Chief customer officer, Tesco
For the UK’s biggest supermarket chain, the pandemic presented both a huge challenge – shelves temporarily stripped bare by stockpilers, strict social distancing protocols and a rush on its online channel – and a huge opportunity. That dynamic was reflected in its balance sheet for 2020, with a 7% rise in sales offset by £900m in additional costs, leaving the grocer with a decline in profits.
For chief customer officer Alessandra Bellini, who joined the supermarket in 2017, the real result of the pandemic was solidifying a strategy that she and the rest of the senior leadership team had put in place long before Covid-19. It meant that while other retailers pivoted, the team doubled down on existing campaigns that stood up to the test of a major crisis, including its long-running ‘Food Love Stories’.
Bellini has said her biggest job throughout it all was to listen to customers, gathering daily insights and colleague feedback, and speeding up how she and the team converted these insights into external and internal comms. “It’s been a thrill delivering in a crisis, but also a pain,” she said of the experience.■
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REGULATED INDUSTRIES
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TRAVEL, TRANSPORT & HOSPITALITY
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Alessandra Bellini
Chief customer and marketing officer, Morrisons
No doubt Sainsbury’s would’ve been sorry to lose Rachel Eyre to Morrisons at the start of 2021. While at the grocer, Eyre had headed up its highly successful 'Future Brands' initiative, an incubator programme that led on the discovery and accelerated growth of distinctive food and drink brands.
Having delivered over £200m in incremental and margin-accretive sales since launching the programme, Eyre was then promoted to head of brand communications and creative across the Sainsbury’s, Argos, Tu and Habitat brands.
Clearly, this "outstanding record" caught the eye of Morrisons, who announced Eyre’s appointment as CMO as part of its plan to develop "the next generation of retail talent". Taking over from predecessor Andy Atkinson, Eyre now oversees all consumer insight and marketing communications for the supermarket, including its advertising, in-store and targeted marketing. That’s in addition to delivering local solutions, and managing its customer service and PR teams.
Her appointment is important for Morrisons "as we continue to listen carefully to our customers and further improve the shopping trip", summed up chief executive David Potts.■
Rachel
Eyre
Food & drink retail
Marketing director, Lidl UK
Lidl has been on a huge journey in recent years. From a little-known discounter in the UK, to experiencing rapid growth in the early noughties thanks to its simple low-price proposition, to now challenging the UK’s biggest supermarket chains as much on quality and value as on permanently low prices.
It’s in developing this latest iteration of its business that marketing director Claire Farrant has been integral, crafting a series of campaigns that shift focus away from price alone and onto provenance and premium lines. Farrant joined the retailer six years ago, first as a consultant before taking on leadership of marketing for the UK business. Prior to this she spent nearly eight years at Tesco, in roles spanning both commercial and creative, providing her with solid insights on how to scale up a grocery business built on both price and quality.
It’s a positioning that has consistently fed through into strong sales growth at Lidl. It reported record sales over Christmas fuelled by sales of its Deluxe range, and confirmed plans to grow stores to 1,000 in the UK by 2023.■
Claire Farrant
Chief marketing officer, KFC UK (outgoing)
While many opted for an earnest tone at the start of the pandemic – or struggled to strike any tone at all – KFC boldly kept up the humour and irreverence it’s become known for, pushed forward by CMO Meghan Farren who is set to become chief customer officer at Asda in October.
It won plaudits for its stroke of genius in inviting locked down customers to recreate KFC at home and share their attempts on social media, responding with its own brand of critique under the #RateMyKFC hashtag. Then, as outlets slowly reopened, there came the tongue-in-cheek twist on its 'Finger Lickin’ Good' strapline, with KFC temporarily censoring part of its famous slogan for the sake of public health. "That thing we always say? Ignore it. For now", read the tagline.
During her nine years at the fast-food chain, Farren worked as both innovation and marketing director prior to her promotion to CMO in 2015. She has championed the bold and punchy marketing style with which KFC has become synonymous. And with UK sales up 16% in Q3 of 2020, despite the huge blow of Covid-19 on the hospitality sector, Farren’s influence on the agility, adaptability and resilience of the chain is evident.■
Meghan Farren
Customer director, Co-op
Having reported into chief membership officer Matt Atkinson before he announced he was stepping down from the business in March 2021, Ali Jones has been an instrumental part of the team that successfully overhauled and repositioned the Co-op business in recent years.
Its focus in doing so has been to better highlight the retailer’s unique co-operative business model and relationship with the community. That included a new unified brand identity, higher-profile messaging around community initiatives and a transformation of platforms across data, digital, membership and community.
In the last year, Jones has been stretched even further. The pandemic pushed convenience retail up the agenda, as many consumers opted to shop in small stores and avoid busy supermarkets. With Jones at the helm of its customer relationships, the grocer navigated this challenge and capitalised fully on the opportunity too.
In the year to 2 January 2021, group revenues rose 5.5% to £11.5bn, fuelled by the 7% jump in sales at established food stores. Pre-tax profits also grew significantly from £24m to £127m in the same period. And the business expects this growth to continue, with plans for 100 new stores this year and a forecast doubling of its online grocery business from a standing start just 12 months ago.■
Ali
Jones
Head of customer and marketing, Iceland
Caspar Nelson turned Iceland’s marketing team into a self-sufficient entity in 2020. The supermarket took the decision not to work with any strategic, creative or advertising agencies, instead bringing all work in-house. The move allowed the supermarket to optimise its agility, executing ideas in "a couple of days", according to Nelson. Even TV ads were on-air in as little as four days after a conversation in the boardroom.
This extraordinary agility across its marketing department allowed the retailer to quickly adapt and respond to the challenges of the pandemic. So agile in fact were Nelson and his team they hardly touched on marketing and advertising in the early days of the crisis, instead converting to customer service functions. Being so close to both their customers and their colleagues in this way also helped put Iceland ahead of the curve. It was the first supermarket to offer a priority hour for NHS staff, for instance, after Nelson picked up on a suggestion from a store manager - a move quickly followed by competitors.
Now, with restrictions easing, the head of customer and marketing believes it’s time to inject a bit more of the tongue-in-cheek fun Iceland is known for too.■
Caspar Nelson
Chief marketing officer, Just Eat
It’s been a busy year at Just Eat. With the nation stuck at home, takeaway and food delivery were given a new lease of life, driving a 54% growth in revenues at the company to €2.4bn (£2.05bn). And CMO Susan O’Brien is at the crux of plans to hold onto that momentum.
Though the company did "significantly" scale back on marketing spend in the first half of 2020 due to uncertainty and the lower relevance of out of home marketing, that all changed in the second half of the year. The company ramped up spend across both brand and performance marketing in a bid to grow its market share further, with a total increase in marketing investment of 158% in 2020.
In early 2021, O’Brien put that cash to good use to showcase the expansion of major brands such as McDonald’s and KFC into delivery, with the ‘We Got It’ campaign. It followed the much lauded ‘Did Somebody Say’ campaign in 2020, featuring Snoop Dogg. That same month the company confirmed it was reviewing its global advertising account, as it levels up marketing across 23 markets in the wake of its £6.2bn merger with Takeaway.com.■
Susan O'Brien
Chief marketing officer, Gousto
While other businesses struggled as a result of Covid-19, for Gousto it created unprecedented opportunity. In fact, 2020 marked the first year of profit at the recipe box company as sales grew 129% to £189m, amid soaring demand for food options that could be delivered safely to your doorstep without the need to venture into stores.
For CMO Tom Wallis, this success was not a stroke of luck but the result of years of painstakingly using data to tweak the product and its messaging to perfectly suit the target consumer.
At the business now for a little under five years, Wallis took on the CMO role in January 2019. He brought with him a strong understanding of the commercial side of the business, having worked as vice-president for growth for two years, where he oversaw revenue growth and customer acquisition.
This focus on the bottom line feeds into his approach to marketing too, with the use of data to constantly improve customer experience and "send the right message through the right medium". It was in using this solid foundation of customer insight that Gousto was able to grow rapidly when the opportunity arose.■
Tom Wallis
Marketing director, M&S Food
In June 2020, after posting a £201.2m pre-tax loss for the year, Marks & Spencer launched its 'Never the Same Again' programme to drive transformation across its business, and the strategy appears to be working.
In the 19 weeks to 14 August, the retailer's food business “outperformed”, with revenue up 10.8% on last year and 9.6% on the previous 12 months. Running the show for M&S Food is marketing director Sharry Cramond, who joined the business in 2018, following roles at rival Tesco, as well as Australian supermarket Coles.
Last September saw the launch of a new partnership to supply Ocado with an expanded M&S range, and Cramond has successfully used online channels to get to know customers better. In early 2020, she oversaw the creation of a Facebook account for each one of M&S’s stores. Initially intended as a way to communicate with consumers amid patchy availability during the first Covid lockdown, these accounts have since evolved into a two-way communication channel, reaching 2 million customers per week.
What’s more, Cramond has used these social insights to inform higher-quality marketing campaigns for the retailer, for those occasions when it does splash out on mass media channels. Those insights informed the relaunch of its ‘Fresh Market Update’ campaign in early 2021, for instance, with feedback online reflecting that provenance was a critical part of the purchasing decision.■
Sharry Cramond
Chief marketing officer and senior vice-president,
McDonald's UK and Ireland
Marketing helped McDonald’s keep its golden arches "shining brightly" during the challenge of the pandemic, according to CEO and president Chris Kempczinski, with a swift recovery in revenues as restrictions began to ease in early 2021.
In the UK business, credit for that goes to Michelle Graham-Clare, who was then vice-president of marketing and food. In August this year she was promoted to her current position of UK CMO, which saw the return of the role a year on from being scrapped. She first joined the business as a marketing manager in 2015.
Graham-Clare now has ultimate responsibility for all food strategy and marketing campaigns, as well as continuing to lead her marketing teams and agency partners. Having already proven her mettle – she was behind the campaign for the fast food chain’s Grand Big Mac, its most successful promotion to date for the region – the CMO will be working to keep the recovery buoyant. This year the UK business has launched a packaging redesign and a new outdoor campaign in February, that boldly stripped back to a single golden arch to showcase its delivery channel.■
Michelle Graham-Clare
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How marketers can win the struggle to hit sales targets
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How brands can control their data destiny
webinars on Marketing Leadership
Sponsored by Salesforce