The global marketing director talks about her awards judging experience
What does your role include?
I am both guardian of the B2B brand and champion of the customer experience. My most important roles are to grow the brand, manage the product portfolio and keep generating profitable ideas.
How do you manage being the ‘guardian of the brand’ for such a large, global company?
To maintain consistency and clarity we live and die by our brand bridge where our pioneering essence is placed at the top and everything brand related ladders up to it – through our ‘passionate expert’ personality to our differentiated offers and the choices we make on which product brands we stand behind. Everything we do threads back to our brand bridge: from our brand architecture, to our thought leadership, our external messaging, our creative platform, our customer experience work, our offer development, our sponsorship and, importantly, our internal messaging. It’s important our brand unites employees and they have a clear understanding of the ‘Castrol magic’ to ensure we deliver a consistent customer experience.
At the beginning of the year you focused on thought leadership and building a content platform. Has it been successful?
We are still at the early stages. I can, however, tell you what I have learnt.
Thought leadership is not a badge, neither is it a campaign nor a tool, it has to be underpinned by real differentiated value, which prospects are willing to trade for. It has to be built on a platform where you have some natural authority. We also did well to partner with an inspired agency to help us navigate a whole new world of big data and analytics to deliver a unique point of view.
You were an awards judge for us this year. How did you find it?
I really enjoyed the judging experience. I was surprised by the stunning effectiveness of a few of the viral videos in B2B; and a number of the retro direct mail campaigns felt quite new and exciting. I reconnected my thinking on account-based marketing’s relevance to our own business. I observed how formulaic and repetitive agencies can be in utilising a model across many clients. On the flip side, overall, I walked away contemplating how agencies really do play a key role in forging new frontiers in specialist marketing areas.
What advice would you give your younger self now?
Have fun. Find what you love to do and do that. Bring honesty, humility, humour and humanity to work.
