Fleet Admiral

Felix Thomson

Content Executive

The Financial Services Forum

The financial services world continues to change at a rapid pace. Alastair Lyons explains to Anthony Thomson his plan for keeping his flagship clear of the competition, and shares his thoughts on a few other critical issues for the industry.
Admiral is clearly a marketing-led organization, although you personally have a great deal of very varied experience in the financial services sector. I sense you are not a marketer by background, so what does marketing mean to you?
I’m not a marketer, but I’m a non-executive chairman. The important thing is that the organization is actually led by marketing men on the executive side – both Henry Engelhardt, the chief executive, and David Stevens, the COO, are from a marketing background. In terms of what marketing means to me, it is effectively being able to understand what the customer’s requirements are, and then being able to design propositions that are actually directly relevant to those requirements.
It is very different from your previous experience, particularly in retail and even your time at NatWest, given that Admiral is primarily a response-driven business. Those companies I would regard as your direct competitors – the More Th>ns, the direct banks and the Churchills – spend quite a lot of money on brand advertising, whereas Admiral seems to be much more focused and primarily driven by direct marketing – so there must be quite a difference in terms of the strategies there.
We spend a reasonable amount on broadcast media, and particularly on TV. We are very selective about the media channels and slots that we use in terms of their cost-effectiveness – so quite a significant amount goes on daytime television, for example, and we measure every piece of expenditure on marketing against the return that we achieve on that investment. One of the areas in which we are extremely efficient as an organization is the return that we get from the marketing investment that we make.
Absolutely. Your return on expenditure is far superior to any of your competitors, and I guess they would love to know how you have managed to achieve such marketing efficiency.
Well I’m sure they would, but I am not going to tell you! It is something that has been built up over a long period, and effectively these are some of the team’s core strengths. Before he started Admiral what now must be twelve years ago, Henry was in a direct marketing role in general insurance, so he has been doing this for a long time.
One of the core strengths is the quality of the information that is available to management at all levels in the organization, enabling them to assess whether or not the decisions they make have the desired impact. They look very, very closely at the actions they are taking and the planned results of those actions – be it marketing, be it pricing – and what actually happens in practice. That is off the back of the very detailed management information, which allows them to hone the proposition.
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