AA marketer Will Harrison: ‘Marketing should inspire the whole business’

The group marketing director tells Tim Healey how the brand best known for helping stranded UK motorists is transforming itself and why Specsavers is a source of marketing inspiration.
From studying English and art at the University of York, you have pursued a career in marketing from agency side to client side with retail, telco and now insurance industry experience. Please talk us through your career journey to date leading to group marketing director at the AA?
I have always had an interest in human behavior – how people think, how people act, why they make the decisions they do, what grabs their attention and what doesn’t.
What inspired me about advertising was solving business challenges with creativity. Creativity in thinking and strategy based on market and human insights as well as audio and visual outputs.
I got close to a grad scheme with one of the big London ad agencies but instead took a role at a small marketing agency in Islington called Bluemoon Marketing with two young founders. I led their Logitech account, which involved a very hands-on trade marketing rollout strategy. I learned a lot about the agency and client relationship – seeing both sides’ cultures, dynamics and approaches to making money. Trade marketing is very tangible. The agreements mostly involved in-person pitching with retailers and trial store agreements with success all based on clear, measurable uplifts in sales over a period of time based on strategic merchandising and approach. It was a great grounding. And I think I will always have a soft spot for retail, the pace of it, the tangibility of it, ‘in real life’ customer experiences you can affect.
Then after a short spell at a larger agency, Crayon, working on Sony, I decided client side was for me after all as I missed the business impact and tangibility. I joined Carphone Warehouse, working quite literally out of a warehouse in North Acton. They fascinated me with their fast-expanding retail footprint combined with the fast pace of telco products and accessories, relationships with manufacturers and networks. From Orange, T-Mobile and Blackberry to iPhone launches, the rise of Samsung, the introduction of Huawei, Google’s evolution. All while trying to navigate Carphone’s role as an advice brand in the middle of these customer relationships. There was also a new initiative or some sort of restructure. And a decent canteen.
The largest business shift was the merger with Dixons and the evolution to Currys. I spent a few years there doing retail marketing, advertising, brand strategy on Dixons side and then ultimately heading up Carphone’s advertising. I learned a lot about stakeholder management, influencing, resilience, creative and media, brand strategy and management and the operational side of marketing with store rollout cost and fulfilment. The advertising (and associated experiences) with Keith Lemon will stay with me for quite a while.
Then I joined Three mobile for a brief period in a very brand-led marketing environment working with Wiedens on campaigns to promote unlimited data, Black Friday and content partnerships with LadBible – some great times with East 17 whispering ‘stay another day’ and a fresh-faced Lewis Capaldi doing ASMR.
Then The AA called, and for the last four years, I’ve been leading a transformation mission to ensure the brand is set up to be relevant and commercially successful short and long term. My role has expanded into group marketing director in the last year to also take on other areas of the marketing mix including strategy & planning and marketing ops & fulfilment.
How did you find marketing and what was the first moment when you thought marketing is for me?
I think I’ve always had a fascination in people and how they behave. I was also very influenced by my Mum and her parents’ retail business when I was growing up. Seeing a business in action, interacting day after day with customers deciding to enter, browsing, buying products and the sales and marketing skills associated with it all had a formative impact. Plus I have always loved creativity and its impact to inspire and move people (particularly art, music, film and sketch show humor). So I was interested to see if I could find a career that combined the two. I genuinely believe that marketing strategy and execution makes or breaks a business. It is critical and still either misunderstood or undervalued in lots of boardrooms.
Fundamentally, I think I find it fascinating that we choose one thing over another in life. We choose to pay a certain amount for a certain thing, but not another. And then in some cases we decide to only buy the same product consistently for a number of years, without considering another. Understanding how to affect that decision-making process in a creative way is what I love.
Why do people behave the way they do? Why do you build affinity with a particular product or brand? Understanding the role of product, proposition, price and communications to set up a business for success and then evolve to maintain that success in the light of market evolution and competitor challenges is fascinating. Brand signals and tone also fascinate me – how a set of colors, sounds and associated emotions can play such a critical role not just in identifying a brand but also developing or changing an ongoing relationship. Understanding and optimizing all of this … I don’t think that ever gets boring.
The AA offers a raft of services to support all motorists
Looking at the AA’s financial reports, revenues are up year on year to £1.3bn, 1.7m policies were sold and you have 14.3m members and customers. That is a third year of steady growth. What does this all mean for you and your marketing as you look to the next year?
It’s a really exciting time for the AA. We want to evolve and drive further volume and value. The business is doing really well. We’ve got a third equity investor now based on the progress that the AA has made over the last few years.
I think the opportunity for marketing, as always, is to ensure that the AA is positioned in the strongest possible way across the full marketing mix, beyond just advertising communications. There’s a unique opportunity for the AA to grow beyond being the category leader in roadside services and breakdown and continue to play a major role in UK drivers’ lives for decades to come and as UK drivers’ lives and their driving landscape evolves.
The AA is a hugely trusted brand that gives drivers’ confidence. Whatever the driving scenario, we want to ensure the AA is the first point of call. From learning to buying or leasing a car, to insurance to accident assistance to breakdown, service and maintenance to selling your car. It’s OK, when you’re with the AA. This year we have elevated our accident assistance product which is included in membership so this has been a focus in both CX, owned, earned and paid marcomms.
AA’s ‘The Shadow’ advertising
We need to talk about the AA’s recent ‘The Shadow’ campaign. Can you walk us through the insight that led to this latest ‘It’s OK’ campaign iteration?
Last year we launched ‘Always Ahead’ as our brand positioning to complement our purpose of creating confidence for drivers, now and for the future. We create this confidence at the AA through anticipating drivers’ needs both in product and proposition across their driving lives, hence being ‘Always Ahead.’ It also leans into our marketing leadership and superiority position with breakdown – we have the most patrols on the road, the largest fleet and the best call to arrive time – and as the UK’s largest driving support brand.
‘It’s OK, I’m with The AA’ is the brand expression of this ultimate feeling of trust and confidence that you get as a member of The AA, whatever the driving scenario. The campaign last year highlighted that The AA was about more than just breakdown. We want people to think The AA when they think about driving. Humor played a big role in our distinctive advertising approach with ‘It’s OK’ so when we read the script from The Gate for ‘Shadow’ which highlights our Accident Assistance service, included in AA membership, we got excited.
‘Shadow’ is the first time we’ve produced advertising portraying an accident. In essence, we want to ensure people know that even in an accident, everything is fine if you’re with the AA. But we wanted to ensure this was created in an everyday British style moment in keeping with the other work, but with a humorous twist. In the black and white film, apart from the flash of yellow on the AA app, a driver is distracted by an unusual shadow that catches his eye and as a result he bumps into the lady in front but stays calm and transfixed on the shadow. And then it turns out the lady in front was distracted as well. And actually, undoubtedly, there will be a few more distracted drivers to follow. But with Accident Assist, and being with the AA, all the drivers are OK.
We’ve taken inspiration from Specsavers. They’ve done some brilliant articulations of ‘Should have gone to…’ over the decades. The strength of the customer insight and the simplicity of the articulation is superb and it has evolved to feel just as culturally relevant now as it always has been. I love that purity of capturing the essence of your brand with just a narrative and ideally as few words as possible. In my view, ‘Shadow’ shows the strength and flexibility of the ‘It’s OK, I’m with The AA’ platform. Hopefully the UK public enjoy it and remember it.
During Covid the AA campaign featured Tukker the dog ‘reliving’ car journeys at a time when travel was discouraged
Why should brands balance the long and the short?
To sustain any business success, it’s critical to have a strategy that thinks about both. Clearly depending on the maturity, size and ambition of the business as well as the market conditions, how short the short-term focus is and how long the long-term focus is, is important. There needs to be alignment between the business’s commercial objectives and the marketing objectives otherwise it is a waste of time and money.
I think it’s a duty of all marketers to ensure that their business has a good balance of both long and short-term tactics. What I’ve aimed to do at the AA, with the brilliant work from our friends at The Gate, is to create a positioning for our brand and an advertising expression for our communications that should last the test of time – in both long and short-term tactics. There should be no reason to change this for years to come, simply evolve and strengthen the equity in it.
It has been well documented but if a business is too focused or solely focused on the short term then there will be a lack of vision and ability to evolve and adapt to drive long-term volume and value. Equally, if there is a lack of emphasis on short-term tactics then the business won’t survive.
We’ve seen so many businesses suffer from an overly transactional and short-term focused approach, which creates volume in the short term but often forgets what the market or customer base wants or needs and how that is evolving. The job has to be to hit volume targets as well as ensuring there is ongoing value in your product and customer experience and this value continues to build and deepen over time to hold on to customers as well as continuing to acquire new ones.
The AA won 3 awards at The Marketing Society in 2024: best campaign, best use of insight and best brand team
Of what initiative, that’s been delivered on your watch, are you most proud?
It has been a real whirlwind at the AA from joining a driving brand two weeks before everyone stopped driving due to Covid to the rise in public interest and adoption of electric vehicles to private equity takeover and the ongoing vision of a customer-focused business with a range of driving products and services set for short and long-term commercial success.
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I have to say, winning campaign of the year at the Marketing Society awards earlier this year, one of three awards we won (the others being best use of insight and data and best brand team) made me extremely proud as it felt like true industry validation based on not just the work we’ve done but the results we’ve achieved in a short space of time with a legacy business, under private equity ownership with a very small but mighty team and modest budget. The pitch process to bring in The Gate, the boldness of the new platform and expression not just for marcomms but for our whole business required a huge amount of influencing, collaboration and sell-in which in turn started to support a cultural change in the organization as well as a change to how the brand is perceived externally.
Collaborating with the fictional Kurupt FM’s MC Grindah for a series of campaigns about the AA has helped the business continue to appeal to a younger audience
I am proud of believing in a vision, sticking to it and most importantly, delivering on it. Everyone can talk the talk but walking the walk is what matters and I am so proud of what we’ve achieved to launch ‘Always Ahead’ and ‘It’s OK, I’m with The AA’ and see the success we did in the launch year. The cultural extensions with Street Fighter and Kurupt FM/LadBible which we’ve built on this year with Red Bull soapbox sponsorship also show how far we’ve pushed the campaign. It’s personally fab for me to see us up against brands like McDonald’s, BBC, Lucky Saint etc whose marketing approaches I hugely admire.
What myth about marketing, would you most like to bust?
Marketing is not just advertising. Advertising is, as Mark Ritson would say, a tactic. And it is just one of the tactics available. Marketing is fundamental to delivering on business strategy and objectives short and long term. Marketeers have to be commercially astute as well as creative. They have to be agents for change and passionate about delivering tangible results.
At the AA, what gets me excited is linking channels together to deliver on one unified ambition for the best customer and commercial results. For example, we’re now exploring new ways to optimize CRM and loyalty off the back of the brand positioning and group business ambitions to ensure CX is even more integrated with better use of data – connecting seamlessly with our paid and earned campaigns.
What have you learned from your career that helps you to get the best out of your marketing teams?
To lead and drive change, I think you have to lead by example and set the standards as well as the vision. It’s about bringing clarity with a combination of passion and pragmatism. From a people perspective, I’m keen to ensure that my team feels like anything is possible, that they can maintain an open mind and feel like they can grow professionally and personally. I like to talk openly to my team about how they are, what they want and aid them on their own career trajectory.
We spend a lot of time working so I think it’s important that there is a feeling of achievement, progression and growth – that in turn fuels business growth if pointed in the right direction.
Maybe it comes with experience, but if you approach work in the way I think we should approach life – being present – you can learn and develop from everything you do and every experience forms part of your own journey. Every interaction, every meeting, every email, every presentation – they are all a chance to understand a bit more about yourself, the people around you and the impact you can have.
I think, rightly, there’s more of a focus on mental health and work life balance now. So leadership requires a good dose of emotional intelligence and confidence to be able to understand people’s ambitions and their strengths vs. their challenges and then develop a relationship of trust and followership. I really enjoy this challenge – people are endlessly fascinating. Maybe I’m just very curious.
Taking ‘time-out’ with Tukker, the puppet dog, on the shoot for the AA’s film campaign
What advice would you give to your younger self if you could go back in time?
Don’t worry too much. Prioritize spending time with people who inspire you. Stay curious.
What question would you have for the next senior marketer that I interview?
My question would be: tell us about a failure you experienced and what you learned from it.
Your question from another senior marketer is this: tell us about a formative experience you had, personally or professionally, that shaped the person you are today.
Launching ‘Love that feeling’, our Covid advertising campaign with Tukker the dog within four months of joining the AA has to be up there. I had to very quickly understand what the business vision was, what the brand stood for and meant to people and think on my feet to switch direction from a costly Red Dwarf campaign to a more cost-effective, emotive-led campaign leaning into distinctive brand assets in a more modern and relevant way with an entirely new team. Plus, all timed perfectly for when drivers got back on the road post lockdown to make the most of owning the ‘zeitgeist’ so all the campaign strategy, planning and execution was done virtually, including the shoot with puppeteers in Latvia and directors in Canada. It taught me that with the right attitude, determination, passion and teamwork you can achieve more than you think. Huge kudos to my brand team and Adam&Eve and Goodstuff – it truly was an amazing team effort. The amount of work delivered at pace in such a different direction for the brand was incredible, particularly during a tough time with constant working from home and I am still very proud of that campaign.
I remember presenting the ad to some of the board members on teams from my bedroom and thinking, wow, we’ve actually done this.
If there’s one thing you know about marketing, it is…
Fundamental. And inspirational. That’s two, sorry.
The strategy behind product, proposition, pricing and how you communicate this to current and new customers is fundamental to making a business survive and grow. And I think marketing can and should inspire the whole business. Creative thinking and outputs are incredibly powerful and contagious – it is what makes you stand out, differentiate from the competition and stay relevant and memorable. I also think it is the duty of marketeers to really understand the customer and challenge the status quo of the business to drive ongoing growth and transformation for those customers.
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.
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