Monzo’s David Brewerton on why brands need to wean themselves off performance marketing

I was keen on Manchester before going to University and I chose a few courses that were business or marketing-related and landed on one that was that was very marketing-specific at Manchester Metropolitan University. There I was schooled in the basics of brand management and marketing management.

After working for Oxford Innovation and for The Guide Dogs charity, my marketing career really began in earnest with Tesco Mobile. Ours was a small team that covered everything, both digital and more traditional marketing. This swiftly focused into me looking after digital marketing with one other person. I learned loads and had great mentors, one of whom is still a really great friend now – Matt Kennedy, CPO and CCO for Giffgaff.

Launching a phone into space with a live stream on the device launch day, the campaign trended above Samsung on their own device launch

The business was growing exponentially and I had opportunities to develop: I was looking after brand and customer acquisition – all through digital channels, but growing my responsibility from a leadership and management perspective. Over time, I also absorbed an existing CRM function. I learned more about the customer lifecycle, from acquisition through to retention and it was a hugely successful period for me.

The final role I had with Tesco Mobile covered traditional media as well as digital media and was again focused on customer acquisition. I spent 10 years there altogether and absolutely loved it for the vast majority.

After 10 years in telco, it felt like the right time to move and Metro Bank came along with a really interesting opportunity. Compared with some of the established banks in the UK, Metro was a relative newcomer, but it offered significant scale and a big challenge. The marketing department was only a couple of years old and needed rewiring.

Before I joined, marketing was very much a service for the business rather than a strategic partner for the business. A large part of what I did there was to reframe how the business saw and used marketing, bring some simplicity and structure to their existing processes and enable a little bit more focus to support the next stage of its growth.

While at Metro Bank, I was accepted on to The Marketing Academy Scholarship 2023, which was transformational for me in so many ways. It’s a marketing leadership program with incredible content, coaching and mentoring opportunities, but, most importantly. it’s a network of amazing and inspirational people.

I’m not a big believer in fate but the Marketing Academy was a godsend for me, especially as I was made redundant from Metro Bank in February this year. In such a challenging job market I had a group of supporters and cheerleaders who have helped me enormously, so being a part of that group couldn’t have been more timely, as it turned out.

I find myself at Monzo now, which is genuinely the only other financial services brand I would have considered after my time at Metro Bank. It’s an incredible business, filled with brilliant people on an ambitious trajectory, which is really exciting. I’m supporting marketing projects covering a really broad range of things over the next six months as the business sets itself up for the next phase of growth.

Brewerton on a panel discussing AI and marketing for Accenture Song and Impact

Moving from Metro, a High Street Bank, to Monzo, seen by many as a well-established fintech challenger bank, must have been quite a shift.

It’s a very different environment, for sure. While both banking operations. they are run very differently with very different ambitions. I’m a firm believer that marketing skills travel well across sectors, categories and customers. So, while I have plenty to learn still – Slack took bit of getting used to – I’ve tried to lean on my experience to guide my decisions so far and I really feel like my expertise is valued, so my focus is on the right things, which makes work enjoyable for me.

What are the core components when ensuring marketing effectiveness for you?

I think the key things are simplicity and consistency. Today, we’re presented with enormous amounts of data. There are tons of new tools available to help with segmentation, personalization or targeting. That often leads to overly complicated communication strategies trying to be all things to all people at the same time.

Lots of businesses get lost in this cycle of performance marketing. Especially with newer businesses, they’re built from the ground up predominantly through performance marketing and performance media. I have had many conversations recently, particularly with e-commerce brands that have become addicted to performance metrics. These business become obsessed with the quest to drive down the cost per acquisition in channels and even formats and lose sight of the bigger picture, which is where growth happens. Leave the optimization to the channel experts and focus on the broader opportunity,

There’s always a point where a business matures and marketing becomes more than performance marketing. For me, efficiency and effectiveness are about being laser-focused on what matters at any given time – understanding what the challenges are and then considering how your solutions are helping to meet those challenges – while keeping your strategy and communications as simple and consistent as possible. Consistency is consistently overlooked; marketers get bored way before customers do and that results in mixed messaging and lower saliency of what matters.

The 2024 brand campaign from Monzo and Uncommon Creative Studio

What’s coming up for you at Monzo in 2025 and beyond?

I am helping Monzo with a few projects around its next phase of growth in 2025 and beyond. Taking a step back, that means bringing my experience from larger organizations to a team that have had phenomenal success and helping to facilitate their journey to the next level.

Monzo has launched ‘Money never felt like Monzo’ platform earlier this year, the first brand campaign for five years. We have announced a new front of shirt sponsorship with Coventry City FC and just hit 10 million customers in the UK. But the ambition is much bigger so I’ll be supporting with building upon the incredible success so far.

We’re intently focused on growth, but doing so in a way that is aligned with the values that the business has been built on and concentrated on customers expectations and experiences.

How is the marketing team structured at Monzo?

We have a VP of marketing, AJ Coyne, and his remit covers brand strategy, growth and product marketing. We work very closely – practically hand in hand to deliver what’s next for the customer from a product perspective while addressing identified challenges the business has.

What’s exciting is that there’s a huge amount of trust in the capability of the team and there’s a huge amount of investment in the team. At Monzo, marketing is seen as a central pillar: the engine which drives the business. Which is more rare than you might think.

This means there’s lots more exciting stuff to come, as AJ might put it, “Painting the UK hot coral.” Whether that’s activating the Coventry City sponsorship, incredible creative ideas like the ‘Monzo x Greggs ATMmmm’ or international expansion.

The marketing team covers a lot of ground at Monzo but it means things get done and brilliantly.

Monzo and Greggs recently collaborated in Newcastle with their ‘ATMmmm’ – anyone could grab a free sausage or vegan roll from the machine to highlight the weekly free treat Monzo perks customers can get

What have you learned in your career journey that enables you to get the best out of marketing teams?

Transparency and clear communication are key. As a marketing leader, you are a part of the wider business decisions in the direction of the business. And as marketers we should make it our goal to better understand both our customers and our stakeholders. What’s motivating our customers? What’s behind those stakeholder business decisions? Then, you need to work out how you can help support those decisions and communicate it succinctly to your team.

Being easy to work with, adaptable and showing willingness are all great attributes to have when leading teams. Earning people’s trust looms large and works both ways, too. If you can give someone a task and then completely trust them to go off and do it – that’s priceless. This way, you can elevate and empower your team members to get on with jobs, safe in the knowledge that they will deliver great work.

A lot of people believe that trust should be earned, but I don’t agree with that. I think trust should be given to begin with. If you start from this point, it’s normally reciprocated because people appreciate being trusted and supported in that way and everybody should be recognized as an individual.

As I moved into more senior roles, I had to adapt my own style. Everybody has very, very different ways of communicating, working with each other and getting jobs done. By appreciating everybody’s differences, I’ve been able to build stronger teams with trust as a foundation.

Monzo recently announced its new front-of-shirt sponsorship of Coventry City Football Club

How important is storytelling when maximizing customer engagement with a campaign?

I’ll come back to consistency. Brand storytelling can be done over time and doesn’t have to be delivered in one campaign or one specific execution. The general public doesn’t pay anywhere near as much attention to marketing campaigns as marketing folk do. Real storytelling around a brand, what a brand does and who it’s for comes over time and through consistency of message.

This doesn’t mean that you need ‘matching luggage’ on everything you do, everywhere you do it, or that you need to run the same campaigns over and over again. But there does need to be consistency and clarity of message: who you are, who you are for, what you do and how you do it.

How a brand acts and how a brand shows up at every touchpoint that it delivers to its customers is vital. Customers will create their own perceptions of the brand. The narrative of brand campaign plays a part in that, but the stories within those campaigns exist in isolation and aren’t as useful as brand experiences.

Consistency will always drive a message home. For some this is how they understand brand voice. I see a lot of brands that advertise heavily, but if you asked 10 customers, you might get 10 different answers about what the brand stands for, does or offers.

To keep consistency, you need an informed and strategic approach to make the right decisions about who you should speak to and also who you will not be speaking to. What you are talking about and how you are saying it. That effect is all but impossible to achieve in a singular campaign because a single campaign is typically too short-lived.

How essential is market orientation to you?

Market orientation is one of the most under-invested areas in marketing. Being properly market-orientated is pivotal if your goal is to create that consistency and focus on your brand or product. Without market orientation as a clear foundation, it’s very difficult to follow through and build a successful strategy.

Your market orientation doesn’t have to be complex or filled with data. It doesn’t have to be super-precise but it does need to be a validated view of the market that you’re operating in. Ideally behavioral and attitudinal data from your market rather than arbitrary demographics with assumptions built on age or location.

Often marketers get wrapped up in differences or similarities that don’t matter. People oversimplify demographics – we hear about ‘generation this, that and the other.’ And this kind of talk is too vague and it doesn’t really represent one group well enough.

Sometimes, businesses look at their existing customers and create their market orientation and segmentation based on their existing customers rather than on the market itself. That creates potential discrepancies because a customer that you might have acquired 10 years ago doesn’t necessarily represent the customer that’s going to bring value and growth to the business in the next 10 years.

Getting clear on issues like this is essential in terms of driving growth and defining where the real commercial opportunity lies. If we don’t give market orientation the attention it deserves, businesses and brands end up trying to do everything for everyone all the time – and too often, that translates into doing nothing very well for anybody.

How do you go about balancing the need for longer-term brand building and more short-term sales activation?

There are a lot of very successful e-commerce businesses that are getting to the point where their investment into performance marketing isn’t scalable any more. Performance marketing alone has a ceiling. It comes quicker and faster than most anticipate. For those businesses, the opportunity for growth requires more investment.

For those businesses, this growth will only be achieved through considered brand marketing. With brand marketing, you generate demand. We should all refer to the old Field and Binet conclusion that you need to balance your marketing spend around 60/40: brand to performance. More and more businesses are realizing that they have to take the plunge and invest in brand marketing. For them, this can be uncertain territory. And they don’t know how to wean themselves off of the performance marketing bandwagon that they’ve become addicted to without appearing to be getting worse at what they’ve been doing.

Monzo’s latest product launch is a free account for those under 16 years of age

What advice might you have for younger marketers reading this interview?

I’ve loved having a broad experience across marketing. I’ve done a lot of digital and a lot of performance marketing. But I’ve intentionally tried to build out my repertoire of marketing experience and skills.

Working with above-the-line media, working on campaigns, working across brand management, working across acquisition and even CRM – having that broad approach allows me to look at things more holistically and then applying a strategic view over the whole rather than just one discipline.

I think that will become more and more valuable. If you want to climb the marketing ladder, it’s useful to have a wide skill set. And these skills shouldn’t stop with marketing – you need to be across the finance team, the core business objectives and make sure your marketing is commercially relevant.

Looking back, I wish I had moved around more earlier on in my career. I probably had a false sense of loyalty to an organization when, in fact, that loyalty was probably with a line manager. I would advise readers to be proactive in broadening their experience outside of specific industry categories. Selfish as it may sound, always have yourself as the number one priority: are you learning more and being challenged? Make sure that you’re doing the right thing for you and your career at any given time.

If there’s one thing you’ve learned about marketing, it is?

Everybody is always going to have an opinion on marketing. People like to tell you what’s right and wrong; what looks good and what doesn’t – which is unfortunate, but it’s all part and parcel and all fun and games. You can have your own opinions, but you can’t have your own facts. As a marketer, make sure whatever you propose is backed up by objective evidence that can’t be disputed.

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.

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