Team-work and communication are what it's all about

My typical working day starts at between 8 and 8.30 a.m., depending on where I need to be. It depends - because our offices are out here in Citywest south-west of Dublin and some of us are based around town or with the agencies, we have either planned to meet them very first thing in the morning in town or very last thing in the evening, so we have time either to fix something or do something.

I arrived in this morning about 8.30 and initially we had a budget meeting and then I had a meeting with our brand agency and our direct marketing agency. I met them one after the other because we are just going through all our plans for January. We are planning some of our January activities and the precise timing of them, so it was a really planning-oriented day.

When we're planning to promote new products or packages, we have to make sure things are technically ready; that means checking back with the information-technology department that it's ready to go, and making sure the product team here are also saying it's ready to go. It was one of those days, ticking the boxes and making sure everyone was happy - that things are going as they should.

Friday evenings I hope to get out a little earlier - about 5.30 to 6 p.m. Normally, I finish between 6 and 7 p.m. on standard days. It depends what's going on here.

I'm part of the communications team, and basically everything we do is team-based, I think. While we are the communications team, we're part of a larger marketing team and I think none of us in here can work on our own. The company is so marketing-led - that means everything we do we needs to concentrate on the consumer. Products, research and communications make up the marketing department here and it's really like a vicious circle: the guys come up with some product or game or sms product; we ask "is there benefit to the customer?"; the research team may research it and find out "this is the benefit, that's not the benefit" and then it would come into us to communicate those benefits - it's that circle the whole time.

There's never enough hours in the day here, but one of the great things about it is that it's very dynamic. It's a really young team; the company is very young. My role is quite broad, being the brand manager, because it covers kind of anything that involves the brand - so I stick my nose in a lot!

Basically my role is to ensure the consistency of the brand across all media. That's one thing that's very important to us, as well as keeping an eye on what our competitors are doing.

We started planning Christmas in August. So while everyone else was on their holidays we were trying to get the agents to think of Christmas. So we had a little meeting - we brought in a tree and Christmas decorations and stuff to try and get us in the Christmas mood. It probably sounds a bit bizarre, but it worked.

We got all the brand team around the table and said we need to plan our Christmas campaign - basically it's a time when sales are going to be huge and probably one of the biggest retail times for us. We came up with a line together. Ideally, what we were trying to get across was: Meteor is the perfect gift to receive. Then our ad agency came up with "give them what they really want". Our Christmas campaign all had to be ready by November 5th, so Christmas seems such a long time ago!

In conversation with Elaine Larkin