If it wasn't hard, you wouldn't need me.

I like a challenge. Luckily my carerr has given me the opportunity to really challenge myself. Here's a few examples of the challenges I faced

The Nameless 125 Year Old

When I joined Thomas Miller it had been in operation for over 125 years. In that time it had never felt the need to promote itself and instead focused its efforts on marketing the insurance companies it managed on behalf of its clients. Nearly all Thomas Miller's staff are seconded to work on client companies. This meant that clients and staff struggled to see what Thomas Miller actually did!

My job was to separate Thomas Miller from its client companies and make it easy for everyone to see the differences. I also had to convince the Board that they should fund marketing for the first time. As you can imagine, not everyone thought marketing Thomas Miller was a good idea and so it took a great deal of effort to build a consensus.

However, by the time I left, the Board had agreed to a complete rebranding which involved not just Thomas Miller but meant that all the companies it managed would now follow Thomas Miller's branding. This was a massive strategic change much larger than anyone, including me, anticipated when I was given the initial challenge.

Making a Market

People have been buying and selling land for thousands of years without giving much thought to the implications of the damage caused by previous land uses. When I joined Certa it was a start up company that had been in operation for 6 months and had only just made its first sale. They had a new insurance product for the UK, insurance for environmental impairment on land.

My task was to build the market for this product and to put it simply, I needed to make sure that everyone involved in commercial land transactions had heard of Certa (on a very modest budget). The first step was to persuade the market they had a problem. The most cost-effective way was to piggyback on the new Government legislation placing obligations on the polluter to pay. The marketing plan used a mixture of direct mail, events, database marketing and public relations to ensure that the target audience was aware of their new risks under the legislation and coincidentally ensure they associated the solution with Certa. The effort proved very successful leading to a doubling in turnover every year between 1999 and 2002.

The Self-Financing Marketing Department

Certa was an underwriting agency to Allianz Cornhill. After four years of trading, Allianz decided they no longer wished to pursue Certa's line of business. It is impossible to be an underwriting agency without an insurer and so we, as the senior management team, decided to leverage Certa's strong brand to pursue other related business activities.

My challenge as Marketing Manager was how to continue to promote Certa's brand whilst keeping costs low. My solution was to start organising commercial conferences. The concept was to arrange conferences that our target audience would wish to attend and to charge them for the privilege. So although it did not permit a sales pitch for Certa, it did allow us to show our brand and to link it with expertise in our area and the best brands in the industry. It also had the added advantage of securing us access to higher level people than those who traditionally attended our free events.

I had full profit and loss responsibility for this division. I eventually found a purchaser for the conference division, was involved in the negotiations and spent a period of time working with the purchaser to ease the transition. Some of Certa's conferences are still running on an annual basis five years on.

Certa's marketing department had become more effective whilst self financing.