About
Commercial Marketing and Growth Leader
Most of my work over the past nine years has been commercial, building marketing functions from a standing start that hold budgets against actuals, report a return to the executive committee and shape which accounts the business pursues, which it protects and where the repeat revenue sits.
Brand and communications is the craft underneath that, carried across nine markets in South Africa, the United Kingdom and the SADC region, and it works because the research, the governance and the operating structure are in place before the creative begins.
Selected Projects
Work across sectors,
markets and disciplines.
What I Bring
"I notice the patterns that repeat across markets and sectors, and I build the structures that turn a strategy on paper into work a business can measure."
Skills & Tools Stack
Skills and tools,
across the stack.
Strategy & Reporting
Automation & AI
Analytics & Listening
Campaign & Paid Media
Governance & Compliance
Delivery & Collaboration
Contact
If the work fits your brief,
get in touch.
Financial Services · Sumer Group · UK
Sumer Group (Professional Services)
I was brought into Sumer Group to manage external communications, and within the first few weeks the more urgent problem showed itself internally, thirteen subsidiaries each carrying a different sense of who they were and no shared architecture to hold them together. Each entity had its own voice, its own assumptions about tone and its own sense of what the parent brand meant in practice. I took that observation to leadership and asked to widen my remit from external to internal, making the case that the external work I was hired to do would keep underperforming until the internal architecture was fixed. That conversation brought the budget with it, and I went on to manage the group communications budget against competing priorities and to consolidate the agencies the thirteen subsidiaries had inherited from their pre-acquisition periods into a single roster, which took duplicated retainers out of the cost base and gave the group one accountable set of creative and PR partners. I also established the listening and reputation discipline the group had never had, tracking sentiment, share of voice and emerging issues across the subsidiary portfolio in Brandwatch and using GWI research to test how far each audience really differed, which is what the architecture was eventually built on. I built the communications architecture the group still operates from, with governing protocols that balanced group-level brand coherence against the distinct cultures each subsidiary had earned, which is the point where most federated communications architectures fail. I managed the communications roadmap that sequenced how change was introduced across the group, pacing the messaging so that people had time to absorb it and so that the regulatory and reputational sensitivities of the financial services sector were respected throughout, and I held senior relationships across the MD, subsidiary CEOs and group functions for the duration.
Visual Work
