CIM and is currently in his final year of an MBA. Although there’s a lot of common sense involved in this job, it does help to put a structure behind what I’m trying to achieve, he adds.
It is this logical, rational approach that also underpins much of Thompson’s success and once the core brand values had been identified and a focus on health & safety selected as the key to delivering a strong, consistent campaign, the next step was to do extensive research to discover exactly what it was the customers wanted. We couldn’t simply guess, explains Thompson. So focus groups and independent research was key to the subsequent campaign. We wanted to get closer to our customers and we felt the obvious way to do this was to ask them how we could do so. It wasn’t rocket science, he says. We also felt it was far too risky to make assumptions we just couldn’t justify spending a significant amount of money on a campaign that might not work.
He adds, We call this market intelligence rather than market research. We’re not looking to regurgitate facts from the past, but want to understand the market dynamics and their future shape and from that, we can give a platform to drive a communications campaign.
The resulting campaign, ‘Safety from the ground up’ which launched in April 2005, was based on the new-found knowledge that although at director level there was comprehensive knowledge of health & safety regulations, when it came to the tool-user on a building site, there was only 33 per cent awareness. Also, it was discovered that many of the users actually choose their own tools, but they weren’t necessarily choosing the best ones it came down to the lowest price or the ‘comfort zone’ brand they were used to getting. So the crux of the campaign was to be education. The beauty of the campaign is that it targets actual users on a site, says Thompson.
So a highly visual creative concept was developed with agency Harvey Fuchs. The latest module of the campaign, which is on dust control, was launched in May this year, (the first in 2005 dealt with working at height; the second with hand arm vibration) and distils technical regulations into basic key points using cartoon images to get the points across. We want to engage with our target audience so we’ve used plain English and added a bit of fun of course, these are serious issues, but I think that the ‘shock and awe’ tactics used in smoking ads for example, turns people off, explains Thompson.
The campaign encompasses ‘Tool box talks’, which the Speedy sales team are trained to deliver. These are succinct presentations on the issues, focusing on safe working practice. We make sure all the talks are consistent, so there are speaker notes on the back and the sales person can literally walk through it my friend’s eight-year-old son even presented it to his class it’s that simple, says Thompson. It’s our way of vertically integrating with our customer base and it’s been very well received.
The level-headed and creative approach to this campaign has won Speedy Hire a number of accolades including two B2B Marketing Awards last year, a Business in the Community Award for responsible marketing and a Hire Association Europe Award for best contribution to health & safety. It works because it really speaks to its audience and gives them practical help and advice. This is because at heart Thompson is a people-person, considering his audience and relating to them as people. I’ve worked with people from all sorts of backgrounds, he explains. When I was at ICI, one minute I could be on a plant with the operatives and the next minute talking to a director. These require fundamentally different languages.
Speedy Hire has also worked closely with the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) throughout the campaign a good example, he says of how private industry and public sector can work together to share the same goals in this case of safer working practice. But it’s also a good example of Thompson’s talent in building bridges and thinking laterally. The HSE realised that we have a sizable sales force about 500-strong plus our branch network who have conversations with our customers on a daily basis. If we can align those conversations to the HSE’s key messages and make sure they are consistent, then this can help the HSE with their own communications programme. It also gives us credibility as we are demonstrating to our customers that our messages are in line with those from the HSE.
Since the campaign launched, brand recognition has improved from 74 per cent to 92 per cent. So in what direction does Thompson feel the brand is going in now? Going forward, I feel that we really have the opportunity to grow and develop, he says.
We’ve established clear blue waters between us and our competitors with the health & safety campaigns and offer our customers clear added value. We will now continue to grow as a company through acquisitions [Speedy Hire has recently acquired Hewden Tools] and green field development and to do that from a marketing and branding perspective we need to take a five-year journey, continuing to find out what our customers want through research, working out ways we can service them and mapping a communications campaign to do so. It’s an ongoing cycle of improvement.
The ‘Safety from the ground up’ campaign has worked wonders for Speedy Hire’s communications strategy, but as a group brand manager, Thompson has also inspired change within the company. When I joined Speedy Hire the marketing department was very much a support function; in fact, we’re branded under support services. Part of my role was to reposition us and I do feel that the campaign has helped us to win a lot of friends in the business it’s demonstrated credibly what we can do, he says. Now some of the more cynical ones will at least have a conversation with me, he adds, laughing.
He has also noticed a change in the way the sales teams react to the campaign. At the first ever briefing roadshow to train the teams I noticed there was some resistance of course, they’d been taken off the road for the day to have a briefing and there were arms folded and not a great deal of enthusiasm initially. At the latest one though, there was a completely different attitude a cultural change. They want to know more and are now really enthusiastic one lady for example, brought along a series of dust masks so we could talk about the differences between them and discuss how to position the better quality product, he says.
Thompson obviously very much enjoys his job and feels that the future of the B2B marketing industry is rosy, saying that although B2C marketing has historically been the sexy area to work in, he is seeing plenty of change in the B2B environment it’s being rebranded in a sense it really is an art form. He adds that it is also becoming more recognised in traditionally sales-driven companies where marketing is starting to work alongside sales and become more influential in driving initiatives. It forms a strong working team and it helps to bring the company together to work towards one goal. And with someone as determined as Thompson helping to establish Speedy Hire as the number one hire brand, it looks like that singular objective is on its way to being realised.
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