Man With A Mission

Man With A Mission
Michael Bolton is back with the high profile launch of his new online mortgage business edeus. He has promised to transform the specialist mortgage market and is not shy about making some controversial observations about the competition. Anthony Thomson talks to him about his plans for edeus, his marketing strategy, and where the sub-prime mortgage market is heading.
What does marketing mean to you?
We specialise in mortgages and I can only really answer the question in the context of the mortgage business. We are in the service industry, no different to walking into a restaurant or a hotel. Our business is about offering superior service. So for me good marketing is about taking your expertise in a particular arena and delivering a superior service, it’s as simple as that.
This sounds like a fairly narrow definition. What about identifying your core target market, developing and pricing products, creating awareness amongst the market or the intermediaries?
I think most of our competitors in the market would say that my team has an innate understanding of how the market works, of what’s important for our business partners, i.e. the mortgage distributors and what’s important to them. We are very good at putting ourselves in the shoes of our business partners and identifying what it is they are looking for and in turn what services they are offering to their customers. You don’t get to the end customer unless you turn on the intermediary. We work closely with our business partners, who have a high degree of influence in how we run and market our business and that is one of the major differences between us and our competitors.
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