🚨Marketing Hackathon!

Great time today working with the students at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. A business clinic hackathon gave the chance for students, tutors and business to come together.

Three interesting businesses - a literacy hub for teachers, a woman's health portal and a tutor service - laid out marketing challenges and the students had to come up with an implementable marketing plan in 2 hours. 🏁

🤩 Scary to see how amazing the students were at laying out a plan - all anchored around content, community and digital to drive growth.

Lots of familiar ground being covered (it was just like a QBR, but without the egos 😬) and a reminder that smart, young talent still has a place counter to the graduate-replacement ethos of AI. Humans unite! 🦸‍♀️

Thanks Luisa Weinzierl, PhD, FHEA, Chartered FCIPD for the invite and to my teammates Bill Clark Hrishikesh Shilu Varun Raviprasad Emmanuel AKINRODEMI. Great fun!

#marketing #future #learning

Contemporary Issues in Marketing in 2024

Honoured to be invited back to guest lecture to 3rd Year Business Management Students at St Mary’s University, Twickenham on "Contemporary Issues in Marketing".

Always a topic that causes some reflection - many “issues” haven’t changed for, coughs, decades (understanding the customer, building a point of differentiation, being smart on channels, sales/marketing alignment, etc. etc.). But thinking on "contemporary" issues I picked these five:

💥 Consumer Choice - the war for attention / how the customer controls the purchase journey / lack of brand loyalty.
💥 Channel complexity - so many choices, so little budget / using creativity to cut through the digital noise / the yearly rise of new social channels.
💥 Sustainability - driven by millennials, consumers demanding greater brand transparency on DEI & sustainability.
💥 Skills - marketers needing to be much more multi-faceted across business, creative, data & program management / tools change, skills don’t.
💥 AI - of course! No tech is ever a silver bullet and our track record of implementing tech in marketing is, quite frankly, poor. But those who embrace AI will win over those that don't.

There are many more I could've added…

Lots of great questions from the students too on (unsurprisingly) AI, innovation and ethics in marketing.

Great to see such an engaged group. Thanks again Lucy Timms for the invite!

#marketing #learning #marketingstrategy