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From Crisis To Comeback: Zoe Hayward On The Big Issue’s Big Mission

From launching bold campaigns to reshaping brand strategy, The Big Issue’s group CMO, Zoe Hayward, shares how purpose-led marketing, quick thinking and innovation turned a crisis into a catalyst for lasting social impact.

Walk us through your career to date.

I studied human geography at the University of Leicester and I was always really interested in people and places. My first job was at Unilever as a project manager, working in the Best Foods division. This kicked off my marketing career and connected the dots between marketing and behavioral science.

I worked my way up through Unilever, working on some of its biggest brands while completing the Unilever marketing foundation courses. This was a fantastic grounding for my career. On Persil, I launched the ‘Dirt is Good’ brand platform in the UK, which is still going strong today. I then moved on to the female deodorants category, which included Dove. Both Persil and Dove had purpose-led brand platforms, giving me a strong grounding in how brands could play a role in delivering real change through programs such as the Dove Self-Esteem Project.

I left Unilever and joined Cobra beer, a founder-led, small business seeking growth both on and off trade and I was responsible for innovation. We launched lots of new products in a short space of time and, living in London in my 20s, it was a great place to work with plenty of beer on tap.

I then joined Bird’s Eye, which had previously been owned by Unilever and recently been acquired by a private equity firm. Birds Eye was highly commercial with full accountability for the P&L, providing me with great financial experience.

After several years at Birds Eye, I then had the opportunity to join M&S, heading up marketing for one of the food business divisions. There, I partnered up with the heads of buying, technical and product development. It’s a business steeped in innovation and I have fond memories of the wonderful product development trips, exploring new foods and bringing new product ideas back to get them launched on to the shelves for UK consumers.

Big Issue

I was promoted to lead the food marketing team and sat on the food board. Our strategy was to create ‘A Foodhall for All,’ making the foodhall the most exciting place to shop on the high street. We launched ‘The Adventures In’ campaign, focused on new and exciting products, and redesigning the look and feel of the foodhall.

I then went to head up clothing marketing: a very different challenge. We needed to ‘bring style back to M&S’ in a highly competitive market. Bringing in new style ambassadors. This included the launch of the Holly Willoughby style edit, which proved very successful. It paved the way for the things that you see today, like the Sienna Miller partnership.

After seven years at M&S, I wanted to broaden my experience in impact-led business, so I joined the Big Issue Group, where I have been for the last five years. It has been an incredible journey with a very different set of challenges.

I joined in January 2020 and the Covid pandemic hit in March. We had to take vendors off the street for the first time in the organization’s history and overnight we lost a significant proportion of our income. We had to put investees on payment holidays and raise enough funding to save the organization and make it through the pandemic, as well as support those we work with.

We were successful in raising the funds we needed and kept our cause top of mind with the UK public. At the same time, we looked ahead as we knew that the UK landscape was changing significantly. We needed to shift to a digital-first approach at pace and get closer to our audiences, create new revenue streams and begin to change perceptions of our work, in order to raise more income and deliver more impact.

We developed a new five-year mission, strategy and impact goals. We rebranded and launched a new value proposition. We launched new ventures, including Big Issue Recruit – aiming to get more people who are facing barriers to work into the workplace, working with corporate partners to create employment opportunities for marginalized people. The pandemic forced us to change for the better.

I’m particularly proud that we’ve done all of this work on very limited resource and budgets. We’re all about delivering impact. It is important to ensure that we’re getting the best value for money or ideally working pro bono. It has been a fantastic journey over the last five years and I’m very proud of the marketing and communications team we’ve built.

Big Issue

What is the offer at the Big Issue Group?

We’re an impact-led business driven by the needs of people affected by poverty. We’re a social enterprise working to end poverty in the UK.

Today, poverty is at the highest rate it has been in the UK in the 21st century, with 16 million people living in poverty and 3.8 million people experiencing destitution, unable to feed, clothe or keep themselves warm.

The Big Issue launched in 1991 as a business response to a social crisis – homelessness. The Big Issue magazine was created for homeless people to sell to earn a legitimate income.

As the crisis of poverty has escalated in the UK, we’ve had to expand our products and services. Big Issue vendors are selling physical magazines on the street: they are facing challenges that we can’t ignore – footfall decline on the high street, the rise of ‘cashlessness’ and the decline of print.

In response, we’ve launched a new range of products and services that enable us to extend our mission of working to end poverty and reach more people through different business solutions. This includes Big Issue Recruit, our recruitment business that enables individuals to get into work in a supportive way to ensure that employment is also sustainable.

A social impact investment organization called Big Issue Invest, where we facilitate investment into social enterprises that are working to end poverty and inequality in the UK. This business extends our impact: our investees work with millions of people across the UK each year. And, most recently, Big Issue Impact Advisory Service, helping corporate clients and partners to enhance their ESG & Sustainability thinking, capabilities and go-to-market strategies.

We’ve built a Big Issue policy function campaigning for change within the UK government. We are currently campaigning for a ‘Poverty Zero’ policy, calling for the government to implement statutory poverty reduction targets and create a strategy to deliver against these.

Big Issue

What have been the big achievements for the Big Issue Group in the last year?

Christmas is, as expected, our biggest quarter, we have more people coming to us to sell the Big Issue magazine, wanting to earn an income at a critical time of year to pay food, fuel bills and Christmas for their families.

Over the last few years our strategy has been to build a more cohesive and bigger Christmas campaign to bring in new audiences to deliver more impact. We have created new products for consumers to buy to raise revenue. We launched a Winter Support Kit so consumers can support vendors with the tools to earn and work through the winter.

The kit includes a beanie hat, coffee and food vouchers, tools to go cashless and support people into training or employment post-Christmas. It’s not just about what happens at Christmas; it goes beyond that. This new product has been really successful for us. We doubled the sales year-on-year and we have been able to support more vendors to earn and work over the Christmas period.

We launched our Christmas campaign with a Christmas ad at the beginning of November, when all of the big brands launch their campaigns. We produced our ad on a shoestring budget. Our brilliant in-house communications team managed to get the ad launched on Good Morning Britain on the same day that John Lewis launched its Christmas ad. Effectively, going head-to-head with John Lewis, our campaign was trailed across Good Morning Britain all morning, with our founder, John Bird, and one of our vendors, André, interviewed too.

That was a particular highlight in terms of a really successful activity which has generated great impact.

What big initiatives have you got coming up?

The big opportunity for us is to engage a wider audience in our mission. We’ve just launched a membership model and it’s a big focus for us this year. Through membership, we will be able to engage all of the different audiences we work with. The idea is to build a community over time that is engaged with our cause and a community that is simultaneously helping to fund our mission to end poverty.

Consumers can become members for just £5 a month. For corporates, it is a larger fee and, crucially, if you’re affected by poverty you can join for free.

How is your team structured?

When I joined the Big Issue Group, marketing was a small function, focused predominantly on PR and social media. The team was doing a fantastic job, but I knew there was much more that we could bring to the business as a marketing function and play a more strategic role in the growth of the organization.

Working at the Big Issue Group through the pandemic enabled us to demonstrate how marketing could really drive revenue for the group. We also showed how central marketing could be, in terms of developing the business strategy and our business impact goals.

We are now a team of 10, responsible for a wide remit including direct-to-consumer revenue – this includes membership, subscriptions and making financial contributions to our work. Today we have a much stronger website and digital editorial proposition and my team works across the site and our app. We lead policy, campaigning and public affairs for the group; we’re responsible for all brand and marketing and internal and external communications.

Our challenge is to bring a wider audience into the Big Issue Group and encourage these audiences to use more of our products and services. All with the aim of enabling our business to deliver more impact for people affected by poverty.

Drawing on your leadership expertise, what has your career taught you that helps you make a great marketing team?

I have learnt over the last few years that perfection is an unobtainable ideal. It’s about making sure that you can get impactful work out the door, as quickly as possible, in the most cost-effective way. Ultimately, what’s important in my role now is that we enable the organization to generate more revenue, to deliver more impact and, as a result, change more lives.

AI in marketing: what are the pros and cons?

There are some pros in terms of some powerful tools that allow for more time to be spent on activities that can’t be delivered through AI. We’ve been looking at social media tools that could help us more quickly generate content and pull content from other sources. This has huge time- and resource-saving potential, freeing up resources for other key priorities.

In terms of the cons, we need to get the balance right between people and AI, but we definitely need to embrace some of the tools available to us more quickly.

Could you tell us about a customer research discovery you made that you found surprising?

One of the big things that has shaped what we do at the Big Issue Group, from a business and marketing perspective, is the research that we undertook a few years back to really understand perception of the brand and how we could stretch the brand.

We undertook a huge perception study, testing a series of hypotheses to better understand the brand, our audiences and future opportunities. This informed our five-year mission, strategy and impact goals and the rebrand that we delivered in 2022. We are now in year three of our five-year strategy and we’re delivering well against the impact targets we set.

It was a huge piece of research. It has driven our business strategy over the last three years and will continue to do so.

What advice would you give your younger self if you could go back in time?

I would tell myself that not everything has to be perfect and probably manage my work-life-balance better … If you’re working at the pace we do, with the complexity of the different business units we work across, with an editorial function publishing on a daily basis, you have to move at pace and manage your energy and time and be able to quickly prioritize.

Tactical opportunities are so important for us – we have fine-tuned our processes to capitalize on these. It’s a big part of the work that we do, given the spokespeople that we have and where we sit in the political and social landscape. We have to stay on top of the news agenda in order to maximize opportunities to help us make change.

What question would you like me to ask the next senior marketer that I interview?

Which brand or organization do you think is getting their marketing wrong at the moment and what could you learn from it?

Your question from a senior marketer: ‘Who most inspires you in the marketing industry in general?’

There are some incredible marketers out there. I’ve had the pleasure of working with lots of very talented marketers. Someone who has sustained a career at a very high level is Margaret Jobling, CMO at NatWest. I was lucky enough to work with her at Bird’s Eye, where Marg was marketing director. I have a huge amount of admiration for her as a marketer, and what she has achieved in her career.

If there’s one thing you know about marketing, it is…

Proposition and positioning are key. Once you get this right, everything else slots into place.

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.

This interview has already appeared in The Drum. Discover the best campaigns, industry insights and interviews from world-leading marketers, creatives and more.

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