Ben Kendall, Senior Marketing Manager, Northern Europe at Airbnb

Ben has recently joined (Sep 2015) Airbnb as their UK Brand Marketing Manager. Previous to this Ben as the Marketing Manager EMEA for Vita Coco Coconut Water. The brand had just become the fastest growing non-alcoholic soft drink in the UK and was rapidly expanding across EMEA. So joining the company as Marketing Manager for EMEA was a big challenge, needing to replicate the huge success in the UK. Within his role he’s directly responsible for all ATL and BTL marketing activity across 10 markets including Germany, France, Spain, Benelux and Ireland. Ben has been fortunate to lead Vita Coco’s international marketing plans from conception to execution, achieving revenue growth across all markets and helped establish Vita Coco as the leading coconut water brand in Europe.

Prior to this role, Ben spent 7 years at Red Bull, starting at university and taking him on a journey to Red Bull’s motherland in Austria where he completed the year long trainee-marketing programme. During his time at Red Bull, Ben became a specialist within youth marketing, building a targeted youth marketing programme that reached 1.4 million students across the UK through ground breaking marketing activity. The success of this programme led him to support the roll out various initiatives across Europe and US, predominantly Red Bull Air Drop, a stunt that took place across 55 countries, at 400 campuses reaching over 10 million students all in 1 day. Ben’s experience in youth lifestyle marketing took him to Spotify on a freelance basis where he led the strategy for their youth marketing in the UK, designing a programme to reach new users within the student community.