Emma Springham
BSc (Hons) Business and Management
- Group Marketing Officer at the Post Office
- Sits on the Post Office Group Executive
- Responsible for all marketing, across all channels
- Would describe as great marketeer as 'entrepreneurial, commercial and collaborative'
My current role
"I have been brought into the Post Office as Group Marketing Officer, and I sit on the Post Office Group Executive. My role is to modernise the brand, ensuring that we grow digitally and on the high street for another 350+ years.
"Since I joined 22 months ago, I’ve been building a high-performing marketing and digital team. We now number more than 70 full-time staff, placed across channels, to ensure our plans for attracting and retaining customers are fully-integrated.
"Together, we drive new revenue into the business across our product ranges – including mails and parcels, financial services, insurance, broadband and more – by providing best-in-class end-to-end experiences."
The University of Bradford provided me with the tools and knowledge to be an expert in my field. My degree has laid the foundations for me to be the best I can at what I do and drive the success of a major UK brand.
Do the research
"I carried out huge amounts of research before settling on Bradford as a place to study. Its history, its outstanding results from the School of Management and its track record of success led me to study there, and I loved every second of it. You have to throw yourself into the experience.
"When looking for jobs, I would advise current students to research, research and research. Review the company, review their websites, review their apps. You should go into interviews with recommendations for improvements based on your findings.
"Also, research the people interviewing you. Video footage will show their tone and speed of speech. It’s important to match their style and treat every interview as a conversation.
“Getting breadth of experience has helped me cultivate my career immensely. I’ve worked with some fantastic brands – RBS, Barclays, Allianz and Royal Mail to name a few – and each experience has built on the last, helping me work my way to group executive level."
Gaining experience
“I took Business Studies for GCSE at my dad’s insistence and loved it from the first day. Unlike my other lessons, I was like a duck to water with Business Studies and always looked forward to them.
“The rest is history. I took a Business and Management degree from Bradford.
“Things went up a gear when I started working at the Woolwich PLC Bexleyheath Head Office aged 16. During my breaks, I’d network as much as I could, going around all the departments – HR, finance, marketing, auditing and product. I learned a huge amount from absorbing the atmosphere of a working business, but more than that, I kept some key contacts warm when I left to study at the University of Bradford."
The best gift you can give yourself is broad experience. Know your business and customers inside out, but also your competitors, the markets you operate in, and how other markets impact them. And it’s important to be familiar with all of the details, even if they’re not your main passion: all of the channels that are touching customers, across all of your products and services.
Finding work
"After graduating with a 2:1, I applied for graduate schemes across the board – both online and via trade fairs. From this and attending graduate assessment centres, I was offered two roles: a marketing role at Unilever and a place on the Woolwich graduate scheme. The latter offered four general placements around the business over two years. I opted for the Woolwich graduate scheme.
"The principle reason for this was the network I’d developed within the business. I didn’t get to choose my first two placements, which were in the fraud department and a branch manager role in a high street branch for six months.
"Barclays then took over Woolwich and I was transferred onto their graduate scheme. This was back in 2001 and the digital evolution was just starting. I was allowed to apply for my next two placements and I opted for digital and marketing."
Your behaviour and attitude count for everything. Demonstrate high energy and passion, bring in ideas from outside your business, make suggestions, network with everyone and truly care and treat your role as if it was your own business.
Adapting to change
"Crises often highlight the robustness of your insights, communications, digital practices and brand. During the coronavirus crisis I’ve been focused on keeping the 11,500 Post Office branches open. They provide essential services and are often at the hearts of their communities. We needed to prioritise protecting our postmasters, customers and employees.
"First of all, we needed to keep our customers and postmasters safe and do what we could to help frontline workers, like repurposing Travel Money counters in locations close to hospitals to serve NHS staff.
"Our social channels, email and call centres experienced huge surges in traffic, which drove up our response times. It was a case of all hands to the pump. We trained and redeployed colleagues from the business to help customers on the ground, set up help and support pages, and kept everyone – customers and colleagues alike – apprised of our latest developments.
"Customer insights have been central to understanding the impact the pandemic is having on our various demographics. We quickly launched an insight hub to inform our decision making for products and marketing.
"We undertook a campaign to let customers know we were there for them. It has been centred around the slogan 'We're Stronger Together'.
"This is a philosophy we live and breathe at Post Office, and it’s been fantastic to see the business come together and support all of our customers, especially the most vulnerable in society.”