I’ve spent my marketing career working where customers, commerce and growth connect.
I’ve built functions from the ground up and parachuted into existing teams and worked across everything from focused digital performance to integrated, multi-channel marketing.
I’ve worked with budgets from £50k to £10M across B2B and D2C.
Sectors: Travel & Leisure | Automotive | Professional Subscription Services | FMCG
Why Dave?
Experience that travels.
I have worked across Travel & Tourism, Leisure & Entertainment, Automotive, Professional Services and FMCG.
Businesses that span A to Z ~ Audi, Fyffes, SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment, Thomas Cook, Virgin and Zenith Optimedia
Different sectors, Different customers. Different problems.
The fundamentals remained consistent:
Understand the customer.
Find the opportunity.
Make the numbers work.
Then make it happen.
How I work.
Different problems need different answers.
I don’t start with a channel, a campaign or a preconceived solution.
I start by understanding what’s changed, what’s getting in the way and where the opportunity might be.
Three things tend to happen.
1 / Start with the customer.
Find the barrier.
At Club 18-30, people wanted to book online. The problem wasn’t demand. It was the huge deposit.
We reduced it, removing a barrier that was stopping customers from transacting.
Online sales grew 175%.
Sometimes the biggest marketing opportunity isn’t more media. It’s removing what prevents someone from buying.
2 / Join commercial dots.
Change the proposition.
Post-COVID, the economics of visiting SeaWorld Parks changed. Car hire and parking charges were increasing. More visitors were using alternative transport.
This meant free parking, a powerful benefit, became less relevant to part of the audience.
Introducing a new ticket with FREE dining, we developed a campaign and B2B education to bring it to market
+14% per capita customer value.
3 / Find the opportunity.
Find a different customer.
The car leasing market is highly commoditised. At the point of conversion, customers compare the same vehicle.
Rather than compete harder on price with the same audience, I looked for other audiences displaying intent.
The opportunity was people searching for ‘nearly new’ second-hand cars.
The ‘Drive brand new’ proposition could then be used in second-hand marketplaces, communities, forums, paid search and retargeting.
What can I do for you?
I can:
Build your strategy.
Lead your team.
Fix a bottleneck
Find an opportunity
Challenge your thinking
Ratify a decision you’re struggling to make.
Or help you work out what you need.
What clients say.
“Dave is a fantastic strategic thinker. He is also very good at converting this great thinking into smart, practical solutions that make a tangible and positive difference to the business and the brand.”
Chris Walmsley, Founder @ Cubo Communications & IkonShot.
“He didn’t just tweak our marketing; he completely reshaped how we think about our brand and our audience. He listened to our goals, identified the gaps we hadn’t seen and gave us a clear, actionable roadmap.”
Spencer Blake, Founder /Director @ Xcite Car Leasing.