Kat Howcroft
Director - digital and media
McDonald’s
True customer centricity is what drives McDonald’s marketer Kat Howcroft in her work. The best thing a marketer can do for their career is opt to work for brands they would truly want to be a customer of, she advises.
“Marketing, at its heart, is about understanding your customer, understanding the product, brand or service, and defining the role it can play in their lives through marketing comms,” says Howcroft. “I can always tell when I have a genuine brand fan working for me.”
Howcroft has been at McDonald’s for almost six and a half years. She joined as senior media and budget manager back in 2018, and held a number of other marketing roles before being promoted to her current position of director for digital and media at the fast-food chain.
Before joining the brand, she worked in the agency world, latterly as a business director for media agency OMD UK. Although Howcroft does not have a typical food and drink marketing background, her nominator says her commercial and creative acumen has been evident since she joined McDonald’s.
In the fight to gain market share, with fewer customers in market, the tendency is to focus on the short term, battling on price and value, and often with shrinking marketing budgets.”
With loyalty apps, touchscreens and delivery riders becoming a feature of many of McDonald’s customers' journeys, digitalisation has impacted the sector significantly. Yet, Howcroft notes the fundamentals of brand building that have delivered success in the past remain constant.
While she predicts that channels like CRM and first-party media targeting will play a bigger role for marketers going forward, the importance of long-term brand building is unlikely to diminish.
What has changed, she says, is a more acute need to ensure marketing’s role is embedded across the business. Howcraft’s nominator describes her as a skilled “connector of dots” who ensures marketing works in tandem with the rest of the business to drive growth.
“More than ever, we must drive sales, and build our brand, working in lock step with business insights, strategy, and finance teams, to ensure we are maximising the contribution from marketing to the top and bottom line,” she says.
While nothing has changed in the fundamentals of how to do marketing, the last few years have presented all brands with perpetual instability, between the pandemic, inflation, supply chain disruptions, and weak consumer sentiment.
“In the fight to gain market share, with fewer customers in market, the tendency is to focus on the short term, battling on price and value, and often with shrinking marketing budgets,” she says.
