The Marketing Week Podcast

Specsavers scooped the win of Marketing Week’s brand of the year for 2025, pipping Adidas, EE, Monzo, ServiceNow and Warburtons to the prize, off the back of its success in the October 2024 IPA Effectiveness Awards, where it won gold for its for its ‘I don’t go’ campaign. Founded by Doug and Mary Perkins in 1983, Specsavers has seen strengths in the business, as group revenue grew by 7.5% in the 2023/24 financial year to £4.18bn.In this episode of The Marketing Week Podcast, editor-in-chief Russell Parsons is joined by CMO Peter Wright and global brand director Spencer McHugh to delve into how the brand has evolved and grown into new territories but kept its purpose core to its heart and maintained “enviable awareness consideration and trust” in a competitive category. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"Great leadership is great leadership. Poor leadership is poor leadership, irrespective of what discipline or function that leadership is in," Becky Moffat, chief customer officer for retail banking and wealth at HSBC UK, tells Marketing Week. In this episode of The Marketing Week Podcast, recorded at Marketing Week’s Festival of Marketing with podcast agency 18Sixty, she shares her lessons for leaders, and how leadership is "fundamentally" about building trust and joining dots. ‘We’ve put marketing in context’: Inside HSBC’s team evolution She also explains how her remit has widened with her promotion from CMO to CCO earlier this year and how HSBC's team structure has evolved as a result. Marketing at HSBC sits within the 'customer' function, alongside disciplines including data and analytics, advertising and partnerships. She describes her team as working in "communities of practice" and explains how the business got to this setup and how, at the heart of it, the customer is being put first. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adidas has been on a transformation journey in the last few years, following a period of turbulence as it grappled with the discontinuation of its popular Yeezy line, waning investor confidence and an overreliance on performance marketing.  Today, the sportswear brand is back on track. Earlier this year, CEO Bjørn Gulden told investors the business had succeeded in building back “brand heat” - thanks to an increase in brand marketing and its new brand platform ‘You Got This’, a clearer brand identity and effective partnerships, to name a few.  In this edition of The Marketing Week Podcast, recorded at Marketing Week’s Festival of Marketing with podcast agency 18Sixty, we get an inside look at Adidas’s brand revival.  Roy Gardner, vice president of brand activation, shares how reinstating marketing fundamentals and getting to the core of what the brand is – and isn’t - created a full marketing solution, “not a brand comms-led, marcomms-led" answer to turning the business around.  “It was about coming together and going, what is it that we can do in marketing to essentially reset and regrow this business?” he says.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fresh from the release of new IPA data revealing the ROI of influencer marketing, in this edition of the podcast we’re taking inspiration from our Influencers Explored series to discuss the numbers, ask what the professionalisation of creators means for brands and how businesses can better support influencer wellbeing.Host Charlotte Rogers, Marketing Week deputy managing editor and head of insight, is joined by reporter Amrit Virdi and Jane Christian, executive vice-president of analytics at WPP Media and author of the IPA research. Our panel is rounded off by Simon Harwood, global effectiveness director at influencer agency Billion Dollar Boy, and Scott Guthrie, director general of the Influencer Marketing Trade Body.We discuss what it is about influencer content that’s driving ROI, why a strong creator-brand fit is essential and ask whether the IPA research will help marketers secure greater investment.Our guests also debate what the increasing professionalisation of the influencer economy means for brands and consider the impact on UK creators of the new All-Party Parliamentary Group. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the latest episode of The Marketing Week Podcast, Hugo Boss's global marketing lead, James Foster, shares his vision for the fashion brand and the crucial role marketing is playing in its turnaround.Hugo Boss has been on a journey over the past five years, as the business looks to build relevance and top-line growth. Marketing is playing a critical role in this transformation, with CEO Daniel Grieder singling it out as a key growth driver as part of his Claim 5 strategy, which launched in 2021 and is concluding this year.Critical to helping deliver that vision is James Foster, who joined Hugo Boss at the start of the year to head up global marketing and communications.He joins managing editor Lucy Tesseras to discuss his first eight months in the role, how to strike the right balance when joining a brand midway through a turnaround, and why the 'why' is so important when rallying teams to drive change. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Whether it’s a time to reset how you work or a moment to look for a new challenge, September can feel like a fresh start for many aspects of marketers’ careers. In this episode of The Marketing Week Podcast, Charlotte Rogers, deputy managing editor, is joined by senior reporter Molly Innes and reporter Grace Gollasch to discuss how September and the year’s final quarter can be a period of recalibration. They discuss how marketers can access mentorship and the benefits of finding a mentor, as well as career development and why it may be a good time to review CVs and refine LinkedIn profiles.  Grace also shares how marketers can reassess their agency relationships, unpacking how AI and data are reshaping dynamics, and following new guidance on intermediary fee structures that encourages marketers to ask more questions about the commercial relationships shaping agency selection.    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From ghosting and indecision to recruitment being a buyer's market and marketers facing an uphill battle to land roles, marketing recruitment is facing a breadth of acute challenges.Last month, more than a fifth (22.4%) of marketers said they expected marketing job cuts at their brands in the following quarter, according to exclusive IPA Bellwether data for Marketing Week.  Senior reporter Molly Innes is joined by former Asahi chief marketing officer Grant McKenzie, Lauren Spearman, marketing consultant, careers content creator and Marketing Week 2024 Changemaker, and Suz Bannister and Lamees Butt, cofounders of Riser, an AI-powered recruitment startup to explore how AI is impacting marketing recruitment, from screening bias to contributing to more applications for roles, as well as the broader challenges in marketers' job searches today, such as ghosting, long processes and indecision.The episode also looks at how companies can rethink recruitment to be fairer, more transparent and more effective, and asks how AI could be used thoughtfully to improve hiring rather than making it harder.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In partnership with Google: Google's managing director of retail and consumer goods, Sophie Neary, joins Marketing Week's Russell Parsons, to explore how marketers can harness the latest consumer trends and technological evolutions to fight for greater share of shoppers' online baskets.They examine how brand and retail marketers can use AI, Search and data to unlock growth opportunities, and to face down growing competitive threats from online rivals, large and small. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the latest episode of The Marketing Week Podcast, we’re discussing why short-termism is becoming a even bigger issue for brands and what marketers can do to mitigate it. Marketing Week’s 2025 Language of Effectiveness survey, in partnership with Kantar and Google, reveals 63.1% of marketers say their business has increased its focus on short-term activity over the past 12 months. Just 17.3% strongly agree their business invests sufficiently in long-term brand health, while more than half (52.9%) believe their campaigns are too focused on performance or sales. The barriers to investing in brand range from a lack of data and budget, to scepticism from leadership and a lack of agreed metrics. As a result, just 11.1% of marketers claim to be able to comprehensively demonstrate the effect of brand marketing and its overall business contribution. To dig into these stats, host Charlotte Rogers, deputy managing editor and head of insight at Marketing Week, is joined by senior reporter Niamh Carroll, Rhea Fox, marketing director for gift experiences at Moonpig Group, and Pete Markey, former Boots CMO and Marketing Week Marketer of the Year 2023.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In partnership with Campaign Monitor by Marigold: Email isn’t dead - it has just been misunderstood and possibly undervalued. This Special Episode unpacks how today’s smartest brands are turning email into a high-ROI channel that powers both long-term brand equity and short-term performance. With Campaign Monitor's senior product marketing manager Michelle Slifcak Villa, we explore the challenge marketers face today to prove effectiveness, how the latest in AI technology is shaping the larger marketing landscape, and how brands who treat email as a strategic channel will outperform in 2025 and beyond. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.