Future Market Leader – Susan McClean, General Manager, Acquisition Marketing, Broadband, BT Consumer

How has your career path led you to marketing for BT?

After graduating with a Literature degree, I joined BT on a graduate programme. This was a great opportunity, being fresh out of uni, I knew I wanted to be part of a successful large scale business that I could develop with and have a rewarding career. I’ve been with BT over 10 years now, and have worked in 4 different parts of the business.

Starting out in the Global division, I worked with sales and business development teams to respond to tenders from large, international corporate clients looking to establish new or revitalise their existing network based services. Next, I moved into BT Group Strategy, working on high profile strategic programmes, before moving into the SME Business arm, BT Business, to launch the first BT Business fibre optic broadband portfolio in the UK. After leading the broadband propositions team, which culminated with a launch of a new Business Broadband portfolio, I then moved into BT Consumer, and this is where I am now.

For the last 5 years, I’ve worked across the area of home Broadband, developing the portfolio of products, including new launches of superfast broadband-based products, and managing the £bn Broadband P&L. A desire to get even closer to our customers, and influence their behaviour led me into Marketing. I now head up broadband acquisition for the UK, responsible for our longer term marketing strategy, how we execute that strategy in market and on driving home broadband sales.

Why did you choose a career in marketing?  

Marketing gets you up close and personal with the customer, in a way that no other function does and this is the core element that attracted me.  We have to know them better than anyone else, in order to best understand and then anticipate how we can help them best.  The pace of change and competition is also intense, especially in this sector, and this environment means you have to stay alert and always push yourself and your teams to ensure you are doing the best thinking/really stretching what you can achieve – you can’t take your eye off the ball for a moment.  This makes it an exciting place to work and marketing is at the very heart of it as the team that influences customers perceptions of the brand and our services. It’s also a really fun place to work!

What do you think makes a successful career in marketing?

Being deeply obsessed with your customers and really getting under their skin to develop a rich insight base.  From this basis, you can put the customer at the heart of the strategy.  It’s also important to be bold and have courage and conviction push boundaries to develop campaigns that really wake up your target audience.  The Gorilla Cadbury’s ad is one that must have been a huge leap of faith for the team involved but it worked incredibly well.  Finally, successful marketers need to think more like business directors; they need to learn to talk the language of CFOs and MDs, expressing the value of marketing in commercial terms to secure and maintain investments as businesses get squeezed to optimise profit in these very competitive times.

And who is a great example of this?

Close to home, Gavin Patterson, CEO of BT Group is a great example of a marketer who has gone on to big things, taking more commercial roles and now runs one of the biggest brand in terms of advertising spend in the UK.   Campaign-wise, I also admire the team behind the ‘Real Beauty’ campaign for Dove.  When it first launched it was incredibly brave but deeply insight led, and they have found innovative and impactful ways to develop this idea through the years.

What do you think are the main challenges facing marketers today?

The pace of change is a huge challenge, it’s key to continually look for new ways of engaging with your target audience.  There is so much noise, and people are more intolerant or worse ambivalent to marketing than ever before, so the brands that can engage in relevant and interesting ways will be the ones that have more success.  You also have a tiny window of time to connect with your audience as their attention is pulled in many other directions.  This has big implications for how brands shape their media and creative plans to maximise impact so they don’t just become more of the white noise we are all learning so aptly to tune out.

How do you keep up with constant stream of innovation in marketing comms?

It’s a challenge!  You have to dedicate real time to innovation and integrate it into your BAU working practices so it becomes part of the way you work and think, and dedicate specific budget for trying new things.  You also need to reinvigorate your own thinking and that of your teams by drawing on the experiences of other brands, thought leaders and your agency teams to inject new approaches.  We often look outside of our sector to see what great work is being produced, and in order to inspire us to think differently we often hold inspiration sessions whereby other successful brands share their learnings so we challenge ourselves to do things differently.

How does this impact your relationship with agencies?

Having a more innovation led agenda has changed the dynamic of our agency relationships.  They understand that our ambitions and expectations have changed and they are excited by this as it allows them more creativity in how they help us respond effectively to our business challenges.  It’s been important to get some wins along the way to show that, as a business, we are willing to commit to change too. One of the best examples of this was our BT Sport Christmas Carol campaign – it was a completely different creative approach for us at BT, but it was very effective with over 6 million views.

To read the rest of the interview please click here

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