Amy Daw - UKRB Marketing & Products

What attracted you to Barclays?
I was on the summer internship at Barclays in 2006 and I was really impressed generally with the training and development that was on offer, with the career opportunities that there were. Everybody I met at Barclays during my summer internship and the company as a whole seemed very positive. People were very quick to challenge things, worked very well as a part of a team, which was all something that attracted me and made me decide to apply for the graduate scheme. I also did a degree in international management so the international element of Barclays business was something else that I found attractive.

Why did you choose to join Marketing & Products?
I chose to join marketing because I have always had an interest in consumer behaviour, in what makes people tick if you like. Marketing has a really important role to play in making sure that the consumer, or the customer, is always at the heart of everything in terms of the product that we develop and also the way that we communicate at all times with the outside world.

What does Marketing & Products do?
I think marketing is actually a much bigger area than people think. The instinct is to think of marketing as advertising which is obviously a big part of what we do, but we also have the brand team, we have branch literature teams, direct mail where they send all the letters and leaflets to the customers. Marketing also covers customer relationship management, insight, research, PR, corporate affairs and events as well. So marketing is a broad area really.

What have you been doing since you joined?
Since I joined in September I have been working in the competitive insight team. We look at all the competitive market activity and try and see how Barclays fits into that, what we are competing with in each of the markets and also looking at exactly what messages our competitors are putting out there in the market. I have been in the same team since I joined and insight really allows you to see the beginnings of the whole marketing process.

What do you enjoy most about your job?
One of the things I enjoy most about my current job is taking a piece of communications from one of our competitors - an advert or something that they have given to customers - and removing the gloss if you like and proving that it’s not actually as good as it looks. Looking into all of the terms and conditions and letting the branch staff know that we are equally as competitive and even though their marketing makes their products look amazing if you look just below the surface we are just as good as the competition.

Can you outline any interesting projects you have been
involved with?
One of the projects I have been involved with was to organise a loan competitor review for the Managing Director of consumer lending. I had to bring in external agencies, creative agencies and a media buying agency to really look at what all of our competitors are doing in the unsecured loan space. We also had representatives from the legal department to look at what our competitors are getting away with in terms of legals on their advertising and whether we could relax our rules a little bit. Another interesting project was when I was asked to analyse the supplier relationships managed by the competitive insight team. Within the team we manage about 12 third party suppliers who supply us with an incredible amount of data and I was asked to look at how we could leverage more value from each of those relationships, feed those back to the team and come up with a list of actions so we could really ensure all of our contracts were as effective as possible.

What support and training have you had since joining?
I’ve been on quite a few training courses since I joined Barclays - campaign management, stakeholder management, assertiveness and challenge and presentation skills courses. I have also taken the Charted Institute of Marketing diploma which included modules on marketing communications, marketing planning and marketing research so I’ve had quite a list of training so far.

What qualities do you need to succeed at Barclays?
I think the people at Barclays have a range of skills and qualities really. Overall they tend to be very positive and quick to challenge things and suggest new ideas and new ways of doing things. And although you need to be able to work on your own I think everyone at Barclays is capable of working in a team to really achieve things.