Marketing Week Mini MBA with Mark Ritson

University of the West of Scotland

Kilwinning Academy

University of Strathclyde

Your Virtual Chief Marketing Officer for Hospitality, Tech & B2B

Holiday Extras

N.E.D. / Brand & Marketing Advisor

I created The Mark McC Supersonic Marketing Podcast to interview the greatest people in hospitality and subject matter experts in Brand, Marketing, Digital, Social and Employee Engagement to share their insights and expertise for free to help businesses all around the world BOOM! You’re welcome.

Supersonic Inc. Ltd

Creator & Host - SUPERSONIC HOSPITALITY MARKETING PODCAST

•	MAKE YOUR BRAND BOOM: Premium Brand, Marketing, Digital, Social and Employee Engagement Strategic Consultant. 
•	Repositioned the Bill’s brand with Bill himself and the board for revamp and successful relaunch. “Mark is the closest anyone has got to defining our brand in 16 years” Bill Collison, Founder, Bill’s.
•	Repositioned the Roadchef and ARC Inspiration brands with the boards for relaunch.
•	Global merger Brand DNA consultant for Fourth and Hot Schedules.
•	NED role for Wright & Bell (an Imbiba backed portfolio of brands).
•	Strategic Brand and Marketing consultancy projects for BrewDog, Fuller’s Inns and Red Bull.
•	Social Media Strategy for eCommerce van and car leasing brand Vanarama.
•	Created THE SUPERSONIC MARKETING PODCAST. Raised over £50k of sponsorship for the two series and have gained almost 40,000 listeners to date.
•	Virtual CMO for ARC Inspirations and Pizza Punks.
•	B2B Tech Brand DNA including Feed it Back and Ten Kites.

FOUNDER & CEO: Brand & Marketing Advisor, Non Executive Director, Mentor, Speaker, Broadcaster

Charged with helping define brand DNA, brand development, strategy and communications.  

Powerverse is a smart energy management company brought to you by global solar leader, Lightsource bp. Through its work with utilities, businesses, local communities and governments, Lightsource bp (a 50:50 JV partner with bp) is helping meet the rising demand for affordable, reliable and sustainable energy.

For over a decade, the organisation has been building and growing meaningful partnerships across the energy transition as a developer, financier and operator of utility-scale solar. This approach to solar offers many benefits to partners such as Powerverse, by leveraging economies of scale, ethical and sustainable procurement, and continuous improvement on quality and efficiency.

Powerverse

Asked back to help the group to enhance reputation, grow sales and help expansion.

Black Rock Restaurants

Brand & Marketing Advisor

Board Advisor to England’s largest arts festival running 5th May to 4th June 2023. www.brightonfringe.org

Brighton Fringe

Board N.E.D. / Non Executive Director

Goodman | Beast | Zelman Meats

Brand & Marketing Advisor / Mentor

Rosa's Thai

Short sharp consulting gig to define the brand, create the strategy, guide the team and write the plan for execution.

StoreKit

A movement to double the amount of people considering a job in Hospitality by changing the UK’s perceptions positively of what a job in Hospitality looks like and what it can offer. We will create and launch the BIGGEST hospitality recruitment advertising campaign that the UK and beyond has ever seen, from TV to Tik Tok and back again.

Hospitality Rising UK

Founder & Campaign Director

Buzzworks Holdings

N.E.D. / Brand & Marketing Advisor / Mentor

Mentor to Creative & Marketing Director and Adviser to the Marketing team on all things Brand, Marketing, Digital and Social including eCommerce store, Inputting on Digital Strategy, Team Org, Project work, Marketing Plans through to Execution and Building KPI Scorecards to measure the success.

Dishoom

Year long consulting gig to define the brands, create the strategy, build the team and write the plan for execution.

Black Rock Restaurant Group

My first podcast series including podcasts with Business and Digital Guru Gary Vaynerchuk and Superstar DJ restaurant owner/investor Norman Cook AKA Fatboy Slim.

The Spectacular Marketing Podcast

Creator & Presenter

Interim position which I could not resist. Amazing brand, amazing company and amazing experience (as you would expect).

Focused on (and achieved):
- Creating and executing 'breakfast is served' promoting a more sophisticated range of breakfast rolls, HOPE for the homeless Christmas campaign which aimed to raise £300,000 for the homeless and January fun take on dieting.
- Raising local sales through creating a new local store marketing toolkit that helps raise sales in a Pret way with nothing cheap or 'me too' like loyalty cards or discounts.
- Create the Pret Coffee story and help Pret be better known for for selling great coffee.
- Create and deliver on Pret's digital strategy. Results to date are Facebook followers up by over 120% (within a one month period) and twitter followers up by a similar amount. There is record engagement also which means the followers are engaged and loyal Pret customers.
- Launch a new mobile and tablet site that acts as a team member in your pocket.

Pret A Manger

Head of Marketing & Member of Senior Exec Team

•	Premium Brand, Marketing, Digital, Social and Employee Engagement Consultancy.
•	Built agency to £1.2m income per year, 25 live clients, 13 FTE with network of senior freelancers.
•	Brand DNA definition for clients including First Utility (Shell Energy) Fuller’s, All Bar One, Cote Brands, The Stable, Red’s True BBQ, SSP Brands (Upper Crust, Millie’s Cookies etc), Paul Hollywood Bakery, James Martin Kitchen, Drake & Morgan, Lucky Voice, Busaba, Anglian Country Inns, Peach Pubs, Belushi’s, Centra Coffee Project, MOD Pizza, Small Batch Coffee, CGA, Harviestoun Brewery, Dark Star Beer.
•	Retained UK Marketing and Digital agency for brands including Ibis/Accor Hotels, Busaba, Fuller’s Inns, First Utility (Shell Energy), SSP brands, YO! Sushi, Peach and Anglian Country Inns.
•	Global Brand DNA definition, creation and deployment of Global Employee Engagement Program to over 2,000 employees in UK, USA, Europe for Fourth.
•	Created and delivered Local Restaurant / Pub Marketing toolkit and workshops for clients.
•	Digital thought leadership sessions and Global local marketing strategy and guides for Costa.
•	Created THE SPECTACULAR MARKETING PODCAST. Gained over 50,000 listens to date.

WE ARE Spectacular

Founder & Group CEO

Key achievements/responsibilities
• Set up all marketing of WE7 from scratch. Define marketing strategy, hire right minds (internal team and external agencies) to deliver on strategy.
• Take new brand definition and create brand guidelines, tone of voice/tone of look docs and drive through rebrand of WE7 on and offline.
• Marketing mix of SEO, PPC, Digital display, Partnerships, CRM, PR, Social and TV resulted in:
o Track streams up by 51% Oct 11 – March 12 
o Traffic increase by 31% Oct 11 – March 12
o Unique users increase by 18% Oct 11 – March 12

We7 now Blinkbox Music (acquired by Tesco plc 2012)

Vice President, Marketing

Marketing representative on Company Exec Board building the most exciting brand in the restaurant industry*.

*source Peach Brand Tracker Dec 2010.

1. Met all sales targets in 2009, 2010 and 2011 with a marketing budget of 1% of total turnover. 
2. Defined the YO! Sushi brand promise and rolled out new brand promise of WOW! through everything we do internally and externally to help our teams deliver it to our customers.
3. Successfully opened 20 YO! Sushi restaurants in 25 months plus 12 complete refurbishments.
4. Won Best Restaurant Website in the World – Webby Awards 2010.
5. Have most active fans on social media of anyone in the restaurant industry worldwide.
6. Voted as Best Company at Retailers Retailer of the Year Awards and Best Evolutionary Brand at Peach Restaurant Industry Awards.

Key responsibilities 
• Build the most exciting restaurant brand in the UK.
• Customer segmentation and insight to ensure YO! Sushi is targeting the most profitable customers with everything we do. 
• Create, own and deliver brand and marketing plan.
• Deliver £60m in sales whilst ensuring no budget overspend.
• Direct, co-create and execute all above and below the line marketing activity in the UK. 
• Be trusted advisor to our franchisees who run YO! Sushi restaurants across the world to ensure brand consistency. 
• Focus on value for money from team, suppliers and agencies at all times.

YO! Sushi

Head of Marketing & Exec Board Member

Three main responsibilities in my role:

1) Lead Brand Engagement Globally across Barclaycard by designing activity and workstreams that land key messages with colleagues in our vision, brand promise and behaviours. 

2) Leading and owning the roll out of new Barclaycard Visual Identity in all markets outside the UK including US, DE, IT, ES, PT, UAE and India. This includes all internal colleague touchpoints and all external customer touchpoints.

3) Assisting Head of Brand Mgmt and local Marketing Heads to create the Brand Deployment Strategy in US and DE. Working with the local CMO and heads of marketing to create the most appropriate way to delploy the Barclaycard brand in these locales. This means deploying our global brand strategy in the every country in a locally relevant manner.

Barclaycard

Global Senior Brand Manager

Key achievements
1. Redefined, repositioned and led relaunch of the lastminute.com 6 core European brands. 
2. Key stakeholder in all creative comms and every customer touchpoint.
3. Raised brand prompted awareness of lastminute.com from 60% to 89% from 2006-2008. 
4. Marketing activity grew Lifestyle business from 18m in 2004 to 25m 2005.
5. Built the first branded outdoor beach in central London for a week in summer 2006. 400k people saw the beach every day and it gained £1.2m of PR worldwide. 
6. Delivered 200k quality sign ups for our newsletter via partnership marketing in 3 months.
7. Launched lastminute.com/Manchester: departures from Manchester rose by 96%.
8. Brand Innovation - developed and launched ipod and mobile phrasebooks app. 1.5m d/loads

Key responsibilities
• Develop the new brand strategy: redefined the brand promise of all group brands.
• Develop the brand and engage staff and consumers on new position.
• Rolled out brand promise from HR to Customer services to Site to Ext Communications. 
• Track brand awareness and brand health KPIs.
• Commercial/Brand measurement: obsessively track brand health and commercial ROI.
• Customer research: led Qualitative and Quantitative research projects in UK and Australia.
• Leadership and People Management: led CRM team of 7, Brand Development team of 2.
• Work with PR team to cut through PR tha reinforced brand promise.
• Create strategic partnerships: Superdrug, Orange, Key Tourist Boards and Metro.
• Plan and deliver Marketing campaigns for all 8 non-travel categories. 
• Budget responsibility: co-owner of £23.3m Marketing Budget.

lastminute.com

Global Group Head of Brand

Role main aims were to rebrand and implement and on and offline 3 year marketing plan that would see eXhilaration become the leader in the gift experience marketplace in the UK.
Responsible initially for all brand definition, comms, rebrand, website, advertising, marketing budget, brochure creation.writing and printing, support corporate team with marketing tools and laterly assume a GM role to integrate eXhilaration in lastminute.com.

Marketing Manager - eXhilaration

Main client and project liaison for 12 clients including Sainsbury's and WD-40.
Fully rebranded haulage company Frigoscandia to become Celsius First and included everything from lorry livery to staff uniforms to brand induction books.

Mark McCulloch