Episode 157 / Rebecca Dibb-Simkin / Octopus Energy Group / Global Director of Product & Marketing
Podcast: Why Drop the Marketing Jargon to Send a Clearer Message
Rebecca Dibb-Simkin is the Global Director of Product & Marketing at the Octopus Energy Group, combining the origination of products with the marketing and having an end-to-end experience of the energy contracts the brand offers consumers. Without having planned a marketing career from the very beginning, Rebecca moved into the industry after having been seduced by an Ogilvy graduate scheme ad. She then became quite critical of what marketing is, shaped a different sort of role, and now her Shiny New Object is “all marketing jargon should go in room 101.”
Octopus Energy offered Rebecca a role where she would be building the product as well as selling it. This interest had developed after her long career in marketing, where she had increasingly become frustrated with the way “true” marketing worked. By contrast, being involved with the product development and launch process from end to end, she manages it all in-house at Octopus Energy.
Being critical of more “traditional” marketing practices has led Rebecca to saying that her Shiny New Object is “all marketing jargon should go in room 101.” From having an unsatisfying experience with overly complicated brand guidelines earlier in her career, she decided that the better way to approach marketing is to strip it back to the essentials. Ultimately, this comes back to one of Rebecca’s favourite phrases from Peter Drucker: “The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.”
Rather than spend time developing logos and complicated rules, Rebecca prefers to focus on creating products “for humans” and developing them in such a way that they “sell themselves.” If consumers see that the contracts proposed by Octopus Energy are simple, straightforward and offer a stellar consumer experience, then there would be no need to focus too much on specific details that marketers tend to get themselves lost in.
Speaking about creating products for humans and stripping back the marketing approach, Rebecca sees this as an opportunity to make marketing more relatable as well. This means that her approach does not limit itself to the service business, but can be adopted by FMCG companies, too. One example we talked about was Dove using regular women, i.e. non-models, for their adverts, being more straightforward and simple in their message.
Listen to Rebecca’s top marketing tips, her favourite new beliefs, and more on why she hates marketing jargon, here.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Tom Ollerton 0:00
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Hello, and welcome to the Shiny New Object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of Automated Creative. And this is a weekly podcast where I have the pleasure and the privilege of interviewing one of our industry's leaders, and this week is no different. I'm on a call with Rebecca Dibb-Simkin, who is Global Director of Product and Marketing at Octopus Energy Group. Rebecca, for anyone listening to this podcast, he doesn't know who you are or what you do. Could you give them an overview?
Rebecca Dibb-Simkin 1:02
Hello, and thanks for having me on. And I look after all product development, marketing and comms for Octopus Energy Group, which is known in the UK as an energy retailer. So a bit like British Gas, but with fewer customers got about 3 million the UK. And we're in 13 different countries around the world both generating energy, so solar wind turbines, and also selling that energy directly to end customers.
Tom Ollerton 1:30
And what were you doing before that role?
Rebecca Dibb-Simkin 1:33
Well, I've kind of, I've worked in marketing, for all of my career, and I wasn't going to be marketing, I actually wanted to be an accountant. So when I was at, you need to do did a business degree, you had jobs lined up with two of the two of the big four. And then I read on the back of my student union magazine after I just accepted these jobs, actually, a brilliant long copy ads about a graduate scheme at Ogilvy group at the advertising agency written by Rory Sutherland, who's bit of a God of copy and promoting a graduate scheme. And I was so captivated by the story which he wove about what it would be like to work for a company like that, and, you know, create content and create columns, which would engage with people that I applied myself and ended up not being an accountant in Nottingham, and working in advertising. In London, which was which is fabulous. Actually, we kind of have six weeks training on this, this graduate scheme where we did loads of cool stuff and met all most important people. And then we got put on accounts, and had a big shot when basically comes in the next six months doing photocopying. But yeah, incredible and over the map, the next 18 months, got experience around the business and then actually ended up moving to British Gas, who was one of our clients and I worked in new business and manage the pitch for the direct mail British Gas business back in 2007. And then got sent over one to comment to work for British Gas replacing and account manager who was already there, which I was terribly miffed about because it's quite different going from trendy advertising agency in London with a bar in the office to British Gas in Slough, you know, and even having to kind of buy new work uniform and all that kind of thing, but actually really found myself enjoying that business worked for. We sponsored the British Swimming Association during the Olympics. So I was seconded over to them to run some of their marketing had a team in another role. They're based all over the UK and in India. So went out to India a few times was working on comms out there. So it was really, really interesting place to work and move around. But actually, I started to get more and more frustrated while I was there, about what being a marketer was. So again, going back to I wanted to be an accountant, because I like numbers and the way they balanced and the way they make sense. And then was literally captivated by copy and support into being a marketer. But sometimes the market is a bit rubbish because you sometimes get given a crap product to go and promote and people go backwards, you could just put this in the TV and then most people will buy and I just like I don't think that's that's the right way to you know, that doesn't always work. So I wanted to a role where actually I would be building the product as well as selling it because I think those two things go hand in hand. So I moved to their hive business, which is their Internet of Things business and actually started building stuff moved into a head of product role and actually built their high thermostat so designed, manufactured work with the Chinese manufacturer was in China a lot and then rolled it out to customers who did all that side of it. And then when I moved to my current business octopus, which was very small business at that point, I was about employee number 14 There were 50,000 customers to look after all marketing and product and kind of grown it since then. So I am an unusual marketing that I didn't want to be a marketer, don't really like marketing very much but seem to be fairly ok at it. So there you go in one log my career over the last 15 years.
Tom Ollerton 4:53
You're the first product and marketing person I think I'm maybe maybe slightly wrong on that. But so how does that work. So yes, you write your product usually give the product to marketing and say, make this look nice and make people buy it like, is that a 50/50 split? How does that work? You ideating with technologists, with a you know, always having a marketing brain on in the background, and then that kicks in at a certain point, you just have no idea how that works at a company like octopus?
Rebecca Dibb-Simkin 5:22
Well, I don't really know how it works, if you don't do it that way. I mean, I my favorite marketing phrase by a chap called Peter Drucker is the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. So you create such an awesome thing that people want that thing, and all you're doing is smoothing the channels of communication to people knowing about that thing, you know, it all goes hand in hand. So octopus, I suppose my primary role is, you know, people is selling energy to humans. And so it's thinking about, how do you make that process as simple as possible for people to take that product? How do you make that product interesting? So we have different kinds of tariffs, if people want an interesting, you know, techy, smart tariff, or if they don't want to take a smart car, and they just want it as cheap as possible with awesome customer service. But how do you put that together to them? And how do you communicate it? And then when they're a customer with you? How do you make that experience as frictionless as possible? Now I do so I suppose, you know, everything I do is I don't separate it. It's like, how do we create this product? And how do we get it out there and the way that we do marketing, marketing, and product octopus is slightly different. It's we do all of our creative, and all of our building houses were a tech business, actually not just an energy company, we think of ourselves as a tech business first. So all of our development is done in house, and the front end development team has always kind of had a dotted line into me as it was, if I needed anything creative, it could just be created. So everything's done in house, we have four designers who create everything that you see, optimize, whether that's a TV ad, whether that's designing an app, whether that's, you know, emails, whatever that that is, and we have developers who build it. So actually, it's a very seamless, the way we do things is about, you know, creating that thing for a customer and getting it to them, and we don't start splitting it into product or marketing.
Tom Ollerton 7:06
So across that career, and then this new, exciting role, don't know how new it is sorry, don't know why I said it. To me anyway, that's embarrassing, but what is what's that new belief or behavior that's really had an impact on your work life and last five years or so.
Rebecca Dibb-Simkin 7:23
So I had my first baby eight years ago, and I've now got four children, which is a lot of children. So I've got an eight year old, a five year old, 21 month old and a six month old, because COVID caught me kind of slightly unawares. And I had two babies during COVID lockdown. And what I've had to do is, you know, as I get more senior and more busy, and my personal life gets more busy, and I can't kind of work in the evening and through the night is getting more efficient at stuff. And I am literally my skills at multitasking and focusing on what's important, have been incredibly honed over the last five years. So no longer do I spend any time on anything that is not the absolute, you know, will actually drive this business harder. So, you know, I've run everything by filter, will this get us more customers? Will this make the customer experience better, and if it won't do it, it's just maybe a nice thing to have, or, you know, someone else thinks it might be necessary. We just don't do it. I'm absolutely ruthless about what I spend my time on. Whereas I think early in my career, while we're kind of like, why spend quite a long time on that, and I spend quite a long time of that you have to be absolutely, I think when you get to this level, you have to be absolutely efficient with how you spend your time.
Tom Ollerton 8:36
So that there's no one is gonna hear that go no, no, that's ridiculous. But I really struggle with this, right? So I get up every day and go, I also have a family a quarter the size of yours. But I could go right, I'm just gonna do what's gonna grow automated creative, right? That's all I'm gonna do. But yeah, all I would do is Hone and repeat the things that I'm already good at and proficient at. Whereas the opportunity may lie in the murky blackness of uncertainty. And that's where all of my previous leaps have come from. It's one of God just throw myself into that into the uncertainty and into a lot of time and investment. So how do you know how do you know that you're not missing out on some really juicy goodness that could like I don't know, double the amount of growth but you wouldn't do it because it's unproven?
Rebecca Dibb-Simkin 9:30
Well, I have awesome people that I work with at Octopus and I have often people in my life who were interesting and read things and look at things and have ideas and I'm a human I engage with people and I'm a consumer and you know, I was I donated some money to Wikipedia that day because they had their you know, their to you know, take this two minutes and tonight is hooked up because you you went saw our information and you know, we need some money off you and it was such an effective process of getting money out of me within about two and a half minutes that I then screenshotted it sent to one of my design that was like this is a really good way of improving, you know, our purchases. Can we look at that for ours? My CEO the other day, got an email from a company he had a direct debit with. That was such a nice way of putting an email together that he forwarded it to me and my creative director and said, Oh, can we take some learnings from this? And I was like, yeah, yes, what a brilliant idea. So I sold it to a copywriter. And I was like, can have a look at this. So I think you need to be open to all the things that one sees in the world as a human, which can optimize their their working environment. I actually, it's funny how the conversation my dad a couple months ago, because I don't have an awful lot of time to read a lot of books. But when I do read stuff, I try to research on like, human psychology, behavioral psychology, because actually, as a marketer, it's about you know, I'm creating a product to sell to a human. And I need to understand how humans take things and why they make decisions. My desert, I've read this really interesting book, written by an Olympic rower about how you know, all the things that he learned to win his medal. And there's all kinds of like business tips in there as well. So I bought this book on Kindle one day and I downloaded It's called How to make the boat go faster. And I read the first chapter, and I realized that it was like someone's book here. But sure, it's a great book, but actually, the title summarize everything that I need to know, right? Does it make the boat go faster? And I'm like, you know, like, I'm trying to grow my business does something that I'm doing make octopus bigger, or more effective, and if it doesn't, don't do it. So. So we actually had leadership away day, a few months ago, octopus leaf transition, where we were able to, and we all kind of shared book ideas. And I literally read this book around and I was like, don't buy the book. Have a look at it online, read the title, think about that. And that's all you need to know. So, yeah, about taking experiences where you can, but then we've been ruthlessly effective and, you know, turning them into something that's beneficial.
Tom Ollerton 11:50
So I was gonna ask you, what is your top marketing tip? And I think you've already shared it.
Rebecca Dibb-Simkin 11:57
Does it make the boat go faster? Yeah.
Tom Ollerton 11:59
And you're not the, you're not the first guest to reference that. And it's lovely to hear it again. Because as a personality, I will like, like, think of lots of things and complicate things. What about this? What about this, but I don't do enough of that. I don't do enough of Will this make the boat go faster? So thank you for reminding me of that. So we're going to move on to the shiny new object now. And quite a long one. It's all marketing jargon should go in room 101. So, Rebecca, why is that your shiny new objects? And what are you?
Rebecca Dibb-Simkin 12:36
Well, I mean, as I said, I always struggled a little bit with marketing. And I remember being at a dinner some years ago with some journalists, when I'd been handed a message track by the PR agency. And I didn't really understand this message track was there was some kind of pyramid on a piece of paper, and it had one message at the top. And then it had two other messages. It was like this is your primary message and these your secondary messages. And then if someone asks that you can loop them into this, and if someone asked that, and it links them into this, and I'm just sitting there, holding this piece of paper, and I have no idea what this means. You know, I know that again, I'm a human and I can talk to some other humans, about stuff. That's important. And I know there's some things that I shouldn't mention. But I just I don't understand how to follow this. It doesn't make any sense to me. And I was like, Maybe I'm just stupid. I'm just not experienced enough as a marketeer to understand how I would effectively utilize the mass message track. And then I realized over time, that all that kind of stuff, in my opinion is bollocks, right? It actually all it was was like, if you sit next to this journalist, they might be interested in that, but maybe don't talk about that, you know, and if they do, try and bring that up, say, Oh, I'm really sorry, I can't talk about that. And actually, I think, you know, the joy of marketing, which is you going back to the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous that you create something that's so perfect, that people just want to take it with you. And it's just about removing all friction, from the experience of taking it from you and owning that product. That I think that sometimes marketers can kind of get lost with all the stuff that they pile on top, you know, brand pyramids and brand guidelines and message tracks and strategies and, you know, plans and all that kind of thing. And it's just something that I always now have an absolute aversion to. So we don't have brand guidelines, I don't have a brand pyramid or donor or a house or any of the other things that early in my career seem to be quite important to people. I don't have a you know, complex strategy or plan. You know, I'm trying to grow this business by getting more customers and make that experience better for customers. And that is my north north star works really, really well. I've never need to do anything differently. And octopus has moved. So when I joined the business that there was 50,000 customers. We've now got three 3 million customers in the UK alone 13 countries, and we're now valued on market valuation is about $5 billion. We're actually slightly higher than Centrica, which is the business I left five years ago. So unlike this stuff works like this stripping it back to what you're trying to do, you know, creating a product for a human. You don't need all the gubbins that goes but it's something like I suppose some of that Got this to kind of form up their thinking. But on the whole, I found that actually people just put it as an excuse in the way of actually stripping it back and understanding how you engage with consumers. So I'm really kind of quite, quite passionate about that, is it not being a thing which you'd have?
Tom Ollerton 15:15
Do you think that there's a place for it at a bigger brand. So I think you're in an unusual position, because you helped find the product and the marketing. And I love you keep coming back to this point, which is like, well make the product really good, and make marketing kind of superfluous. It's just like, if it's really easy to onboard, and the experience is great. Customer service is great, then, and then I'm gonna tell the mates about it. And you've got this kind of beautiful, virtuous, also Kantech cycle really, very familiar to a tech product, as you describe yourself as a tech business. But if you're if you're launching, I don't know dove in China or something like that, then how, how is head office going to articulate to the China office, I don't have chose China don't have chose to have but I'm there that without without those donut houses, pyramids, hexagons, whatever they are, and I don't, when do those things have a role? Or are they just complete be?
Rebecca Dibb-Simkin 16:12
Well, we need to give. So we have a very basic toolkit that we give countries that we're launching. So we're obviously in the UK, we've also launched in the USA, in Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan. And so our designer generally what happens when we launched the countries, I will lend them one of our designs, whenever I see designers to start building out their columns initially. And there's a kind of basic toolkit of logos and a bit of guidance around color palettes and all that kind of thing, which they will work with to go oh, this is our style octopus, and this is how you use them. So there's some some guidance, but actually, the whole, it's more like one set of rules to follow, we have examples that we hope people will leave from so it's like, you know, objective is to take cheaper, greener power around the world and grow the business. And we'll go this is what we found in the UK, this was really useful, this is a good channel to use, you know, and here's some some tools that can help rather than having an absolutely rigorous, you know, set of you could only do it this way. And I mean, again, I shouldn't, I don't like to criticize kind of former employees. But remember British Gas spending about three months wants to and I worked in the brand team redesigning the business cards, and the and the SMT, which got at the time, I remember one absolute point over what went back on the back of the business card overnight, graphic designer tweak it and everything. And it's like, so that stuff is just that different kind of business, right? You know, it doesn't really matter what your business cards are sticker legal and people will cope with, it doesn't matter whether the logo is like two millimeters to the left or to the right. And when I look at businesses that I think are disrupting the world, I look at Tesla, and I look at Uber and I look at Amazon. And you know, Netflix, those kinds of businesses very disruptive. And I think they have a vision for what they're trying to achieve. You know, Amazon wanted to be the place to buy stuff on on the internet, Tesla wants to make the world electric. And I'm sure there are some guidelines in there. But I feel that actually and having worked with some of those businesses, that that worked more important for them is ways of working. So you have the Amazon route, which actually I pinched off to this as well, when they want to launch a new product, they write a press release, first, they understand what the consumer will get at the end of it. And you know, Tesla has an interesting model where they don't do marketing, they don't do PR, they don't talk about it at all, a lot of stuff kind of comes from Elon. And so I think people you know, when you say big brands need guidelines? Well, I think the big brands that are changing the world do things very, very differently. And I'm not saying look and feel isn't important, because it is but I think they're always challenging what the traditional norms, you know, should be.
Tom Ollerton 18:41
And I'm playing devil's advocate here, because I do agree with the but just to be annoying, cuz we're doing it because it's Christmas, other than Tesla, you'd argue that they're all services businesses, they're all dot-com, you know, you arrive at the site, and there's a, you know, Amazon's buy something in one click or, you know, let Netflix you've never been there before, you could be watching some incredible entertainment within a few clicks on any device anywhere. I'm not sure who else you mentioned Apple, I guess a service business a bit. But what I think the where the argument happens is when you're starting to talk about, like FMCG, for example. So if you're like, going to go back to New let you know, if you're trying to make your brand appear different to 25 other products at the point of purchase that is arguably very similar and it its makeup and what it does, then the subtleties of strategic positioning and how the brands sit in the mind of the consumer is vital because that's all there is. Whereas, whereas you I think it's a very different with FMCG and services business, potentially.
Rebecca Dibb-Simkin 19:49
You say that it's interesting, though, that you talk about DOF because actually, I wrote in my advertising module at uni I wrote a paper on Dove and their They're Real Women Campaign, which I suppose must have been 20 years ago now because, you know, cracking on a bit, which is when they were the first beauty brand to use women who weren't models in their advertisement, which is massive and incredibly bold, and, you know, brought in a whole new change of changing the way that big brands looked at that they looked at their advertising. And I wrote this paper on it. And because I was a bit of a Clever Dick, I rubbed the paper that when I submitted it with Dove soap, and then I wrote at the end, like, oh, you know, to the to the lecturer, like, you know, I'm trying to use every every touchpoint as a marketer, his wife loved it, you know, so you may have smelt it as you're writing it. And this means you're bound to give me a first because I've thought about all of the senses that I can encapsulate when writing this piece. And I did get first actually, just in my in my advertising module. And actually, funnily enough, when I went to Ogilvy actually Daryl Fielding, who was the head of the account for the Dove piece of work was was obese I was I used to watch you walk through the building. I think she's amazing in terms of thinking that so I think that even with that kind of FMCG brand, actually when they you know, you might say they might follow some more specific guidelines around visual and packaging and what that looks like on the shelves. But actually, if you if you redefine categories and think again about you know, being a human and selling a product to a human and I don't know whether Daemul was kind of where the idea came from but someone was in the shower one day and thinking Hang on, you know, I'm looking at you know, using my shampoo and thinking why is this always got a supermodel advertising it when actually the normal person promoting using this product is is a kind of slightly dumpy, you know, perfectly happy kind of middle aged lady, and why aren't we using those kinds of people as well. It's like, actually, Ogilvy also did a rebrand on Kotex, which was the first period product manufacturer to use red in their branding, which was totally, you know, nice mo in those days as well. Why would you use red when you can use pastels. So it's like even in those more traditional sectors, brands that have made a difference? Actually, we take it back to thinking about humans, you know, women have periods and they bleed and it's red. So why is that not on packaging to kind of like, you know, be like we're women talking to women, you know, people who bleed and, and the driving that cut through for human to human. So, yeah, it always works.
Tom Ollerton 22:18
Well, we've covered some real ground here. And I've thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much. But unfortunately, we are at time. So Rebecca, how would you like people to get in touch with you?
Rebecca Dibb-Simkin 22:31
Oh, I have an email address, which is rds at octopus dot energy, because my name is quite long and complicated. So our do s at octopus store energy, if anyone's interested in saying hello, I'm always interested in talking to interesting people. You know if there's any kind of use me, so please do get in touch.
Tom Ollerton 22:48
And what makes a really good email?
Rebecca Dibb-Simkin 22:51
What makes a really good email, think about who's receiving it. So, you know, kind of like, Oh, I've been thinking a lot about my career. And I'm quite interested not to listen, because I have an hour of your time. So you can give me advice on where I could do next. Because I'm like, that's not really beneficial to me. I think if you go I'm awesome. And I've done all of this and I think I should grow your business. And that's more interesting. So think about your, your end user.
Tom Ollerton 23:16
What a lovely way to finish it. Thank you so much for your time and have a great Christmas.
Rebecca Dibb-Simkin 23:21
And you thank you so much for inviting me
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