This week it’s Tim Dowling, Head of External Communications at Pets at Home. To suggest another senior media or creative figure for A Week In My Life, please email david@prolificnorth.co.uk.
Monday
Monday begins at our office in Handforth with a review of last week’s online trading performance. A major part of my role is driving online traffic, so following this review, my team and I will update other colleagues on digital performance and meet with the E-Comm operations team to chat through any challenges or issues over the past week.
From here, it’s straight into a new product development session where the marketing plan for our new own label food brand is discussed.
I grab a quick lunch and then head into a monthly promotions planning meeting with the wider trading team. Our financial year ends shortly so this is a good opportunity to check that our plans for quarter four are on track.
The objective of this meeting is to ensure marketing and trading are strategically aligned to deliver the business plan we’ve all committed to during the last 12 months. My external communications team play an important role in making both new and existing customers aware of what we stand for as a brand, how we can help to give those customers advice about a variety of pet related topics and how our different promotions can help them to save money when shopping for the best pet products around.
Monday ends with our weekly ‘shoal’ where the entire support office team come together to talk through what’s happening, both from a business and office community perspective, (there is a cake sale planned to raise money for pet charities this week). These meetings are a great way to get an overview of the entire business’s priorities as well as to have a few laughs when people’s dogs take the agenda into their own hands! I doubt there are many national retailers that have a group of canines barking along to the end of meeting applause.
Tuesday
Always a busy day and this week it’s no different as I have back to back meetings. My first catch-up is on next year’s digital strategy with two of our directors. It’s an important discussion to help ensure we have the infrastructure in place to deliver on our digital growth targets. I head straight from this meeting into another with our digital agency, where we look at how we can make analytics tools work harder for us so that we have more actionable insight to use as the business grows.
All of the pets in the office are much loved and celebrated but there is one particularly unusual pet who belongs to my colleague Emma. His name is Quentin, and he is our marketing team tarantula! Feeding time is always an interesting event when Emma lifts the vivarium lid in order to give him the locusts he’s very fond of.
Another quick lunch (is there ever a slow one!?) and then I head into my team’s weekly two-hour slot. I really value this session as it gives us time to come together as a group to cover the many pieces of activity we have in play. We use this afternoon’s slot to discuss potential challenges, review our upcoming campaigns and divvy up work streams to ensure that all deadlines are met.
