Nigel Spencer's Email Addresses & Phone Numbers

I like Marketing because it allows you to be imaginative, creative and make things happen. I like the fact that to succeed you have to know your customers. I also like the competitive element as you try and win against your competitors. Marketing also has such a variety of opportunities and challenges, with no two brands the...

I like Marketing because it allows you to be imaginative, creative and make things happen. I like the fact that to succeed you have to know your customers. I also like the competitive element as you try and win against your competitors. Marketing also has such a variety of opportunities and challenges, with no two brands the same. It is always fresh and interesting. Key for me is to be able to see the results of my efforts. If I'm expending my energy, time and talent in work, I have to be able to look back and say, "Look what we've achieved. Look how far we've come." I find that wherever I work I look to create a sense of purpose, a goal we can all strive to achieve. I like to work with people who find ways to make things happen, because there's nothing worse than being stuck in a group where people don't really care. Some core things that are important to me include fairness, respect, empowerment, independence and getting things done. If you were to ask those that work with me why they like to do so, I think they would say it was because things get done and my team delivered. I am a big fan of momentum. I'd be put in a job in which we would very quickly take a lot of cost out, drive up sales and build an effective team. I think they'd also say I am fun to work with and helped them to develop. Looking back, Octopus, Aviva Investors, Aviva Europe, Aviva Insight, RAC were all in a similar position when I arrived: "We haven't got anything really at the moment", or "what we've got isn't working" or "can you improve what we’ve got?" I now have over 20 years’ experience in financial services and marketing, across banking, insurance and asset management in the UK and internationally. During that time I have worked in B2B and B2C channels as well with intermediaries and on occasions all three at once. Experience which helps me add real value as a consultant. Specialities: brand positioning, advertising, insight, marketing research, data, CRM, direct marketing.Interim Marketing Director @ Champion of British savers, homeowners and SMEs, Aldermore provides its customers with straightforward savings accounts, award-winning mortgages, and specialist finance for small and medium size businesses. Launched in 2009, we are making a name for ourselves as the new British bank offering a fresh, dynamic and vibrant approach in a historically traditional sector. As Marketing Director I lead the development of the Aldermore brand, make sure that the voice of the customer remains at the heart of the business, and shapes everything we do. And of course deliver the marketing communications to continue our rapid growth in customer numbers. From May 2015 to September 2015 (5 months) London, United KingdomMarketing Director @ Octopus Investments is a fast growing investment company in the UK specialising in smaller company investing through tax efficient products. During my time Octopus enjoyed its most successful year in terms of customer, sales and revenue growth. What attracted me to Octopus was the fact I would be the functional head for Marketing across all aspects and it's a company where Marketing could make a real difference. I was also reporting to the CEO, who had founded the company . With less than 300 staff it offered the opportunity to demonstrate I could succeed in a small organisation, very different from my previous experience. The first thing in the brief was to make Octopus famous. This was a brand challenge, and opportunity. I brought in all of the learning and experience I had from Aviva, and implemented it into a company that was small and evolving. It was great fun at Octopus, as well as some hard graft . I added a lot of value and contributed to the company’s most successful year. There was the personal challenge of adapting to a small, entrepreneurial, environment than experienced previously. And there was the marketing challenge of creating a marketing function to stretch beyond sales support, build a team, integrate corporate and marketing messaging, create a research and insight programme, define and deliver the brand positioning, drive efficiency improvements to achieve economies as we grew and build a digital marketing foundation. On top of that there was a full refresh of the literature suite, a new visual and verbal identity, and the company’s first foray in to brand sponsorship through the partnership with Surrey and Birmingham Bears T20 teams. It was quite a time. I decided to leave Octopus to look for a broader marketing responsibility than that provided by the investment niche Octopus competes in. I had proven I could be successful in a very different organisational environment, and created a strong marketing foundation for the future. From May 2013 to July 2014 (1 year 3 months) London, United KingdomGlobal Head of Brand and Investment Marketing @ For the first time, Aviva Investors was trying to win business in the Financial markets and it needed some Marketing help to do this. The core elements of the role were to design and develop a Brand Positioning for Aviva Investors that was related to Aviva's brand, but sufficiently different to reflect the markets and the offering, because a Car Insurance brand is very different from a Pension Fund Asset Management brand. I had to define and deliver a Brand Positioning and Proposition for Aviva Investors which included things like Tone of Voice, Visual Identity & Literature Review. Effectively, it was a re-launch of the Investors' brand. This all came together in an integrated campaign which was recognised as B2B Campaign of the year by Money Marketing. My second task was to transform their Digital presence, because like many asset managers the history is very much face-to-face, personal selling, and they had no presence in Social Media or Online. I worked on and designed the whole Digital Transformation program. It included a refreshed Web Site and then a Social Media strategy built around LinkedIn and target groups, plus equipping our sales force with a Publishing app and iPads so that they weren't carrying around paper. That was the first job where I really got into the Social Media side. The third element of the role was Research and Insight. There was no existing Marketing Research, no scanning of the competitive context, so I introduced a Research and Tracking program to ensure that client feedback fuelled the business decisions. I was also responsible for all the content. Content in this case was for Investment Firms, Fund Manager Reports, Fact Sheets, White Papers, Research Papers and Technical Papers. I was responsible for compiling all that material and making sure it was shared and distributed effectively. From March 2011 to January 2013 (1 year 11 months) London, United KingdomDirector of Marketing @ I became the Director of Strategy and Planning for Aviva Europe, which was my first international job. I was responsible for the Marketing, Planning and Strategy for 11 markets in 11 countries across Europe, working with local marketing teams in Russia, Turkey, Spain, Italy, France, Poland and more. The job was to make sure that their activity would deliver the regional plan. This meant a lot of travel on Eurostar and a significant increase in my Air Miles! What was good about that job was the diversity, the cultural experiences; working with people from different countries. What was bad about that job was that I didn't have anything I could do myself; it was like a Regional Coordinating job. From January 2010 to March 2011 (1 year 3 months) Head of Marketing Insight @ At the end of 2007, Aviva decided to rebrand in the UK from Norwich Union to Aviva. I was asked to lead the UK Marketing work stream for that project. There was a huge job to do with the rebrand; There was external communications project, but at the same time there was a massive internal change program aligned to that. Everything had to be bought together in a way that customers valued, so we didn't end up with massive rejection. We needed to avoid any perception that this famous, long established British name had been tossed away and some funny name brought in its place. So to ensure that the customer voice was loud I took over the research and insight team as well. As well as the customer marketing there was the engagement of our people; when someone phones up and asks, "Why have you changed the name of Norwich Union to Aviva?" someone in a call centre has to have an answer that's credible and that they believe in. When we rebranded in 2009, The Times described it as the slickest corporate rebrand in history. We liked that. Within nine months of the rebrand, Aviva was exceeding awareness in consideration measures that Norwich Union had had before. Remember, Norwich Union had over 200 years to achieve that. In 2009 with the rebrand delivered I took on the deployment of a CRM system for Aviva UK. This was a £10 million technology change program to update our databases and our marketing capabilities. The task was to supply better capability to the UK marketing teams and helping them to be more efficient. We knew we were wasting a lot of Marketing money so the question was "How do we get better at this?" And at the same time deliver 175 direct marketing campaigns a month. From January 2007 to December 2009 (3 years) Norwich, United KingdomHead of Personal Customer Marketing @ At the very end of 2005, Aviva asked me to pick up the marketing challenge at RAC. Aviva bought RAC in 2005 and I became involved in building the Marketing Team. There was no marketing capability within RAC, as the incumbent team had departed as part of the acquisition. The company was in a bit of a mess marketing wise, and our job was all about re-launching a brand, building a Marketing team and creating value from the acquisition. I was Head of Personal Customer Marketing, which handled all of the Marketing to individuals, mainly the core rescue product but also the driving school BSM, and our car purchasing products. This was a direct marketing job in the main where the objective was to acquire and retain millions of customer each year. This was the first time I got into Online and Digital techniques. There was traffic generation, conversion, search and email; a whole range of functions I hadn't done before. We had a £25 million marketing budget, 20-odd people and a big target. We had to win 2.5 million customers a year; that involved Memberships and the full range of RAC products. As with general Insurance products, the customers renew every year. That means, in effect, you have to reacquire them every year. We had 1.9 million Rescue members when I started, all of whom had the opportunity to leave within the next 12 months. So a big part of the remit was to retain those customers and, more than that, grow the customer base. Two years later, we had 2.3 million customers, so I added 400,000 members in two years. From November 2005 to December 2007 (2 years 2 months) Head of Marketing @ RBS taking over NatWest signalled a change and I went on to join Norwich Union which became Aviva. Prudential had just launched Egg in the height of the "dot com" boom. Prudential had seen a massive share price increase because they had an online arm, so Aviva was playing catch up and was launching NorwichUnion.com as an online vehicle. They headhunted me to launch the banking products within their online financial services play; Credit Cards, Loans and Savings. In March 2001, the "dot com" bubble burst, so they closed the project. But as my products had been launched and were profitable, I stayed in the company in what's called Norwich Union Personal Finance, which was the mortgage and lending arm of Norwich Union. Our customers were retired people who wanted to access the equity in their homes without having to sell and move to a smaller property. These products are now called Lifetime Mortgages. Iin the spring of 2004, I became the Head of Marketing with Norwich Union Personal Finance. That was my first Marketing Leadership job. I had a team of 20 people, a budget of £5 million and I was responsible for the product development, marketing communications and PR for our Retail mortgage products. It was a standalone business within Aviva Group; it had its own managing director and employed 350 people with a turnover of £500 million. The position was the functional head; running the Marketing Department. I effectively sat on an executive committee for a company of 350 employees with a Managing Director, Sales Director, Finance Director, Operations Director and Marketing Director and we had to run that business as a separate P&L, which was fantastic. I'd never done that before. You're making decisions that affect people's employment prospects, you're deciding how to allocate budget and resource across different functions, you're arguing with Operations or with Sales; it was a great experience and good for developing the skill sets I needed. From January 2001 to October 2005 (4 years 10 months) Norwich, United KingdomSenior Marketing Manager @ Marketing attracted me because it was a far more positive way to spend my time. It was a positive function, all about growth, all about winning and creating customers. With some experience under my belt, I quickly realised that it was the one function in a large company where you touched all the other parts of the company and the external world. It is a very rich environment. You weren't sitting in Finance or Operations or Manufacturing. It cuts across all the silos and it faces the external world. On top of that there's a freedom in Marketing to create something of value. My first campaign within NatWest was a "small business" start-up campaign. The feeling I had when that campaign hit all 2,500 branches was fantastic - windows, posters and even a TV ad - I thought, "Wow, that's all me." You could see the results of your efforts and I really enjoyed that. It has since always been the case that people working in Marketing tend to be people that I like to work with. I feel I get good energy from them. They are stimulating in positive ways. By 1996, I had become a Product Manager for Personal Lending, followed in 1998 by a move into Credit Cards. The post was titled Senior Manager of Credit Card Proposition and Development. What was most interesting in the Credit Card role was being tasked with the new development to experiment with Mobile payments. We partnered with Orange to test and experiment on how to get payment and transaction facilities from a credit card onto a mobile device. It was very early days with all that kind of technology. We were playing with WAP and different protocols. Ultimately, I was invited by MasterCard, the global credit card company, to spend a week in their offices in New York. I went on to travel in Europe speaking on behalf of MasterCard, talking about mobile transactions & mobile payments, and I was a founding member of the MasterCard Global Mobile Commerce Forum. From August 1994 to December 2000 (6 years 5 months) London, United KingdomManagement Trainee @ Starting off as a trainee, I was working as a bank clerk (cashier). I worked in a bank branch for a couple of years rotating through all the branch jobs. In those days you had to know how the shop floor worked to get on in banking. It was a great foundation, dealing with unhappy customers and having the humility to do things like sweep the vaults, clean dog mess from the banking hall. I did Business Lending from 1986 through to 1989. Then in 1989, I went to the Regional Office to work in the HR Department. I did Work Measurement and Job Evaluation in HR, a real detail and analytics role which also required tact and influence to explain to branch managers how they could cope with workload with less people through efficiency changes. Then in 1991 I was back in lending but this time at the regional office crunching through larger corporate lending cases. In 1993 I moved over to Sales where I ran a regional sales team of 20 much older sales guys. My management training ended with my move to Marketing at Head Office in London. In 1991 I joined Corporate Lending, lending to big companies. In the early ‘90s, Lending was not fun because there was a recession going on at the time and a lot of business were struggling. I was working really long hours, effectively just closing down small companies, calling in loans and enforcing our security. It felt like a pretty negative thing to be doing. All my talent and energy was being expended writing off millions of pounds of bad debt and closing companies down. It was not a great time. From July 1985 to July 1994 (9 years 1 month) Nigel Spencer is skilled in: Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Multi-channel Marketing, Digital Marketing, Direct Marketing, Financial Services, B2B Marketing, Brand Positioning Strategies, Integrated Marketing, Marketing Research, Marketing Communications, Proposition Development, CRM, Business Development, Brand Advertising