EY’s Rebecca Hirst on why marketing must be in the room on product, price and promotions

When I came back from Lyon, I got a job at the French-owned agency group Publicis. I spent the formative years of my career in the brilliant world of advertising. I was in Los Angeles looking after the Star Alliance account when September 11 happened, and the bottom temporarily fell out of the airline advertising industry, so I decided to make a career change.

Having spent 12 years in advertising, I decided that I wanted to better understand what happens behind the brief: the business, the P&L, the supply chain, packaging. So I went to Kimberly-Clark, which was a great place to learn the ropes as a brand manager

Next, I joined the Coca-Cola Company, which is an organization that lives and breathes marketing. As a business, the Coca-Cola Company sells to a network of bottlers who manage manufacturing and distribution, and the job of the Coke Company is to create the magic that keeps the brands special.

Coke was always at the cutting edge of what was new, innovative and never-been-done-before. We created a whole campaign using emojis – when emojis were a new thing. We digitized labels on bottles, printing a million different permutations of first names for our ‘Share a Coke’ campaign. It was the most amazing place, and we had a lot of fun. We also worked very hard.

I looked after 13 countries and traveled all the time. I got to work on things like the London 2012 Olympics, where I spent eight very happy weeks in the Olympic Stadium, managing all the drink outlets. I also worked on the Fifa World Cup Trophy tour in 2014. These experiences were extraordinary.

I then moved to Samsung and like Coke, it was a fast-paced, dynamic culture. Samsung is always innovating, on the front foot, wants to be the best and has big ambitions. I enjoyed my time there, and was passionate about opening doors for as many women in technology as I could. The culmination of my time at Samsung was the privilege of being asked to open the show at Samsung Unpack in San Francisco, where we unveiled the Galaxy Z Flip phone to the world. Years later, I’m still a loyal Galaxy Z Flip fan.

Next, I got a call about a job at EY. I wasn’t convinced that professional services was for me, but the firm’s huge growth ambitions and the promise of a blank sheet of paper to transform the UK marketing and communications approach convinced me that it would be a great opportunity.

The best learning curves and experiences in my career have been when I’ve taken a left turn and done something that I thought would stretch me most.

EY’s purpose is to build a better working world

Could you summarize the offer from EY? What is it that you’re selling?

EY helps our clients – businesses large and small – with their biggest challenges. We have an exceptional team of over 20,000 people in the UK who help clients transform their businesses, which helps build a better working world. The work ranges from how we help entrepreneurs to scale, to working with FTSE 100 business on the big challenges like embedding and getting value from new technologies.

We also help clients on their decarbonization journeys. If you’re a big organization, how do you start to decarbonize? How do you monitor progress against your commitments? The work that we do helps businesses to perform better, and at our core, we believe that when UK businesses run well, society runs well.

Could you run through your responsibilities in your role?

In a firm of this size, they are very varied. I am chief marketing and communications officer and I run a team that covers brand, marketing and communications. This includes how we show up in the world with our marketing and external communications, how we engage our 20,000 employees, how we build relationships with clients, stakeholders and attract talent to EY. We’re a major UK employer, and this year for example, we welcomed over 2,000 new student recruits into our degree apprentice and graduate programmes.

Digging into EY’s finances: revenues grew by 16% in the last reported year. Fee income increased from £3.23bn to £3.76bn. You currently audit 23 of the FTSE 100 companies, 177 of the FTSE 350. In short, it is going very well. Your UK headcount grew, your brand value is up 16% and EY is the nation’s strongest brand and the second most valuable UK brand. What does this mean for you as you approach 2025?

Over the past few years, as an organization we’re proud to have achieved double-digit growth at a time of economic uncertainty. There have been changes in global supply chains, world conflict, Brexit, COVID, inflation, which means that the market has been tough, but also that our clients needed us to help them with these challenges

We understand what’s keeping our clients awake at night, and we have to show up for them and be really clear to them about how we can help. That’s what the marketing team is there to help do.

AI is a great example. All of our clients are grappling with it in some shape or form, so our job is to help our clients understand where the value can come from. Do you know where it’s already used in your business? Do you know if there’s any built-in risk? Is there any bias that you don’t know about? Are you doing things ethically? How do you integrate it into your business? Is your organization ready for it? How will it enhance your employees’ experience?

What’s your first memory of a marketing success that you were part of, where you felt ‘this is me, this is the role for me’?

Mine would be working for Coca-Cola on the London 2012 Olympics.

I applied for a secondment into the Olympic team for the summer. My job was to be part of a team that managed all of the drinks outlets in the Olympic Stadium. The not-so-glam part was doing shift work and wearing a uniform made of recycled Coke bottles (looks better than it sounds).

The best parts of it were seeing Usain Bolt on the warm-up track, Danny Boyle on his way to direct the rehearsals for the opening ceremony, or hearing the Arctic Monkeys on stage doing a sound check.

What’s your view on the power of emotional connection in marketing campaigns?

I think it’s the most important part of any campaign. Since I took on this role, I am often asked about the difference between B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer). As marketers, we connect with human beings, whether we’re in a big organization like EY and selling professional services, or whether we’re selling a can of Coke or a mobile phone. It’s all about an emotional connection to the brand. I believe in building long-term brand salience first and activating it through shorter-term tactics. Both are crucial.

What advice might you have for fellow senior marketers that might be struggling to sell in the need to balance the long and the short to their leadership team?

Read the IPA paper, ‘The long and the short of it’, by Binet and Field. The most important word in the paper’s title is and. Both long and short-term marketing is needed. In my role at EY, we’ve got ambitious metrics to land this year, but a lot of the work we’re doing is focused on being consistent and in it for the long game.

As marketers, we need to get close to the business and understand where revenue growth is coming from in the short and long term, how we can be of service to the commercial outcomes of the organization, and ultimately help make the boat go faster.

The giant post-it note attached to the side of the EY building in London Climate Action Week achieved record levels of engagement

Of what initiative delivered on your watch are you the most proud?

There are so many great things that my team have delivered at EY. One that I really loved was the work that we did around London Climate Action Week a couple years ago.

It’s a competitive area and EY was beginning to build its reputation in this space. We partnered with Project Everyone whose work is in support of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. One of the ways they do this is by creating awareness of ‘the world’s to do list’, and we agreed to attach a 12 metre high post-in note to the side of EY HQ during London Climate Action Week in support of one of the actions: ‘make city sustainable.’

There was a fair bit of skepticism and resistance at first, but I strongly believed that we needed to do something that made a stand and showed our 20,000 employees that we are serious about helping organizations decarbonise, so they feel proud of our work and they share it. This, in turn, creates a ripple effect by starting conversations about what we're doing. And that’s exactly what happened. It achieved record levels of engagement and started thousands of conversations.

‘The better the question. The better the answer. The better the world works.’ EY’s solutions contribute to global improvements

How do you navigate the whitewater rapids of fast-moving technology and tech platforms? And what's your north star when making key technology decisions?

How we leverage tech platforms at EY is a coordinated global effort. For example, we just migrated EY.com to the cloud with Adobe. You can imagine the scale of moving all countries globally off an old platform on to a new platform – it was a huge undertaking

My job is more focused on getting my team to leverage new tech in the best possible way. We’re focused on the quality of our data, and how to improve UX and personalization for our clients.

What myth about marketing would you most like to bust?

The thing I find super-frustrating is when marketing is two steps removed from commercial discussions, and it’s seen as a service rather than a driver of value. In the organizations where I’ve worked, marketing worked best when we were in the room for conversations about product development, pricing, promotions and customer experience. I hate it when it’s the opposite: “Oh, we’ve decided to launch this thing and hope that you’ll do something about it.. “

It is also our job as marketeers to make sure that we’re speaking the language of our organizations in a way that they understand. We must consistently reinforce the value that our teams bring. It’s not always easy to do. You can’t always show a linear link from marketing investment to sales outcomes, especially where the buying cycle is very long.

What advice you would give your younger self if you could go back in time? What would you do more of and what might you avoid?

There’s one thing that I still have to remind myself of – even now – and I also encourage my team and my mentees about this too – it’s to be confident and to voice your opinion. Your experience and your background and your point of view is unique, and your perspective is valuable.

At Samsung, I learned to say: I come at this from a different point of view. Despite how it may appear, I’m more of an introvert than extrovert, and in the past I was sometimes shy about voicing an honest opinion. Not so much anymore, but I still sometimes have to remind myself: ‘You've got a point of view on this, you need to voice it.’

What question would you like to ask the next senior marketer in this series?

I would ask them: if you weren’t doing the job that you are doing now, what would you most like to be doing?

The EY Foundation continues to support driven and talented individuals who are awarded free school meals

Your question from another senior marketer is “What are you doing in your role to make the world a bit of a better place?”

I'm very proud of having had free school meals from as long as I can remember right up to A-levels. I was one of four kids being raised by a single mum. We didn’t have much money, and my lunches were paid for by my school, which sometimes felt a bit embarrassing as no one else was getting lunch tickets.

I learned a lot from that life experience and now I have the opportunity to work with EY Foundation, a charity that supports young adults from backgrounds where they are eligible for free school meals. They receive access to learning about the corporate world, interview techniques, accessing paid internships and then ultimately paid employment.

I mentor for the EY Foundation and am currently working with a 16-year-old maths whizz kid who wants to pursue a career in finance. I also just started coaching a group of EY’s new recruits as part of a challenge where they’ve been given £200 seed money with the goal of turning it into the largest amount they possibly can in support of the EY Foundation.

I’m really passionate about mentoring, because I had so many people help me on my journey from my school days in Sheffield to where I am now. Never in a million years did I expect to become UK CMO of EY and it’s my way of giving something back.

Outside of business and marketing, what makes you tick?

I had a side hustle for many years: Glorious Wellness. I have a postgraduate qualification in personalized nutrition and ran a coaching business, helping senior leaders stay on top form. Nowadays, I’m not actively coaching, but I lead by example when it comes to staying fit, healthy and energized.

If there’s one thing you know about marketing, it is…

The one thing I know about marketing is it’s a brilliant place to build a career. You get the opportunity to have an impact on a business’s top and bottom line: to be part of building its future, to connect with customers and shape how they feel about the brand. Marketers are the people within an organization who have permission to be brave, creative and innovative on a daily basis. What better job is there?

You might die tomorrow so make it worth your while. Worth Your While is an independent creative agency helping brands do spectacular stuff people like to talk about. wyw.agency.

Tim Healey, is founder and curator of Little Grey Cells Club, the UK’s premier Senior Marketer meet up.