Talking with Dianne Thompson

On the eve of her retirement, Dianne Thompson, CBE, chief executive of Camelot and recipient of The Marketing Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award, talks with Elen Lewis about the marketing and leadership wisdom she has collected over a 41-year career.

What do you believe bold marketing leadership looks like?
It’s about anticipating and satisfying customer demand. A marketer needs to anticipate what people want, long before they can see they want it. Bold marketing is about seeing where the path is, and having the courage to follow it.

Do you need to be a certain kind of person to be a bold marketing leader, or do you learn with experience?
I’ve always believed that marketing is 60-70% common sense and 30-40% intuition and experience. I am a consumer and I think like a consumer, and most of my decisions in my career have been grounded in thinking like a consumer. As you go longer in your career, past experience helps you get to certain decisions more quickly.

What advice would you give to a marketer at the beginning of their career?
My advice would be to use tools alongside your intuition. I had no formal business or marketing training when I got my first marketing job as a marketing trainee at The Cooperative Society and I learned on the job. Therefore my attitude to risk was different. A lot of it is instinct – get the consumer in your head and think what you would do in their position. Don’t be too constrained by the risks and research that go around it – use research as a tool.

How about higher up the chain – do you have advice for a marketing director who wants to become a CEO?
In my career, the hardest transition I’ve made is moving from a functional director to a general manager. There are lots of courses you can do as you move up the marketing ladder but unless you’re prepared to do an MBA, there’s a big gap. It’s one of the hardest moves you can make.

What do you wish you had known at the beginning of your career?
Probably, that everybody has moments of self-doubt, when they think: ‘Can I really do this?’ We all do, don’t we? Even now – not very often, I must admit – I think: ‘Are people just being taken in by me or am I really as good as they think I’m going to be?’ It’s about getting the balance right.

What do you count as your biggest achievement?
It has to be Camelot. I’ve worked for 41 years with 17 of them at Camelot. It’s what the company itself has done – raised £32 billion for good causes in 20 years. Under my tenure as CEO, we have raised £21 billion – what a legacy to leave. That’s my proudest achievement.

How about your biggest mistake?
A controversial lottery grant of around £324,000 was awarded many years ago for an anti-deportation coalition and their purpose was to prevent illegal immigrants from being deported. The Daily Mail took exception to the grant and for quite a while they ran double page spreads about some of the ‘silly grants’ from lottery funding. Those articles hurt the National Lottery in terms of sales. In my naivety I met the Daily Mail’s editor to ask if he could put the story in context with the great stuff we’d done because the article had caused the lottery to lose sales of £1m a week – that was my biggest mistake. The next day, the front page headline was: ‘This grant is causing good causes a loss of £1m a week.’ I learnt the hard way. I fuelled the story – but hindsight is a wonderful thing.

How would you like to be remembered?
I think most people will remember me, if anyone remembers me, because of what was achieved at the National Lottery and I’d like to be remembered as someone with a high work ethic, total integrity and a passion for what I do and the ability to build great teams. I’m very grateful and proud of the people I’ve worked with here.

If you won the lottery, what would you do?
Can you imagine having a pot of money that you could give away and do great things with? I have some great winners, hundreds of them – one couple, who I’m so fond of, won £7.4m and they’ve given over £5m away. They do the things that we’d all like to think we could do. They take disabled kids at Christmas to see Disney on Ice. They take war vets back to the Normandy beaches. If you read about a little girl who needs an operation in the US, they’ll step in. They’re modern day Robin Hoods, using lottery funding to make other people’s lives better. That’s what I’d do. It would be fabulous. I’ve got no personal aspirations. I live in a small cottage, I’ve got no fast car, a yacht doesn’t appeal to me. Yes, I will play when I retire and it could be me!

What are your three best features?
Integrity, total honesty, and I think I’m a good team builder.

Being a great team builder is a valuable leadership skill. What are the ingredients?
You have to be honest, and communications is at the heart of it. In any business, in any walk of life, there are sometimes things that are so confidential, you can’t share – but wherever you can, share. Provide a clear direction for people to follow you.

Worst features?
I demand quality. Years ago I went on a course full of jargon, but the one thing that stayed with me all my working career was to demand quality or you’re helping to abolish it. And I do totally believe in that. I am therefore very demanding; I can’t tolerate sloppy work. I can forgive people for making a mistake but I can’t forgive them making the same mistake twice.

What is the biggest challenge facing the industry over the next few years?
The pace of change, the amount of information and the rising expectations from consumers on trust in the brand and the companies that supply them. We are inundated with data on consumer behaviour. Take a product like the National Lottery, which 30 million people buy on a regular basis. How can you deal with 30 million sets of data points on customer behaviour? From a world of one-size-fits-all to a world of individual customised messages. For people like us that’s a massive opportunity, but it’s also difficult to deal with.

You have fought and won these bids for the National Lottery and the embattled Health Lottery. What do all leaders need to know before going into battle?
First, never give up before you try. We were told by our QC at the time that 90% of judicial reviews fail and, at that stage, no operator had successfully challenged and won against their regulator. It looked like a hopeless cause but we decided to fight anyway because it just seemed so unfair – and we won. My message would be don’t give up and if you believe something is right then you have to fight for it. You might not always win but you can’t walk away.

Do you believe the battle for women in marketing has been fought and won?
I certainly believe the world has changed from when I started my career 41 years ago, when gender was a key issue. There is still what I would call gender ghettos, where you see more men or more women, but the whole idea of quotas fills me with horror.

At Camelot our philosophy is clear – we choose the right person for the job. So why not more women in the boardroom? Two things. One, women are now exercising a choice, rather than being pressured to go up the career ladder. In my generation, in a corporate world, the ambition had to be to get to the top, otherwise you weren’t ambitious, and that has all gone. The younger generation have a better view of work-life balance than I certainly ever had. I’ve always been driven because I was told very early on that to get anywhere, I had to prove I was better than all the men. At ICI Paints [now AstraZeneca], at my interview they told me that to be treated equally to the men I had to be at least 10% better and my response was: 'Well that’s OK, I’ll be at least 15% better.' And then I’m coming out thinking: 'Oh my god, can I do this?' It was false bravado.

You’d never dare say that now but that’s what it was like. Fortunately, it’s not like that any more. Women are realising it’s acceptable to get a work-life balance. You don’t have to be seen to be tough and aggressive. Gradually, more companies are waking up to the concept of flexible working. I grew up in a generation where if you said you were going to work from home, people thought you were skiving, and that’s just not the case any more.

Do you have advice for young, ambitious women?
Believe in yourself. I came from a northern working-class background. My mum was a trained Clarks’ shoe fitter, my dad was a butcher, and neither of them had any formal education beyond 16 but they instilled in me the conviction that if you work hard and you believe you can do it, the chances are you will. If you’ve got a dream then believe you can do it, but it doesn’t come on a plate – you’ve got to work hard to get it. I was the first person in my family to go to university.

Are the golden rules of marketing the same as they always were?
The golden rule is always to think of the consumer, put yourself in their shoes and think like they do. The internet has not blown everything out of the water, but it has increased the pace and given access to far more data. The real challenge is big data and access to tons of information, and that in its own way is valuable, but it needs to be put into context. It answers the what, but not the why. What you really need to get to is why people do what they’re doing. You have to know why.

What’s next?
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what’s next. I have had 41 years without a break, never been unemployed in that time. I’m excited about running The George Hotel on the water’s edge on the Isle of Wight. I never had a vision of being a hotelier – though I have part-owned a restaurant for 13 years – so this is a love affair with a building. It’s in Yarmouth, and I’ve been going there on and off for 23 years.

This article was taken from the September 2014 issue of Market Leader. Browse the archive here.