Marketing director, fashion, home & beauty, M&S
Sharry Cramond has been a driving force behind M&S’s brand resurgence since joining as food marketing director in 2018. She added responsibility for the Sparks loyalty programme in 2023 and, ready for a new challenge, moved to head up marketing for the retailer’s clothing and home division in June following Anna Braithwaite’s departure. She retains oversight of Sparks and cross-business brand activity.
It’s been a strong few years for M&S. Last year, the retailer’s brand value rose 38% to $2.47bn (£1.85bn), according to Kantar’s BrandZ ranking. YouGov crowned M&S the UK’s best brand after it achieved the highest brand health score in 2024. Capping off its success, M&S was also named Marketing Week’s 2024 Brand of the Year.
These recognitions reflect success at the tills. Under Cramond's stewardship, M&S Food repositioned around quality, value and relevance, supported by a multimillion pound investment in price and consistent innovation. M&S Food’s market share rose to 3.9% in the year ending March 2025, while food sales grew 8.7% to £9bn and operating profit for the division jumped from £388.4m to £484.1m.
Despite a major cyberattack, M&S CEO Stuart Machin described the business as being in its “best financial health for nearly 30 years”.
Chief customer officer, John Lewis
After four years transforming M&S’s clothing and home division, Anna Braithwaite is set to return to John Lewis – where she spent 11 years at the start of her career – next month as chief customer officer.
At M&S, Braithwaite spearheaded the overhaul of the retailer’s style perceptions, repositioning it as a fashion-led, value-oriented brand. Her work includes sellout collections with the likes of designer Bella Freud and making Sienna Miller the face of the brand, supported by effective marketing campaigns.
“If we don’t have style, we don’t have anything,” she said in an interview to mark M&S winning Marketing Week’s 2024 Brand of the Year accolade.
Under her leadership, M&S’s fashion, home and beauty sales rose 3.5% to £4.2bn in the year to March 2025, as the wider business notched up a 22% increase in pre-tax profit – its highest in over 15 years. Braithwaite oversaw three years' worth of value share growth, with M&S reporting it is now ranked second for style compared with sixth in 2022.
“In fashion, home and beauty, our authoritative lead in quality and value perception and much improved style credentials has broadened appeal and grown market share,” M&S CEO Stuart Machin said in May, describing the brand as having a strong foundation to “drive future growth”.
Anna
Braithwaite
Sharry Cramond
Chief marketing and digital officer, Wickes
A marketer who believes in blending data with creativity, Gary Kibble has led a long-term effort to broaden Wickes’ appeal beyond its traditional audience of local tradespeople. In 2019, just 19% of the retailer’s DIY audience were women. By 2024, that figure had climbed to 36%, thanks in part to a targeted marketing pivot.
Today, Kibble is focused on tackling “empty awareness” – the gap between brand recognition and conversion. Wickes’ recent ‘Proud as a Peacock’ campaign aims to bridge that divide, targeting three core segments: DIYers, tradespeople and design-and-install customers. With the focus now on pride, the campaign marked a major shift from 2019’s ‘Housebarrasment’ work and extended into channels like TikTok to reach younger audiences.
Kibble also spearheaded the launch of Wickes' internal AI tool Mission Motivation Engine (MME) in 2020, which now comprise 14 programmes. In its FY24 financial report, Wickes hailed the AI-powered personalisation tool as a “highly effective method of using first-party data” for customer communications.
Following a 6.9% group-wide sales rise in Q1 this year, Wickes entered the FTSE 250 in June – a milestone for the brand.
Senior vice-president, group marketing & corporate responsibility director, TJX Group
In 2024, the average CMO tenure was 4.3 years. Deborah Dolce has beaten that sevenfold, spending over three decades at TJX Group – owner of high street ‘brands for less’ chains TK Maxx and HomeSense. She joined the business before its first UK store opened and has seen it go from relative unknown on the high street to surpassing £4bn in sales for the first time in the UK last autumn.
During her tenure, Dolce has overseen a major shift in how the business communicates value. Once a kept secret, TK Maxx shoppers are now proud to be savvy spenders, she told Marketing Week. That mindset was central to the brand’s 2024 festive campaign, which encouraged customers to “spoil your loved ones for less”.
The ad may have felt familiar – ‘Festive Farm’ first aired in 2023. Rerunning the creative reflected a bet on consistency, following an impressive System1 score of 5.8.
That same dedication to consistency is evident in TK Maxx’s long-term partnerships. This year, the retailer marked 20 years of supporting Cancer Research UK with a campaign starring actress Naomi Watts in a 50-layer dress – representing the £50m the retailer has raised to date.
Deborah
Dolce
Gary Kibble
Chief customer officer, The Very Group
Since joining The Very Group as CMO in 2022, former Metro Bank marketing director Jessica Myers has embedded a data-driven approach and brought sharper meaning to the Very brand. Promoted last year to the newly created role of chief customer officer, she now sits on the executive team and leads a 500-strong “customer-obsessed” team.
A champion of consistency, Myers has continued to develop the retailer’s ‘Haus of Flamingo’ brand platform. First launched in summer 2024, the platform helped drive a 10% uplift in brand consideration across womenswear. In spring 2025, Very expanded the campaign with ‘The Departure’ and ‘The Arrival’, spotlighting its multi-category fashion offering.
Myers is also a firm believer in creative effectiveness, using pre- and post-testing across platforms, including TikTok. Very’s investment in TikTok has increased around 20% year-on-year, she recently told Marketing Week.
Additionally, Myers led the launch of retail media proposition Very Media Group and in-house creative studio HelloStudio. In its 2024 financial year, customer experience improvements helped The Very Group deliver its highest-ever Net Promoter Score of 40 – up four points year-on-year.
CMO, Bloom & Wild
Charlotte Langley became Bloom & Wild’s first CMO in October 2024, six years after joining the online florist as brand and communications director. It marked her third promotion at the business, signifying the brand’s focus on investing in growth.
During the cost of living crisis, Bloom & Wild pivoted from top-line growth to profitability, slashing post-tax losses by over 95% in the year to March 2024. Marketing spend was cut as the focus shifted to retaining existing customers. Langley later praised her team for “a terrific job optimising for profitability”. The success of that strategy helped to pave the way for renewed brand investment.
Having right-sized the business, Bloom & Wild is once again “investing for growth”, doubling brand spend in the run-up to Christmas last year. Customer acquisition is back in focus too, supported by econometric modelling to demonstrate ROI. According to Langley, the year to March 2025 saw stronger trading as a result.
Growth priorities include non-flower gifting and better serving male gifting occasions. Retention also remains key, with the Bloom & Wild Rewards scheme now boasting more than half a million members.
Charlotte
Langley
Jessica
Myers
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 its brands under a single identity to ease customer confusion and highlight the breadth of services it offers.
Marketing director Madeline Shaw led the transformation, including a £2.2m TV campaign to support the newly unified proposition. A year later, Pets at Home hailed the impact. Brand consideration is up 9%, with the business also noting a "big uplift" in consumers saying they know what the business stands for, which is enabling it to forge stronger connections.
Group consumer revenue rose 2.7% to £1.96bn in the 12 months to March 2025, while underlying profit before tax edged up to £133m. With share of wallet still its “biggest opportunity”, the retailer outlined plans to invest an additional £3m in marketing in FY26. Shaw faces a challenging time ahead, though, following two profit warnings in two months. With demand for pets and pet products in decline amid inflation, creating stronger brand relevance and tighter connections with consumers will be critical.
Brand and marketing director, Currys
Dan Rubel believes safety is the root of mediocre advertising, which is why over the past two years he’s embraced risk to help Currys stand out. Since launching the ‘Beyond Techspectations’ brand platform in 2023, the retailer has leaned into “weird” humour and brand-first creative to become more memorable in a crowded market.
The shift is paying off. Since the platform’s launch, ROI has increased 44%, CRM sales impact is up double digits year-on-year, organic social engagement has tripled and content engagement has doubled. Meanwhile, Currys’ TikTok strategy has helped it amass over 140,000 followers and 4 million likes, with one air fryer video alone hitting 10 million views. Last year, the retailer reported a 6% revenue increase in the UK and Ireland, crediting marketing effectiveness as a key driver.
That boldness continued into this year’s ‘Sigh of Relief’ campaign, winner of Channel 4’s £1m Diversity in Advertising Award. Focused on the in-store experience of customers with accessibility needs, the work maintains Currys’ comedic tone while delivering on inclusion – and scores particularly well for short-term effectiveness, according to System1.
Dan
Rubel
Madeline
Shaw
CMO, Specsavers
After nearly a decade at Ikea, Peter Wright took the top marketing job at Specsavers in spring 2021. Four years on, the optical retailer has reported group revenue of £4.18bn for its 2024/25 fiscal year – up 7.5% year on year.
For the past three years, Wright has brought Specsavers’ senior marketers together at an internal festival to share knowledge and ideas. At last year’s, he emphasised the importance of creating “psychological safety” – a culture where teams feel confident to take risks and try new things.
That approach is delivering results. The brand won Gold at the 2024 IPA Effectiveness Awards for ‘I Don’t Go’, a home visits campaign that subverted its iconic ‘Should’ve gone’ line and delivered an estimated £19.8m in incremental profit.
Other recent standouts include a third season of YouTube series ‘Best Worst Team’ featuring darts star Luke Littler, a partnership with Elton John Eyewear and a temporary rebrand to ‘Specsandhearingsavers’ to promote its audiology services.
As the business wrote in its annual review: “Our marketing initiatives continue to innovate… to ensure we create effective messaging, excitement and engagement.”
Marketing, ecommerce and customer executive director, AS Watson UK (Superdrug and Savers)
Matt Walburn has spent more than 15 years at Superdrug parent company AS Watson UK, over two stints. In recent years, value, digital and loyalty have become key focus areas – and the results speak for themselves.
Superdrug reported its “best ever Christmas” in 2024, with like-for-like sales up 5.1% and own brand ranges performing strongly. Online sales rose 21%, boosted by improvements to the Health & Beautycard VIP rewards app and faster delivery options, such as 30-minute click and collect.
The retailer continues to invest in its ‘Online + Offline’ strategy, amid plans to open 25 new stores in 2025 after a 25% sales rise across its 100 largest shops. Superdrug is also expanding its online beauty marketplace to include fashion brands for the first time, such as Nike, Wrangler and Blue Vanilla, a move the retailer says “addresses customer demand”.
Other innovations include a branded Roblox obstacle game – ‘Superdrug Obby’ – launched to mark the retailer’s 60th birthday last year. The activation attracted nearly 1 million players, helping Superdrug connect with a younger, gaming-savvy audience.
Matt Walburn
Peter Wright
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