A champion of ‘behind the- line’ marketing

Judie Lannon interviews MIKE HOBAN, customer and brand marketing director of Scottish Widows, about his experience of bringing marketing to life in side a successful financial services organisation.

JUDIE LANNON: Let’s begin by talking about how you got into marketing. Was it by luck or by judgement?

MIKE HOBAN: I got into marketing completely by chance. I finished university in June 1987, the day after the general election and the plan was that I was going to work for a Member of Parliament. But he lost his seat in that election, so I was suddenly looking for a job.

I went to Rank Hovis McDougall and various other companies, and ended up on the marketing team at RHM purely by chance.

JL: Everybody has the experience of finding a mentor or, possibly, several people who you know immediately have something to teach you and will figure in your future. How did that happen with you?

MH: I have been very lucky because in every job that I’ve done I’ve worked for someone who is really good.

In fact, I’ve now made a conscious effort to take a long look at the person that I’m going to work for and I take as many references about them as they take of me.

Right at the beginning I worked for Michael Reyner who was one of the brightest people at RHM and is now a partner at McKinsey. When I worked in consultancy, I worked with Peter Grender, who taught me a lot. When I worked at Jacobs, I worked with Graham Bishop, who’s now runs his own consultancy.

So throughout my career I’ve worked with a large number of people who have been very influential in shaping how I think of marketing and what I think is important.

JL: What would you say are the most important insights that you gained from these people?

MH: The most critical insight for me was about the customer. If you get it right for the customer and you put the customer at the heart of the decision, you’ll always get it right for the business and for the shareholders. A profound insight that I had from Eva Eisenschimmel, when we worked at British Airways together, was the importance of everyone in the organisation acknowledging and acting on that principle. This is absolutely essential in service organisations. So it’s not just the marketers who need to be customer focused, it’s not just the front-line people but everyone all through the organisation. Certainly this was true with BA when I worked there.

Marketers talk a lot about above-the- line and below-the-line but we don’t talk so much about behind-the-line. I’m a big advocate of behind-the- line marketing – what I think of as internal marketing. We may spend a lot of time talking to customers but then we tend to let HR or some kind of problems department deal with internal issues. But that’s not the same as marketing to your people and getting them aligned behind a promise. HR people can’t do that.

I say to my staff that in a service organisation, your brand tells people why you’re better than competitors. Your brand makes a promise to people and the advertising tells people what that promise is. But it’s the people throughout the organisation who deliver that promise. And if those people get it right then the customers will reward you. But marketers don’t spend nearly enough time on behind-the- line marketing.

JL: How do you do it at Scottish Widows? What is your approach to ‘behind-theline’ marketing?

MH: The first thing to do is change the language. We don’t talk about brands and propositions. Instead, we talk about promises, and we talk about customers and the experience they have with us. And the second thing is that we have created an internal engagement team, which is solely focused on how we get the message to our people: how do we train, how do we give them the skills and techniques and resources they need to deliver the promise that we make in our advertising. I feel we've been very innovative in this respect. Even to the extent that we’ve introduced a company recognition scheme that operates at the highest level. Our directors choose people every quarter who have excelled in delivering the company promise. Most people call this delivering the brand proposition, but we call it the company promise.

I think one of the things that happens in marketing is that people hide behind the clichés. When I worked with Graham Bishop at WHSmith, I learned something really important from him: we can intellectualise to each other what marketing is about but obviously if the people on the shop floor don’t get it, it ain’t going to happen.

JL: The word promise is very powerful, isn’t it – by conveying both responsibility, even duty, it goes further and deeper than ‘brand proposition’. It makes the relationship with customers that much more personal.

MH: Yes exactly. One of the things that we try to get across to our people is that actually the marketer’s job is very easy. We go and make ads and all of that activity is in our control. But what they do is really hard. They have to actually deliver the promise and they’ll all have a role to play in delivering that promise.

Of course people go to work to earn a living but everybody wants to do more than simply earn a living, no matter where you are in the organisation. Thinking of your job as keeping a promise to customers brings alive to the staff at all levels the role that they play in making sure the customer experience is a good one.

JL: You have to have a particular company structure that helps you to operate in this way and it sounds like your structure may be a bit different from that of other companies. What is it in the structure that supports the way you want to work?

MH: I don’t think I know of another organisation that has a brand management team that are as specifically focused on the internal audience as we are. There are those who have internal communications departments, but they’re often situated in the HR function. And as such they are usually about spreading the HR news. Or, an internal communications division will sit within the corporate communications division. But you then find that corporate communications organisations tend to be outwardly focused rather than inwardly focused. When I joined Scottish Widows, we created that function and it’s now got four people in it – a small number of people but a massively effective and influential team.

JL: You sound like you’re familiar with a lot of different kinds of organisations. Where does this experience come from?

MH: I’ve worked for British Airways, and when I was in consultancy I worked with people like Vodafone. Also I’ve worked for Retail Reconstruction in Newcastle, I worked for WHSmith and I’ve worked with other retailers when I was in consultancy. So obviously I’ve seen how quite a few different kinds of companies operate. Also when I talk to other people in financial services and tell them about what we are doing and why we’re doing it, nobody I know has anything like it. This phrase behind-the-line marketing is not a widely used phrase because it’s not a widely practised activity.

JL: You’ve been talking about how the company has to have a structure that supports what you are doing. But it also has to have a sympathetic management and culture. What are the features of the Scottish Widows’ culture that support what you want to do as a marketer?

MH: It’s actually very important indeed. When I joined Scottish Widows what was clear to me was that it’s a famous company that’s highly respected, but there wasn’t a clarity about what made it better and different. The main thing that I found when I joined the company was that they are nice people, fundamentally nice people. And I don’t know exactly where that comes from – perhaps, in part, because it used to be a mutual organisation rather than a private company. Also Edinburgh is a lovely place to work and there’s a sort of Scottish prudence and civility about the atmosphere. Also maybe it’s because the company is in the pensions and investment and insurance area, which tends to be more long term, more thoughtful, more cautious.

We have built the brand around that fundamental cultural insight: that this is a nice company that does things prudently, with integrity and does things over the long term. That makes it really easy for us to talk to people about promises because it’s a phrase that increasingly rings true.

One of the things that I’m really proud of with Scottish Widows – and I know this sounds a bit sanctimonious – is that we live in a world where most things are orchestrated around consumption and debt. But actually what Scottish Widows is about is it encourages people to save. And we make our money from people saving and investing.

So if there’s a set of pearly gates at the end of this journey, being able to say you’ve helped people save for a comfortable retirement is quite a nice thing to say that you’ve done.

JL: You have a valuable property in the Widow, which seems to have been running a long time.

MH: Yes we have been very much helped by the presence of the Scottish Widow herself. This is an enormously powerful brand icon that people understand and love. There isn’t another brand in financial services that has an icon that is held in such esteem. So that gives us a tremendous advantage. The company’s been around since 1712 but the Widow’s only been around for 20 years, which is considered to be a long time but not that long really.

Whenever we do research, customers bring it up and it seems to convey a really strong message – a message customers like to hear. So much marketing communication consists of messages that organisations want to push and are rarely built on things the customers want to see and hear and believe. So for everything we do now, I always ask, is this something that customers want to hear or is it something that we want to say? Because if they don’t want to hear it, they won’t.

JL: Introducing new ways or working in a company usually brings with it certain resistances or difficulties. What problems have you encountered?

MH: I would say that the biggest difficulty anyone in non-fmcg marketing faces is that so much of the business is really out of your control. In a retail organisation the buyers are in control. In an airline the customer services people are in control, in financial services the actuaries and accountants are in control.

As a marketer you have to be an advocate and a champion for how you can make a difference to the organisation. And that’s what people need to think about. It isn’t enough simply to be intellectually correct, you have to go further and think about how to invade the rest of the organisation. You need to demonstrate how you add value to the organisation.

So I think that’s where the marketer’s role is hard in any type of service organisation. It’s not actually in doing the marketing, it’s getting others to appreciate the value of marketing in organisations that are not marketing-led and where other functions have more power.

JL: It sounds like you’re really talking about the need for different personality types in service organisations – stronger, more extrovert personalities, prepared to take on a big advocacy role.

MH: What you need to do as a marketer in an organisation like mine is to realise that people skills and the ability to network, to produce, to cajole, to persuade, even to argue and stand up for what you believe in, are as important as technical marketing skills.

A lot of marketers come in believing that as long as they’ve got the right answer then they’ll win through, and actually you need to take people with you through organisations that are not marketing-led. It’s a lot easier if you work for a Unilever or P&G or Heinz or Mars – the whole company is marketing-focused so they are all on your side to begin with.

JL: Thinking about your career so far, what would you say was the single thing that you’re most proud of and what in your career do you wish you’d done differently?

MH: The thing that I wish I’d done differently was not to have burnt so many bridges. Sometimes because I’ve been passionate about what I do, I haven’t always taken people with me. But I don’t have many regrets at all. I’ve moved around a lot but that has given me an invaluable insight into things.

The thing that I’m proudest of is that I love what I do and I get paid for doing something I really enjoy. It doesn’t seem fair when you look at some of the jobs that other people have to do. I suppose it’s not really pride, it’s more that I feel really lucky that I’ve managed to do that.

JL: Finally let me ask you about advice. If somebody who just joined a service company asked you what are the three most important things he or she should do, what advice would you give?

MH: The first is understand the business model, understand that marketing isn’t just about colours and fonts and type sizes. It’s about connecting the business with its customers and their needs.

The second is build a network, get to know the accountant, get to know the HR people, make them your friends and make them your allies.

And the third is be a champion for what you’re doing, make sure that other people understand how marketing adds value to that organisation.❦

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I’m a big advocate of behind-the-line marketing – what I think of as internal marketing. We spend a lot of time talking to customers but then we tend to let HR deal with internal issues. But that’s not the same as marketing to your people and getting them aligned behind a promise. HR people can’t do that

As a marketer in an organisation like mine you need to realise that people skills and the ability to network, persuade, even to argue and stand up for what you believe in, are as important as technical marketing skills