Marketing Manager - John Beasley

Marketing is defined by their Institute as ‘the management process that identifies, anticipates and satisfies customer requirements profitably’. To you and me that’s the department of a company which helps it deliver the right product, in the right place, at the right time, at the right price. A marketer can find themselves involved in any process that helps achieve this whether it be conducting market research groups, devising new products, designing new packaging or coming up with innovative new distribution channels or ways of selling their product.

A large part of a marketer's job is managing their company's overall brand and those of its products or services. As a result marketing departments often work very closely with Advertising, Event and PR agencies. The benefits of working agency side or as a marketer (client side) are hotly debated and it is quite common for people to switch between the two. From what we saw the big plus of an agency is the breadth of experience you are able to gain quite quickly by working across multiple clients. You also get to focus on the part of the communications mix you most like. The benefit of client side is that you get a much more in depth understanding of your business and a broader understanding of marketing communications. Being involved in every element of campaigns also means you’re able to have a more tangible impact on the success or failure of them.

Salaries vary quite a bit depending on the size of the company you work for but typically an entry level marketing executive would be in the low 20’s. A marketing manager would be in the £40-60K range and a Marketing Director £60K plus.

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is John Beasley and I am Marketing Manager for Red Bull.

What is Marketing?

So marketing is the arm of the company that is responsible for creating a desire for the product, for communicating the product benefits and for working across a number of levels.  So on a large scale making sure there is a general awareness of the product at a much lower scale maybe at grass roots level that there an understanding of what it does and the role it can play if it is a functional product and finally find the most interesting and exciting ways for a consumer to be able to engage with the brand.

What attracted you to this career?

I came from an advertising agency previously so I was already in the field of marketing in the advertising world and I guess from the work I had done there I became more interested in the broader disciplines available in marketing and this career was the opportunity to have more of a role to play within the communications architecture of the brand and actually to get involved in all aspects of marketing rather than just purely advertising.

Interviewer: So why initially advertising?

Advertising purely for me was the thing I was most excited about, it was the thing I talked most lucidly about adverts with my friends.  I loved the strategy and the thought process and I loved the detail and the actual length at which you would go to to make people thoroughly understand and offer them an interesting and attractive product in the most beautiful way possible. That is what interested me into the industry and the more I looked into it the more I found there was no such thing as day to day, it isn’t routine, one day you will be out researching, one day you go from researching what lorry drivers tend to keep in their cabins to having to head down to Dorset to purchase an old mark III Bentley for another client; it provided such a diversity and kept life interesting.

What does your job involve?

So, over the course of the year, Red Bull will hold a number of events, some will be small scale, some of which will be national events such as the Air Race or the Red Bull Flugtag and then beyond that we will have an advertising campaign which will run throughout the whole year.  Then we will also be doing a number of small scale events, snowboarding events, surfing events and other activities.  So my responsibility is to look after the campaigns for the events for any partners we work with how we integrate with them, also responsible for how the brand is reflected online and any community activity we do and then I also play the role in the event team organising the events purely from the perspective of how Red Bull is represented.

What do you do on a typical day?

I will spend a lot of time talking direct to agencies or talk to my team about what agencies have produced for them and give them some direction on where they should take it or what deal is working or not working.  I will talk to our international team about what new developments they have made, any products they would like us to follow or any partners they would like us to talk to.  Also I spend a lot of time meeting and talking to current partners or future partners.  We work for example on the Air Race, we work very closely with AG and with Visit London and with Kiss FM and we spend a lot of time understanding how the relationship will work best.  We work on the principle of not being over promotional so we are always looking more for a credible integration of role with our partners so it is as much as what we can do for them as what they can do for us so really involves working closely with them.  As I say with events, working on events it is important to see how a number of them have done around the world and see what learnings we can take, so I do travel quite a bit to Air Races in other countries and the Flugtag that has happened in other countries, so I go and see that.  Then finally a lot of what we do is find a lot of opportunities, whether that is new event we can support, new opinion leaders we can help talk about the brand or new technology to help us integrate our message in whatever media they happen to be in.

What are the speicialisms within your industry?

Within Red Bull I guess we are quite different from a lot of other marketing departments, typically you would have a marketing executive and a market analyst or market researcher that is looking at the day to day how the brand is responding, what people think of it and what they think of particular promotion and the like, up to marketing manager who is responsible for different projects campaigns and working across a much broader remit across the company up to marketing director who is responsible for marketing responsibilities as a whole and the business and all budgets set and reporting back to the board.  Within Red Bull it is kind of different because out marketing department is quite large and broken down into brand and planning so that is your more brand management side of it which is responsible for the research planning of any project we do and then researching the effectiveness of them and then also delivering the creative.  Then you have also got the events so event marketing, that is looking at new event ideas and actually delivering them working with our project managers and also external project management agencies.  Then you have sports marketing managers and athelete managers who look after athelletes who we sponsor, look after their careers look after projects they might like to work on, and the sports marketing manages will work with governing bodies work with sports teams around the country and help them understand how they can use Red Bull and how it can work as part of a conditioning and training scheme.  Then we have culture managers who look after our interests in film, music, fashion, art, they will work with what we call opinion leaders who could be celebrities, or fashion designers or they could be graffiti artists, we have got students and team marketing managers who look after our student marketing programme any team related marketing we do so there is a broad remit across the department depending on whether you want to be in involved in marketing sampling more experience side of it, campaigns or planning.

What are the best bits about your job?

I love events, I think having worked in advertising before, events are kind of like our shoot days they are really exciting you are up at five or six in the morning and you don’t finish until three the following morning and you are on a high the whole time.  It is really exciting, particularly working on things like Hot Air Race, where you are so close to the action and you get a unique behind the scenes perspective and that gives me a real buzz.  Then the opportunities that are afforded for working for Red Bull are incredible, we get such unique access, we do the behind the stage area at so many gigs and concerts you get exposed to all that, you get exposed to new music scenes, snow-boarding events in Switzerland to going to Silverstone for the British Grand Prix it is such a broadness and diversity, it keeps you on your toes.

One of the best bits of my job and probably the hardest to deal with is the sense of reward you get at the end of a campaign.  So we will start our business planning really early in April or May to plan for 2009 activities so the team will set out really clear objectives and brief that to agencies of the likes.  Then you obviously review at the end of it and look back whether you have achieved those goals and it is so rewarding to see the direct impact of what your activity had, to see what campaigns work, to see when you use a particular media, whether you used online verses mobile to see what impact that had is obviously really rewarding.  Obviously at the same time it can be quite crushing because you don’t always achieve your goals and there are obviously goals to be learnt but obviously if I have briefed an agency to deliver something they will deliver it to the best of their ability against the brief I have set, so they will achieve all the goals I have set out for them even though I won’t have achieved them ultimately.  So you are so much closer to it and you do get to see it and share in the result and the achievements you do make and at the same time be prepared that not everything works and one of the strengths about Red Bull it is a culture that we accept that people will make mistakes and the only thing is you have to learn from them and you have to use that influence that you do next year, so you are allowed to make mistakes but just not twice.

So it is a really good thing to do though and one of the things I missed about agency side is, you see it when agencies pitch they have never done a campaign which didn’t work and you know that isn’t true but as far as they are concerned they did exactly what they were asked to do and they did it so it did work to an extent but whether that is the complete picture is very unlikely.

What are the worst bits about your job?

As with all jobs you cant just go ahead and do things there are a lot of detail in everything we plan and produce which can be quite frustrating because for example when we did the air race last year we were managing 44 agencies which meant changing two laws and working with four local area councils.  Obviously you are very excited what that event can deliver but that is not to say that everyone else is on the same page as you so it requires a lot of patience and you can’t skip the documentation you can’t skip detail, if you need to submit a 60/70 page document in triplicate then that is what you have to do, and if you make a single mistake that document is invalid so with event planning a lot goes into it.  So that can be probably the least exciting part of the job rather than the worst.  Then you can spend months and months producing and planning it and developing a really nice campaign and then the smallest thing can really upset it.  We had a really nice ad for Flug Tag which used the music from Top Gun and everybody was really excited about it but at the last minute it turned out it hadn’t been submitted to the people who own the rights to the film and they weren’t happy for it to be used so we had to pull it off air.  So there are disappointments as well.

What has been your greatest achievement?

Without a doubt the one that stands out most is a project we did last year called Faces of Charity.  Essentially we were looking to do a project with Formula One, our Red Bull racing team which would help people to get closer to the team, be a much greater part of the Formula One world, which is famously exclusive and really hard for people to get into and at the same time we also wanted to support a new charity we had launched which is called reach for life, supporting spinal injuries.  So it was quite a dry project to develop with a lot of restrictions you can’t do a lot in Formula One, so we basically came up with the idea of getting everybody on to the car, most formula one teams are renowned for having their cars covered in sponsors logos, and we came up with the idea of switching that on its head and rather than having the sponsors’ logos it be covered in the people supporting it and so we set out to get as many people on the car as possible and by doing so raised a million pounds for Wings for Life.  So that was a nice goal to start with but actually persuading the owner of Red Bull and the owner of the very professional Red Bull racing team that it would be a good idea was quite some feat and that is probably the thing I am most proud of actually, was persuading them.  The huge coverage it got then standing in the garage as they drove out and seeing everyone’s faces as they rolled out was just incredulous they could believe a Formula One team would do something that was that inclusive that sort of charitable was really exciting and thrilling.

Any regrets?

Yes and no, I wouldn’t in as much everything I did contributed to where I am now and I would want to change that for the world.  When you look back over your career, and I have often looked back to university it almost that simple that I wanted to be in advertising and went hell for leather and applied and did everything I could to get work experience and get everything I could to get a job in an advertising agency and was fortunate to get accepted and then I moved agencies where I thought would best service my career in terms in working with really good brands and an exciting working environment.  It was probably at my last agency when I started looking at my career in terms of what I wanted to get out of it, what I wanted to achieve long term which then influenced my decision to try and get a job at Red Bull.  I think if I could have done anything differently I would love to have had that thought much earlier and thought right “what do I want long term for my career and what steps do I need to do and what companies do I need to work at that are going to help me achieve those goals”.  It is easy to say with hindsight and maybe would have led me to the same place, who knows.

Why did you move 'Client-side'?

It is exposure to the huge breadth of business, partnerships, agencies, that client side work, that marketing side work with it is only now that I appreciate what a small part of my clients’ life I was.  You found constant frustrations thinking I can’t believe they are not taking my calls, I can’t believe that even though they are spending this much money why am I not the most important part of their day?  It was appreciating the huge volume of the number of calls I get in a day from the people who want sponsorship, who want me to support their events, who want me to advertise publications.  There are a huge number of opportunities that come up all of which are interesting and we make a principal that we remain professional and respond to everybody’s call so it does put a restriction on your time but it made me appreciate that there is a huge diversity of agents they work with and work that needs to be done and I don’t think I could get that opportunity agent side.  On top of that I would say in terms of where I want to take my career, I wanted to run my own business, I don’t think I could ever do that by staying agency side even if it was to run my own agency I would still want to understand the clients’ perspective and I don’t think it is possible without working there.

What is the pay like and are there any perks?

It is hard to say, agency pay differs incredibly, I think it is fairly competitive to agency side, I would say the significant different is when you work client side you are part of something you feel an integral part of a larger goal which is for us to sell cans of Red Bull and everybody who works for the company is bound in by the same purpose and goal and as such you are bonused accordingly.  So even though I am not directly responsible for getting out and getting distribution and sales of the cans I get exactly the same target, bonus target, as someone who works in our sales team or someone who works in our finance team.  As a result you are all mutually responsible so you get a very significantly different bonus than you would if you were agency side, or from any agency that I have every worked for.

Interviewer: Tell me what the perks are like.

Well for me the perks are I get to work at events which I love doing, there is some great travel, our head office is in Austria so I will pop over to Austria a good eight to ten times a year, which is a stunning county.  We go away as a team four times a year and kind of time spend three days working and having fun.  I find it much more of a unified culture, in agencies, whilst you are one team you are still comprising all the teams that work on different clients and business so you don’t necessarily get to spend as much time together.  There is a lot of interaction and engagement with everyone who works in the marketing team because there are a lot of areas, for example I talk to a lot of agencies who spend a lot of time on mobile and digital aspects so they are responsible for our team and student marketing; I will work with them a lot, it might overlap a lot.  So the perks are diversity, it is getting to do so many different things, finally the one thing that stands out above everything else is you get to be an entrepreneur.  If you want to do something and you think it will service the goals and ends of your business objectives then you go ahead and do it and it is your responsibility and that singularly distinguishes it, everybody is solely responsible for delivering business objectives and as such you can be an entrepreneur.

How long is a working day and do you have to work out of hours?

It is very different from my previous life working in agencies which was very long hours, this is slightly different, it is more regular, it is more nine to five, some days if I have phone calls and meetings with Austria, I will be in at eight and if I have phone calls within US then they wont start until six, so those two kind of stretch the days.  Again there events in the evenings so they will go on until midnight but most of the time it is regularly nine to six working hours people come in at 9.30 if there is nothing immediate to start in the day but that is accepting that every month you have to commit one day weekend to working for the company if necessary.  Then after that any additional days you get recompensed for but if you work an event coming up you will work every hour available, you will be on sight by six and off sight before it gets light again so it is different.

Is there much in the way of travel?

There is a lot of travel, I will go to Austria a lot, go over to see our international team about any new areas new developments, particularly on the web and online in different communities side of it.  I went to Rome last year to see the Red Bull Flug Tag out there, I went to Abu Dhabi to see the Air Race.  I will take partners to Air Races; we took Channel 4 who produced the TV show and also do a lot of advertising around it, take those to the Air Races, so a lot of travel.  Also within the UK we have a lot of events, we are doing what we call small fires, which are basically scaled down events which might just be for students or could be for a particular scene such as surfing or skateboarding and we will do those to test them out and see what the reaction is and see if they are worth developing and growing into national scale events. So I will travel to a lot of those and I also travel to go and see our sales teams about what exciting projects we are up to and things they can talk to their customers about.

Do you have to be based anywhere in particular?

Doing my job in marketing?  I mean essentially Red Bull is based in London and our team is here so to do my job at Red Bull then I have to be here because this is the hub and this is where the teams who work all around the UK come in to.   That said we have regional marketing managers who are on the road represent different areas of the country.  So they will take larger event properties which I will develop and I will work with them to activate it in their local areas for example Flug Tag we did a large build showing how the Flug Tag machines are built, hopefully inspiring people, getting the press down giving them something to talk about.  So I work closely with regional managers, and we did that in five cities in the UK.  So to do my job at Red Bull it is important to do my job here to be based at the hub, but from a marketing perspective it is not quite so London focused, big companies are based all along the M4 corridor from here to Bristol and beyond so it depends on what business you want to contribute to and be part of.

What is the working environment like?

One of the things I enjoy most about the job is the working environment it is a very relaxed culture.  There is no specific dress code, my day dictates what I will wear, if I am going to talk to partners or look at how they are going to invest in our events then I will dress according, similarly if I don’t have any meetings and I am just looking at new ideals and new projects for us to work on and it is the summer, then it is totally fine for us to come in in shorts and flip flops.  So it is a very relaxed environment it is quite young culture here and the thing that is really great is you get people from loads of different backgrounds.  In my team, one of the guys worked in music, then Channel 4, then he worked in agency, one of the girls came from a law firm, you get people who have worked in PR firms, you get from nightclubs who have been sort of worked with celebrities, working as their personal assistants, right across to guys who have come straight from university and set up their own little projects and events at university who have just got that entrepreneurial attitude.  So it is a real mix of people it is probably slightly more girls that boys and is probably age range from about 23 to mid 30s, so I am probably one of the older ones

How did you get into your job?

I am going to guess that you don’t have to have a particular degree; I did theology and religious studies so that probably wasn’t clearly targeting the marketing and advertising industries.  I think it is more about a mindset and attitude.  I did theology for example because I was interested in the understanding and the way human beings act and think and have behaved culturally over the last how ever many thousands of years, so I guess that was why I went into that.  Actually it isn’t that different from the mindset of those people who actually go into advertising, I shared that goal to understand what it is that excites people and find ways to really develop insights that they will respond to and understand and that will meaningly resonate with them as an audience, so I guess that is what led me from my degree to advertising.  Thankfully the people I interviewed with were looking for a kind of a person a level of common sense, an intuitive, an entrepreneurial attitude rather than a specific degree.  That said I got a 2:1 in my degree, it don’t think if you don’t get a 2:1 you can’t get into an advertising agency but they were looking for people who had a level of aptitude in the work they had done.

What's the application process like?

I am not as familiar with that as I am with advertising but with Red Bull for example I know they do a fellowship scheme whether they take 25 people a year who then get posted to different countries around the worlds.  This is one of the first years they have done it so they are mostly Austrian and German students; we have got three working in the UK at the moment.  But in terms of Red Bull in the UK we have a student brand manager programme and are one of the first companies to do that and it is a really extensive programme around the UK.  It really gives you the opportunity to do as much or as little as you want and some guys are really on it and will organise their own events, they will be marketeers at their university and it is incredible and impressive and the ones that do the most and take advantages of the opportunities given to them, who do stuff off their own back, who don’t wait to be asked, they are kind of the ones that we find space for in our marketing team.  So there is the opportunity to become a student brand manager, a regional marketing manager and then gradually move up within that area.  Then as spaces become available we look to fill them either externally or with people within our own organisation.  So it is not a traditional graduate application process where you come in and train across different areas, but then Red Bull is not that kind of company, you have to learn is as you go along.

What are the key skills required for your job?

I think the key skills you need are really good strong communication skills, to be very open minded a lot of the time good ideas come from bad thoughts and bad thoughts start from bad ideas, so you have to be accepting and also understand that not everybody is above to communicate as clearly as they might like to, you have to be very patient.  Very good at communicating very good at listening and very good at organising people and processes, we are very focussed so there is no point doing something unless you have goal, you have targets, you have objectives and you have milestones along the way to achieve them.  So someone who is very focused, project focused, goal orientated, also someone who is lively who has got a point of view, who is energetic, you will take a lot of rejection people will disagree with you, a lot of what we do in the marketing department basically its all about spheres and influence you.  Basically you are rarely the budget owner, you will come up with ideas and you will need to get a budget from another team, could be a sales team, you could be from a project team for example the guys who are the budget holder for the air race or Flug Tag or from a whole different gammit but you need to position yourself in a way that you are respected, trusted and your point of view is held in a high enough regard that they will commit budget to it, so it is not about being arrogant pushy, bolshy with people you need to work closely, help people understand that there are key stake holders that you need to manage, so it is a combination of that; then it is always keeping your eyes open for the future.  The Austrians who set up Red Bull have lots of really funny phrases, so they will describe the ideal person as ‘bright eyes and clear mind’ and it is really funny that you can tell that with so many people that work here who are always open to new ideas and always excided that there could be a possibility, that there could be a better of doing it than the way they have done it in the past.  I guess that the final think I would say is the skills you need are self critical, you need to be constantly challenging yourself, every year we look at what we have done and no matter how good it is it is all about how could we do that better, how can we improve it and really pick and pick away at everything.  I think when I first came here I found that quite difficult, a lot of people always do, you feel that you yourself are being criticised whereas it is not that, it is just everything can be done better, everything can be improved.  Also, it is the kind of person who is excited at the prospect of finding a way of doing it that will really succeed.

What's your top tip for breaking into your industry?

I think the thing that stands out and I went through this on a recruitment process last year, I saw lots of CVs from people who had worked on amazing brands.  I think it is really difficult to be able to stand out on a CV and you have got to be able to bear in mind that the person reading is going to be looking at dozens of them so I think that even if you can go some way to get a measure of your personality across in your CV then you will stand out miles from the pack.  I know from my point of view I am always looking for that entrepreneurial attitude and mindset, I want people who have done things, who have got things off the ground themselves, who are self starters, who are very motivated, who can take projects and run with them and not need to be constantly pushed and encouraged and managed.  It is interesting that when you look at peoples CVs there are projects that you can see can run on their own you get a good measure for what kind of person they are so find some way to communicate your personality and that will help you stand out.  Just make sure there is at least one key area of your CV that shows truly something that you have done, because I think the classic thing you always get on CVs and it is really obvious for anyone that has been working in the industry for any length of time they know when you didn’t do that on your own, so people take responsibility for everything and you know as an account executive, for example you know they wouldn’t have had the responsibility of the project alone and wouldn’t have been solely responsible for a 20m budget for media planning and media buying and the creative as well as the TV production of an advertising campaign.  It is picking the more realistic things that will really show you as a person and what makes you stand out from the rest of the pack.

What's the career progress and how quickly can you move up the career ladder?

Marketing at Red Bull is a much flatter structure, with advertising agencies for example there is clear progression and you move up every couple of years.  Within marketing it is a very different structure they are not so hierarchical so only the marketing director has an assistant as a PA, you are responsible entirely for yourself, you kind of need to be pretty comfortable that you may be in the same role for a number of years, your pay will increase more with your responsibilities than with your job title.  That is actually similar to a number of job industries, so you are not going to progress as quickly because there are not so many positions but I don’t think that hinders your progression in terms of what you are exposed to I think there is just a broader remit for each job role so when you come in at the beginning three years down the line you will be doing a very different job and your pay will reflect it but you may not have moved up as many positions.

Where do you see the industry going?

I think it is one of the most interesting times, particularly for marketing for quite some time, when you look at the way it is moving beyond your traditional campaign, marketing is a mixture of events, obviously the more traditional advertising, non traditional stunts, experiential, sampling.  Then particularly digital with online, mobile, interactive, gaming all number of new platforms that are emerging so it is a really broad spectrum.  For me I find the most exciting thing at the moment is, we are doing a huge amount in the way of gaming and then translating that on to the online environment.  For me what I find most interesting is how you can take that in a sort of virtual online environment and replicate it off line or in the real world or vice versa, replicate real world experiences online.  So a lot of the time we look at the incredible ways in events we enable consumers to engage with brands in the most fun and playful way and see how we can replicate that online.  So someone who has a foot in both worlds who is excited by and understands true online and digital and how all those worlds will converge whilst at the same the same time understanding we are all people, we live in the real world not the digital world, just spend a lot of our time in the digital world so someone who is able to understand both is the one for me.

Is there scope for movement during or after this career?

When I first joined Red Bull I went to a company meeting a marketing department meeting and a couple of people had just left and the one thing that was highlighted to me was by our marketing director at the time was that we make no bones of the fact that Red Bull should be the most CV maker of anyone who works here’s career.  So there is no begrudging anyone who leaves as they have made the most of their time here. So my skill set has increased enormously since I have been here, which has been down to the huge number of things I have been exposed to from the business side of the company, you get much better exposure to develop new profit and loss sheets and doing analysis on that to more project management, understanding the enormous scale of what goes into organising an event through to actually cutting edge of mobile and online campaign type things so marketing has generally broadened my skill set and I still get to do the advertising part which I did before so it has just broadened my skill set even more.  I think the opportunities afterwards are far greater than when I arrived, whether that would be to continue to do this job at another company, I mean marketing is a broad skill set and can be applied to anything, any kind of business, I think that is one of the key things about coming to work for Red Bull, it broadens your horizons enormously.

What are the industry resources that someone interested in joining must know about?

Definitely, I read Campaign, Marketing Week and DMA and so I think there is a number of trade magazines, I don’t really look at industry blogs, although Marketing Sherpa and Marketing Vox are the two I do use from time to time, they are quite American focuses but they also give you a broad perspective of what people do in other countries.  For example everyone is looking at Korea because they are developing the new technology that brands can use so it is good to keep a broader eye on those.  Inspiration comes from everywhere I think it is maintaining a balance you could read every single trade magazine there is but still miss the point and we do a lot of projects here to make sure everyone who works here tries and keeps other areas of influence in their life they are constantly being inspired by other things, whether that means going to an exhibition or show or going to Crufts, which is one we did recently, there are loads of different things to show you the richness of life which should influence you and what you do, they influence your decision making and what you bring to your job.  So I would say some key trade magazines but actually there are a lot of other magazines and outputs out there that are really important to mould the way you think about the world and that is important too.  

If you weren't in this career, what would you be doing?

I think I would like to be a professional snow-boarder but i'm not good enough at snow- boarding, I always wanted to be TV presenter and I work with quite a few of them now and it is actually one of the hardest jobs in the world in terms of having to deal with the kinds of people you have to deal with.  So I would say teaching because my wife does that and I have never seen anyone get such a buzz from a job as she does and I think that is one I would like to do. 

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