What’s the connection between Harvey Keitel’s Winston Wolf, 200g pouches of cat food, and neurodiversity? The answer is marketer, coach, and podcaster Mark Evans

Data Malarkey - the podcast about using data smarter

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles talks to Mark Evans, one of the most successful marketers of his generation. Mark worked for ten years at Mars, rising to be Brand Director of Petcare Europe, before spells at 118118 Media UK and HSBC.

In 2012, Mark joined leading UK insurance business Direct Line Group where he helped to transform the business and the fortunes of its brands. Perhaps most notably – and in the teeth of stiff competition from the price comparison websites – he relaunched and reenergised the company’s flagship Direct Line brand. In that time, as well as championing the role of data and analytics in the company’s decision making, he even persuaded Harvey Keitel to reprise his role as Winston Wolf from Pulp Fiction, and in the process to drive the brand to new heights.

In 2023, Mark’s gone plural, and is a non-executive director, coach, speaker, and podcaster. Indeed, he’s the regular co-host of “The Places We’ll Go Marketing Show”, now WITH well over 100 episodes. Guests have included many of the great names in modern marketing, from Unilever’s Paul Polman to Professor Philip Kotter, from Mark Ritson to Byron Sharp – though for those who know these academic luminaries, they won’t be surprised to hear Ritson and Sharp didn’t appear together.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 14 March 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Mark describes his route into marketing as neither typical nor traditional. An economics graduate with a Masters in corporate finance, the job he was due to take up at Hill Samuel disappeared “in a puff of smoke”, thanks to a corporate merger.

Throughout his career, he’s brought the rigour, analytical skills, and test-and-learn approach of financial markets to a wide variety of different marketing roles. Every decision he’s taken and encouraged his teams to take has been driven by the evidence. This has helped him to elevate marketing and marketing decision-making up the food chains in corporate hierarchies. It’s driven by his desire to test, prove or disprove hypotheses, a skill he cut his teeth studying high school science.

We talk at length about the way that Direct Line Group uses the Net Promoter Score (NPS) – a measure of how likely customers are to recommend products and services to friends and family – as the single metric everyone in the business was measured against. This unified, simplified approach made it clear to everyone in the business how important both measurement and measurement of customer experience is to the top and bottom line. For the better experience customers have with a business, the more likely they are to remain customers – and recommend the company to others.

Mark details the transformation journey he led from 2019 to turn Direct Line into a properly agile business, as well as his passion for building and championing “whole brain teams” across the full spectrum of neurodiversity. Many on the systemizing end of the autistic spectrum are brilliant at solving analytical challenges but at the same time find the interview process difficult. This means that many who could be hugely valuable to all sorts of businesses remain outside the workforce. Mark details his experience of working with the social enterprise Auticon – whose purpose is to help businesses “become a destination for neurodivergent talent” – to address this.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Mark’s LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/markevans2/

The Places We’ll Go Marketing Show – https://open.spotify.com/show/3zajAP9qA031znCniJnHuV

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