ANCHOR Factors are consistent across companies but the emphasis on each ANCHOR Factor can differ from company to company. This can be shown by the difference of working at Innocent Drinks, compared to Mars Food. Gareth was brought in by the CEO of Mars as a change agent and he could well have landed on Mars.

He was given the brief to make ‘Mars more Innocent’, challenging because Innocent based heavily towards the Change ANCHOR Factor and there were over 40,000 colleagues in Mars following a tight system based upon the Consistency ANCHOR Factor. The CEO wanted to retain the consistency that had made Mars so successful, but needed to also bring in a new, faster and more nimble approach that challenged these systems.

With the support of the CEO and wider Leadership Team Gareth started to understand the current approaches that made the organisation successful and looked for opportunities to deliver change. The opportunity came when they looked at price tiering in the dog food category and proposed the introduction of a price fighter brand.

The marketing team launched the challenger brand in an agile way. The normal ‘lock and load’ European innovation cycle usually required careful alignment and buy-in from multiple countries and would have taken over 2 years from concept to launch. Misfits was launched within 6 months and over a dozen years on the brand still exists and is doing well. The historic procedures and process were respected and the CEO was able to start to impact his change agenda. It was a small project that built trust and alignment with the CEO and Leadership Team and enabled a wide shift in project development in the future.

Many people criticise McDonald’s for all sorts of reasons. It could be the perceived health credentials of the food, or the impact of such a large company on the environment or animal welfare. Having led the UK and Ireland marketing and food team, Gareth has got behind the scenes and has enormous respect for what they are trying to do, how they are responding to change and are leading the wider industry.

During his tenure the issue of single use plastic was increasingly becoming headline news. McDonald’s already leads in many sustainability areas and had switched from plastic to paper straws, but still predominately used ‘single use’ plastic toys in the Happy Meal product. Changing this seemed like an impossible task. McDonald’s was after all the world's largest manufacturer of toys and Happy Meal toy commitments were made years into the future.

The marketing team had concerns and were spurred on by the protest lead by two sisters Ella and Caitlin. They were two school girls, who protested about plastic at the UK head office. This encouraged the marketing team to bring a series of proposals to the Leadership Team which involved switching from plastic to paper toys, introducing a toy recycling amnesty and letting customers switch toys for fruit bags. Old toys were even recycled into new playground equipment for charities.

This required a new supply chain, new instore procedures and major toy stock write offs. The Leadership Team agreed to all the changes and the UK and Ireland were the first country in McDonald’s to go plastic free in Happy Meal. It is possible to change the direction of a super tanker using Challenge and Unity.

Checkatrade is the UK’s largest online marketplace to find reputable tradespeople to carry out home repairs and maintenance. Gareth was asked to be CMO and unify three distinct marketing teams.

There was the customer acquisition team, the tradespeople acquisition team and the tradespeople retention team. Each was effective in their own right, focusing on their own distinct objectives but had increasingly grown apart. KPIs weren't always aligned between the three areas, the brand had a subtly different look and feel, and roles had started to morph, stretch and overlap.

There was an opportunity to reorganise the team to make it more efficient and effective, but as the new CMO Gareth needed to understand the issues from the grassroots. He needed to get to know everyone personally in the marketing team, so quickly set up informal, agenda-less 121s with everyone. He wanted to get behind the potentially biased opinions, understand what everyone did and get to hear what they saw as opportunities and risks.

Gareth was in listening mode, hearing everyone’s history, understanding what was and was not working and appreciating their points of view. This started to show who the star players were, they created value time and again and also pointed out the problem areas. Gareth’s task was to translate what he heard against the business strategy, identifying the critical roles, filling them with the star players, remove fringe or duplicating areas and give everyone a clear role down the marketing funnel.

This started to create a high performing team with a ‘one team’ attitude. The previously siloed system rewarded performance within one area, but meant the implications elsewhere in the marketing funnel were ignored. As one team everyone needed to understand their personal responsibility but care about the impact they had on others, so personal KPIs became not just about acquisition but retention too. Good team performance was rewarded, and siloed performance wasn’t.

In the humdrum of daily work we all get caught up in routine. The daily meetings, the regular reporting, the endless correspondence and stakeholder management to get things done. There is hardly enough time to manage all of this, let alone have an abstract hunch which might be valuable long-term. But these hunches are important. Marketing is about finding future revenue streams and this means staying curious.

Gareth worked in the past on the breakfast cereal category. The market was pretty static and the major innovation was around kid’s cereals and new guidelines around healthy eating. This was hardly the environment for a 100-year-old brand called Shredded Wheat. The primary audience was over fifties, who bought into the brand because it was natural and wholesome. It was after all 100% wheat and no added sugar and salt.

The brand was slowly declining and something needed to be done and a top-down decision was made to launch a kid’s version called Sporties. This leveraged the brand’s health credentials to target kids. The brand even had an iconic sports star at the time, Michael Owen, as the brand spokesperson and a uniquely designed ‘power zone’ inside each biscuit.

It was a disaster. Sporties was quickly redesigned and relaunched but it kept failing. Shredded Wheat was a substantial eat and, whilst the idea worked on paper with parents, it did not fly with kids. The common playground expression ‘Never Eat Shredded Wheat' to teach kids the points of the compass (N-E-S-W) probably also did not help.

Around the same time the brand team were looking at how they could be more effective with their core audience, the over fifties. This audience were more health aware and bought Shredded Wheat because it was simple, honest goodness. The trouble was most of the benefits of the cereal were linked to the absence of ingredients. No added salt and sugar were important, but it is a little like saying no added cholesterol. The team therefore looked for alternative ways to promote the brand. Initially we started a partnership with the British Heart Foundation, donating over £250k per year. It was a natural partnership for the brand, but also ended up getting the company in court with Shropshire Trading Standards for misleading the customer on the brand’s health benefits. This was not intentional, and energised the team to find a way to talk about the positive messages in a more constructive way.

By coincidence, epidemiological data and clinical studies were taking place in the US on whole grain. This was starting to show strong association between whole grain intake and a reduction in risk of coronary heart disease by up to 20–30%. The team’s hunch had some substance and the studies were followed up. Cutting a long story short, Shredded Wheat was repositioned to heart health and in its first year grew 17%. All of Nestlé cereals and General Mills cereal globally were subsequently positioned around their whole grain content, and whole grain became a new health benefit.

A memorable experience in optimising the customer’s experience with the brand was in developing Bear Snacks. Andrew and Hayley Gait- Golding were importing dried fruit into the UK and were keen to develop a healthy brand for kids. Gareth looked at the options available and honed in on Kellogg’s Winders, marketed as a playful brand for kids but there were 12 different ingredients and most of them incomprehensible. There had to be a healthier version, something that was as tasty as a chocolate bar and healthy as fruit.

Hayley was a fruitarian, knew everything about fruit and was sure she could create something as playful as a Winder, but with one ingredient. Fruit. Well to be honest two, fruit and sometimes veg.

The concept evolved and with the help of B&B Studio, a new design agency, Bear Snacks was created on a shoestring budget. With such a tight budget we needed to make sure everything communicated. From business cards to sales invoices and secret messages kids could discover on the packaging. Everything was a potential connection point with a new customer and we wanted to be memorable, distinctive and talked about.

Our best connection point was, however, created by mistake. The fruit snack comes as pairs of fruit rolls which were originally simply packed in a wrapper side by side. The rolls slight stickiness meant they kept falling out of line and this stopped production. We needed to introduce a backing card to hold them in place. Every card squeezed the already delicate margins but we had no choice and decided to make these into collector cards with fun animal and fruit facts for kids to collect.

We never anticipated the impact the cards would have. They became trading currency at schools and combined with a simple fruit message gave us permission to talk to adults and kids through social media. Slowly the brand fame grew and marketing activity advanced. Even now there are collector sites for the cards and eBay has sales of the cards taking place every day.

McDonald’s are the masters of operations and meticulous with detail. Seconds matter so they try to ensure every store gets it right first time. Of course there can be odd mistakes, but the team are constantly looking for ways to make short term efficiency adjustments.

This eye for detail is drilled into everyone and as a new member of the executive team Gareth spent his first week in-store working every station and getting to know the crew.

The Chief Operations Officer was particular impressive. We had regular leadership safaris instore and on the street. This was to assess what we were doing well and badly, but also to see what could be optimised to attract customers in-store or into the driveway.

Detail mattered. How clear were the menu boards to read? Had we the optimum outdoor signage in proximity to store? Were helmeted Uber Eats or Just Eat delivery drivers intimidating customers? Was the right product being advertised at the right time of day? How competitive were our prices vs a new deal from a competitor? We needed to be constantly agile and responsive despite serving 3.5m customers every day. Simple questions that should be asked every day whatever the business size.

This led to some simple but effective activity which enhanced sales. From copying artisan coffee shops and introducing an A-frame menu board to disrupt the customer walking by, or in key high streets getting the team guerrilla couponing in the shoulder period between breakfast and lunch, and most importantly listening to customers. Why, for instance, should breakfast need to finish at 10.30 a.m.? This had always been the case for McDonald’s in the UK and Ireland, but the social media disappointment of arriving 5 minutes late was palpable. Changing this to 11 a.m. substantially improved sales whilst still proving enough time for the staff to change over and prepare for lunch.