Position: senior brand manager, HP Sauce, Lea & Perrins and BBQ, HJ Heinz
Date of Birth: 19/08/1986
Having joined Heinz on a graduate placement scheme, Clark quickly landed a brand manager role on the flagship Heinz Tomato Ketchup brand, before making the leap to her current position in June 2012. With a role that encompasses project-managing innovation, developing brand strategy and managing media planning, she has retained a genuine passion for food marketing.
Describes herself as: Diligent, positive, enterprising.
Q: What attracted you to marketing as a profession?
A: I was originally drawn in through my love of food. Discovering food marketing was the perfect way to combine my interest and creativity with my career.
Q: What are the biggest marketing challenges you face?
A: The digital world creates so many marketing opportunities that it is both overwhelming and exciting. Gone are the days when a media plan included just TV, radio or print. The biggest challenge is identifying the right opportunity for your brand and consumer and executing it in the right way at the right time. Agility is a crucial part of this. The consumer absolutely has the control and can choose what is relevant and therefore what they want to engage with – a very different model from the traditional push advertising.
Q: What are the biggest trends affecting your business?
A: The continual value-seeking by our consumers, which isn’t just about price, it’s the balance of how our brands’ benefits meet our consumers’ ever-changing needs.
Q: Are there any trends or new media platforms you believe are overrated?
A: No, a media platform that isn’t right for the brand I am working on might be perfect for another, so you can never completely rule any out. Similarly, it’s important to keep abreast of how they change over time; what might not work today could be perfect for your business challenges tomorrow.
Q: How are you changing the media channels you use to better reach your consumers?
A: We are responding to consumers, following their interests and interrogating the changing way in which they are engaging in different media channels. An example of this is the growth of YouTube over recent years, where consumers are behaving completely differently to traditional media. They want bite-sized chunks of information, with which they connect with intently, while you have their attention. This has opened up new opportunities for HP Sauce and we used YouTube as a key media channel for the recent ‘Sauce of manliness’ campaign.
Q: What are your most admired brands and why?
A: John Lewis. Over the past few years it has created a succession of really engaging TV ads that have strengthened the strong emotional connection that consumers have with the brand, making the purchase decision so much more than just a rational decision based on quality and price.
Q: What is your most admired piece of advertising or communications and why?
A: One of my favourites is the Lurpak ‘Joy of Creation’ campaign from 2010, largely due to its simplicity. The campaign successfully tapped into a rich insight that there is so much more pride in cooking something for the family from scratch, which resonated with scratch cooks and made dormant cooks want to grab their apron again. It made a commodity product, usually purchased based on rational decisions, very emotive.
Q: What skills do you think are most important to get ahead in marketing today?
A: Creativity and agility will be key in these volatile times and in the midst of ever-changing technology. Staying connected and inquisitive about consumers, products, competitors and new media will help you identify ideas and opportunities and, once combined with rigour and agility, can make the difference in delivering the plan.