CEO of AFG Media – Morphsuits / Foul Fashion / Royal & Awesome
Tom Holmes, creativebrief Founder & Chairman, talks to Fraser Smeaton, CEO of AFG Media – Morphsuits / Foul Fashion / Royal & Awesome and Marketing Academy 2010 alumni.
Fraser studied Electronic Engineering at the University of Edinburgh which taught him two things – 1. An analytical approach to solving problems and 2. That he didn’t want to be an engineer. Both of which he says, have been very useful.
After University, he joined Mars Confectionery on their management training scheme. He did a year working in each of Sales, Finance and finally marketing. After falling in love with marketing he left Mars at the end of the scheme to join the BT consumer marketing team where he had roles in Propositions and Customer Acquisition.
It was while working there that he and his business partners, brother Ali and fellow marketing academy alumni Gregor had the idea for Morphsuits. After launching it in May of 2009 they spent a year as 5 till 9ers (working their second jobs in the evening) before going full time on Morphsuits. In June 2014, Morphsuits expanded their product offering to include more general fancy dress costumes and rebranded to become MorphCostumes.
Fraser Smeaton: At Mars I was taught that marketing is understanding what the consumer wants and then creating products and communication that meet that want profitably. Once I understood that and therefore realised it was marketing that makes the difference between a successful and unsuccessful product or business it was the only place I wanted to work.
Fraser Smeaton: Definitions of success are a personal thing so I can only talk about what would be success for me. That is to use excellence in marketing to create great innovative, profitable products and ultimately businesses.
Fraser Smeaton: Using Steve Jobs as an example is clichéd but that doesn’t mean it isn’t right. He wasn’t orthodox in his process, probably relied on intuition more than anything else and would have been hell to work for. However, he used a deep understanding of what the consumer wanted to create industry changing products across consumer electronics, films, music sales and software sales.
Fraser Smeaton: Explaining to the rest of their company that marketing is so much more than making the advertising campaign for a product that is handed to them by another department.
Fraser Smeaton: It is hard work but doing so is something that gives us a big advantage vs our competitors. As a company we read widely on the internet and in trade mags, we keep an eye on other innovative companies we respect and ask our agencies to always keep us in mind when they see new opportunities. If we think something looks good we will test it quickly and cheaply and then scale it up if it works. We built the company by being at the forefront of Facebook Advertising in 2009 and this Halloween we had great success with promoted facebook posts and in video advertising on Youtube.
Fraser Smeaton: I think they like it because it keeps our work together fresh and interesting.
Fraser Smeaton: It isn’t easy when much our work is in the digital space where the definitions of success are constantly changing. Our method is to ask the agencies what success looks like before we start, if that fits with our business model then we go for it and challenge them to beat their own targets. We supplement that by benchmarking vs other companies in comparable industries.
Fraser Smeaton: More than doubling the conversion rates of our websites over the course of 2012. We did this through a rigorous program of generating consumer insight through consumer feedback and then proposing and testing many little changes to our websites. It was, to me, the real essence of marketing and was a great team effort from our marketing teams, our IT teams who made the changes and our excellent conversion agency Conversion Rate Experts. No one change made a big difference but the cumulative effect was huge.
Fraser Smeaton: By explaining that marketing is much more than advertising. Once senior management are clear that marketing is about working out how to give the consumer a great service or experience everytime they come into contact with a company or brand they will start to see Marketing as function that can add value and should be at the core of everything rather than a department that is their only to spend the profits on advertising.
Fraser Smeaton: It only matters vs your personal goals. There are many great roles as a specialist in any function within Marketing. However, I want to run brands or companies and to do that you need to be a generalist in order to effectively understand how best to fit different functions together in order to create the best result from the whole.
creativebrief partner, the Marketing Academy is a non-profit organisation which provides a unique forum for industry leaders, marketing gurus, entrepreneurs and inspirational people volunteer their time to inspire, develop and coach the next generation of future leaders. The Marketing Academy gift a maximum of 30 ‘Scholarships’ each year to the fastest rising stars in the marketing, advertising and communications industries. A team of high profile mentors and coaches develop these stars through a process of mentoring, coaching, networking and personalised learning. 86 mentors, 30 Coaches, 20 Judges, 36 companies and an owl called Merlin all provide their time, resources and knowledge to assist in shaping the minds of our future leaders. Furthermore as a vital part of their curriculum all Scholars volunteer at least one day per year through our Donate28 initiative to work with charities who need bright young marketing minds. For a full list of the individuals involved, see the Sherilyn Shackell interview.
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