Steady strategist knows her consumers well

Either Barbara Patton is the most discrete marketing person around or else she's a consummate strategist. How else can you explain that during this interview which took place last week an hour or so before the Irish Permanent announced its dramatic interest rate cut, Ms Patton, its general manager in charge of marketing didn't mention a word about it. No broad hints, no teasing references to the Bank of Scotland, nothing - just a phone call later in the day after the cut had been announced to enquire if I would like to see the press release.

Admittedly her job in the Irish Permanent wasn't the reason for this interview. She's in the spotlight because earlier this week she took over the chairmanship of the Irish Marketing Institute (IMI), but still, it is safe to say that most marketing managers wouldn't have been able to resist even a little trumpet blowing.

This measured, steady approach is reflected in the career path of this soft-spoken and highly engaging woman. She started in the 1970s where many of her generation of marketeers began, in the secretarial department. As a 17-year-old in Guinness she was "just about making the tea" when she was accepted on to its new in-house marketing course. Ten years later she left the company having worked on several brands at assistant brand-manager level. "I absolutely loved it, there was a real collegiate atmosphere there," she says, "and really I could have stayed forever but I had a sense that if I didn't move on and test myself away from Guinness I would never have known if I was any good."

She moved to Showerings in Clonmel for three years and seems to have been further inspired by the dynamism she found there. "They were totally marketing focused, they were willing to take a flyer, to invest in new products and give it a go."

However, if Showerings was an adrenaline rush, her next move proved to be just the opposite. Feeling that she should get out of drinks and broaden her experience, she moved to AIB to the capital markets division. "It was like hitting a wall," she says of her four years there. After the weekly targets and buzzing seasonality of the drinks industry, the slow complacent pace which she found in the bank frustrated her hugely. However, she used her time there well, gaining an MBS from the Michael Smurfit Business School and it was also the place were she learned the difference between marketing a FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) and marketing a service. This difference initially added to her frustration.

"You have much more control over how a consumer experiences a product," she says. "If you don't like the label you can change it, and you know what the product is like when it leaves the factory and if there's a problem you can identity it and fix it." With a service she found that there are so many variables and so many layers, that the marketeers role in influencing opinion comes to the fore.

Given her negative experience in financial services, a move six years ago to head of marketing at Irish Permanent was hardly the logical step. However, she had come to think that the relationship building potential in the financial service industry could be very exciting and she was lured by the mix of product and service offered by the retail side of the company.

One of her roles as chairwoman of the Marketing Institute will be to oversee the institute's educational activities which range from a transition-year programme to distance learning. "There's still a great deal of confusion out there as to what marketing is," says Ms Patton. It is still often used as a blanket term to cover advertising or sponsorship, she said. "Marketing is still often regarded as a fast way of spending a whole lot of money, but the true meaning is about making profit."

She is particularly scathing of the interpretation of marketing as simply advertising and having worked in the business in the 1980s and early 1990s she is also critical of the feel-good, backslapping relationship that was prevalent between some companies and their ad agencies.

"It used to be the case that if there was a problem, then the great big band-aid of advertising was reached for and you just stuck out an ad," says Ms Patton, "and with that sort of mass communication there was a huge amount of wastage."

Commenting on the new advertising environment she says that companies are looking for more from their advertising agencies these days. They want strategic marketing partners not simply someone who can create pretty pictures with a clever copy line.

Barbara Patton sees service marketing as being increasingly more focused thanks largely to the ability of information technology to deliver greater knowledge of the consumer to the marketeer. "Consumers are simply saying `You should know me'," she says, and thanks to such initiatives as loyalty cards, companies increasingly do. In the financial services industry, this knowledge of the consumer and the ability of companies to target products directly at individual consumers is still relatively low thanks to the lack of sophistication of financial data bases. However, she believes that this will change dramatically when smart cards come on stream.

She cites Amazon, the Internet bookshop, as the perfect example of marketing through relationship building whereby, for example, the bookshop recommends a list of likely titles to the consumer based on pervious purchases. "That's truly effective marketing. Offering something to the consumer that they want."

Boom economies are notorious for spawning a growth in marketing activities. After all in London in the 1980s the stereotypical GTi driving yuppie who didn't work in the City worked "in marketing". Ms Patton agrees that now is a good time to be working in marketing in Ireland simply because people have more money and less time which means lots of opportunity for marketeers.

However, she cautions that a boom is just the time when companies can be so blinded by rising sales figures that they miss underlying marketing problems or worse still ignore problems because fixing them would be too troublesome or expensive.

"The important thing is to be customer-focused at all times and to get out there and understand your market. Other professions such as accountancy and law have to stay aloof but as a marketeer if you're not out there with your market, you die."