Marketing Director - Martine Ainsworth-Wells

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 marketers job is managing their companies 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?

I’m Martine Ainsworth-Wells and I’m the director of marketing at Visit London.

What is Marketing?

So marketing is understanding what consumers want, finding the right product and selling it to them.

What attracted you to this career?

Marketing is a fantastic industry to work in because you get to work with lots of different people, people who are creative, people who have fantastic ideas that inspire you to have fantastic ideas and you get to work within an industry which is part of the fabric of our everyday life; we all watch TV, we all read newspapers, we all consume products, that’s what we do every day and you can be part of that Industry.

What does your job involve?

My job in its simplest form is to get people to come to London, to get people to come from London,  from the rest of the UK and from all over the world and take a short break or a long vacation here in the city.

We need to understand why people travel and there are many different reasons why people travel and they differ from country to country. Americans like to travel because they like to experience heritage and culture that they don’t have at home. Europeans like to travel because they really enjoy experiencing new cutting edge fashion and music. So firstly you have to understand why people like to travel and then understand how to communicate with them. Our marketing programmes run around the world but we talk to different audiences using different media so we use radio advertising in some markets, online/print advertising in different markets to communicate to different groups.

What do you do on a typical day?

I guess I’ll get up in the morning and the first thing I’ll do is check my emails because based in London is a fantastic base because you can talk to Asia in the morning and North America in the afternoon, so I will have received a whole load of emails overnight while I’ve been asleep from our Asia markets so I normally spend the morning on the way to work responding to those before they head off to bed.

Then I’ll come to work normally deal with emails, have stakeholder meetings, being a publicly funded organisation as you can imagine we have a whole platitude of different stakeholders, political, commercial, so I’ll have meetings with those, and generally engage with our advertising agencies and plan campaigns, liaise with the team, make sure they understand what they’re doing, what their remit is and occasional I will be travelling in or out of the country.

Describe the process of your work?

So let me give you an example of a new market that we thought we’d discovered and how we actually went about running a marketing campaign in that country.

So last year we noticed that more Australians were starting to visit London. We hadn’t actually run any kind of marketing activity in that country at all but we realised that visitors were starting to come and in higher numbers than previously so we sat down and looked at the demographics of the customers that were starting to come from Australia and decided that we could probably go prod that market a little bit more and get more of them to come.

So we sat down with our advertising agencies and decided that we needed to come up with different advertising than we used in other countries to talk to these visitors. Australian visitors are typically over 55, they tend to come on a package tour and they tend to like to stay here for a long time, 2 to 3 weeks, which is very unlike other visitors who come to London who stay for a day or maybe up to 5 days. So we had to come up with a very different way of talking to them.

So first of all we sat down with our media buying agency and looked at the kind of media that those 55 year olds and above consumed. How did they get their information about travel, what magazines did they read, what TV stations did they watch, and planned a media programme that would actually communicate with that audience.

We then sat down with our advertising agency and looked at what kind of messages did we think this audience wants, what kinds of things will they be excited by what will they be motivated by. Then we looked at how they actually buy their holidays. Do they buy online or with travel agents? We found out that they went to travel agents so we then had to put in a communication programme into place which talked to travel agents and explained what’s so great about London, the kinds of things that your customers might like to hear.

We then looked at the media landscape from a public relations point of view and looked at the media that we needed to engage with and perhaps invite to London to showcase London and report back from London to that particular market so we covered off a whole serious of individual projects which culminated in our first ever Australian marketing campaign this year.

What are the speicialisms within your industry?

Marketing has a huge breadth of opportunities within it.  You might be really interested in market research for example so that is the bit where you sit down and understand what consumers want and why they buy products.  You look at statistics and you analyse information, you perhaps run your own surveys and pull all that information together and define the profile of who the customer is and what they actually want. You can also work perhaps in the creative side, so once you have decided who your customer is, how are you going to communicate with them, what type of advertising, what kind of pictures should you use, what kind of stimuli should you use to actually get that customer to buy that product.  There is also product development so right we know they like toothpaste, but what should that toothpaste taste like, what should it look like and then how to advertise it.  Then more defined disciplines for example brand management sits in the marketing portfolio and brand management is really about not just a visual identity and a logo but what that logo stands for and ensuring that every single person in the organisation lives and breaths those values and that ethos.  So there are lots of differing jobs within marketing it is not just about getting a budget and making some adverts and putting them on television.

Interviewer: As a marketing director do you oversee all of that, do you oversee a little bit of that?

As a marking director I oversee everything within that portfolio so I would oversee brand management all of out publishing remit right through to the campaigns and the advertising campaigns that we run across all of out markets.

What's the difference between Marketing, Media, PR and Advertising?

Marketing is all of those disciplines encompassed in one umbrella so marketing is everything from understanding everything your consumers want, finding an audience, coming up with some method to communicate with them and delivering that communication. 

Advertising is just one part of that process, so advertising is the release of an advertisement on radio, an advertisement on a publication or an advertisement on television and the creation of that actual advertisement.  Media is about the channels in which you put that particular advertising so understanding the media landscape and buying the media, so buying a 60 second spot, a page in a publication or an online advertisement, so buying of the media. 

Public relations is about  getting free editorial coverage within a newspaper, within radio, within television by talking to journalists and persuading them that you have got something very interesting they may wish to cover their pages, which are currently empty and need filling so your job as a public relations expert would be to persuade the journalist to write about your particular product or destination or service.

What are the best bits about your job?

I think working for London it is one of if not the best product in the world that you could possibly have to market and advertise. So that alone is motivation to get out of bed in the morning and promote this fantastic city.  I haven’t reached Groundhog Day yet and I don’t feel I probably will with this job because London is constantly changing so there is something different to promote every day and we are discovering new markets everyday as well.  New people are discovering outbound travel they are finding they have the money to be able to travel, we are finding mechanisms to communicate with those people and advertise to them and it gives me an opportunity to learn about a whole new culture and a whole new way of engaging with a different country.

What are the worst bits about your job?

I don’t think there are any bad parts, the only thing I would say is challenging about this particular job is I don’t think I am ever going to finish it, it is a never ending task. There simply isn’t enough time in the day to do everything that we could possibly do.

What has been your greatest achievement?

I think from a delivery point of view I feel I really do something which really does benefit Londoners, tourism is a huge industry for London it employees about 280,000 people it is 10% of the value of London economy so maintaining visitors coming into London means that Londoners keep their jobs and hotels can maintain their staff, restaurants, cafes, bars can also maintain their staff too.  So it is a huge industry and I feel when I come to work every day I am not lining some shareholders pocket I am actually keeping people in employment  and I am ensuring they have a good livelihood, so that alone makes me feel great.

Any regrets?

When I was 18 I probably had some well defined goals, I think at that age you want to kind of map out your life to your early 30s and I would say, bin those, don’t worry if you don’t achieve them, if you do then great but be open to being blown around a bit.  You know if a storm comes through and blows you off course it is for a reason just go with it, just go with the flow and see what happens.

What is the pay like and are there any perks?

I think marketing as a profession overall is probably challenging in terms of pay and salary.  A profession such as lawyer, doctor clearly has higher earning potential than anyone working in marketing profession but I think there are many perks working in marketing because you can achieve something overnight you can see something happen overnight, you can run a piece of advertising and actually see people purchase or engage in your product so it is very easy to get some tangible benefits to actually feel good about what you do.  In my particular area I guess within the tourist board, which is essentially what we are, we are public sector funded and public sector funded roles aren’t generally as competitive as those in the commercial world.  But they come with other benefits so they tend to find that public sector pension schemes are much better, they are the gold standard pension schemes as opposed to private companies who are tending not to offer as many benefits with pension schemes or you have to go and sort out your own.  With travel and tourism clearly travel and an opportunity to see the world is a fantastic perk which not many jobs and roles can offer.

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

It is not in the slightest bit structured at all, I have a contract which says I work 9.30 to 5.30  but  I can’t every remember working 9.30 to 5.30 obviously we have markets in Asia that we are in contact with very early in the morning and then markets in North America who are just getting up at lunch time, who we are talking to over the afternoon and well into the evening.  I think if I was selling something that I didn’t really love and cherish I would find that a bit more challenging but I am so passionate about the city and the people that I don’t really mind working long hours and travelling on weekends, I see it as part of my vocation in life.

Is there much in the way of travel?

In London I travel quite a bit, we have stakeholders across all 33 boroughs so I probably know London a lot better than I would had I just lived here and commuted to work every single day.  So lots of travel around London and lots of travel around the rest of the UK and we have 10m customers from the UK every year and about 155m day trippers so United Kingdom is a really important market.  Just like any country in the world just how they behave and react to advertising does actually differ around the UK as well, so I may travel to a focus group in Manchester and sit with potential visitors to London and try and understand what they might be interested in visiting.  We also work very closely with tour operators and travel agents around the UK as well to make sure they understand what is new in London and what is happening in London and what they can sell on to their customers too and that really applies globally.  So I travel across Europe and again will go and speak to customers and speak to travel agents and tour operators and understand what they need and how they can better sell London.  I have travelled as far afield as Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, right through Asia to Australia so maybe Africa is maybe the only place I haven’t been on official work business.

Do you have to be based anywhere in particular?

I don’t think you have to be in a big city I think you can work remotely, I think technology allows us to work remotely.  Certainly if I am on an oversees trip I can still do my job in that particular market.  I think one of the beauties about a city like London is there is so much related industry here already, creative industries in London are very, very strong and this is where the choice is.  If you physically want to go and interact with media owners, radio stations, television channels, advertising  agencies, PR agencies, consultants, they do tend to gravitate towards big cities, so I think if you really want to be in touch then you need to be in a big city like London but you can temporarily step away from that.

What is the working environment like?

If you were to step into our office you would probably feel like you had stepped on to any London street, it is very representative of London essentially so we don’t particularly have a dress code, I am sure somewhere in the HR policy there is a dress code about not wearing bikinis to work  or something but generally people come to work in a dress that they feel represents London the city and what they promote so there isn’t anyone naked running around the office or we don’t have to wear suits other than for a formal business occasion.  Are there more men than women?  I would say it is quite balanced, my team are all girls, I have 20 people, it is all girls for no reason other than they were the best interviewed candidates.  Our digital team are mostly guys because they were the best candidates so it is about 50/50 and a really wide age group as well so young and senior people working in the organisation.

How did you get into your job?

For this particular role I didn’t have to have any statutory requirements or degrees I certainly didn’t have any experience in tourism but I had plenty of experience in marketing and that experience had been built up.  When I graduated I started to work for radio stations, media owners, I have worked for newspapers, then I moved into the agency world so I took the middle ground so to speak, worked for agencies then came client side.  I think certainly the person who was recruiting me at the time was very interested in the breadth of experience I had had across the marketing mix so I understood what media owners wanted and what radio stations and newspapers wanted and what they could offer, I understood how agencies worked and therefore I was probably reasonably well placed to start looking at how this organisation wanted to market itself.

Interviewer: So to get into marketing do you need a particular degree or can you enter it with any degree?

I think you can enter marketing with any degree I think it helps to have some kind of vocational experience before you start looking for work.  When I was doing my degree, I spent two summers during the three year degree programme working at radio stations for free, I just phoned up and asked if I could get some experience and that essentially got me my first job at a radio station because I had that  experience so I guess I would encourage anybody who wanted to get into the field who didn’t have it within a qualification to get some experience no matter where or how, just get some experience within media or marketing.

What's the application process like?

Certainly from a client side the bigger companies and global corporations do have graduate schemes which I would encourage anyone to have a look at what those graduate schemes are because many chief executives and marketing directors have actually come that route through.  Joining the grad scheme it is a great way to actually get your first step on the ladder but clearly that is with big global corporations who can actually put that kind of a structure in place, if you are interested in working in marketing from a less global corporate perspective then I would encourage getting some work experience and just working summer holidays or weekends for free, it’s the best way to learn.

What are the key skills required for your job?

I think you have got to enjoy consuming media for a start off, you have to understand the media landscape, if you don’t like watching television, reading newspapers, looking at websites, understanding how mobile phones work, if that really doesn’t interest you, you are not going to like marketing because those channels are the ways we communicate with people and if you don’t understand them or don’t like them or are not interested in them you don’t have a television, I would say don’t bother.

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

I would recommend people be honest about the skills they don’t have and be honest about those they do.  When highlighting the skills they don’t have to explain why they might not be on their resume right now but they actually want to learn them and they see the role they are applying for as a great opportunity to learn within that organisation.  I get so many CVs sent to me where you can blatantly tell this person can’t possibility have had the experience they are putting on their CV; I would rather someone be honest.  I am not a great fan of recruitment agencies who are economical with the truth because you can see right through it and you know that a 20 year old graduate has not had the experience that a 30 year old has had in the industry so be honest, be up front and demonstrate you are willing to learn.

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

I think it depends which part of marketing you are working for so if you are working in marketing for perhaps a radio station or media owner, you can move through very quickly, the turnover is quite high so you can move through quickly.  Within advertising agencies it is more of a formal process I think, not necessarily in terms of application more of a formal process in terms of the rungs of the ladder and what you need to achieve in order to be able to move from an account executive to an account manager and account director and move through.  The same on the creative side as well demonstrating your breadth of experience and your portfolio which you have worked on will help you move through.  Then from a client’s side, again depending on the size of the organisation, if it is a global corporation there will be quite a structured programme perhaps a graduate training scheme through the marketing team that you will be able to work on.  Smaller companies like ourselves with about 100 people you have great opportunities to move around the marketing team and work on different projects just because you are already here and we tend to like to offer opportunities to people who are already here in the organisation.

Instead of dealing with a partner such as British Airways at a very junior level you are probably dealing with a vice president in the organisation and in overseas markets so the responsibility becomes a lot higher and you are responsible for delivering more; the more senior you are the buck stops with you essentially.  With a position like mine, I am responsible for all delivery against our marketing budgets but that is quite exciting as well.

Where do you see the industry going?

I think the hotspots for marketing are really trying to predict the marketing channels of the future.  Everybody is talking about digital technology and is the future but it is changing on a daily basis.  A year ago we were all talking about Facebook and interactivity websites and this was the future, that has continued to evolve as well so I think digital medial is definitely a hotspot but I think it has gone beyond that, I think what we are seeing now, certainly within travel marketing, is that consumers and potential visitors are no longer going to be persuaded by my advertising as the official visitor organisation for London, they want to know what people who have been to London think about London and whether they access that information digitally or that we provide case studies and testimonials, they want to hear what other people have experienced in London and whether they like it or not, they are simply not relying on the marketeers word anymore and I think we need to start taking that more into account and utilise and understand that more.

Is there scope for movement during or after this career?

I would hope so, I hope I have gathered a lot of skills through marketing job, a lot of people who don’t work in marketing look at our profession and say “oh you simply get given a huge budget, so you get given a million pounds and you employ an advertising  agency and you go and spend it”.  It is not actually as simple as that as I found out when I started working in the industry.  You are not only responsible for that budget, making sure your advertising campaigns will work, but you have to engage with a whole series of stakeholders in that process.  In my case they are Political with a capital P, not a small p, that is an experience and a skill set which I think is very valuable to future employers who might look at my resume and say “here is someone who has got a very deep understanding of how the political system works in a major city, that is quite interesting”.  Where that might take me I have no idea right now but I think anybody who is working in marketing should look at what sits around the outside and what the macro sphere they are existing in and make sure they put those skills on to the CV and make sure they value them and make sure the wider context in which they have worked.

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

Obviously there is plenty of marketing collateral and websites, whether it be Marketing, Marketing Week, Brand Republic, Campaign, just to keep in touch with whose doing what, what the innovations in media are, I think generally consuming media is a good thing to do to make sure you are keeping up with what this weeks free newspaper is that they are handing out at the tube station, make sure you are indulging in radio stations, checking out new websites just keeping across where media is going, I think that is the best training ground to be honest.

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

I would probably have done a different degree I would probably have done a degree in geography and I would probably be a volcanologist, I would be digging around volcanos, something completely different, that is what I would be doing.

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