Alex Singleton

Insights from an in-house marketer

Alex Singleton

Why people watching is a useful activity for PR practitioners

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Over the past few decades, as Walkmans then iPods then smartphones have become commonplace, people have tended to become more self-absorbed when out in public. When Covid came around, we became even more isolated from seeing the world around us. This self-absorption is something that I would suggest we, as PR practitioners, should consciously avoid at least some of the time.

Try deliberately spending some time watching the world go by with a cup of coffee in a town square. Or wait for a bus with headphones put away. Visit a community pub and talk to random people with very different careers or none at all. Chat to retired people in a Post Office queue. Maybe take up street photography. These activities are rarely dull – and understanding people who are different from you can be good fun.

A game I sometimes play is to imagine who random passers-by are – what they fill their days doing, what motivates them in lives. I possibly get all the wrong answers, but it’s a useful reminder that diversity is a much broader topic that the box-ticking of the HR world.

The make-up of the PR world is skewed – a well-educated, highly literate, upper-middle class workplace, with a large part of the workplace in great global cities such as London and New York. I don’t think we should apologise for having a highly literate workforce, and organisations such as the PRCA and Taylor Bennett Foundation are doing good work encouraging greater ethnic diversity into the profession, but we need to avoid being a bubble.

Indeed, the overwhelming hostility to Brexit back in 2016 from PR practitioners compared with the general public does suggest something awry in how diverse our sector is. When CIPR Fellow Andy Green posted a photo of a trip to Wetherspoons on social media, he got some stick for visiting “Neverspoons” from a PR practitioner. His response?

Although you may disagree with some of the founder’s political views, I support them because [they] provide amazing value drinks and food; are an exemplar of heritage and restoration; do an excellent job of promoting CAMRA; invest in print with an outstanding customer magazine; [and] are doing a critical job in preserving the British pub.

You also get a wider social mix – a critical need in modern day society. Do try and be pleasantly surprised.

It’s easy in a profession that tends to offer above-average salaries to get isolated in the social mix we meet, and that’s something we need to resist. 

How to get a marketing or PR job early in your career

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‘I’ve applied for 100 jobs and not got an interview’. That was the headline on one BBC News story and certainly the experience is something that many people experience. What’s the cause? Well, the candidate is sending generic applications out of desperation. Here are some tips to make your applications more likely to succeed.

Firstly, the trick is to really understand what makes each employer tick. They won’t be trying to hire just a marketing, but one who shares their worldview about marketing. Are they about building a mass consumer brand or about supporting a B2B sales programme? What does the marketing director say about their experience on LinkedIn? Because if they are an ROI-focused direct response marketer, talking about brand might come across as fluffy. If you have university library access, you might be able to use Nexis to read the employer’s media coverage and, if not, there’s always Google News. You want the employer to think that you are an ideal fit, so if you read about them more than other candidates, you’re likely to get an interview and perform strongly in it.

Secondly, take a view as to what bits of the job description are really important and what are just standard requirements that the hiring manager might not care about. They might not get any good candidates apart from you, so the requirement for a professional membership or a degree might not be as important as you think. You could alway ask for an informal conversation about the role before applying in order to get a steer on what they really want.

Thirdly, if you don’t have all the software or other business skills they are asking for, signing up for a free LinkedIn trial can give you access to short courses that you can refer to on your CV. Likewise, if you’ve read some of the important books on marketing, you’ll be able to talk about the subject more effectively.

Fourthly, include successes in your application rather than just responsibilities. You want to give the vibe of being a winner. Growth in attendees at a student society that you ran or the turnaround in the performance of a university football team that you captained can work well.

Fifthly, avoid any suggestion of desperation. I once interviewed a marketer who had been made redundant from his previous role. “I’m just desperate to get a job,” he explained. That was a big turn off. I also interviewed someone who revealed that he’d been made redundant from several of his previous roles, which was a red flashing light.

In reality, finding a good fit can be difficult for employers, so spending your time applying for fewer roles but positioning yourself as the right fit can pay dividends.

Why top marketers turned their backs on segmentation

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Segmentation is supposed to be a core building block of marketing, an idea pushed relentlessly by Philip Kotler, the economist who wrote the seminal marketing textbook. It even makes the very first, 1967 edition of his Marketing Management tome, when the fully formed theory of Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning was still to be invented. By Kotler’s 1976 third edition, he declared that “the analysis of market segments lies at the heart of marketing strategy”.

In fact, segmentation is mostly a nonsense, made worse by marketers often splitting their markets into segments in random ways.

When done well, segmentation is based on clustered preferences – that is to say, there is a group of prospective customers who would like a cheap, basic printer for home, and there is another group of prospective customers who want a big, high-speed printer that’s robust enough to support dozens of workers in an office. But here, what we are really talking about is the need for brands to adopt a product range strategy – rather than trying to exclude segments or create different brands to cater for individual segments. The most successful companies in the market, such as Epson and Canon, don’t try to pick one or two segments but apply their brands to products in every segment.

Where segmentation goes awry when people try to apply demographic and psychographic segmentation and give those segments names such as “Quipster Hipsters” or “Worcestershire Women”. Often, marketers don’t base these segments on actual clustered preferences – they just invent them in a meeting room, with no data. Or they use generalisations from consumer research firms about people that have nothing to do with their sector.

The main problem with these sort of crass generalisations is that, as Prof Byron Sharp (the top marketing effectiveness academic in the world) points out, “competing brands sell to the same sort of people. Within each brand’s customer base there is a lot of variation (i.e. different types of people), but each brand has the same variation.” In other words, despite the fact that many brands try to pigeon hole themselves into catering for specific segments, consumer behaviour is way more complicated. For example, a luxury handbag brand might think its segment is the super-wealthy globetrotter with multiple passports who would think nothing of spending £1,000 on a handbag. In fact, probably the reason why the brand has been able to grow is that people on relatively ordinary incomes visit its stores and splash out on a special occasion. As Prof Jenni Romaniuk, a colleague of Prof Sharp, says: “The desire to target just a fraction of the market is often based on the idea that the brand is highly differentiated and so much appeal to some and not others … Data on real-world buying does not support this view.”

Prof Romaniuk goes further and writes: “A really dangerous practice in modern marketing is to describe a market as a single person: for example, ‘our target consumer is Nicole, she’s 28 years old, is passionate about the environment and sustainability, shops at Whole Foods Market, likes new experiences, reads classic literature but also watches Keeping up with the Kardashians as a guilty pleasure’. This is the height of inane target marketing: to treat all of those very different customers as if they are clones of Nicole. In defence, some will say this caricature is just to ‘bring the customer alive’, to ‘help thinking’, but it is lazy, dangerous thinking that often finds its way into advertising and media plans, and the brand ends up talking to only a tiny fraction of its potential market.”

Segmentation as a term is often used loosely in all manner of marketing tools – e.g. in Google Analytics it can refer to website visitors who have visited a particular page. I have no objection to this sort of “segmentation”. Or, indeed, of trying to create products and services that appeal to different customer preferences. But in its original sense of a brand choosing only specific market segments to target, it is likely to curb growth and profitability.

Some marketers have long opposed segmentation. As Drayton Bird, the doyen of direct marketing, says, there are marketers who “segment [customers], using pretentious phrases, like ‘upwardly mobile’ or creative language their research people have dreamt up so as to charge more – like dividing them up into different kinds of fruit or animals … [In fact] your customers are individuals, not types.” Which brings me to my use of supermarkets. I shop at Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Lidl, Aldi and, about once a year, at Fortnum and Mason. And I appreciate the highly differentiated offering of some of those retailers, but like many individuals I probably don’t conform to some marketing strategy’s segmentation, instead picking and choosing the from a range of propositions. The clever targeting for those supermarkets is to target the whole market, not a supposed segment, and if I’ve shared my contact details with them to keep on communicating with me so to influence me to give them a greater share of my expenditure.

Since Byron Sharp’s groundbreaking book, How Brands Grow, was published, top marketers have realised the futility of segmentation. But, as John Maynard Keynes said: “Practical men [people], who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.

How to choose a first job in marketing, advertising or PR

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Choosing a good first employer can be a huge boost and help direct your career in the right direction. But how do you know if an employer – and specifically their marketing department – is any good?

I like to think of employers as fitting into four categories:

  1. Big and first rate. Here you learn from excellent colleagues who are ahead of you, where the culture is ambitious, and where you also learn how to navigate and successful in big organisations. There are probably some nice perks, too, like private health insurance.
  2. Small and first rate. You won’t learn how big organisations work, and there are fewer formal process, policies and departments. The upside is that you might end up doing more senior and varied work because there are fewer people around.
  3. Big and second rate. There’s still a lot you can learn from these, but the organisation has lost its way and is in decline. If it’s an agency, there may still be some good, prestigious clients to work on, but which the agency is struggling to retain.
  4. Small and second rate. Working here will teach you little about how to be successful as a marketer and it probably won’t sound prestigious on the CV. There are higher risks here to your wellbeing and careers, such as having to deal with the emotions of a manager whose business is stalling, and there’s a much higher risk of unexpected “termination”.

Someone early in his career asked me for some advice, after he’d been let go from a couple of PR agencies in quick succession. Incongruously, he was clearly bright and a good communicator. The issue, I concluded, was that his employers had been in categories 3 and 4, and he probably needed a different environment and someone to take him under their wing. I helped him get some some-short work, and he has subsequently worked for in the world of category 2 (small and first-rate) and been successful.

How to categorise a prospective employer

Of course, this is all well and good in theory, but how do you know in advance what an employer is really like behind the façade of a good-looking website? The answer is that it’s actually quite difficult to know. However, here are some ideas:

  1. Obviously, famous brands can be great options – it’s why so many people apply to work at Microsoft, Unilever and Nestle. They will normally be in category one, but a brand like BHS would have been in category 3. You can determine the category through annual reports or coverage in the business sections of newspapers. However, all big companies have stronger periods than others, and a weak period where a company grasps the nettle and puts in place a turnaround plan (like John Lewis) doesn’t stop it being in category 1.
  2. Go to industry events before you graduate and talk to people a few years ahead of you about who they recommend.
  3. Do summer internships to get an inside look. If a summer job is at an employer you like, it could be perfect for a graduate job. Internships are also a useful vantage point to learn about employers in the sector generally, and to make connections.
  4. If you’re planning to work in an agency, look up the client list. The agency may not be a prominent brand, but do its clients look like companies with significant budgets? The ability to say you worked at an agency on its Sainsbury’s account is much better than saying you handled the local hairdresser’s account.
  5. Check out employer review sites such as Glassdoor.
  6. If they have a team page on their site, think about whether there’s sufficient experience and gravitas among the team for you to learn from. An agency shouldn’t just be fresh-faced new graduates plus the boss.
  7. If not applying for an official graduate training programme, ask potential employers what their commitment to personal development and training is.

How I chose my first employer

Of course, I didn’t know all the above when I started out in my career, but it is a codified reflection of what I learned along the way.

My first proper job was in my gap year before university (and went back to the same employer afterwards). The Adam Smith Institute was (and is) a small but first-rate organisation. My boss had been described in John Major’s official biography as one of only two intellects that Major had respected. He had been a syndicated newspaper columnist in the United States and on the editorial board of a British national newspaper, a professor of logic at a US university, Secretary of the high-IQ society Mensa, and had degrees from Edinburgh, St Andrews and Cambridge.

I had a really interesting gap year as a result, helping to place stories in newspapers, develop ideas for the website and, around a month after leaving school, made my first appearance on BBC Radio 4. Unlike a large organisation, there was no formal HR-led training programme (there was no HR department, either). But there was plenty of learning how to do stuff from someone with expertise.

To take the role, I had turned down an offer to spend my gap year in the Press Office of the Conservative Party, working for someone who is now the eminent Executive Director for Government Communications. That would have been a great learning experience too. Hate to be mercenary, but the deciding factor was simply financial.

How did I know the employer I was choosing was good? I went to a range of the organisation’s events and spent a good half hour talking to someone who was part-way through a gap year job there. It was a small outfit but I understood the internal dynamics and what the job was going to entail.

The thing about first-rate organisations is that they are not afraid of change; it’s the constant iterative process in how they function that makes them first rate. Once a week, my line manager would take me for lunch and the idea was that I would pitch ideas for new activities and tweaks – actually, that might not have been the idea, but it is what I did.

The number one attribute you need to be a top marketer

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In The Matrix, the most notable movie of 1999, the lead character Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) is able to acquire new skills that would normally take years to learn – including martial arts – by being plugged into a computer and receiving a digital download that takes mere seconds. This sort of learning ability was an attribute that one of the best hires I have made seemed to have

Jack (not his real name) was working on a reception desk but kept rapidly adding new skills in all the Adobe applications and in design. He didn’t actually have Neo’s rapid downloading capability, just a hunger to learn and he spent his evenings doing online learning. During quiet spots during the day, he started volunteering his skills. With passion like that, Jack deserved to be in a marketing team and I was able to make it happen for him.

Why hunger to learn accelerates your effectiveness

Hunger to learn is the most important attribute that affects if someone is going to be a top marketer. This is the case for three reasons.

Firstly, there is a body of marketing knowledge that has been built up over the past century, in areas such as copywriting, advertising and psychology that can fast-track your marketing abilities. The best copywriters are the ones who have read the classics such as books by Joseph Sugarman and Drayton Bird, which give techniques for using words to convince and sell, and read novels and poetry, which show how to use words with style. There is a huge body of knowledge out there – such as why a photo including someone’s face works better than a pretty scene – which can be learned faster by studying than through your own work. 

Secondly, the pace of change in marketing is speeding up. While you can learn plenty from personal experience, it’s much better to also learn from other people’s experience – such as by watching online videos about Photoshop, attending seminars, listening to experts on Audible or watching Ted talks. Sometimes people think that they only need to talk strategy and don’t need technical knowledge. In fact, a good level of technical knowledge is necessary to be a senior marketer. That’s why the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s Professional Marketing Competencies framework, even for CIM Fellows, incorporates a Technical capabilities section.

Finally, hunger to learn advances your career because a proven commitment to continuing professional development tells a powerful story. People will see your skills are growing and give you more opportunities to work on bigger, and perhaps more interesting, projects. Most marketers underinvest in the time needed for learning, but for those who take their development seriously, it can be surprisingly easy to become a top performer.