Paul Coxhill, global CMO at WGSN, talks with Maxine-Laurie Marshall about how his marketing department is using insights and data to its advantage
Walking across the white glass bridge into the WGSN reception area I suddenly felt very conscious of my outfit choice for this interview. The fashion and consumer trend forecasting company is in the business of knowing what looks good.
Thankfully when I sit down with its CMO, Paul Coxhill, he tells me fashion was new to him when he joined WGSN. Excellent. No Devil Wears Prada-style sly digs at my ‘so last season’ shoes.
Coxhill was originally brought into the company via its parent arm, Top Right Group, where he spent two years as digital marketing and insight director. He worked with other directors across the group to ready the company’s brands (including Emap, WGSN and Planet Retail) to become standalone operating companies. At the end of the two years he was asked to head up the marketing for WGSN.
At this stage the company had just merged with its biggest competitor, Stylesight. The challenge of integrating the two brands is what drew Coxhill to the role. “We had separate tech platforms, two separate brands, the teams were separate. We had to ensure we kept the customers we had on both platforms and that we continued to grow the business. My role was to bring all that together. We rolled that out last year.”
Marketing and insight
Insight is a key tactic WGSN uses to help stay relevant to customers. Coxhill explains this came from his time with Top Right Group: “All the businesses in Top Right Group, from when I joined in my previous role, didn’t have enough resources. The new leadership group wanted to make sure we were making more fact-based decisions, so not just going with gut feel.”
He continues: “It was logical coming into the WGSN role that one of the areas I’d want to build up was that. When we merged the two businesses, we had great insight people in other functions, what I did was bring all of those people together under marketing.”
By combining the insights function with marketing, Coxhill’s department is driving strategic insight for the wider organisation, earning marketing more respect as a function. While insisting all B2B marketers should consider having an insights team, he says it comes with a caveat. “Sometimes the insight team will tell you things that may, if you were in two separate teams, be negative to marketing. For example, they could say: ‘Actually that campaign you did didn’t go that well.’ So, by having it in the same function you have to wear a couple of hats and be open to telling a part of the team it could be doing a better job. It’s an interesting trade off.”
Using data
While marketing is using insights to determine how to take its products to market, it is also collecting and using data from how its customers interact with them. WGSN implemented marketing automation (MA) a year ago and it is now automating a lot of its client engagement programmes using Marketo and Salesforce.
Coxhill says: “What we’ve been able to do over the last year is stitch together data from our website, Salesforce, our product backend as well as web analytics so we can create automated algorithms. So, if someone hasn’t logged in for a while we can encourage them back via personalised recommendations. We have about 4000 segments, so we couldn’t do that manually.”
WGSN has also used its data to create a churn model – with the help of a third-party. It can now see how likely a customer is to go or stay. This is then fed into Salesforce so the account managers have access and can have more personalised conversations with customers.
Using data intelligently is something Coxhill has tried to do throughout his career. His first project at his first job on a graduate marketing scheme at Barclays was: “Trying to figure out how we took the power of the database and put it in the hands of our frontline staff. Something called customer action prompts.”
Speaking about recent activity around customer data at WGSN, he says: “It’s really exciting for me as it’s going back to that Barclays example of how we’re using data to really enrich the relationship we’re having with the customer. The next challenge is to take that same logic and thinking into our prospect and new business marketing.”
The millennial challenge
Fear not. Even though Coxhill has an enviable MA set-up, he also shares a frequently cited challenge for many CMOs. He says: “Getting the right skill sets is a challenge. Getting that millennial generation into the team is essential because to some extent I’m an old fuddy duddy now. The millennial generation coming through is so different. The channels they use to access information have changed to the ones used by generations before them. Therefore, having that new thinking in the team is also really important. We have to keep up with our users; where and how to talk to them and what motivates them. B2B hasn’t always thought about that.”
As well as the acknowledged need to hire in a new generation of marketers, the skill set challenge comes with another issue. The new hires may not end up being marketers. Coxhill’s work with insights and data leaves him needing more and more IT skills in his department. He admits in future his marketers may come from an IT or mathematics background, but says: “I think you’re looking at people who used to reside in an IT function, and who are delighted to be in more of a commercial function because they’ve always had that desire for the commercial piece.”
Summing up nicely, Coxhill explains: “’People’ is the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity. The market is moving so fast, you constantly have to think ‘have I got the right skills in this area?’”
