Interview with McLaren's CMO, John Allert

Ahead of the Abu Dhabi 2017 Formula 1 Grand Prix, we will be hosting a Leadership Breakfast with McLaren's chief marketing officer, John Allert in Dubai.

Not just a race team, Allert stresses the sporting company's goal to be 'not only at the forefront of sports marketing, but marketing generally.'

So we caught up with the ambitious CMO, who oversees all marketing and partnerships for the McLaren racing and technology business, to find out his secret behind keeping up with constantly evolving technologies and what he's learnt from leading sportsmen and women. 

What does bold marketing leadership mean to you?

Bold marketing leadership, to me, is all about honesty. Honesty with yourself, honesty with your team, honesty with all your stakeholders – whether they be customers, fans, shareholders or anyone else.

The days of marketing being a proxy for ‘selling’ are long over. We’ve educated consumers, and in some situations let them down. In 2017/18 bold marketing is more about having a conversation with your audience than it is imposing your brand, product or service on them.

Communicate and educate, absolutely. Inspire, definitely. But attempt to persuade or convince an audience and you risk scepticism, defensiveness and lack of engagement. Marketing has always been a blend of art and science, originally probably 90% art and 10% science.

But more now than ever you have to respect and embrace the science of engagement, psychology, even neuroscience, to be truly bold. As marketers we’re quickly moving towards a new reality of 10% art and 90% science…which doesn’t make creativity LESS important – if anything it makes it even MORE important.

What have you learned from running a marketing team like McLaren?

Running the Marketing team at McLaren has taught me the importance of humility and teamwork.

My prior years of brand consultancy instilled in me a necessary level of self-reliance, independent thought and the need for robustness and accountability in the work that I did, but McLaren is much more of a ‘we’ culture, than an ‘I’ culture.

Especially in 2017/18, the diversity of specialisms we now employ within the marketing team (70+ people), from esport to event management, communications, partner strategy, licensing etc means that trust in the top team is paramount, and that replies on having the very best people, which we do. My role is to join the dots, and set a direction and culture that enables our people to perform at their best.

Being McLaren, this journey never ends as we aim to be not only at the forefront of sports marketing, but marketing generally.

 

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Nov 16, 2017 at 10:23am PST

What’s the biggest risk you’ve taken in your career?

The biggest risk I’ve taken was leaving behind the agency world and joining McLaren in 2007.

It had never occurred to me that I would ever work client side, but at McLaren I have the best of both worlds – a brand and a business to build and market, and a roster of premium brands we work with in partnership, from Chandon, to Hilton, SAP, Logitech etc, with an evolving agency type model, which happens to own some extraordinary marketing assets.

What’s traits have you learnt from working with elite professional sportsmen and women?

I’ve worked not only with some amazing elite sportspeople, such as Lewis Hamilton, Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso, but also an incredible number of inspiring business leaders and brand owners.

Probably the single biggest lesson from all of them is the importance of resilience.

Any elite business, sport or environment is going to experience as many challenges as it is good times – people only tend to remember the peaks, not the troughs, but you learn more from challenging times, which make successes even sweeter.

And even in a seemingly individual sport such as Formula 1, team work is absolutely essential to success.

You’ve built a reputation one of the UK’s leading practitioners in digital marketing. How can marketers keep up with constantly evolving technologies?’

The number and sophistication of technology tools in marketing has ballooned over the past decade, and keeping up with what’s hot and what’s not is an ongoing challenge.

At a basic level, marketers have to stay fluent with the tools at their disposal, in terms of the what, how and why, but given the importance of digital to every brand, a deep understanding can only be gained by having the right people advising, evaluating, beta testing and implementing technologies to help us market our brands better.

The right people might be an internal team, or an agency – or even your IT department. Critically however, it needs to be done by people who understand not only your brand and its ambition, but the needs of your core audiences also.

By Orianna Rosa Royle, Digital Assistant at The Marketing Society