Interview with Chioma Igboaka


What do you do? I’m Marketing Director for the central marketing team at Travelex.


What does that mean? My team’s job is to drive customers to our business and get them to buy from us, and then build deeper relationships with them so that they buy from us time and time again. We extract value from our customers to make the business money. Broadly this can be split into three parts: firstly, making sure that people are aware of who we are, and we are present in the places they are (e.g. on Google search online); secondly, ensuring that their experience when they arrive on our site is a positive and easy one, which lets them complete their transaction; and thirdly, communicating with them post purchase and encouraging them to both tell other people about us, and come back themselves.


I manage a team of 14 marketers, the majority of whom are digital marketers, but it also includes designers, PR, and analysts. I have some particular areas that I work on myself, but also a lot of my time is spent managing the team, and representing marketing to the wider business.


What is it you enjoy about your job?


The biggest thing I love about marketing is that no two days are ever the same. During a recent interview to fill a role in my team, I was asked this question, and in my reply I reflected that I could not remember a time during my marketing career where I had ever looked at the clock and thought ‘time is going so slowly’. In fact, quite the opposite! My day can start with looking at budgets for my team and reviewing where we’re spending more or less than we should; I might then spend some time working on our brand refresh – identifying what we stand for as a brand, what our strengths are versus our competitors, and reviewing the creative work that accompanies that. After lunch I may have a meeting with the Compliance team to talk about an upcoming legislation that is going to impact how we collect and use customer data, before talking to the tech guys about our marketing technology and how we need to structure it in order to deliver better marketing activity. Finally I may then spend the rest of the afternoon talking through a proposed marketing campaign plan with one of my team. My day starts at around 8.30am and I try to leave the office by 6.30pm, always with a load of ‘to dos’ to tackle the following morning!


Tell me a little about how you ended up in marketing?


If I’m honest, I didn’t even know what digital marketing was when I was at school. I probably had a vague idea of what marketing meant (although it was probably more what would be considered ‘advertising’ – TV ads, billboards). What I did know was that I had a bit of a love for science at school, reflected in my choice of A-Levels (Maths, Further Maths, Physics, Chemistry), and later on, my degree (Engineering Science).


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When I decided to study Engineering, it was very much with the plan to become an Engineer after graduation, given that I enjoyed Science and was good at it. What I did not foresee was me realising somewhere through my time at Oxford that whilst I found the course and the challenges abstractly interesting, I didn’t quite feel the same passion as some of my classmates. Luckily after a slight panic of not knowing what I was going to do with the rest of my life, I calmed down as I realised that I was not alone in that, and at 22, that was OK!


As I approached the final year of my degree, I attended a few careers fairs and spoke to many people


to try to work out what might come next. I decided that I would keep my options open, and rather than commit to a particular industry or business, I would spend a few years exploring different businesses to hopefully find what was right for me. I got a job as a management consultant (my definition of which was ‘someone who goes into a business for a short time to help them with a particular challenge and ultimately make the business perform better’). I spent a fantastic four years working for a boutique firm with exposure to all sorts of industries. But it was whilst working with client marketing teams on their customer strategies that I realised that this ‘marketing thing’ was quite cool. Rather than just talk about what you could do to get customers to buy more from you, it seemed far more exciting to be part of the team that made that happen! So I moved to work at Tesco, as I knew that – with them having one of the largest marketing teams in the U.K. - I would definitely learn from some of the best.


My move into digital marketing was actually quite accidental: my first job at Tesco was still more in the consultancy space, but then an internal opportunity came up within the digital marketing team for Tesco direct (the online non-food business). I got it (transferrable skills go a long way), and as they say, there’s been no looking back. Today I work across the entire marketing spectrum, however my passion and strength still lies in the digital part. I think it’s the science geek still very much in me, as digital marketing really is a numbers, logic and analytics game.


Who would you say has inspired you and helped you get to where you are today?


Inspiration can come from anywhere, and I do believe that your experiences from an early age impact you massively further down the line. I would say that having a mother who had been a Maths teacher and subsequently stayed working full-time in education whilst raising five children taught me that women are incredible and can do anything.


Going to a school with only girls meant that it didn’t even cross my mind not to do a subject because it was for boys and kept me away from entertaining the stereotype of girls working in arts and boys working in science and tech.


Having fantastic role models in my Science and Maths teachers who loved their subjects, taught them with so much energy and went above and beyond to ensure I got the grades I needed is a big part of the reason I have a degree in Engineering, without which I wouldn’t be where I am today. Oh and those teachers were pretty much all women. I think women are great. I think men are great too, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have some brilliant male bosses who have supported and ‘bigged me up’ along the way, but I have a lot of time for a successful woman in my industry.


The Old Cornelian SUMMER 2017


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