From the moment you walk through the door at BOC Industrial’s headquarters in Guildford, it’s quite clear where the company sees itself. The bust of Joseph Priestly who invented the commercial applications for Oxygen in the 18th century stationed behind the reception desk, says it all. BOC is an establishment heavy-weight, with roots dating back to the golden age of British industry, which has been facilitating much of our traditional industrial activities for well over a century (it was founded in the 1880s as Brin Oxygen Company). A new-fangled, here-today, gone-tomorrow business software house, it certainly is not.
Perhaps this is why the chirpy, upbeat (and instantly slightly irreverent) Australian-accented voice of its marketing & communications manager sounds just a little bit out of place. Pamela Edmond is young, pretty and vivacious, and certainly not everyone’s preconception of a senior marketer at a small-C conservative old-school brand like BOC Industrial. However, beneath the charming exterior, there is an enormous sense of drive, purpose and passion for a brand that she has worked for on opposite sides of the world.
So how did this former Sydney resident end up in Surrey managing the marketing of specialist industrial gas services? I drifted into B2B because of my experience, she explains. People say I should work in B2C because of my energy, but B2B has given me the freedom to use this energy.
Edmond clearly relishes the challenge inherent in working for a brand with the heritage and perhaps even the baggage of BOC Industrial. The industrial sector keeps the country running, she comments. Working here is always challenging, and I thrive on challenges. It can be frustrating working for a large company. I work hard every day to bring the brand to life, but then I watch in awe when we unite under high-pressure situations, such as getting emergency oxygen to casualties of the London bombings last year.
As marketing & communications manager for BOC Industrial in the UK, Pamela Edmond is tasked with the company’s total marketing activities, for a broad range of products, to a diverse selection of customers. As she puts it, we work with everyone from hospitals to hospitality. Our core market is heavy industry, but we are also moving into areas such as biotechnology. The diversity and spread of operations and activities means her self-diagnosed high energy levels are put to good use in her role. We cross so many markets and have so many customers that there are always a huge number of campaigns underway. Edmond has been in her current role since the beginning of 2004, reporting directly to sales & marketing director Dynes Woodrow fellow Australian and former colleague and in charge of a core team of eight.
It was Woodrow who tempted her back to the UK, four years after her initial stint, with the prospect of the BOC Industrial position. But as well as having worked in the UK before, Edmond also had a strong track record at BOC, having played a key role in the evolution of its proposition and product portfolio while in Australia.
We undertook a brand revolution in Australia, launching our own branded equipment products. BOC invented many welding processes, and the aim was to relaunch our brand in this space. So successful was the initiative, she explains, that it has since been rolled out globally. Edmond says that moving back into equipment provision has rejuvenated the company, particularly in markets where traditional industry is relatively mature, and therefore new opportunities are more limited.
Edmond’s understanding of BOC Industrial was deepened further with her next role as a product manager. This was very exciting. It involved working with retail outlets and really getting under the skin of the trade. The products we were selling were quite sexy, and competition was very strong. So much so that she was head-hunted by one such competitor, whom she was employed by for a further 18 months. Despite being apparently well established and connected in her native country, when the call came inviting her to back to the UK and to BOC, she jumped at the chance.
According to Edmond, her reasons for leaving Australia again were both personal and professional. There are very different business cultures in the UK and Australia, she explains. The UK is much more focused on trying new things and moving forward. It has a generally more open industry network. In Australia there is much more of a focus on business qualifications, whilst in the UK it is more about experience and competencies. I did an MBA in Sydney, because I felt I had to go through the motions of keeping my qualifications up to speed. The implication is that she felt her career could progress more quickly in the hands-on UK environment than academia-obsessed Australia.
Just as business generally is different on the other side of the world, so is marketing, explains Edmond. Marketing is light years ahead in the UK, she says, although she qualifies this by suggesting that Australian marketers are early adopters in some areas, such as e-commerce. There is much more emphasis on DM in the UK. The variations are largely down to cultural differences, she says, highlighting the relative unpopularity of catalogue shopping as an example. In Australia, customers look forward to the personal interaction of shopping.
From a personal perspective, a return to the UK also appealed. I don’t like the climate in Australia, she explains, and had already decided I wanted to move back. I’ve got friends all over the world, but I’ve got a particular concentration in the UK. I’d actually just checked the Home Office website to see if I’d be let back in, then 10 minutes later I got a call from my ex-boss. It would be hard not to see this combination of circumstances as a little like fate.
Although she may have been born in Australia and still have the accent (and apparently attitude) in marketing terms Edmond is probably more at home in the UK, having cut her teeth in event marketing here for exhibition company ITE. I always wanted to be in marketing, and London is the gateway for everything, she says. Like so many antipodeans, she boarded a plane to the UK in the early 90s to sample life on the other side of the world. Unlike most, she had a marketing degree in her back pocket.
At ITE she was involved in show management, and in partnership with Reed helped take the successful InterBuild exhibition concept to the former Eastern block, working in Moscow and Kazahkstahn. It was a very interesting and exciting place to work, but we were advised to keep close to our drivers! This was followed by a spell at West London Training & Enterprise Council, helping connect locally based businesses with the long-term unemployed and deprived ethnic minorities. From here, she moved to the Direct Marketing Association, where she was PR executive working under former chairman and industry guru Colin Lloyd. I loved working for Colin, she enthuses.
The one thing all these diverse roles have in common is that they are all [almost exclusively] B2B. In combination, they give Edmond unrivalled expertise in this discipline, although one on which she has a particular perspective. I see it more as B2I: business-to-individual, she says. We are all individuals. At BOC Industrial, our whole organisation runs on SAP, and the company is very focused on using it, and putting things into tidy boxes. I always try to think of them as individuals. This is a perspective that has a particular bearing on her work to date, and how she has attempted to take the brand forward.
The primary challenge facing Edmond on her return was to pick up on the threads of what she had so successfully started in Australia: the relaunch of its equipment business. BOC Industrial in the UK was still heavily focused on the gas market, and therefore her knowledge and understanding of this sector would prove invaluable, not to say her direct experience of having done exactly the same thing for the same company in another market. She was, it would seem, the ideal choice for the role.
As part and parcel of establishing (or perhaps more accurately, re-establishing) equipment product lines, there was an onus on the marketing decision makers at BOC Industrial to reappraise its brand positioning, to consider whether this was appropriate for both new and existing requirements. There was also a requirement for a marketing tool that would help BOC become closer to its core audience of engineers and maintenance personnel.
Marketing in B2B has traditionally been quite dry and samey, says Edmond. We wanted to use a different ways to evolve our brand. The BOC Industrial brand had not been evolved graphically for a long time, and there was a perception that it needed updating. It was therefore taken as an opportunity to refresh the branding of this well-known business institution, in a manner which given its context and previous positioning could be seen as more than a little bit radical.
The preferred means of achieving this back-door brand revitalisation was what Edmond describes as a ‘character association strategy’. The focus of the strategy was and is a bright, sassy, energetic, but at the same time mildly tongue-in-cheek woman called Scarlett, who always appears clad (to a greater or lesser extent) in BOC’s livid red.
Scarlett was dreamed up by marketing agency Volume, and is gradually being integrated into BOC Industrial’s broad range of marketing communications. However, her first and most popular incarnation is on the company’s annual calendar, where she appears in various mildly provocative but humorous poses representing the company’s different activities. For example, astride a motorbike, welding on a building site, fixing leaky pipes for plumbing industry, etc. She’s half way between a Pirelli calendar girl and a company cheerleader: sexy, but tastefully done and ultimately inoffensive. Whilst poses are semi-provocative, the model undeniably attractive, her clothes most definitely remain on. There are clearly a strict set of guidelines being closely adhered to. There is a definite sense of balance [in terms of imagery], says Edmond, who is clearly both immensely proud of and fond of Scarlett. She is our Lara Croft, referencing the Tomb Raider video game star, who was designed to titillate her audience of teens to 40s men, but always retain her dignity… not to say her clothes.
To say the strategy has been successful would be a considerable understatement. Design and production of the 2007 calendar is currently underway, following two highly successful years in which over 20,000 were printed each time and distributed to BOC Industrial clients. We’ve been inundated with requests for the calendars, she says. Our relationship with engineers and maintenance men is very much safety-led, but Scarlett is making us more flexible and approachable. It is getting them to understand that although we are safety-focused, you can have fun with us, because we’re here to help.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, getting the board to buy-in to the concept was no mean feat. There was a huge battle internally to get acceptance, says Edmond. She explains that Volume were instrumental in helping her secure commitment. They gave me the courage to keep going when I wasn’t getting buy-in, and have worked very closely with us to develop Scarlett. They are quite protective, but are always looking for opportunities for her. For example, Scarlett has recently become the voice of BOC Industrial on its interactive voice response (IVR) telephone system. Her reach is growing and growing. Gradually all but the most die-hard objectors have begun to accept and embrace Scarlett’s obvious charms; as a marketing vehicle at least.
A key milestone in the acceptance of Scarlett, explains Edmond, was the decision by the Ministry of Defence one of BOC Industrial’s oldest and largest customers to allow her into its workshops. This kind of endorsement demonstrates that the strategy is working. And therefore, by implication, so is Scarlett.
So is Scarlett about giving BOC Industrial sex appeal? Edmond prefers not to use the ‘S’ word talking instead about enhancing relationships. Scarlett is about making the BOC Industrial brand more contemporary, approachable and fun. For our smaller customers it’s about being more personal and humanising our approach.
Whichever word you choose to describe her, Scarlett is light-years away from the old responsible, worthy but ultimately dull impression that many may have had of BOC Industrial before her arrival. The sense of fun and enthusiasm she exudes is a significant departure in what is a conservative market sector, and an all too rare example of marketing creativity.
The conception, development and deployment of Scarlett throughout its marketing should be where the story of Pamela Edmond and BOC Industrial ends, were it not for the fact that parent company BOC Group agreed to an acquisition by German-based competitor Linde earlier in the year. To date, the repercussions for the BOC Industrial brand are unclear, but Edmond is confident that it will not be adversely affected. The BOC Industrial brand is our most powerful tool. Linde have issued a statement that the brand is what they have bought, and this is encouraging for us.
She adds that Linde is actually smaller than BOC, with smaller global reach, and this would suggest that the established brand will be key to both the integration and future development of the combined company. If that is the case, we can expect to see a lot more of Scarlett in the coming years… although obviously in a dignified and non-exploitative way. Which without doubt is a good thing, because the world and its workshops and white vans in particular would be all the more dull without her. Just as it would without Pamela Edmond.
Click here to search and apply for the latest B2B Marketing Jobs
