Matthew Wrigley, Chief Marketing Officer of Lithia UK, was told by an early mentor to listen to people and never stop learning, and he follows that advice to this day. He tells Lynda Ennis, Co-founder and CEO of Ennis & Co Group, that emotional intelligence is the key to great leadership.
Lynda Ennis: You have what I would call a traditional marketing background, but obviously marketing has changed considerably since you began. Tell me about those early days of your career.
Matthew Wrigley: I became interested in marketing when I was studying for a business studies degree at university in the mid-90s, though marketing then was very different from what it is today. We were still on the cusp of the digital era, and I don’t think I even had a mobile phone at the time. When I was looking for jobs, I remember waiting for the Sunday paper to come out and scouring the job listings. I would then drive to businesses to drop off a printout of my CV and ask for a chat about the job they were advertising. One of the jobs I spotted was a Marketing Executive role at a car dealership, Hartwell Bath. After visiting the site and meeting the General Manager, I was offered the job.
Although I had plenty of theoretical knowledge about marketing, I had no practical experience whatsoever. The GM, who was a quintessential, old-school English gentleman, turned out to be a great influence on my career. Instead of throwing me into the marketing deep end, he put me into different parts of the business to learn how everything was done, which was a great foundation. I worked in all areas of the business while simultaneously building up my marketing work. I will always remember him telling me not to underestimate the power of my youth. I had no ties or risks to worry about, and there was nothing I couldn’t do. I just had to say yes to everything, listen to people without being judgemental, learn as much as I could and then do my own thing. I’ve followed that advice ever since.
Two and a half years later, I left to join a marketing agency, which again was an important stepping stone in my development. I always say to anyone starting in marketing that they should go and work in an agency because you learn more in a short period of time about all the different elements of marketing than you would working for a brand. The agency experience gives you all the rocket fuel you need.
One of the key things I learnt at the marketing agency was attention to detail, which is something I don’t see as much of today – people have become reliant on digital channels and the art of stopping and using your own judgement seems to have fallen down the pecking order. I used to do the Auto Trader ads, reviewing bromides before everything moved online, checking them against a long list of cars before sending them off to be printed. If I got anything wrong, there was no way of changing it. In the online world, you can correct mistakes instantaneously, and I think that has resulted in people paying less attention to detail. That’s one of my bugbears.
I worked for three marketing agencies but was keen to return to the client side, and I got the opportunity in 2003 while working with Mercedes-Benz Retail Group and discovering that they were looking for a smart Brand Manager. The business was a good hybrid of retail with OEM backing, and so I got to learn all about the Retail and OEM world at the same time. As Brand Manager for smart, I was essentially left to my own devices and spent a lot of time asking General Managers to explain how certain things worked because I didn’t know the answers. This gave me a spectrum of views to which I could then apply my own thoughts.
LE: Over the next 13 years, you progressed from Brand Manager to become Group Marketing and CRM Director before being headhunted to join Jardine Motors Group as Group Marketing and Innovations Director. Following JMG’s acquisition by Lithia, you now hold the position of Chief Marketing Officer for Lithia UK. Tell me about how your leadership skills have evolved as you have risen in seniority.
MW: For me, leadership isn’t about being the leader or boss. It is about listening to everyone, irrespective of who they are and what their role is. Everyone can have a view, and everyone can make an impact. I suppose what I’ve developed over time is a better understanding of where people’s views can add value and how you can collectively move things forward.
Going back to the early advice the GM of the Hartwell dealership gave me, I feel the learning never stops, and I’ve always wanted to understand different aspects of the business. Although I’m classically trained in marketing, I’ve done other things such as training and development, customer service and contact centres – things that would not normally fall into the realm of marketing. I guess they all track back to the customer, and what I have always enjoyed most is the retail aspect. It is in retail where you are closest to the customer and where things have to be done with agility and at pace.
LE: The retail world is obviously going through a lot of transformation, whether it is acquisitions of retail groups, changing attitudes of customers as to how they want to consume mobility, new retail models or new technologies. Marketing is at the coalface of all these changes, particularly with the advent of AI, so how do you make sure you keep up with the transformation in terms of your marketing strategies?
MW: It all comes back to customers. There are still pretty much the same number of customers around; it’s just that there are different models to service them. There are different ways to deal with this, but my approach is to split the team into two elements. I have an operational excellence team who deal directly with the OEMs to make sure we’re adhering to the brand and how they work. Then I have subject expertise that overlays everything with responsibility for digital, CRM, data, customer service, internal communications and design. Separating these elements means, for example, that I have experts in the digital team who can focus on AI while the operational teams keep the cogs moving in terms of OEM requirements, the activities of disruptors or aggregators and what’s happening in the different industry bodies.
Our digital team have implemented a clever layer that will integrate everything across the different platforms, whether it’s the CRM system, the website or whatever is being used at a store level. Strategically, that means we’re in control of our own destiny. We have all the data in the background of our own systems, and we’re not relying on the various manufacturer systems – 35 of them in our case. It also means that we can look at the data that goes across all the brands and take all of that learning together.
LE: To do that effectively, you need a high-performing, multi-skilled team. How do you motivate and energise your team, and what are you doing to anticipate the next generation of skills that you are going to need in this environment?
MW: I always say that you can teach marketing because a lot of it is straightforward, but I can’t teach attitude. For that reason, I’ve asked the team to recruit on attitude, which makes the training part so much easier.
I’m a firm believer in investing in the team’s training, and obviously we keep up to date with developments and where we need to be as a marketing team. It’s also about making sure that the team are agile enough so that we can move them around into different areas such as customer services, marketing and data to make them more rounded as individuals which provides engagement and also opportunity for everyone.
LE: In your career, you have experienced an OEM-owned retail group, the transformation of a retail group to a premium position, and recently its sale and expansion under American ownership. You must have experienced very different styles of leadership. What style of leadership behaviours have you seen, and what are the things you learnt from them?
MW: I’ve learnt that no-one is wrong and that there isn’t a definitively right or wrong way of dealing with things. I just take the good bits from each of the leadership styles I’ve encountered. In the world of Mercedes-Benz, for example, I learnt the importance of structure and process whilst Jardine taught me how to operate in a matrix style organisation and environment.
The thing that I like about our current culture is the notion of the inverted pyramid. The most important people are the customers, and whilst everyone is important the most important employees are those who are closest to the customers. You then work your way through the inverted pyramid until you get to the chief executive It works because everyone understands that we’re working collectively to drive power to the people who are closest to the customer and therefore servicing the customer to the best of our abilities. That’s what defines success. You’re responding to your customers’ needs, you’ve got experts in the right areas to do that, and you’re listening. The listening piece is crucial, and it doesn’t work if you don’t have humility. It’s never going to work if I go into the office and just tell people exactly how to do the marketing strategy. You need to be agile enough to say, ‘Okay, that’s working to about 80%, but if I tweak that by 5%, that will really work for the people at the top of the pyramid.’
One of the key challenges for a new business that has only been in existence for 18 months has been bringing together the two cultures. Neither culture was right or wrong, however people were used to doing things in a certain way, and no one really likes to change or compromise. In the marketing team, we ensure that everyone has a voice and everyone can be heard. Every month, I will sit down with a random selection of team members and invite them to provide feedback on what they think is and isn’t working. One of the positives of bringing together two teams means you can get different ideas and viewpoints on how things are which in turn may take you down a different path.
If you step away from the development of a new company / team the challenges facing us are the same across the industry. We’ve got commission disclosure and redress schemes being announced, we’ve got the government changing the way company car schemes work, and we’ve got the electric mandate to deal with, and all the complexities that go with it on top of the running of a profitable automotive retailer. Part of the enjoyment of my job is that there is always something different to deal with in this industry, and you have to be able to react to it in a fresh way. You can’t just rely on how you’ve done things in the past.
LE: Reflecting on your experience, what do you think will be the most effective and relevant elements that prospective marketing leaders need to develop and master? And what advice would you give your younger self?
MW: To be a future marketing leader, I think you must have a great understanding of your customer, your business and its processes, combined with versatility, but, above all, you must have emotional intelligence. This refers back to what I was saying about recruiting on attitude because no matter how good you are at what you do, if you’re not listening to others, then you’re never going to be the best you can be.
The advice I would give to my younger self is ‘Don’t be afraid to fail.’ In the early part of my career, I thought failure was just bad, but there came a point when I realised that I actually learnt more from failing. When I talk to my team, I tell them I don’t mind them making mistakes so long as they learn from them because it at least shows they are trying to make things happen rather than just playing it safe. Speed to market is always going to be the thing that wins. If you’re pushing boundaries, then great, but if you’re too far away from those boundaries and too worried about making mistakes, then you’ll always be off the pace.
LE: You’ve been talking about recruiting on attitude. Is there any advice you would give to young marketers in terms of whether to be a marketing generalist or a specialist? Are there any trends?
MW: The reality is that 90% of people coming out of university have no real idea about what they want to do in their careers, unless they’ve been studying a vocational degree. If you take the approach of learning and listening, then you will work out whether you want to specialise or take the generalist route, though I would say that there is a definite focus towards specialisation in areas such as data and digital. If you want the security of constant employment throughout your career, my advice is you need to be in that digital space because it’s a huge growth area regardless of the chosen industry.
Obviously, if your ambition is to be a Chief Marketing Officer, then you need to understand the bigger picture. My job is essentially about strategy, empowering the team and supporting them to break down barriers to achieve what they need to achieve, and you can’t do that unless you understand the wider business. For example, my job goes beyond marketing and integrates with IT to the extent that I’m called ‘Shadow IT’ by our CEO and CTIO. However, you can’t do that kind of integration without understanding how that is going to work at the top level.
LE: Who has inspired you during your career, and what impact did they have?
MW: I’ve talked about how the GM of Hartwell Bath inspired me at the start of my career, but there are many individuals that have shaped me as an individual or inspired me and they’re not all ‘leaders’, If you reflect on all your interactions, either in the moment or further down the line I think we all would recognise that people have influenced or inspired you at some point in your career and that will continue to happen throughout your journey.
LE: As someone who has known you a long time, my observation is that what makes you an exceptional leader is that you’re incredibly intelligent, but you don’t have any ego, and you treat people with dignity and respect. The way you take time for people and the way you listen and feed back in a positive way is a rare quality that I’ve only encountered in one or two leaders in my career. I wonder whether your team understands the value of your leadership style.
MW: I can’t answer for the team and would definitely not consider myself intelligent. What I would say is that I follow the same approach that was taught to me by my father, which is to treat people how you would want to be treated and seek first to understand. To give someone time, respect and listen to what they have to say gives you the chance to see an alternative perspective and, if the roles were reversed, is all that I would want.
