What is your career background?
I joined NatMag straight from University as a Business Development Executive for the Group Classified Department in 1995, later being promoted to Senior Business Development Executive. This role was predominantly an advertising marketing position, which included working with the sales team producing and manipulating figures into sales stories, presentations & mailshots, whilst also working with the management team to increase the efficiency of the department. My next move was to head up the Central Advertising Marketing team working across the central sales divisions i.e. corporate, group classified, northern office and international sales and later jointly managing the advertising marketing resource across the whole portfolio. In 2000 I moved to a small publishing company called Aim Publications to be their Marketing Manager. Aim was acquired by NatMag in 2001, and NatMag Specialist was created. I moved back to the NatMag marketing department in 2002 as Brand Marketing Manager, this role was later expanded to Marketing Manager in 2004. I was promoted to Group Brand Manager in 2007 when marketing was centralised. I now oversee eight of the magazine brands and manage two brand managers.
What attracted you to NatMag?
The fantastic portfolio of such well known brands
What does you role involve?
It's a very diverse role! The main focus is selling copies and to do this I need to understand our consumers and also our competitors. This is achieved through various forms of research and evaluation. Alongside the Publishers and Editors I help police the brand, ensuring that brand summaries are accurate and relevant and through editorial product evaluation we keep the product on brief and deliver what the consumer wants. A large part of my role is working with the publishers on the marketing strategy, with responsibility for recommending, sourcing and project managing all gift with purchase products and other forms of added value and managing the given budgets, plus ensuring that this is communicated clearly and strongly at newsstand. The other side of the role is the advertising marketing strand, where I work with the advertising teams to provide reader profiles from various information sources like National Readership Survey (NRS) and Target Group Index (TGI), manipulating data to help the sales team sell and analysing category performance against the competitor sets.
What is the best thing about working for NatMag
Cliched I know...but I have to say it's the people.
