travel, transport
& hospitality
Vice-president of marketing and product EMEA, Starbucks
Reuben Arnold
Reuben Arnold has been harnessing the power of social media to enhance Starbucks’ pulling power. It has become an increasingly important channel for the business to communicate with customers – so much so, it has diverted investment away from traditional media. And the strategy is paying off, with the company estimating it has achieved a return of £4 of additional profit for every £1 invested.
Social is also central to Starbucks’ product development strategy. With Arnold’s guidance, the chain has been exploring the opportunity of ‘dark social’, using private groups and social accounts to engage consumers around product development and testing. While this will not replace more traditional market research practices, Starbucks hopes it will provide a more natural way of engaging with consumers. Using platforms such as Facebook and increasingly Instagram also enables Starbucks to see which trends are beginning to gain traction. Arnold believes this area has the potential for marketers to “use the audience in a much more meaningful way”.
Sarah Barron
Chief growth officer, Costa Coffee
Sarah Barron’s remit is as broad as it is deep. She is responsible for global marketing and brand strategy across more than 30 markets, from the UK to China. Her job got even bigger in July when she was promoted from CMO to become the coffee company’s first chief growth officer. Not only does she manage the brand around the world and lead on global innovation, she also oversees the digital customer experience, store format and design development.
The chain’s £3.9bn acquisition by Coca-Cola last year is a ringing endorsement of the brand’s power and, with further global expansion potentially in the pipeline, Barron is in the perfect position to help take it to the next stage of development. Innovation has been high on the agenda, with the brand launching its first ready-to-drink product. The range includes three of the most popular variants, with 30% less sugar than most other ready-to-drink coffees in the UK. It has also launched the first-ever contactless ‘clever cup’, which allows customers to pay for their coffee using a reusable cup, powered by Barclaycard’s bPay.
Lis Blair
CMO, easyJet
Good value is an excellent brand attribute, but Lis Blair wants more for easyJet. That is why her first ad campaign since taking over as CMO last year was designed to give consumers a “big dollop of emotion”, as it looks to create a stronger connection with customers while also improving desirability. TV is just one aspect of Blair’s strategy and while it is crucial for creating an emotional connection, digital is also vital. To this end, Blair has overseen the launch of Look&Book, an extension to easyJet’s app that allows users to link seamlessly from a photograph of a destination though to booking.
The tool works by enabling customers to take a screengrab on their phone and share it with or upload it to the easyJet app. Image recognition technology then identifies the location and matches the photo to an easyJet destination. Prior to taking on the CMO role, Blair headed up CRM and insight at the airline.
Claire Cronin
Senior VP and CMO, Virgin Atlantic
Claire Cronin is a master of doing more with less, and despite being “massively outgunned” in terms of marketing budget compared to competitors such as British Airways and TUI, stays top of mind with consumers by focusing firmly on experience. She has also refocused the brand’s efforts on TV. When she joined in 2017, Virgin Atlantic was investing just 6% of its budget on TV, despite its own econometric modelling suggesting it should be at least 40%. Its lack of presence on TV was also having a knock-on impact on the performance of other channels. So Cronin decided to reinvest in TV and, as part of this strategy, Virgin Atlantic joined forces with Virgin Holidays to launch the brands’ first joint ad campaign at the end of last year, which aligns creative to increase efficiency.
The campaign helped the airline grow topline revenues by £150m. Cronin is also an advisory board member for Beyond Analysis, which is a data and machine-learning company, indicating her focus on data-led decision-making.
Meghan Farren
UK CMO, KFC
KFC weathered what could have been a major disaster when it ran out of chicken last year, thanks to the quick thinking of Meghan Farren and its agency Mother. She is an advocate of seeing agencies as “real business partners” and letting them into the brand, as she believes it delivers far stronger results. By rearranging the letters of its name to spell FCK as KFC issued a heartfelt yet humorous apology, the fast-food restaurant helped turn what could have been a damaging crisis into a brand opportunity.
While Farren admits she was initially “incredulous” at the suggestion, she says it is testament to the strength of KFC’s relationship with Mother and shows the brand is confident in its identity. The company took a similarly self-mocking tone for a full-page print ad last year, admitting its fries were “letting the side down” after receiving a tweet complaining the “entire world” dislikes them. KFC took the criticism on board and pledged to change the recipe, showing it takes customer feedback very seriously.
Gareth Helm
UK CMO, McDonald’s (for work at ZPG)
A technology-savvy marketer who has just moved from Zoopla owner ZPG to McDonald’s, Gareth Helm has an inherent sense of building marketing teams to meet modern demands. As CMO of ZPG’s property and comparison division for the past four years, he has continued to drive Zoopla’s dominance in the online property market. Despite new challenger entrants, the platform has managed to regularly exceed 50 million monthly visits and has 92% prompted brand awareness.
With a career spanning 29 years, Helm started out at Unilever in 1990 and has since held senior marketing roles at some of the UK’s best known brands, including Nestlé, Mars, Innocent and MoneySuperMarket.com. Despite never working for a fast-food brand previously, Helm’s wealth of experience across challenger brands and global giants will prove useful at time when McDonald’s needs to innovate. Prior to leaving ZPG, Helm worked with new owner Silver Lake Partners to reorganise the marketing teams and review business priorities, which led to the creation of two separate marketing teams to cover property and comparison separately.
Kenny Jacobs
CMO, Ryanair
Kenny Jacobs is a great believer in taking a “common sense approach” to marketing, which is what he has been doing since joining the low-cost, no-frills airline in 2014. Prior to his arrival, the company did not have a marketing strategy, instead choosing to focus solely on sales. Jacobs’ biggest success has perhaps been in making it possible to mention customer service and Ryanair in the same breath.
The company, notorious for its brusque approach to customer experience, has seen great gains since adopting new approaches to service, including creating an in-house customer service team. He has also been driving the company’s Always Getting Better strategy, which sees Ryanair offering consumers a range of more targeted additional products such as holidays, transport, car hire, concert tickets and destination activities, which is helping to boost revenues. Jacobs has extended the Ryanair offer while simultaneously squeezing costs, claiming the airlines spends considerably less on advertising per passenger than its competitors.
Amber Kirby
Director of brand and customer experience, Eurostar
(for work at Virgin Holidays)
At Eurostar, Amber Kirby has set out to establish a new data and insights team, new segmentation model and new era of customer experience. Before that, for Virgin Holidays, she managed to capitalise on the considerable brand equity Virgin has built up in travel. Kirby collaborated with Virgin Atlantic CMO Claire Cronin (who was also a predecessor at Virgin Holidays) on a joint ad campaign to build on the combined strength of the two Virgin properties. She also helped Virgin Holidays achieve its second-bestever peak sale.
Under Kirby, the CRM team at Virgin Holidays delivered substantial value through focusing on email as a communication tool. It saw an uplift of several million pounds from the channel, while sending around 22 million emails a year. On top of this, AI-optimised campaigns increased awareness by 66% and created a 33% increase in web traffic. Kirby also set up a traffic light system to help LGBT+ travellers see the destinations likely to be most welcoming of the community and those to avoid.
Carolina Martinoli
Brand and customer experience director, British Airways
For a brand to be successful, it is often a case of going back to its essence to understand how deeply it resonates with customers. Carolina Martinoli is mining all that made BA great for its 100th anniversary. Over the next five years, the company is putting a multibillion-pound investment behind customer experience, which ranges from upgrading cabins and check-in technology, to on-board meals.
With flight delays sometimes unavoidable, Martinoli recognises that delays in compensation can add insult to injury, so BA has launched a “streamlined compensation” process to help people claim for cancelled flights. This, plus the Premium Transfer Drive service, which ensures customers make their connecting flights, is one of the pillars of her push for improved customer experience. She is also developing metrics that measure customer emotion to drive action from the brand. Customer experience is Martinoli’s watchword, having joined BA from Iberia, where she redesigned the airline’s customer experience and increased its satisfaction score by 27 points.
Hannah Squirrell
Customer and marketing director, Greggs
Greggs’ marketing stands out from the crowd under the leadership of Hannah Squirrell. The brand’s vegan sausage roll took the UK by storm earlier this year, with a viral video campaign resulting in a massive uptick in sales and a nomination for Brand of the Year at the Marketing Week Masters awards.
With a clear focus on the breakfast sector, Greggs grew sales by 7.2% during the 2018 financial year. Like-for-like sales rose by 2.9% as the bakery chain opened 149 stores, taking its total to 1,953 nationwide. This year, Greggs expects to open an additional 90 to 100 locations. The bakery chain has become known for cheeky festive marketing, and in 2018 launched its first Christmas gift range of doughnut socks and sausage roll phone cases. The company also released a gifting bot, allowing friends to send each other tasty treats via mobile. As well as her commercial and marketing success, Squirrell is an active participant in Greggs’ community and health-based initiatives.
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hOME
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meet the judges
meet the judges
methodology
methodology
analysis
analysis
TOP100 hOME
TOP100 hOME
meet the judges
meet the judges
methodology
methodology
analysis
analysis
The growing appeal of second-party data
FURTHER READING
Bringing brands
back into line
Three ways to make email marketing fit for the future
Three ways to make email marketing fit for the future
The Future of the CMO/CIO Relationship
Striving to serve today’s connected customer
The Business Case for Customer Journey Mapping
From Marketing Week's 'Intelligent 1:1 Customer Journeys', sponsored by Salesforce
From Econsultancy