Building Britain's Most Iconic Brands - Kerris Bright (BBC)

0:06Hello there Jim, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. Now, we're going to be talking about the BBC with someone who knows all about the BBC, which is their Chief Customer Officer, Kerry Sprite. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Well, it's wonderful to have you. I'm really excited to be talking about the BBC and getting into what all that means. I've got a ton of questions to ask you. But before we get there, you had a career before the BBC, which won't surprise anyone listening. So I thought I'd find out. Is it true that you have a PhD in philosophy and molecular neuroscience? Well, I have a doctor of philosophy, but in molecular neuroscience.

0:35So a PhD, yes, in molecular neuroscience. my sins. That's astonishing. Now, I meet lots of people in this job who've kind of got into marketing. That's an unusual career path. But I guess you kind of understand how people think, maybe, and how the brain works, maybe. Is there anything you've taken from that education that you take into your job now? Yes, it's not the most straightforward start to a career in marketing, it has to be said. But I think what I take out now is one of the reasons why I decided to not become an academic was I didn't think I was the same shape as most academics that I actually loved the subject matter and I liked, I'm very comfortable with data and the science side of it, but I was more interested probably in telling the story of it, teaching it, talking about it.

1:18And most of my colleagues hated that communication side of it. They actually wanted to do the work. And I realized I don't actually like doing work at a bench, but I love the results. I love talking about it. I like piecing together the story. I like the storytelling of it. So I've kind of realized I probably wasn't going to be really successful or academic, I probably should choose something else, hence making a break and going into the marketing. And I didn't know much about it at the time, but I thought I loved psychology. I thought I liked advertising. I'm interested in shopping, why people make the choices they make.

1:50And it was as much as that. And I thought I need to make a good, a new start, start again in a way. And I joined Unilever. But as I look back, I think the fact that I'm really comfortable with the left brain and the right brain, with data, with ideas, with magic with logic with art and science i find that has sort of served me well and that probably is the thing that sort of like i've been a bit of a red thread through my career is i've done jobs where both of those things have kind of mattered and i think the fact that i was both of those things and not one of those things is probably why i was never going to be a great scientist amazing you just reminded me actually very very early in my career i did um they used to do these bell bin type profiles yeah i don't even remember those and i remember going to the assessment center and the lady running it said you've got a very unusual profile right and apparently i was monitor evaluator which is kind of the academic numbers and plant which is the creative ideas person and apparently i topped out both of those spectrums which she said was really unusual usually people are one or the other and actually in a weird sense i i do like marketing because it does bring the kind of creativity and art and magic of inventing things with the sort of science data discipline of business and getting results and it does marry those two things and i found that because often many of my roles have been in heavily businesses that are dominated by r &d research and development technology innovation and i found the fact that i was a research scientist i can absolutely know what it's like to do research where you can't plan to get the answers out in one year to a budget has helped me with a little bit of credibility when working with those parts of the organisation.

3:27So I'm not going to say having a PhD has really served me well in my marketing career, but there are some elements of it that I think... It's a lovely trump card to play every now and then, isn't it? Just when you need it, you know? Yeah, and it helps if you're doing a bit insecure, just as actually Dr. Bright. If I mentioned my PhD, yeah. And I think also, you know, I was blonde haired, long hair, blonde hair, Essex girl. I think part of me also was a little bit insecure that I wouldn't be taken seriously in the world. And so I think doing a PhD, I thought, maybe in this world of work, I might also be taken a bit more seriously, which back in the day, Yeah, I can imagine.

4:01Women in business kind of actually, that maybe it's dead means instead there as well. Now, you started out in perhaps might be considered the most brand led organization in the world at training marketers, Unilever. I mean, what a grounding to have in terms of the, you know, the understanding of how marketing works and, you know, being brand led as an organization. I mean, they are really kind of, you know, I guess they're pioneers as kind of brand led marketing, aren't they? What did you learn in those 10 years about kind of brand building that's put you in good stead? Oh, just very fortunate to, it wasn't an incredibly well thought through thing.

4:34I wanted a job and I wanted to start somewhere. And I felt I needed to make a good start having done a PhD. And then so joining a good company, if I could, felt important. I felt I wanted to get a bit of training behind me. And so that's why I was attracted by the schemes. And I joined the Unilever trainee scheme back in the day. And the level of personal development that they're prepared to put you through, as well as skill development, I think actually that is probably. So as well as helping you be a functional marketer, the skills or brand building, they also develop you very early on as a manager and as a leader.

5:12and probably it's as much that aspect of it the personal development i think that has served me well as i've been able to you know have leadership positions um going forwards but an incredible organization full of super smart people doing really exceptional things but i actually joined sort of i was a bit on the edge of unilever i was not at the core as they say i first joined um quest international which was a b2b perfume and food ingredients business so i was working with perfumers and I even trained to be one for a couple of months actually so I was thought I might be a nose at one point worked out I had hay fever which is not a good not a good start but it was a very interesting business but it's b2b um not on the core of Unilever but you're getting all of the training about brand building consumer facing brand building in fact being exposed all of that training and working with others who were working with consumer brands made me feel that oh maybe the business I'm in is not the one that is most interesting so after three years I actually asked to make a move and i made a move to a consumer facing business but it was a small entrepreneurial business called unipath in consumer health care women's health care um it was a tech startup they took a technology which was monoclonal antibody technology but they applied it to pregnancy testing so they were the pioneers of the two blue lines oh really wow and patented that and had the patent for that globally so they were the people that invented the simple way of knowing whether you're pregnant or not and then commercialized it and were commercializing other aspects of women's health care so i thought wow this might be quite interesting maybe a better fit for the next step consumer branding because it was a consumer facing business and i wanted to test out my experience in there but also i felt look i'm interested in this and i could understand it actually so i was one of the few people that could sit in r &d and talk about monoclonal antibodies and actually understand what they were doing and how they did it um doesn't make you a great marketer but it probably as i said earlier it gets you more connected into the organization a little bit more respected when you're talking with phds and r &d and so i joined unipath tiny business in unilever's um sort of home and personal care group along with leavers and leader gibbs i think it was in the day so you're part of a group that's doing amazing brand building things and i could learn from all of that if i had a question on segmentation i could learn from the best at the center of Unilever but it was a very small business and you could actually do quite meaningful things inside your team get promoted quite fast asked to do big things I was a general manager when I was 31 because I asked to create a general manager position to run the UK and they were like yeah why don't you do that so I felt I was really lucky in those first 10 years because I had all of the training the backing and the business had the financial security of being part of Unilever But what I got to do was experiment with jobs, do international jobs, general management jobs, sort of develop quite fast.

8:08I'm not sure that would have been available to me into a bigger organisation. They're probably a bit too competitive. So in a small organisation, you probably can do more. And so that probably for me personally, those 10 years stood me in really good stead. It's really similar, actually. My experience, and not quite at the League of Unilever, I was at Britvik and I gravitated to the smaller brands. because what I found is you had much more responsibility. You may not have the budget or the glamour of working on Pepsi, which is probably our biggest, or Robinson's our biggest brand, but you've just got so much more experience.

8:37You've got P &L accountability. You've got to own the plan and implement the plan. And I just similar thing to you kind of working international for a bit to see how the markets do it, a bit of innovation and so on. And I think you accelerate your career far quicker, don't you? And you just get much more rounds of experience rather than working on a small part of a big brand, which can take a lot longer. And I think for me also, much more leadership experience, probably much faster. I mean, getting to manage small teams is not that hard, but often I was put in charge of sales teams and managing people a lot older than me sometimes, which in your early part of your career, it gave me a lot of experience, I think.

9:14So I'm incredibly grateful, actually. And I think if you cut me through the wrist, I am Unilever through and through. I know you tend to be, you're either P &G or Unilever today. And I do feel deeply grateful to that organization. In fact, I was the president of the marketing group of Great Britain a couple of years ago, and you have to organize speaker dinners. And I actually went to talk to Alan Yope, who I didn't know, who was CEO of Unilever at the time. And I said, will you come and be one of my speakers? Because I'd love you to come and talk at something. Because for me, Unilever is so part of my background.

9:48And I'm so proud to have been part of the organization. I'd love it if you would come and talk to the group. And he was absolutely fantastic. Oh, that's very, very special. Yeah. Now you made quite a big pivot, didn't you, after that point? So you went from probably the most brand-led organisation, I think, on the planet to the world of paint and a very, very big job with lots of responsibility. So what was the challenge in moving from a brand-led organisation to ICI, which I'm guessing was probably a lot more commercial R &D focused, product focused? Actually, there's an interesting story about how you get that job right when people think these things are well plotted.

10:20and it's a bit of a fluke and a massive stroke of good luck and a bit of preparation. I was talking to a friend whose husband used to work at Unilever and I'd probably been, I was at 10 years at Unilever at that point, thinking, what do I do next? I was in this small company. I couldn't go much further in the small company and it wasn't obvious how I'd make my way back into the big parts of Unilever. So I was at that point of thinking, what's next? Talking over dinner. And then three weeks later, got a call from him and he said, I've been thinking about Eucharist and your next step. and I'm at ICI, the paints business actually needs really good marketers.

10:55It's got the Dulux brand. It really needs good marketers. They don't always find it easier to attract them. Do you think this might be interesting? And I remember thinking, Unilever, ICI paint, why would you ever do that? I'm in the kind of like the best organization for brand building. But then I started to think, oh, Dulux, wow. I'm working in a very small business and this is a massive brand. My brand in Unipath gets one foot of space in boots and I can go into B &Q and you see Dulux and it takes up metres and metres of aisles. This might be quite interesting. And personally, I love interior design architecture.

11:30So this is not hard for me to get interested in that world of colour and interior design. So I started to get quite interested. But the only thing that happened was he said, well, I'll try and set up a meeting for you with the European CEO. That meeting didn't really happen. It took about almost five or six months later. We tried to get this meeting. Didn't happen. I was traveling. He was traveling. And in the end, we found the date. And I thought, well, I'll just go. And I went to this meeting. The chemistry was very good. I liked him a lot. We talked a lot. And it wasn't an interview because there was no job.

12:00And so you're probably a bit more confident. And we talked about what I felt the business might need. And I talked about a local business that might benefit from more European or global brand building, category management. and he said so what would you want to do if you came here and i said well maybe the you know uk marketing director would be the place to start but there's probably something you could do at european level and he said funny you should say that keris because yesterday our uk marketing director resigned wow to go to a very big job at nestle so literally a meeting that had taken five months and almost never happened happened the day after someone left and he said why don't you come and talk to the UK general manager which I did they wanted to see me like a hole in the head because I would have been given to them but we actually got on very well I started then to prepare I kind of wanted to do this do a job there at that point and so I just met people in the organization and they never actually advertised the job and I think if they'd advertised the job I probably would never have got it because even though I was Unilever I was working on very small things i'd never made a television ad in my life and yet ici paint and g-lux was doing a lot of that work so i think they actually took a bit of a punt on me and it was literally fortuitous that i happened to get that job and that's how i ended up being marketing director of ici paints i think this is such an important point though because like and we had helen on from squiggly careers who's just incredible and and i think we we tend to think of careers as this linear i mean particularly in a unilever it's like i go and do this job then i go and get the experience in this market and then I work on this brand and this bit of the mix.

13:34But actually you make your career far more than people realise. It's a lot less linear, isn't it? Yeah, it was a relationship. It was a connection. And then when that connection was made, which almost didn't happen, yeah, I actually prepared really hard for it. I really then decided I wanted to do that job. And I remember being so excited about going there on my first day and thinking how wonderful to learn about this whole new world. I was a UK marketing director, so it was a really big job. the first time I'd really and it was the most senior marketing role in the organization so I was really excited about it and I remember going in to see my boss the general manager and he said Keris we need to have a chat and he said something you need to know which is um we've just fallen out with our biggest customer which is being cute and we're about to have quite a lot of our range delisted and we're not quite sure what that's going to mean for us and I thought I was going into this nice learning period of a new organization get your feet on and i joined a business that actually was in crisis it was pretty scary if you talk about being out of your comfort zone i've never been more out maybe i have since but i was thrown out of my comfort zone because they're like we don't know quite what this is going to mean for us this is off scale we're going to lose 30 of the volume of our business and distribution overnight and we got to work at what we're going to do and how you're going to help and i'm thinking okay right what am i going to do in my team so it was not a comfortable start that said as they say never waste a crisis i got a lot of help from friends and networks um that i built in unilever and said look how can you help me i've got a month to create an innovation program and a whole brand building program that is either going to try and win that customer back because we hoped we could win the customer back and if not we've got to build our brand elsewhere and make up for a significant chunk of lots of distribution and you're from that world and you'll know what that can mean to business and uh and we did lose that distribution and i we spent collectively the next two years putting into place all of that innovation the business made a massive commitment to brand building also working with very big customers so we work very closely with home base but we also fell in love again with independent retailers that i think if we're honest we turned our back on a little bit to focus on the big chains.

15:53And through those years, we built back all of that market share. And in fact, three years later, we still didn't have that distribution. We'd put on four percentage points in market share value and were making to the business, the margins were a lot healthier. It wasn't what I expected to go there and do. I thought I would do some nice marketing with an amazing paint brand. But from a commercial perspective, category development, working with customers driving all of that stuff was the accelerated learning of a lifetime it's amazing isn't it how a crisis actually very very often turns out to be the best thing that ever happened because it focuses it forces you to lead doesn't it it forces you to move quickly it forces you to innovate forces you to think about your brand all those things that may not have happened at the pace that and it forces you to connect into the organization yeah and i mean i have another story probably from virgin media when we come to that which is when things happen like that Like if you've joined an organization, a senior, it can take you a long time to connect to build those relationships.

16:53When you join a team that is facing something quite difficult. Yeah. If you use that opportunity, you form relationships and connections because you're in the trenches together. That's a very good point. And suddenly you're in the business and not on the outside of the business. And you don't know it at the time, but it was the thing that allows you to get connected and work as a team and then go and get stuff done. slightly analogous this um during covid did some do some research from mc saatchi clear that talked about the role of a cmo in a crisis and it's really interesting because the expectations of the business is that the cmo will lead come up with strategy be very visible connect to customers all those kind of things so when things are going well the cmo is kind of in the background when things are in crisis like everyone's looking around going what are you gonna do like come on Like, where's your plan?

17:38Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, because we had to grow. And we had to grow with different customers. And you really realize, yeah, I think I could be the source of that growth. Also, I mean, look, you don't do this on your own. We had a new sales director join the organization. He was phenomenal. He understood the power of us working together. And if you've got a great marketing director, a really strong partnership with your sales director, and you both understand each other's roles, which isn't always easy. We all know sometimes a bit of conflict between those two functions. But he was brilliant.

18:07And together, plus the other team, we kind of fought that course. And so it was not the experience I expected joining the organisation. But I stayed, look, almost for 10 years in that business, clearly loving it. And then over time, my love of colour, interior design, the psychology of colour and of environment, we were able to do some of that stuff and that exciting stuff and we could do some more creative things. Just before we move on, what lessons did you draw from how to work closely with commercial colleagues? Because I think that's probably something that a lot of marketers listen will feel the sales team don't understand the benefit that marketing brings.

18:48You know, they see us as a cost, not as an investment. And there's always that sort of competitive rivalry. You know, as marketing, you're looking more long term sales. You're looking at what do we sell yesterday sort of thing. So those two functions often great each other, don't they? And it can be hard to build trust and execute. So any advice on how as marketers we can be more effective working with kind of a sales team? That's a very good question. And I have to say it really helps if you have a really high quality leadership on the sales side. And we did. So the quality of that individual, but also their relationship, they were prepared to work together.

19:21They did not see us as competitors. And that I don't want to underestimate. That really helps. The other thing that we did, and in fact, one of my teams had this idea is we started to work very closely on category development. So not just brand development, but how we could help retailers. And this was really back in the day, right? So this is quite early on how we could really help them shape the category. What was interesting is the decorating category had got wallpaper and paint and almost four times as much space was taken up with wallpaper than paint. And we worked together on category management that said, you make four times as much profit out of paint.

19:58We suggest you reduce your wallpaper space and you give much more to paint because you'll make much more money. And actually, that was very successful for the retailers we're working with, which is why they fought off against B &Q agencies, why they were more successful in that time. But that was a program that was done absolutely together with the sales teams. So we had joint teams working on things to create category solutions, to create promotional solutions that were going to advantage our customer, not just build our brand. But having those teams working together and interestingly, presenting those ideas, we'd get the sales team to present the ideas to their other colleagues, not the marketer trying to sell to a sales team about what they wanted to do.

20:41we got teams working on it and often the sales representative on the team would talk about why this idea was a great idea poacher term gamekeeper it's and you sort of sit back and think that was not my idea it was one of my team's ideas and you think it was absolute genius because it was now became our idea our ambition not a marketing versus sales that's a genius bit of us i love that i often say to people let other people tell your story because it's so much more credible isn't it if it comes from someone else that's a really good tip yeah it wasn't my natural style i kind of want us to be amazing group that's you know showing that we have impact and it was just through you know some of my team were a bit smarter a bit more eq in that sense and they said why don't we run this project like this and and i think it could be more effective and uh because we were testing quite radically some assumptions around promotional effectiveness we weren't you know spending money on the wrong things so we were challenging quite a lot of what the teams had been doing not an easy thing to do but having them work with the data work with us on it it turns me but also even in the way you tell the story about the the four to one ratio in terms of where profit comes from you're using data very clearly to show the commercial opportunity and then marketing and supporting with the execution of that and then you think well what are you going to fill that space with it's got to be great and then well we've got a ton of innovation that we think is going to drive up your profitability and it's going to add more value and you better have the innovation and you better have the marketing that really connects the audience into that stuff so you've got to deliver underneath it yeah um but actually luckily with a brand like do you like actually it's a phenomenally good brand but uh with a very clear purpose actually i think it's quite interesting we sort of articulated it which is the time it was your dad's favorite paint brand is that actually it yeah well dad's favorite paint brand in a category that's all driven by young women so not such a great thing and so we said how do you take your dad's favorite paint brand to be a brand that's synonymous with young people, the explosion, the changing room effect, the explosion of interior design, and synonymous with colour.

22:41So we had to go from being your dad's favourite paint brand and white paint to a brand that was dynamic and synonymous with colour. So I had a very clear sort of sense of what we were trying to do. Not just because we thought that was the right way of building the brand and connecting with our customers, coloured paint is a lot more profitable than selling white paint. So it was in all of our interests that we sold a lot more colour paint than white paint. And so it had a very clear, the brand idea, the purpose, and we ultimately made it a very big idea to add colour to people's lives, called Let's Colour, was always rooted in a business imperative of driving business growth, but absolutely linked to a truth about the customer and the audience, and then that would actually really redrive the business.

23:23And so it ended up being that sense of how colour can have an impact on your life became a very big purposeful idea but it wasn't me that understood the power of purpose at that time it was a new ceo joined the organization actually an ex-unilever ceo that in the last couple of years that i was there really unlocked for me actually the critical role of marketing to mobilize mobilize an organization behind a common purpose and actually to do something that's more powerful for your audience which is like to to do something which actually has a bigger purpose in the world but has commercial benefit but that's that that's where purpose is done right isn't it and that's a really really good example because it's rooted in an absolute truth about the people you're doing it's authentic to what you do it's in court so why you exist and it makes profit right which is what you're here to do so it's aligned absolutely right i mean that sort of end diagram of you know a category insight um a consumer in societal insight a consumer insight and a brand insight because we also with gilocks understood the science of color we really understood the science of color so it was like that was a sweet spot brand idea what was interesting i was very excited about it because i could see how it's going to connect with the audience i could see how it was going to grow with customers and that's where my excitement was and it took this a new ceo joining us who's actually ex-unilever and this is way before paul polman and what this is way before that actually this gentleman called text gunning he was the ultimate purpose-led marketer he joined the organization when we had been ic i've been acquired by our biggest competitor actually we're acquired by accident bell that's quite a challenge being acquired by your biggest competitor we were actually then asked to lead that integration and a year into that acquisition a new ceo joined he could see the power of this idea that why we existed to add color to people's lives was not just a great way of connecting audiences or customers with us he saw it as ways galvanizing an organization that was still two companies two ex-competitors former ICI and former accident he knew he had to galvanize the organization and he said I want to use this idea to galvanize this organization behind a new purpose of why we exist we've left we leave the past behind and I had never thought about that I was thinking about my role to grow customers to grow the business he was thinking about the power of idea to mobilize and this organization to take us to a better place and it was uh it was it was pretty challenging time for a whole bunch of other reasons which i won't go into but in terms of a learning it was probably one of the most powerful learning experience of my life and when we took that idea into the organization and said look this is why we exist it's like adding color to people's lives it improves worlds improves our customers world painters can have a brighter future we created a whole internal plan around it and it can help our lives adding color to our lives Why are offices so boring?

26:14Why don't we add colour to our offices? Why don't we help all of us understand the power of colour? So we did all of these programmes inside and outside the organisation. And it really, really helped drive a new sort of a feeling for the organisation behind a new common purpose. We were now the new Axe and a Bell, not the two former fighting competitors. Critically, it also drove a lot of growth through the organisation. So Let's Colour, and I still see it on cans and vans today, and that's sort of like 15 years ago. So a great learning experience. That's really powerful. There's some good data on it actually.

26:46Peter Field did a report on purpose a couple of years ago and he was looking at the IPA database and whether purpose gives brands an advantage or not. Now, overall, purpose-led campaigns did slightly worse than non-purpose-led campaigns. Of course, the headline was, you know, purpose doesn't work. He then drilled into when it works and why it works when it works sort of thing. And what the interesting observation is, exactly as we've said, it's true to your core reason for existing is when it does work, of course. But the interesting other observation is particularly works for recruiting people and for internal employee engagement and satisfaction.

27:20And we forget that sometimes in all the critique of purpose in communication, often the role is actually about what's the organisation here to do. Great. And we used it as a great start. We used it to get distribution. So we'd work with distribution partners to say, look, come and exist with us on this and let's invest in communities. So it really wasn't just a comms thing that we think is a nice thing to say. It was core to why we did what we did. And it was a way of growing the business and building sort of mobilizing the organization. And it was interesting because I was part of this acquisition.

27:56Culturally, it's very challenging. And it was very challenging because we were acquired by our competitor. And the organization has spent the last 50 years trying to kill each other. and it's quite hard because you don't like each other where you do business that's like the truce in world war one when they come over you come together it's like oh let's create this new business you're like well hang on a minute we spent all our lives trying to fight each other and kill each other in the marketplace now let's work as a team and um it was an insight it was about how you just get an organization away from what it used to be to go behind a new common sense direction but so yeah so that was that was that was that was towards the end that was the last couple of years i'd love it lovely example my creation on purpose i was working on lucas aid sport and the brand had been in long-term decline so you know high single digit decline every year category under threat space in store under threat seen as an outdated brand and the team came up with this beautiful positioning called made to move and the insight was just as human beings we are made to move and we feel better we work better everything you know we live longer if we move more and so we decided that you know as human beings we're made to move and lucas aid is here to help and suddenly we viewed everything through that lens is what we're doing helping people to move more wherever you are whoever you are whatever you know your ability is etc etc it's a lovely galvanizing thing and i remember um so i was the marketing director at the time and then i was in charge of uh basically announcing this new brand strategy to all our customers in the annual in in the autumn you have your annual sell-in for the for the following year and the very very first customer i had to present this new strategy to was greg's the baker which is a very big Like, you can imagine me like going, I got the brief, like, John, we need you for the first half an hour.

29:37You inspire them and, you know, you're leading and then we'll do our JBP negotiations next. But you're up first, right? You know, inspire the Greggs exec on your new campaign. And I'm thinking I could not think of a single way in on this. I'm like, this is so difficult. Greggs, sausage rolls. Where do I go with it? Anyway, so I just thought, hell, I'll just do it. I'll just give it all the barrels. And I started talking about it. And then they stopped me halfway through and we go, we've got an idea. I'm like, what is this idea? This is absolutely perfect for our business. And I'm like, I don't understand what you mean.

30:08They said, can you make an app that tracks how people in Greggs move? And the biggest problem we've got is we have lots of people that are overweight because all they do all day is go take the sausage rolls out of the oven, put them over the counter, right? Oh, right. Yeah. So internally within Greggs, one of their biggest HR problems was they're not encouraging a healthy living because people are getting, obviously they can have free grapes or whatever. But what they suddenly saw in the idea wasn't what I thought, which was a consumer idea. It was actually internal employee engagement. So they said, right, the biggest thing I do next year is get stores competing on a step basis.

30:46Can we encourage our staff to move more and exercise to compensate for, this was also when pasty gate was happening. You know what I mean? So they had a reputational issue. It's one of those things I did not realize that, And actually the campaign, although it was successful from a consumer point of view, we just pivoted straight away and went, this is a great B2B thing. How can we help our customers help their employees to move more? And then suddenly it changed every conversation we ever had. So just the power of B2B. We forget, don't we, that even in the most B2C brands, you have a B2B element.

31:19Yes, there is a relationship or a gatekeeper. Exactly, that gets you that. That can affect. Well, how smart of that. Greg's person. and then for you yeah it completely shocked me because i was honestly i was thinking i think i cannot connect this strategy to what they want and surprisingly was the best the best selling i ever did that year was was amazing um and you had a little stint in private equity didn't you just to turn to that because it connects to your ici role don't you a bit later you then go and you find yourself in private so um so uh the ceo i was working for in ici paint a gentleman called david hamill he actually left when we were acquired so he managed the first year of the integration um he then left because they wanted people to move to amsterdam and he was like that's not for me so we always knew he would lead us through the first year and a lot of the leadership board interesting even though we've been acquired by axo they acquired us because we've built global businesses in often emerging markets that they hadn't been able to do and we were a consumer facing business and they were much stronger on the b2b and they said we want to grow in your area so most of the management team they put together was former icip people including the ceo it's quite like very brave of them to do that, to say, look, we've acquired this business because we want these skills and this culture, please help us.

32:31And so David was leading that, but just for the first year, we always knew he would leave after that. And he was one of those leaders that you, you know, you follow. He made a pivotal impact on my career. He'd created the first CMO job in ICO paints for me. And we went on a journey together. So when he left, that was quite tough. And then a couple of years later, he turned up somewhere else working with Bain Capital. and I was at British Airways at the time and they were recreating the role that I'd gone there to do and that wasn't quite what I wanted to do and he actually said, look, do you know what we did at ICI?

33:03Want to come and work in private equity? Turning around businesses is really exciting. It's really hard, but it's really exciting. I'm doing something where they need people with consumer skills, brand building skills, innovation skills. Do you want to come be part of this management team? And I thought, do you know, that probably now fits me a bit better and it felt like it was the right role and i also went because i trusted him a lot as a leader i thought if anyone can lead a business through transformation and turnaround he can do that and i might learn something along the way so i went into working with bain capital into what people thought well you've gone from big brands into this really it's a bathroom business you can sell bloody toilets how interesting is that and i was like oh yeah god i hadn't quite thought about that but actually for me i'm like bathrooms are amazing spaces because you don't forget i'm an interior design fanatic and I'm thinking how you create a functioning beautiful bathroom really matters to your life and I was really into it and we would go to these big trade shows there was one every year in Germany called Ish which was football pitches full of all of the bathroom show houses and for me it was what I would love to spend my time doing walking around these amazing interior design sets.

34:17And I'm thinking, and this is now my job. So for me, I never saw it quite that way. I saw it as a great opportunity to invigorate. Idle Standard was an old brand, had a lot of heritage. It was very B2B. They wanted it to be B2C. How do you get into showrooms and DIY and make a consumer-facing brand out of this? And I kind of thought, oh, I think I can do that. And it goes back to your point you made earlier, John, which is it's a small business. It was a billion pound turnover or something compared to British Airways, which is 7 billion. But I was in charge of quite a lot, all the product development, all the innovation, all the trying to get into showrooms, design.

34:53And we rebuilt a brand from scratch. How am I going to position this? What's the language, the identity, the visual language of it, the purpose of the idea? And we had this idea about a beautiful use of space because this was a bathroom business that understood the ergonomics of how to design something. So it was all about the beautiful use of space. And we had ideas where we actually did research where we put, all done in the right way, heat cameras into people's bathrooms. And we looked at how they use their space and where all the wasted space was and how we could then help them redesign their bathrooms, of course, using our stuff, to make a beautifully functioning space.

35:26And so it actually was one of those cases where it's a small business, but I've got a train set to play with. and if you have to grow your idea and build your grow your brand with consumers we had had this great opportunity and i i hired a few brilliant people small teams the budgets were not huge the ambition was massive hired a few brilliant agency people who created some fantastic work for us and so i look back on that i think the impact on the business of the brand in all of its incarnation including a whole new pricing strategy and all of that that we created is probably one one of the most impactful things that I've probably done because it touched every part of the business.