Financial services
Sara Bennison
Chief product and marketing officer, Nationwide
Sara Bennison was promoted in 2019, adding responsibilities for product and proposition to her role at Nationwide. She chose not to “shout about” the new job, saying it “shouldn’t be a surprise that a senior marketer should have responsibility for price, product and proposition as well as all the other things”. She’s also a fierce defender of a function she loves, urging marketers to stand up for its role in business.
Bennison has had to manage through the coronavirus crisis, which has seen the building society’s profits tumble. In May, the organisation promised that no mortgage member would lose their home over the next 12 months via a support package that is also helping those in rented accommodation.
Before that, Nationwide was named Which? Banking Brand of the Year in 2019 and number one for customer satisfaction among its peers earlier in 2020. The building society attracted an extra £5.7bn in deposits in 2019, helped by its ‘Pay Day Save Day’ campaign, and across its 2019 financial year it also reached its long-term target of achieving a 10% share of the current account market.■
Group chief marketing officer, HSBC
Leanne Cutts is cutting her teeth in a tough market for banking, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. Despite a tricky time for the bank, with a reduction in senior roles earlier this year, HSBC’s retail banking and wealth management arm grew its customer base by 100,000 in 2020’s first quarter.
Cutts believes the pandemic will change marketing, but this can be for the better. “This is a real reset moment for our role as marketers, as guardians of our brands, for our teams, for our organisations. We want to have stronger brands, to be useful and relevant to our customers, to foster creativity, deepen customer relationships, contribute to the communities that we serve,” she told an audience at Cannes Lions Live over the summer.
At HSBC, this has involved a rapid pivot to working from home and the quick introduction of new services such as mortgage payment holidays and calls to vulnerable customers. HSBC has a coronavirus framework in place, called the three Rs, that aims to help the company react, respond and rebuild.■
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Leanne
Cutts
Mark
Evans
Managing director of marketing and digital,
Direct Line Group
In 2019, Mark Evans was promoted to Direct Line Group’s executive committee, stepping up from marketing director to managing director of marketing and digital, as part of a company push to simplify its operating model and work in a more agile way. He’s responsible for brands including Churchill, Green Flag and power brand Direct Line.
Over 2019, the business saw “great gains” in its net promoter score (NPS), which was up 20% on the Direct Line brand, and a 23% reduction in complaints for the first half of 2019 versus 2018. There is also a keen focus on marketing effectiveness, with the company running 77 econometric models for its marketing spend, meaning Evans can drive down the cost of acquiring customers while maximising ROI.
The company decided to divert its new business budget towards existing customers during the coronavirus pandemic and also upped its monitoring of employees’ mental health. Evans also oversaw the decision to retire brand personality Winston ‘the Wolf’ Wolfe earlier in 2020, replacing him with famous animated characters as part of a shift in marketing activity.■
Chief marketing officer, GoCompare;
Chief executive officer, AutoSave at GoCo Group
Growth and transformation specialist Zoe Harris overhauled the GoCompare brand in 2019, repositioning its famous opera-singing character, Gio Compario, to build on the brand’s high awareness. It has an awareness score of 87.9%, according to YouGov’s BrandIndex tracker, but Harris wanted to add “depth” to the character. She also switched marketing away from paid search and towards above-the-line advertising, to build the brand over the long term.
Across the GoCo Group’s price comparison services, marketing spend hit £73.4m in 2019, and its ‘marketing margin’ (the difference between revenue and marketing expenditure, divided by revenue) increased to 47.1% from 46.4% the previous year, “reflecting the disciplined approach to customer acquisition”, according to its annual report. Harris is also CEO of GoCo’s AutoSave group, which has around half a million customers, and, according to its company statement in June, has been growing at an annualised rate of 100%, and allowed switchers to achieve “record levels of savings”.■
Zoe
Harris
Emma
Isaac
Brand marketing director, NatWest Group
Emma Isaac oversees marketing for NatWest Group brands including NatWest, Ulster Bank and Coutts, and in February led on a campaign for NatWest that promoted the ‘MoneySense’ lessons it runs in schools, showing a girl swaggering through a car park as she collects a £1 coin from a supermarket trolley. In 2019, staff taught more than 3,000 MoneySense workshops, and it’s a way for the bank to walk the talk, according to Isaac.
As the coronavirus pandemic hit, NatWest quickly moved to provide support to NHS workers and those aged over 70, communications for which Isaac said represented “fast and decisive action to give extra support to those who need it most”. Isaac was also behind a campaign that took “an active stand” in tackling the “patronising” way women are spoken to by banks – noting that women “have a preference” for NatWest, and defending the move as “courageous” in the face of polarised views.
While the banking sector sometimes sees a mixed reception from consumers, the NatWest brand saw improvements in annual rankings published by the Competition and Markets Authority in 2019.■
Chief customer officer, Lloyds Banking Group
Promoted to chief customer officer in January 2020, Catherine Kehoe oversees functions including brand and customer strategy, insights, marketing and communications for group companies including Lloyds, Halifax, Bank of Scotland and Scottish Widows. And it’s been a busy year or so for the group, with Halifax relaunching its brand with an updated visual identity and marketing campaign in 2019, and Lloyds creating a money advice series called Save Well, Spend Better on Channel 4, among other initiatives.
In 2019, the number of digitally active customers went up to 16.4 million from 15.7 million the previous year across the group’s brands. The group also exceeded its goal of adding 1 million pension customers, ahead of target, and now has more than 5 million people able to access a single customer view of their finances across the different brands. Net promoter score (NPS) for group branches went up 5%, while overall complaints (excluding PPI) went down 13%. ■
Catherine Kehoe
Raj
Kumar
Group brand and reputation director, Aviva
Raj Kumar is spearheading Aviva’s focus on the customer and is pushing for the company to represent that customer with a more diverse workforce. He’s a firm believer that brand and communications must be aligned – because a company’s reputation is built on actions, not words – and knows that building human relationships is a key driver of trust. Kumar is also a board trustee of The Prince’s Teaching Institute, a charity that trains teachers at all stages of their career.
Aviva delivered some “great customer outcomes” last year, according to its latest annual report. These included a 10-point increase in transactional net promoter score (NPS) from +33 to +43, as well as encouraging scores from a newly introduced Net Trust Index showing the brand was above the sector benchmark. The business also saw a 21% reduction in complaint volumes in 2019 compared to 2018. AvivaPlus also launched last year, a product that offers existing car or home insurance customers the same deals as new ones, aiming to rebuild trust in insurance.■
Chief marketing officer, TSB
Pete Markey has a long list of responsibilities. Along with his position as chief marketing officer at TSB, he is an executive sponsor for LGBT within the business and took up the role of ISBA vice-president in July 2019. He also decided to learn improvised comedy and put on a show for Comic Relief that raised £30,000 for the charity via The Marketing Academy in March 2020.
In his day job, he’s responsible for all of TSB’s marketing and digital sales activity, including brand, analytics, research, effectiveness, strategy and social media, managing more than 100 people. He’s steered the brand through rather a rollercoaster time after an IT failure locked customers out of their accounts in 2018. In January 2020, the business announced £46m in pre-tax profits for 2019 after losing £105.4m the year before. It also increased deposits by 3.7% to £1.1bn, with a 20.7% uptick in business banking deposits, as well as an 18% increase in mobile app users.■
Pete
Markey
Lloyd
Page
Marketing director, Moneysupermarket
Lloyd Page became Moneysupermarket’s marketing director in March 2019, after a consultancy stint. He launched the comparison website’s ‘Get money calm’ proposition, which aimed to help people to save money on their bills, quickly adapting the messaging when the coronavirus pandemic hit the UK. In the space of two days, Page worked with his team to try to understand how customers felt and what they needed, launching with messaging that showed how people could save up to 50% on energy bills – at a time when they were likely to be using more energy, owing to increased time spent at home.
He also has a strong emphasis on personalisation at scale, and last year launched a campaign that promoted the brand’s credit monitor product, which allows each customer to understand their own credit score and switch to the best products. It did well, with engagement click-through going up from 20% in 2016-2018 to 39% in 2019, and CRM revenue up 30%.■
Vice-president, marketing, Monzo
Tristan Thomas was promoted to vice-president of marketing at app-based bank Monzo in November 2019, and leads marketing, communications, policy and financial inclusion. Last year, Thomas oversaw the brand’s first TV commercial – watched more than 20 million times on YouTube – worked on the launch of the brand in the US and helped to oversee a funding round that raised £113m, valuing the bank at around £2bn. While the startup is yet to be profitable, more people joined Monzo than any other bank between July and September 2019 – a total of 22,800 customers. By the end of 2019, the bank had more than 3.6 million customers and was the UK’s most recommended brand in a YouGov poll, although it has taken a hit due to the pandemic.
If his day job wasn’t enough, Thomas is also a fan of the side hustle, launching both PrintStamp – a service that prints and sends documents – and wine subscription service Winepost during the coronavirus lockdown. Thomas plans to leave Monzo at the end of the year to take a break and then “try something new”.■
Tristan Thomas
Consumer goods,
tech & luxury
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Has the pandemic accelerated a digital shift, or is it a temporary blip?
Why marketing transformation is taking on new urgency
Unified data: the key to understanding post-lockdown consumer trends
Has the pandemic accelerated a digital shift, or is it a temporary blip?
Why marketing transformation is taking on new urgency
Unified data: the key to understanding post-lockdown consumer trends
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