Zoe Gould - UKRB Marketing & Products

• What inspires you?
• Why did you choose to join Marketing?
• What have you been doing since you joined?
• What does your current role involve?
• What do you enjoy most about your job?
• What support and training have you had since joining?
• What qualities do you need to succeed in Marketing?
• Have you been involved in any inspirational moments?
• Why join Marketing?

Transcript

What inspires you?
I am drawing this, the Burj posh 7 star hotel in Dubai, because I’d really like to work abroad at some stage. I grew up abroad and my family actually live over in Dubai, which is why I’ve drawn the hotel and also Barclays have offices there, so maybe one day I’d like to get a placement out there or something along those lines. That’s the reason I’ve chosen to draw this object.

Why did you choose to join Marketing & Products?
At university I studied management and I was able to tailor my course with modules that I enjoyed. Throughout university I’d studied marketing and it was something I really wanted to get into, but I didn’t necessarily know I was creative enough to work agency side. So to be able to bring my previous knowledge from high street banking into a bank and work client side and get experience of agencies and dealing with all different areas of marketing, as opposed to specialising straight away, was a great opportunity for me.

What have you been doing since you joined?
The first three months I spent actually in a couple of the branches, I shadowed the area director for south-west London so I went around all of his seventeen branches and talked to all of his staff about areas they would like to see improved. So I asked them about motivation, reward and things like that, so I did a mini survey on them.

Then in January I moved to head office where I worked in the brand and advertising team, so since then I’ve worked on the big project that you’ll see in Canary Wharf. There’s artwork across the station, we own it, we call it station domination. As of yesterday, we recently launched our ‘half two’ advertising. So I’ve been working on that with all of our team, so that’s to promote a whole range of products for the rest of the year.

We’ve also managed a lot of the internal comms for our various advertising campaigns. I’ve also been looking at extending the template advertising process we have for the branch staff and also looking at how we can drive forward with Barclays green propositions and how we can compete more effectively in the market.

What does your current role involve?
On a day-to-day basis I’m on the phone a lot. The way I’d describe my role is probably an intermediary if you like. I work between stake holders in the business and then agencies externally. So I get to interact with our media buying agency, our creative agency and also whoever is coming to us from the business that needs support on any of their advertising.

So I’m really busy, I work with a whole range of people and it gives you good exposure to senior stakeholders across the business. So from the word go, whatever area you go into in Barclays you're encouraged to interact with senior leaders across the business and participate in meetings and take on responsibility from the outset.

What do you most enjoy the most about your job?
Probably the variety of it actually, I do a different thing everyday. I get to meet different people, I go to agencies all the time, so it’s the variety, I’m in and out of the office, because I’m at various meetings. So it’s variety and no two days are ever the same.

It’s really rewarding to see the outcomes of your work, for example, today I opened the paper and I see an ad I’ve worked on and worked with our agency to create so that’s really fulfilling.

What support and training have you had since joining?
I’ve had quite a lot actually. I’ve been very fortunate really because my line manager is really supportive and when I joined she’s helped me to identify any training needs I might have. So I’ve done campaign management training, I’m about to go on some stakeholder management training.

Also, throughout, we are offered the opportunity to study CIM which is the Chartered Institute of Marketing professional diploma, so I studied that and I get my results next month. So hopefully I’ve done okay in those. And we also start getting a two thousand pound training budget.

I haven’t quite decided what I’m doing with mine yet but it’s a really good opportunity and I know that when it comes to it I can ask whoever in the business for support and advice on how to spend it and how they think I can develop it, because I have regular development meetings with my line manager to identify any areas of weakness.

What qualities do you need to succeed in Marketing & Products?
I’d say that you have to be energetic, a bit of a cliché, but a people person. You’re interacting, as I’ve mentioned several times, with people from a variety of different areas across marketing and in the business.

You have to have really good interpersonal skills and communication skills because you have to translate the company’s need into a brief format that agencies understand, so you have to be really good at communicating.

And really motivated and driven to succeed. And it wouldn’t harm to have an understanding of customer needs and what goes on in the market, just so that you can ensure that those are translated into whatever advertising campaign you come up with at the end of the day.

Have you been involved in any inspirational moments?
I guess the one thing, it’s kind of in process at the moment. I was recently sent on a green marketing conference and I came back from that with a mind full of knowledge about what other people in the industry are doing. And then I met up with someone in the business that had been on a similar course with more of an environmental basis.

We worked together, figured out that we should obviously be driving this forward at Barclays because it’s such a hot topic at the moment. We put our heads together and figured out that there was actually quite a lot of people across the business working on little pockets of propositions trying to drive it forward themselves, so together we’ve pulled everyone together and we’re trying to push it forward.

I mean we’ve got people from Barclaycard, people from the mortgages department. Someone’s looking at loans propositions, someone from corporate affairs, who works with our CEO on environmental initiatives. I guess that’s probably the most inspirational thing that I’ve been involved in because it’s actually pulling together people from, not just the UK Retail Bank, which is where I sit, but it's people from across the business.

It’s everyone getting together, off their own back really, and we’re just doing it. No one’s actually told us to sit down and do it. It’s just something we all want to do so I think that that’s quite inspirational.

Why join Marketing & Products?
I’d say it’s really varied and the marketing department is huge. We’ve got insight and CRM, we’ve got customer relationship management, we’ve got direct marketing, we’ve got brand and advertising, we’ve got the propositions team, we’ve got in-branch marketing, I think, so there are a whole range of departments.

I just think it’s a really exciting place to be because come the end of the scheme, there’s a whole range of options open to you, and I just think it’s really exciting to be able to see the results of your work on a large scale in newspapers, in a flyer in a branch or in a letter sent out to customers.

You can actually see the results of your work and your efforts and it’s really exciting to see it translated from the insight from customer needs to translating that through to a proposition that’s developed and then a campaign that’s put out to the market. It’s really diverse and really good fun and everyone’s lovely in the department so, come join!