Michelle Newman - UKRB Marketing & Products

What attracted you to Barclays?
I really wanted to work for a globally recognised company and Barclays offer a range of programmes, one of which was the one that I wanted to join. Also Barclays are very open with the benefits and salary that they offer their graduates.

They were able to offer a London-based placement, which is something that I really definitely wanted. The people that I met during the assessment days and interviews, they seemed like my people.

You always hear that when you go to an assessment day or when you go to an interview with the actual company you eventually work for, you can kind of tell, because you know, you’ll get on with them, and you’ll sort of bond with them and you’ll understand them and they’ll understand you. So, that’s kind of one of the reasons why I decided to work for Barclays.

What does Marketing do?
A lot of people think that marketing is just about advertising. It’s actually not, it’s about a lot more than advertising, it’s about driving traffic into the channels, whether that be into the branches, whether that be telephony, whether that be online.

Marketing is also about when you walk into a branch, how the branch looks to that customer. Marketing is about speaking to the customer directly, whether it’s direct mail, or speaking to them over the phone. Marketing is about general brand perceptions in our customer’s minds - what do our customers think of us, why do our customers choose Barclays?

Marketing is also about maintaining a budget and using that budget in the best possible way to speak to our customers in order to generate the return on marketing investment that we have. Marketing is also about developing products and propositions to meet the customer’s needs. It’s also about researching what those customer needs actually are, and understanding also what our competitors are doing.

So it’s not just about advertising or the brand or being in the media or having a look in the magazine and seeing that there’s an advertisement there. It’s all about a whole range of stuff. That’s what marketing really does.

What does your current role involve?
One of the projects I’ve been working on is the student and graduate proposition, and for that I’ve spent the last six months looking into what we currently offer our students, what we currently offer our graduates, with regards the products and service they receive, identifying also what our competitors offer.

Also I went out into the branches and I spoke to the student and graduate relationship managers there and tried to understand how they sell the products, what works for them, what doesn’t work for them, what the students need in their opinion, what changes we need to make to our products.

I was also able to hold some focus groups for the students and for graduates that have recently graduated and try to understand what they would want from a product, what their ideal product would be. Off the back of all that research and identifying what the customer’s needs are, I’ve tried to adapt what we’re offering students and what we’re offering our graduates.

What support and training have you had since joining?
Support and training have been very different. Support you have when you start, you’re obviously taught a lot about the business immediately. You have a group of graduates in that they in themselves are supporting each other.

You also have a mentor which isn’t someone directly in your line of reporting but it’s someone that you can go to with any kind of issue that you have, or anything relating to your career or anything relating to the project that you’re working on. If you want them to check some presentation that you’re doing that’s going to someone important or you know that you’re giving the next day, then you can just ring them and say can you look through this and they’ll help you out with it.

You also have a buddy as well, and the buddy is a graduate which is in the year above so they understand what you’re going through and how you’re going through it. And they can give you a lot of guidance because they have the contacts if you need to speak to someone. Or if you fancy moving from marketing to another function they know people in that other function, as do you, because you know graduates in that other function that you can speak to about how that function works.

Probably typically working in team of eight people, that team obviously lends a lot of support. You’ll also have one to ones with your line manager or someone in that team that is responsible for developing talent. It’s very good how there will be someone in that team who has been put aside and told this is your new graduate, they are a very talented person and we want you to develop that talent. They’re very enthusiastic about doing that.

We are offered a professional qualification from the Chartered Institution of Marketing, which is a year long qualification, it’s a diploma. It’s actually a really useful thing to do and it gives you, depending on what level of marketing that you’ve studied, it gives you the basics or it gives you an intermediate level, or it gives you a postgraduate level.

Any additional training that you want to go on you just speak to your line manager and they’ll set you up straight away. I’ve been on a personal excellence course, I’m on an Excel course, I’m going on a stakeholder management course tomorrow - it’s down to your own development, whatever training you want they will absolutely 100% give it to you.

What qualities do you need to succeed in Marketing?
You’ll need to be quite a fast thinker. In marketing it’s all about making decisions quickly and I think that that is quite an important quality to have. It’s also really important to be able empathise, to be able put yourself in the minds of your customers and say, well, if I was the customer I wouldn’t want to see something like that or I would want to see something like that.

Because obviously marketing is a lot about how you communicate a certain message, so it’s very important to be able to empathise with your customers. Obviously being a bit creative and a bit innovative goes without saying.

Who at work inspires you and why?
He’s the Head of Marketing at Barclays. He is very inspiring, he is a very inspiring leader. There are these big events that are held every year and to a lot of people in the branch - staff all over the country - and he goes to talk to these people and he’s very inspiring, very enthusiastic about Barclays and about the brand.

He just makes people want to work for him, he’s very charismatic as well. I don’t know what it is about him but he’s good, so if you join marketing you’ll meet him and understand what I’m talking about.