Brand Project Director - Tim Davis

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 am Tim Davis and I’m a Brand Project Director for Added Value.

What is Marketing?

I think marketing is about the business of creating emotional bonds to a product or a service.  Consumer chose brand B because they make them feel the way they want to feel but from a marketing perspective it is really about what is it they want to feel and how do they feel about that what makes them feel like that and what can we do as marketeers that makes them feel like that.  So a consumer will choose Gucci because it makes them feel whatever way it makes them feel but working for Gucci it is all about trying to understand how it is they want to feel but actually how do we get them to feel like that but also how do we get other people to feel like that as well.

What attracted you to this career?

I think when I was at university, it went back a long way, my uncle was in advertising and I had always been interested in advertising messages, and I guess from watching TV or in the cinema or whatever, the advertising messages, why are you getting me to buy that particular produce, why am I loyal, what makes me loyal, why do I stand out from my friends, why do I want to stand out from my friends?  All those different thought processes about what makes people buy those things.  I did a placement while I was at university in an advertising agency in Paris, which was great fun, I thought advertising was what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go, it was bright lights, big city, kind of.  The creation of TV, certainly when you are at university and looking at that career was really interesting.  Having worked there it wasn’t quite for me, I wanted to get more behind the kind of process of why do people buy things, what is the wider campaign, advertising was a bit too specific for me I wanted to get to the broader spectrum and trying to get in to marketing was the really difficult thing for me, I got turned down by 90% of the big blue chip companies because I hadn’t been to the best university and didn’t have the best results, so it was really kind of difficult ten years ago to get into that area.  So I got into a smaller agency which actually in my opinion was the best way to do it, a small agency you can make your mark on the agency as opposed to you are just a number, just one of a hundred in a marketing team and I just worked my way from there, finding out what interested me, what didn’t interest me, working with clients made me think may be client side may be more for me, I want to get in there, get my sleeves rolled up and get stuck in so it was just trial and error for want of a better phrase, just getting in somewhere where you can spread your wings and kind of cut your teeth on what is there and my opinion the smaller agency or the smaller client side really helped me to do that.

What does your job involve?

It is a good question, almost everything to do with marketing, essentially our goal as an agency is to be the marketing inspiration behind iconic brands so essentially we are a bunch of creative problem solvers who deliver strategic solutions to a brands problem or challenge.

What do you do on a typical day?

A typical day is very varied, because of the nature of the work we do, we will be working with any type of brand from small to large but 50% of my day is made up of meetings and conference calls and the other 50% of the day is working very closely with the project team and doing a lot of thinking and doing but because of the nature of the business we spend a lot of time working in project teams internally trying to solve the problem that the client has given us and that is our ultimate challenge.  That is why clients come to us they have a marketing challenge, a marketing problem that they want solved and they come to us because we are the experts in our thinking.  They will come to us with any problem it is very dependent on the brand, but ultimately it is about repositioning their brands so the brand is not performing as well as it has done or they may be launching a new brand off the current brand or whatever it may be but ultimately our biggest challenge is to define that problem so a client may come to us and say this is our problem but once we get under the surface of that brand we find the challenge is very different or completely different to what they thought it was just because we are not as close as they are to the brands, so they obviously work on it day to day, where as we work across a huge number of different brands.   So we can actually look at their potential challenge and really work out what it is.

Interviewer: And then do you distribute that to a team and who is doing what?

We are made up of brand experts and also some research experts as well, so qualitative and quantitative experts so we have a broad spectrum of skills in the agency.  Depending on the nature of the project but we can pull all of those people into the team to really break down that problem and really find out what is at the core of it and it is finding that key insight that ultimately is this problem and how are we going to solve that problem and how are we going to give that client the actionable changes the actionable strategy to take it forwards.

Interviewer: So you don’t implement it you kind of give them the strategy and they go off?

Exactly, I think from my perspective coming from client side, originally that is where my frustrations is with brand consultancy the fact that we do a lot of thinking, we will implement that strategy we will pull it together and ultimately we do hand it over to the client and it is the client’s responsibility to go and implement that we will give them to tools the strategy to go and implement it but at the end of the day, most of the time it is not our responsibility to go and implement it.

Describe the process of your work?

Because we do work locally in the UK but also globally, I have done a project recently for a big telecoms provider buying up a lot of different networks around the world and trying to spread their brand footprint, trying to be an international or a bigger international brand, both for two reasons, for the consumer but also for the cost savings in a basic way internally. Very much about them buying the brands and them coming to us saying we have bought these different telecoms providers in local markets, we need to pull all of these brands into our parent brand we want to have that brand to have the same values or want the consumers in those local markets to really understand our parent brand but we want there to be a smooth transition that the consumers don’t then run away from the brand knowing that the brand they have been used to or loyal to is changing.  So that is one of the big global projects I have been working on recently and really understanding what makes a consumer tick and the different cultures and how to understand those cultures from a brand perspective.  One of the local projects based in the UK was a snacking brand to us and more specifically in the crisp category, they wanted to know how to refresh the category or how to make the brand appeal to a what they call a more premium consumer so those with slightly more income to spend on snacking.  They came to us wanting to know how do we redefine that market, how can we recreate a new brand that is going to really capture the imagination of that consumer be a premium brand they would spend a little more money on.  So we spent a huge amount of time understanding that category, understanding the consumer and really understanding what makes that category tick and going into a lot of detail with semiotics and finding out what do the different images mean, what do the different icons mean, what is it that people look for in store, a huge amount of research was done, we then did a lot of work with consumers themselves, so consumer panels, will this work, kind of taste tests, packaging tests really going into a huge amount of detail, really getting  down to the granularity of the industry of that category, and then came up with a specific brand, a completely new product that was packaged differently, that tasted differently, that had premium ingredients, which has been really successful, fantastically successful and it has almost created this theme of more premium snacking whether it be crisps or whatever it may be so the experience is hugely varied.

How long does a project generally last?

For the telecoms industry has been going on for 12 or 18 months so it is a hugely detailed process because of the nature of the global perspective of it they are constantly increasing their brand footprint.  But we then get pulled back in to look at that position and how do we bring it to life with the local market whereas the UK specific one was about four to six months with a team of about eight of us working on it all the time really trying to delivery it as soon as we possibly could.

What are the speicialisms within your industry?

I think the key ones are firstly a brand manager, who looks after a specific brand is ultimately responsible for the performance of that brand, the communication of that brand. The product manager who deals with the specific product knows that product inside out is kind of the world expert on that product from manufacture to implementation and a campaign manager is specifically targeted with looking after a campaign itself, managing that campaign, taking it to creative idea to implementation. Then you have the likes of ourselves, so the consultants, who don't work directly for the brand, who will come in and work on specific projects and define and redefine the strategy behind it. There are a huge number of job roles, again whether it is agency side you might be an account handler or a creative or whatever it might be, client side there are a huge number of roles, you might be a product manager or you might be head of advertising, so a huge number of roles. My view for someone coming in to marketing is find a role that you can be exposed to all of the different areas from the marketing mix, so whether it is advertising or direct mail or whatever it may be you just want to get as much exposure as you can so then you can choose a specific part of marketing that is of most interest to you.

What are the different roles in Marketing consultancy?

We probably have fewer roles than you would client side so consultancy you might be in different areas, you might be a research consultant, or a brand consultant and a lot of brand consultancies will have a lot of brand consultants within the agency.  There are less roles within a consultancy because we are not actually doing the implementation so we will recommend they do a direct mail campaign whatever, we will define their below the line strategy but ultimately the client normally has an agency that they will go to because they are a specialist in that particular field.

What's the difference between 'above the line' and 'below the line'?

Below the line is where the communication is one to one so it might be an email that is specifically tailored to you, specifically tailored with an offer that they know is relevant to you. Whereas above the line is one to many so it will be a broadcast media, it will be an advertising promotion that goes out to a huge number of people.

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

In my opinion advertising is communicating a product or service that already exists, whereas marketing is made up of a number of different elements but it is essentially the strategy, the thinking that goes behind creating that product, so it might be how much it is going to be sold for, what that product is, where that product has come from, is it an extension of another product, who is going to buy it, why will they buy it a number of different elements sit within marketing and advertising communicates that product. PR in my opinion is about word of mouth; it is about creating a buzz about a particular brand, product, service whatever it may be but definitely not using the traditional advertising as a communication tool. Media is essentially the culmination of all those different outlets that your advertising can be positioned through so it might be press, or a particular magazine or newspaper, but it is the culmination of all those different avenues that you can advertised through.

What are the best bits about your job?

I think being scarily passionate about and interested in brands, it's the ability to work across a huge variety of different brands so the huge Tesco's the biggest brands in the world right down to, some kind of pregnancy test brands, some male incontinence brands so everything, it is a real eye opener most of the time but it is a fantastic experience of working across lots of brands, it might be for six months it might just be for a month.  Rather than focusing on one particular brand day in day out we get to see how loads of different brands work and really get to know the people within them but get to know their challenges as well. 

Interviewer: Why do brands excite you?

I think it's the consumer at the end of the day, it is a huge buzz when you actually see a brand that does take our advice, does implement the strategy, the changes that we have made and you see it out there in the market place, you see the consumer maybe watching something or buying something, you know you were ultimately involved in perhaps changing someone's perception within that brand to being what is laid out in front of the consumer it is very exciting to see it played out and actually knowing that you challenged someone's perception internally to kind of benefit the brand.

What are the worst bits about your job?

I think the worst bits is as we have touched on you have got the gap between, we will define that strategy, but it is defining that strategy, but it's the gap of implementing that strategy as well, so it is very frustrating coming from client side where it was very much getting your sleeves rolled up, getting stuck in, actually delivering the strategy you have defined, delivering on a day to day basis, within consultancy you don't get as many opportunities to do that as you do client side but I think that is weighed up with the fact that you get to work on a whole load of different brands, but I think my biggest frustration is you had it over to the marketing director or whoever it may be, and there is that little thought in your mind is, are they going to take your advice, are they actually going to implement it, so that is definitely my major frustration.

What has been your greatest achievement?

I think a project that I am working on at the moment that involves a lot of international travel is repositioning an international beer, but it has been a really challenge because the client doesn't want to talk about their heritage, the provenance of where the beer comes from and 99% of the beers in the world absolutely sell them beers on the fact that it is from Turkey, or wherever it may be so we need to reposition this beer, we need to launch this beer and we will be launching it in the UK but without telling the consumer where it is from, which is a real challenge it really kind of stretches the grey matter but it has been great fun and continues to be a real challenge because it is not just your every day consultancy project.

Any regrets?

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, I don't know if I would do anything particularly different, I would certainly, at the start of my career be a lot more pushy, I wouldn't take no for an answer when I was trying to see people to get roles, I would be a lot more pushy and a lot more in their faces. I did a couple of things when I was trying to start on the career of writing letters to senior management of the big brands saying I want to come in and take to you and take you out to lunch and in hindsight I probably would have been a lot more pushy and turned up in the reception of Tesco and said right I want to talk to the marketing director because I want his advice or whatever it may be, so I think I wouldn't have take no as the answer as often as I did.

What is the pay like and are there any perks?

I think the pay is slightly better at the moment than client side, so if I were doing a similar role client side I would be getting paid slightly less than in consultancy but that gap is narrowing very quickly, we do get big benefits, I am part of a big agency network so there are good benefits and a good benefit package.  We don't have the bonuses that the finance and banking world will have so the bonuses in the marketing world, certainly from my perspective is very much come and have a beer, so that is pretty much it, we certainly don't get the big cheques that the banking guys do but the pay is definitely better than client side but the gap is getting narrower.

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

Again because of the nature of the work we do, it is quite a lot of international work that we have to accommodate the time lines and time frames and go along with that so the standard day I get in about 8.30 leave at 6.30 but we do do quite a lot of travel so you are sitting in your hotel room wherever you are working at strange hours of the day or night but certainly when we are based in London then it is 8.30 – 6.30.

Is there much in the way of travel?

I do get to travel quite a lot but it is kind of luck of the drawer which projects you work on, the more senior you become the more travel you do, again it will vary, because of the nature and with the agency being an international agency we have 25 odd offices around the world so we tend to do quite a lot of travel but the projects we tend to get will be more international than one country based.  The smaller agencies will work predominately in the UK, in and around the UK, whereas our expertise is working across countries and pulling all of that feedback into one central point.

Do you have to be based anywhere in particular?

I don’t think so, I think a lot of agencies are based in London but some of the leading agencies are based in and around Oxford and outside Cambridge so I think you need to be based in the city just for the nature of meetings so if clients are coming from abroad to the meeting they will tend to go to the main cities, but we are certainly can be home based as well you just need to be contactable on the phone so that clients and colleagues can get hold of you.

What is the working environment like?

It's a relaxed agency, with an average age of 30, early 30s so it is a young agency, there is a good vibe to the agency, we spend a lot of time talking to each other using our own experiences and expertise on different projects so it is a relaxed atmosphere, certainly not a formal dress code so kind of jeans and shirt or whatever you feel comfortable in.  With client meetings you have to match what the client dress code, but it is a relaxed informal, less relaxed than an advertising agency but certainly more relaxed than the stereo typical client corporate organisation.

How did you get into your job?

I didn’t get into marketing through the classical way,  I didn’t go through the graduate scheme for the likes of Mars or some of the blue chip companies so I worked for an agency straight out of university and got into client side organisations, I think I got the role out of my experience in the specific role that I have done rather than my stereo typical blue chip training, so I got a lot of varied experience from being with a small brand and I think you can get into the industry either way I think stereo typically ten years ago people had to be blue chip marketeers to get into consultancy but more and more they are looking for that specific experience rather than ten years of classical training.

Interviewer: So did you come into the agency by answering an ad?

I wend through a recruitment consultant I got bored and frustrated in my previous role and wanted to broaden my CV a bit more and thought consultancy would be a good way through to doing that but I didn’t know enough about consultancy.  I think there are some client side marketeers that see consultancy as a black art that nobody really knows what do, you get paid far too much.  So I just wanted to find out what it was about and it was when I came in for interviews etc, met some of the team here and it was really interesting to meet them and find out what do rather than, you can’t tell an awful lot from the job description.

What's the application process like?

Again it completely depends on which element of marketing you want to go into I think you can go through the graduate scheme and do the full blue chip training or you can just do firing off letters to different companies just trying to get a foot through the door, you can do placements, whatever it maybe to get in.  I think my advice to someone trying to get into the industry is to get that experience, any kind of experience you can get, if you are at university would be go and get the student brown manager role, go and get the advertising role for local paper, whatever it may be but demonstrate you have an active interest in the marketing world, rather than thinking to a particular company to be able to get on in my career, it is having that real life experience that I think is hugely powerful.

What are the key skills required for your job?

I think from a consultancy point of view you need to have a good grasp of the thinking behind marketing so the theoretical side behind marketing but more importantly how to apply that to any given situation so we will get any challenge from our clients and you need to be able to use your knowledge and experience to be able to look at that problem in a particular way.  I think if it were somebody coming fresh into consultancy is very much have a brad range of experiences behind you, have a passion for brands, have an interest in brands and just be willing to develop that theory so know about marketing, know about the basics of marketing obviously you won’t be expected to know the full theory but a kind of real desire to learn.

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

I think my top tip is probably perseverance and don’t give in, I think careers in marketing are very sought after I think just don’t give up find new ways to do things, use your initiative to find creative ways to approach people just go and talk to people for the sake of talking to them, there is no harm in writing a letter to the marketing director of Tesco’s and saying I want to come in and talk to you, I want to take you out to lunch, I don’t want a job, I just want to get your advice on how you got into the industry, how you did it, what is different now, so it is using your initiative, you might not have the career behind you to get into the industry but people really do notice those that go at it in a different way whether it is a creative letter or a bright orange envelope, whatever it may be, just to stand out.  Because CV’s these days are very similar and you can do all sorts of different career choices, university choices or whatever it may be but it is finding that way to stand out whether it is a student brand manager role, even if it is just for three months just to show you are interested, you want to get real life experience as a student.

Again I think it comes back to experience but real tangible experience I think more and more people are doing business studies degree rather than languages, so it is becoming harder and harder to differentiate yourself amongst everybody else so I think if you can get those key experiences of real life marketing, whether it is a student brand manger, but just to demonstrate you are keen, have taken the initiative to meet with people and it may be that you just turn up and say I’ve met with five marketing directors of these brands this is what they said, this is what really interests me, I know this is the next big thing in marketing it is just showing initiative.

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

Again consultancy is very much you do come in and will learn that craft in that particular role so it is not the stereotypical you will do two years in a particular role and then move up the ladder, if you come in afresh you need to sit within that role, learn that craft, learn your skills and then develop from there.  What I want to do is get the experience from consultancy and then look to go back client side.   I want to get this string to my bow and look to go back to client side and then development the career from there.

My role at the moment is the day to day client management of that particular project, as you go up the business you have much more of an emphasis of bringing business in as well, so when you get up to director level you get given targets it’s a real emphasis on the bringing in fresh business into the agency and really develop the thinking of the agency, so the theoretical thinking that is developed by the people internally, it is the directors that are kind of looked upon to develop the thinking.

Where do you see the industry going?

I think ethical marketing is really important, I think those graduates that are coming fresh into the industry really need to understand the importance of ethical marketing across the full spectrum so from agency to client side I think they need to understand the consumers perspective on ethical marketing as well and the ethical, so whether it be fair trade, green issues, carbon footprint or whatever it may be, but I think consumers are trying to make a decision on the values that they have so they have very strong values and their values are becoming stronger and stronger the more aware they become of ethical issues and I think the consumer will make a decision based on those values, and I think a potential marketeer coming into the industry needs to be very aware of those values.

Is there scope for movement during or after this career?

I think you can, certainly in marketing, consultancy is something that is seen that once you have done it, it is a very powerful tool because of theoretical thinking, because you worked on lots of different brands so there is the opportunity to move around once you have been a consultant.  It does give you the opportunity to also go over to client side on secondment as well so certainly as added value we have people that will go over some of our clients for six months and come back so they have got real experience of being on the clients side but then coming back and using those skills within the agency so there is definitely the opportunity to move around within the broader marketing perspective, we do also have career breaks, once you have worked at Added Value for four years you get six months off, some of it paid and the rest unpaid so there are the opportunities to do things that perhaps you wouldn’t find in a client side organisation.

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

I think the Trade Press has always been vitally important and will always be so the likes of Marketing and Marketing Week, Campaign from an advertising view, it is really understanding what is the heartbeat of the industry at the moment.  They will pick up on issues and have article that are really important.  I think really important for the graduates coming into the industry is to read it, understand the issues, understand the people and use it to also see what jobs are out there, what people want from those jobs as well.  The websites as well, so it might be Brand Republic, there are a lot of websites out and about that you can learn about the industry.

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

A very good question, I have always wanted to be a sportsman of some kind, I don’t know if you choose a sporting career or not but if I could have chosen a sporting career I think I would have chosen that.  But then again I come back to marketing and brands and without sounding horribly cheesy, it is in your blood, you either have a passion for or you don’t so I think that once I had been a sportsman and kind of come to the end of my career I think I would have ended up in some sports marketing arena or something like that.

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