Marketing director, M&S
Anna Braithwaite joined M&S in June 2021 with a mission to turn around the clothing and home division’s poor style perceptions and rebuild M&S’s reputation as a fashion retailer. That journey has continued over the past year - and the tide is starting to turn.
In September 2023 Braithwaite secured Hollywood A-lister Sienna Miller as the face of the brand, and later led the launch of M&S’s first dedicated menswear campaign in eight years to capitalise on the halo effect.
Braithwaite has also led an effort to “massively increase” the retailer’s share of voice and stay front of mind by lengthening the time its marketing campaigns are live. Meanwhile, investment behind the scenes into personalisation technology is helping to preserve the “magic” of the iconic brand.
Clothing and home sales grew a further 5.2% to £402.8m in the year ended 30 March, a long way from the 34% clothing sales decline reported by M&S three years ago. The business also returned to the FTSE 100 index for the first time since 2019 last year, showing that its marketing investment is translating into commercial success.■
Marketing communication manager (cluster), UK&I, Ikea
Kemi Anthony has been the driving force behind Ikea’s UK campaigns for over eight years. In that time, the flat-pack furniture giant’s popularity has continued to soar, with total UK sales up 11.9% to £2.46bn in the year to August 2023.
A marketer who believes in both consistency and avoiding the obvious, Anthony has also been responsible for steering Ikea’s 13-year relationship with creative agency Mother London. The duo is shortlisted for four prizes at this year’s Marketing Week awards, with campaigns including 2023’s ‘Show Off Your Savvy’ and its Christmas-themed social media stunt, ‘Turkey-sized Meatball’.
The tongue-in-cheek creativity has continued this year. Ikea’s 2024 campaign playfully misdirects viewers with what appears to be an ad for a high-end kitchen retailer, ‘Eureka Spiritsis’, only to surprise them by revealing that it was Ikea all along.
With its ongoing UK transformation plan, Ikea is looking to become more accessible, affordable and sustainable. That focus on accessibility extends to its employer brand. Anthony this year led the creation of a virtual Roblox store in a novel approach to attracting the next generation of workers.■
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Executive vice-president of customer and marketing, Asos
Dan Elton has a big job on his hands, turning around the fortunes of online fashion retailer Asos. The former Google and Argos marketer was hired in March 2023 to rebuild Asos’s marketing team and steer the brand back towards profitability.
When he joined, roughly 85% of Asos’s media investment was spent on performance marketing. Elton has set about rebalancing the budget with a £30m investment in brand building. So far, that has included the creation of its first full-funnel brand platform, ‘Asos Your Way’, and an always-on social and influencer programme. Early signals suggest positive movement; Asos reported a 10% uplift in new customers and a 2% uplift in organic web visits as a result of its campaign activities.
The hope is that a stronger brand will help the retailer move away from its reliance on promotions and drive more profitable full-price sales. To that end, Asos now also buys in smaller quantities to avoid accumulating too much stock. As a result, the retailer made more than 60% of its sales without any promotions during the first half of its financial year.■
Senior vice-president, group marketing & corporate responsibility director, TJX Group
In 2023, a fifth of B2C CMOs were in role for less than a year. One marketer who can beat that tenure 30 times over is Deborah Dolce, who has spent the last three decades at TJX Group, the owner of high street ‘brands for less’ chain TK Maxx and HomeSense. She joined the business before it launched its first UK store; now the UK subsidiary makes revenues of almost £4bn.
Over the years, Dolce has led significant change in how the fashion retailer offers value to its customers. Once a kept secret, shoppers are now proud to be seen as smart with their money, Dolce told Marketing Week. That mindset is reflected in TK Maxx’s most recent Christmas campaign, which promoted quality and value in its message to "spoil your loved ones for less". The campaign was part of the retailer’s biggest-ever Christmas investment.
One advantage of Dolce’s lengthy tenure is the “consistency” it creates within the business. That consistency is evident in TK Maxx’s longstanding partnerships with Comic Relief and the Prince’s Trust, the latter of which has reached 10 years.■
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CMO, Boots
Since joining Boots in 2021, Pete Markey has led widespread, research-driven changes to the retail giant’s brand and loyalty proposition. Those changes are working - Boots UK has now enjoyed 13 consecutive quarters of growth.
Consistently delivering strong ROI is a top priority for the CMO, who formerly led marketing at TSB Bank. Boots’ last three summer campaigns have all delivered ROI of over £2.50, while its Christmas campaigns have exceeded £4. Proving payback has allowed Markey to progressively increase the size of his marketing budget, enabling the launch of Boots’ biggest-ever summer campaign, biggest-ever value campaign, and its first spring campaign in a decade - all within the last 18 months.
Dedicated to creative effectiveness and pre-testing, Markey uses System1 at every stage of developing Boots’ ads. The final iteration of its most recent festive campaign, ‘Thank you, Santa’, fell in the top 5% of all ads tested, he claims.
All of this led to Markey being named Marketing Week’s 2023 Marketer of the Year. Ever generous with his time and expertise, the CMO has also been appointed the new president of ISBA.■
Pan-partnership & John Lewis customer director, John Lewis Partnership
Charlotte Lock joined the John Lewis Partnership as its first pan-partnership customer director in March 2022, before taking on additional responsibility for the John Lewis brand 12 months later. She is not afraid to shake things up, resurrecting the brand's retired ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’ price promise last month as the retailer looks to improve value perceptions.
To communicate the revival of its price pledge, John Lewis has made its biggest-ever investment in marketing, with the launch of a new platform and a three-part ad series to be released over the "golden quarter", the first edition of which is now live. It is the latest work by agency Saatchi & Saatchi, which took on the account last year after Lock led the business through its first agency review in 14 years.
Lock has made mastering John Lewis’s data a core focus for the customer team. The business has made “great strides” in building a single customer view and can now “operationalise” that insight across the customer journey, she said.
The Partnership swung back to profitability in 2023, notching up £56m in pre-tax profit following a loss of £234m in 2022. John Lewis alone attracted a record 13.4 million customers.■
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Marketing director, Pets At Home
The year to March 2024 was a pivotal one for Pets at Home. The British retailer - which also owns Vets for Pets and Pets Grooming - underwent a major brand refresh, uniting all of its brands under a single identity to ease customer confusion and underline the breadth of services it offers.
By the end of the fiscal year, consumer revenue had jumped by 6.9% to £1.9bn, and has now identified growing its share of wallet as its “greatest opportunity”.
Marketing director Madeline Shaw led the transformation, as well as the creation of a £2.2m TV campaign to support the newly unified proposition. According to System1, ‘We’re all for pets’ scored a solid 4.8 stars for its long-term effectiveness potential. Nine months later, a new 20-second spot scored the maximum 5.9 stars, despite being sales-oriented with a promotional offer.
Pets at Home has long championed its ability to use data effectively within its marketing. Shaw says the retailer has invested “a lot” in its data and insight capability, including the creation of its members club, Pets VIP. The loyalty scheme now has 7.8 million active members, a 2% increase on its 2023 financial year.■
Chief customer officer, The Very Group
For the marketing team at online retail company Very, effectiveness is a constant priority. “We’re rigorous about measuring effectiveness,” Jessica Myers told Marketing Week earlier this year. The former Metro Bank marketing director joined the business as CMO in 2022 and immediately set about embedding a data-driven approach, as she aimed to give more meaning to the Very brand.
That effort culminated in the launch of Very’s new brand platform, ‘Let’s Make It Sparkle’. Unveiled with a humorous Christmas campaign last year, the platform came with a new set of brand characters: three flamboyant flamingos named Kerry, Terry and Cherry.
Grounded in audience insight, the platform was designed to deliver success over the short and long term. Indeed, the Christmas campaign ranked as the second most persuasive festive ad of 2023, according to Kantar, helping to boost Very UK’s retail sales by 3.4% over the Christmas and Black Friday period. The flamingos returned in this summer’s campaign, ‘Haus of Flamingo’.
In May, Myers was promoted to Very’s executive team in the newly created position of chief customer officer.■
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CMO, Specsavers
After nearly a decade with Ikea, Peter Wright took over the top marketing job at Specsavers in April 2021 to oversee the group-wide marketing framework. Three years later, and as it celebrates its 40th anniversary, the optical retail chain has managed to exceed revenues of £4bn in the year to the end of February, up by 10.3%.
In its annual review, Specsavers credited its in-house marketing development programme, Specsavers Academy of Marketing, with helping every colleague globally to “thrive” in their work. The retailer also claimed its marketing campaigns “continue to go from strength to strength”.
Those campaigns include last year’s ‘Kiss Clash’, which sought to drive consideration of Specsavers’ contact lens proposition. The campaign drove a 22.9% increase in sign-ups for Specsavers’ contact lens packages and boosted consideration by seven percentage points. Importantly, contact lens trials increased 9.6%, winning Specsavers the 2023 Marketing Week Award for Insight and Market Research.
The retailer was also identified as creating standout print ads by Kantar’s ‘The Works’ study. With its reimagination of the ‘Snellen’ eye test, Specsavers scored in the top 1% of UK ads for distinctiveness.■
General manager of integrated marketing Europe, Amazon
Ed Smith has led Amazon’s integrated marketing team in Europe since 2017, overseeing advertising and sponsorship marketing for the digital giant’s retail division, Alexa, Prime and the Amazon masterbrand.
With Smith at the helm, Amazon’s 2023 Christmas campaign ‘Joy Ride’ divided opinions within the ad industry, but Mark Ritson said the spot was actually a “lesson” in market orientation. Despite coming under fire for its creative execution, System1’s public testing awarded the ad its highest possible effectiveness score, making it one of the most creatively effective ads Amazon has ever made. At a global level, the business later reported a 14% increase in Q4 revenue to $170bn.
Women’s football is a big focus for Smith’s team going forward, after striking Amazon’s first major pan-European sports sponsorship with UEFA Women’s Football last year. The retail giant followed up with a European-wide brand campaign, ‘The Grit’, to support the sponsorship, the first work delivered by Amazon and its new agency partner, Adam&eveDDB.
Outside his day job, Smith mentors with The Marketing Academy and sits on the board of the Princes Trust charity.■
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