Sex, driving and how to be a CMO - Marg Jobling, NatWest CMO

Margaret Jobling is the Group Chief Marketing Officer at NatWest. Margaret has spent the majority of her marketing career in FMCG, before to joining the utilities sector in 2014, as Director of Marketing at British Gas. At the beginning of 2016 she moved into a CMO role at Centrica, transforming the firm’s marketing capabilities across all regions. Then in 2020, joining NatWest as CMO.

In September 2020, Margaret was announced as one of Marketing Week’s Top 100 Most Effective Marketers for her work at Centrica.

What we covered in this episode:

• How Marg went from laser chemistry to marketing
• Blagging her way through her first job in marketing
• Capturing an emotional response in a rational way
• How to look smart giving creative feedback to an agency
• The ABC of assessing a piece of creative
• Why marketers face a much more complex context today
• How marketing is like sex and driving
• Using the language of business in the Board room
• Why marketers should focus on customers and commercials first
• The two hats every CMO wears
• Creating a culture where people can test and learn
• Inverting the pyramid and supporting the marketing team
• Why the store manager is king
• The power of showcasing what has gone wrong
• Marg’s hidden showreel of what went wrong
• Jon’s best training talking about his biggest failures
• Why Marg wouldn’t go back to fast moving consumer goods
• The importance of a consistent customer experience
• How service sector and FMCG differ
• Defining what marketing is
• The inspiration behind ‘tomorrow starts today’
• Why procrastination is the largest barrier to your success
• What NatWest is doing to protect the climate
• How banks can finance a greener economy
• Which technology we should be paying attention to
• Why not even the tech giants know what the future holds
• If it saves time, money or effort it will work
• What being in the Top 100 CMO charts does for Marg
• Leaving the world in a better state than we found it