Why Innovation Is More Than Technology | Gemma Paterson From Legal & General | 20 Minute Marketing #80

Hey everyone and welcome to the 20 Minute Marketing Podcast. I hope you are having a wonderful day and thank you for joining us. We really appreciate the support. My name is Liam and on the show I interview a different guest every week for around 20 minutes.

We chat about different topics like content, paid ads, social media, SEO and lots of other really cool and interesting topics as well. The show is brought to you by Reach Interactive and we first launched all the way back in April 2019, so quite a while ago now. It has been an absolute blast to host 80 episodes of the show and I've learned a ton of things but unfortunately my time as a host is coming to an end. I made the move to agency side in April to work as an SEO manager at Blu-ray.

Before I left, we recorded nine final episodes of the podcast that will take us to number 80. And we've been sharing those episodes across the last couple of months, but now we are at that number 80. So this is my last one. It's going to be a weird feeling signing off, but we have a great guest who I know is going to bring some real value to the show and I'm looking forward to it.

So I'm not going to waste any more time but let's dive in. Our guest today is Gemma Patterson from Legal and General. So hi Gemma and welcome to the show. How are you today?

Hi Liam, I'm really good thank you and it is an absolute pleasure to be here doing this with you. Really excited. Yeah me too, definitely exciting but also bittersweet for me. An interesting fact as well, Gemma and I grew up about 10 houses away from each other so whenever I was in trouble as a teenager and my parents weren't home, I would have to go and ask her mum for help.

So shout out to June. I think it's fitting that you're joining us for my final episode as host, Gemma. And I remember it well, Liam, those good old days playing out on the close. Yeah, absolutely.

Those were definitely the days. So before we get started, could you give our listeners a quick introduction? I can. So my name is Gemma Patterson and I'm head of people development experiences and innovation at Legal in general.

To give you a real sort of whistle stop through my journey in my career, I did spend around about eight years in marketing, so both working in in-house teams and agency side as well, always with a real focus on digital and technology. And about seven years ago, I had what I'm going to call not quite a quarter-life crisis, a bit later on than that, but had a bit of a career change and moved into an internal role. And I know we're going to explore that a little bit today, sort of on the podcast what some of the parallels are between an internal and an external role but the focus has always been on innovation that's what really lights my fire and gets me gets me out of bed in the morning.

Yeah awesome so we're going to be talking about innovation which isn't strictly marketing but there's definitely a huge overlap and it's going to be really interesting because I know Gemma has a ton of experience that she's going to be able to share with us so we'll talk about how to innovate why it's important how to use it in marketing how smaller businesses can use it and things like that. So let's get started and dive in. So I always like to start off this main section with a nice top level question that lets our listeners learn a bit more about every guest before we dive in further in a little bit deeper.

So one thing that really interests me Gemma is that you studied film and literature at university. So what was it that motivated you to get into marketing instead of making films? really good question so for me marketing is all about storytelling and that's what film and literature is right it's a collection of stories and I mean let me tell you it was the dream to spend three years at uni watching films and reading books that was like the best thing ever and what I did when I chose that course was I sort of followed my passion I didn't take a course that I thought was gonna land me a particular job I just thought what am I interested in enough that I can really engage with for the next three years and as I sort of started to explore that a little bit more I started to think towards the end of the three years what am I going to do with my life and ended up looking at marketing as a way to sort of employ some of those things around creativity and storytelling and sort of bringing that together.

I love creative writing, I like to write short stories and poetry and that's all about engaging an audience and making an audience feel something. So for me, it felt like a natural fit, like a natural progression. I'm also a huge nerd when it comes to technology. So always been really into social media, into tech, into digital.

And when I left uni, and this is showing my age now, social media was just emerging. So things like Facebook were just coming out and Instagram wasn't even a thing. And I was really drawn to that. I was really drawn to thinking, how can you use that to engage people?

How can you use it to innovate? So it felt like a natural progression. Yeah it always makes me smile when I speak to a guest that started out in their career before a lot of the major channels like Instagram and LinkedIn existed which actually wasn't that long ago at all but it is really interesting. So since then you've worked out some really exciting and cool roles so it's only right that I name drop a few for you.

So you started in an internal comms role at HSBC and then you've switched to customer facing roles at places like First Direct, Monsoon and agency side as well and now you're back in an internal role again with legal in general. So what is it about the internal side and specifically innovation that you really enjoy? So the reason I made the move into internal, so I was working for Monsoon Accessorise at the time heading up their digital comms team so doing all of their sort of social media, email marketing, web content, all of that good stuff and I got approached by someone from BP who said, do you want to come and work in a learning and development team?

And I said, absolutely not. No, I'm working in marketing. I'm literally living my dream. I've moved to London.

I got my dream job Why would I want to do that And we started to have this conversation And the more we talked about it the more I realized sort of I could use my powers for something else so learning and development is exactly the same as marketing in the sense that it all about changing behavior and helping people to sort of change the way that they do things and it's about making a connection to customers so helping people internally really understand why it's important to connect to the customer and all of the other stuff that comes around the edge as well with an internal role it's about people it's about culture it's about doing things differently it's about getting people to think about work in different ways and for me like the inspiring thing about being in an internal role is that I can help people to do the most brilliant work of their lives like that's my job getting out of bed in the morning to help people love what they do and find meaning and purpose in what they do and by knock on effect that then has an impact on the customer at the end so whilst I might not be in a marketing team sort of by title I am still impacting that customer journey that customer experience that bottom line so I'm still getting the buzz of all of that with all of the internal people and culture piece that comes with it as well.

I think one unique part of this episode besides learning about innovation is that it could possibly help some of our listeners to learn more about the value of internal roles and what that looks like as well so it's really cool to hear that you're still involved in marketing but just in different ways and for me innovation is really interesting because you could have this you know fantastic product that is the best in the industry but quite often a big purchasing factor will be company culture and your people so making improvements there can have a huge impact on success.

I'm not sure if this is the right question or not but should one of those things be prioritized over the other and how do you approach sort of innovating your products and services but also innovating through people as well? I think it's a it is the right question to ask and it's a really good one I think it's one that a lot of the sort of exec teams that I've worked with over my career ask themselves as well like where do you focus is it the customer is it the people and I think it's both I don't think you can do one without the other and there's there's an example that I always like to bring out um so Liam you know I love Vegas that's where I got married and I'm a big fan of Vegas um but there's a really nice example of this in play in the Bellagio which is one of the big casinos out there so in the Bellagio they give their people who work in the casino or in back of house in the casino the exact same experience that they give their customers and what that does is it translates that the people are having an amazing time working there and that flows through into the service that their customers get and the customers get that really premium amazing service but without that you might have people who might not care as much they might not feel as engaged or as motivated so for me it's both you can't have one without the other and to give you sort of a real example from where I work currently at Legal in General.

There's a massive focus at Legal in General on employee experience and on using things like service design to improve it. And the question I always sort of ask myself is, if we're not spending time improving how we work, how can we improve what we're doing for customers in that innovation space? So like if we're not innovating our own processes for our own people, how does that translate? Like they're two sides of the same coin.

And for me, like innovation is about never standing still right it's about being agile responding to changing needs um listening for things that are changing being really empathetic with your customers whether your customer is someone who works there or an end customer so for me they're both equally important and if you drop the ball on one you drop the ball on both so it's a definitely two sides of the same coin I think yeah I can definitely confirm that you do live Vegas and I really like that example from the Bellagio I bet there are lots of things that could be classed as innovation then that we probably wouldn't assume would fall under that category.

I started thinking about Vegas and my time studying on the west coast of the US during your answer and one thing that comes to my mind is In-N-Out which I regularly get cravings for. So for anyone unfamiliar In-N-Out is a fast food restaurant that is extremely popular and what they do is they separate themselves from competitors in the fast food market by really taking care of their staff and investing in their team and lifestyles. They have a really strong training program and pension schemes.

I think most store managers are earning well over $100,000. So when you go into the store, all of their staff look really happy and there's this upbeat environment that transcends to the customer. So that probably wouldn't have been something that I had previously described as innovation before this conversation, but it definitely is when you think about it. I absolutely love that and I love In-N-Out Burger.

Like that used to be our ritual when we could travel. Me and my husband would fly into LA and then hire a car and drive to Vegas and we'd stop halfway for an in and out and the employees always were happy actually that's a really good point. Yeah you always get good vibes in their restaurant that's for sure. So moving on you've worked in innovation for several years now this is going to be a really open question but how would you define innovation and what role does it play?

In my job titles I've tended to have the word innovation in my job title in the last two jobs that I've had. And it's sometimes been a little bit problematic, if I'm honest, because people don't always know what innovation means. And it means different things to different people. I think the biggest thing that I've bumped up against is that a lot of people think that innovation is about technology.

And for me, technology does play a role. But at its core, innovation is just about solving problems. It's about being creative in your thinking and creative problem solving so for me innovation is looking at an issue figuring out how to get over around through under that challenge and then trying stuff and learning from it if it doesn't work like that for me is the the biggest thing so as I've sort of got deeper into my journey around like innovation I found that there are actual methodologies to this it's not just a made-up thing that I was like but surely it's just about listening to what customers need and then solving their problem.

So design thinking has become like a really big part of my practice. There's a book by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans from the Stanford D School called Designing Your Life and if you haven read that I would say read that it changed my life like it changed how I think about work how I think about problems how I think about customers and for me it it very core and very hard innovation is just about solving problems for people and doing the right thing for people. Yeah I think that was a great answer and thanks for sharing the book recommendation with us.

One thing that does interest me is that smaller businesses with low resource and limited time and budget don't have someone like yourself who has loads of experience in innovation so they might be discouraged or not know where to start or perhaps they think that innovation is for the big guys only. Do you have any tips or insights for those smaller businesses or SMEs specifically around innovation and how to get started? So I would say anybody can innovate. I think the most important thing that you need to create a culture of innovation and doing things differently is to give people a safe space to do that in.

And what I mean by that is creating like psychological safety. So showing people that it's all right to try things and get them wrong and learn from them because that's what innovation is it's about trying things testing them getting them wrong learning doing something differently so about leadership demonstrating that it's okay to do that and not living in a world where you're in a culture of fear and blame and you think you know I don't try that like where I think about some of where I've done some of my work that I'm most proud of it's where my boss has just sort of given me space and said just try it if it goes wrong we'll learn from it like for me that is the biggest gift and it costs you nothing to say that to people and that's it doesn't matter what your budget is for that so I think I think that's a big thing about psychological safety I think there's also something about starting where we are and so understanding where you are today what you've got to play with and not feeling constrained by that but thinking right this is my reality what can I do with it I think in terms of some things that can help you that are low cost or free as well is I mentioned design thinking.

Get familiar with design thinking. It's all about inspiration, having empathy with your customer or your users, about having ideas, and then quickly prototyping those ideas and testing them on real people and seeing if it works. And again, you don't need any money to do that. When I say prototyping, I don't mean you have to go build an app.

You could literally paper prototype. You could write something down on paper and then show it to a customer and say, would this work for you? Like that's free. that costs nothing more than your time and I think a lot of people can get caught up in this idea that innovation is about technology and it's not it's about just looking at problems from a different angle there are a lot of free resources out there as well that you can use so things like IDEO is a really good resource that's got loads of tips and tricks that you can try on I think they do like a free five-week intro to design thinking that you can sign up to on their website but I think for me the main thing it's just creating that culture that it's okay to try stuff and it's it's safe to fail and like innovation is if you're doing innovation properly innovation is innovation you are going to try things you are going to get them wrong you are going to fail you are going to learn so I think getting your head around that first and getting yourself out of this mindset that things have to be perfect that I think is is really helpful and that's that doesn't cost anything it doesn't matter how big your company is asking people as well like asking people what's not working for you so whether it's asking your customers or asking the people who work with you or for you which bits of this are broken what feels painful like where are your challenges um that in itself is innovation and again that's just a conversation it doesn't cost you more than your time it takes to do that yeah absolutely uh that was a great answer coming from a marketing background i'm working in-house agency and internal i'd love to hear your thoughts on how innovation works in the marketing industry specifically?

Yeah definitely I mean there are so many examples of innovation out there I think the whole global pandemic obviously has been horrific in loads of ways but in some ways it's been amazing for innovation and just looking around at what it's done for the industry and how people are doing things differently has just been amazing like if I think about this is not a marketing example but I'll share one in just a second if I think about legal in general where I work we had a digital transformation roadmap to get to a place where our workforce could be more agile and you could work from home and that was probably going to take three years at best guess to do COVID came along and in the space of two weeks we'd done the digital transformation roadmap do you know I mean it's and that for me is what innovation is about it's about looking at your situation and going how do we react to this how can we respond to this?

I think to give some sort of examples of companies that are focusing on innovation and that are using this, I mean, all the names that you will have heard before, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Nike, Tesla, Netflix, Patagonia, all of those really big on innovation. So one final question during this main section, do you have an example of a company, perhaps big or small, that has innovated really well, that has had a positive effect on their business? I think one example that I really like is Lego.

So if you think about Lego, we all love it, company famous for making plastic bricks, but guess what people don't love? Plastic, because it's literally killing the planet. And that's a really big problem for not only the planet itself, but for Lego's customers who aren't going to want to engage with a product that isn't going to be environmentally friendly. They've then been able to switch their process and their manufacturing to change the way that they're making things and to use different materials.

So that in itself, for me, is like a really nice example of responding to a customer problem. Like they're going, actually, this is an issue for our customers. They care about it. How can we change the way that we're working to still appeal to that customer?

And I think if you think about sort of climate change in general, that is quite a big worry for a lot of companies and rightly so. And they're using innovation methodologies to solve it. So we've seen it illegal in general we've run hackathons around climate change to look at how we can solve that problem because it is something that yes we should be doing it because we've only got one planet and we don want to ruin the planet but also thinking about back to our customers are they going to want to engage with the company who isn solving that problem and the answer is probably no so um yeah loads of loads of examples out there of sort of innovation in action i think yeah lego is definitely universal so that's a great example to share with us love lego yeah me too um so we're going to wrap up the main section of the episode right here i have two quick questions that i'll be asking jemma to close out so stay tuned for a few more minutes so the closing section of every episode has two quick questions that I ask to every guest that joins us and they're always really fun my first one Gemma is do you have a memorable story that jumps out when you look back on your career so it could be something that makes you laugh a career highlight or something embarrassing for example oh man there is absolutely loads of these so many moments in my career that are funny highlights embarrassing and I was thinking about this before I came on the podcast because obviously this is always the fun bit of it I think one of the most surreal moments in my career was when I'd just moved out of marketing so I'd just left Monsoon and gone to work for BP and it was like a different world like the budgets were crazily different like at the time working in oil and gas there was like huge budgets whereas I come from retail e-commerce where the budgets and the marketing budgets were much smaller and I was tasked with sort of solving the problem of sharing the story of a big culture shift that BP had made in its biofuels business.

So biofuels business based in Brazil, basically the way it works is they grow sugarcane in fields and then they mill the sugarcane and a byproduct of the sugarcane is ethanol. And ethanol is what they use as fuel for a lot of the cars in Brazil. So that's sort of a big business for BP. But they'd had this big problem with culture and it was a really negative sort of place to work.

And they'd done this leadership program that's really turned it around for them um so my boss said can you like figure out how we share this story and get other people sort of behaving in this way and I said after a bit of thought I thought I think the way that I do this is by jumping on a plane and going to Brazil and um making some films about these people and going back to the film and literature degree thing and um my boss said yeah go do it and so I was then like oh my god I'm three months into this new job and I've just been told to go to Brazil and make some films and I was like super excited like really really up for it and so did all my prep and everything and got all my interviews lined up planned to go to these three mills in sort of deepest Brazil and jumped on the plane got out to one of the mills totally in the middle of nowhere like going down a dirt track on a big sort of jeep vehicle to get there and met up with the people in the field for the first interview and I got there and this probably sounds like the most obvious thing in the world but had not occurred to me in the slightest and this was a massive learning in my career and got there ready to do the interview realized I didn't speak Portuguese they didn't speak English and I was there ready to do like 60 interviews over 10 days in Brazil so I was like what do I do so straight away had to just think on my feet and luckily I had a phone signal and I was like right google Translate that's how we're going to do it and so I ended up having to translate all of my interview questions via Google Translate and then let the Google voiceover ask the questions and then they would say their answers and then I would translate it back to me myself through the phone so yeah it was literally necessity as a mother of invention in action but yeah massive learning curve for me what I learned was like make sure that I am prepared make sure I'm not making any assumptions make sure that I'm not thinking that everybody thinks or behaves or lives in the same world and reality as I do but also just be brave and try stuff and if it goes a bit wrong you'll figure it out like it's it's not that scary so for me that was probably a highlight and also one of the biggest like all my days moments in the world but yeah and it did go well we made some amazing films and they went down brilliantly but um yeah I think that for me was a proper made me laugh and we'll never ever forget that.

Yeah, I feel like that's quite a story. It's really awesome and a great one for our final episode. We've had lots of funny things over the past year, but I think the big takeaway from your story is to be brave and if you get the opportunity to jump on a plane or do something a bit different, then go for it. So my final question is, do you have a favourite resource that you use on a regular basis which could help our listeners?

So it could be innovation or marketing related or just anything that you enjoy. there are a couple of things that I use on the regular Hyper Island is one of them so Hyper Island have an online toolbox and that is packed with stuff that can help you to innovate and think differently and create a safe space and it's free as well so you can go on there and just use the resources on that toolkit IDEO is a similar one that's that's got a toolkit as well that can help you with design thinking but in terms of sort of inspiring stuff I don't know if you've come across Bruce Daisley's podcast it's called Eat Sleep Work Repeat and that for me is just amazing so Bruce used to be European VP of Twitter and he left to really focus on like making work better for people and making work a better place to be and it's it's great it's funny he has brilliant guests on there's always something that you learn from it and he's super inspiring and a really nice guy as well so I would definitely say check that one out.

Yeah cool thank you for sharing those with us so we're going to wrap up the episode here thank you for joining us Gemma it's been a really great episode and I've enjoyed learning about something new from you oh thank you Liam it's been brilliant what a nice way to spend a day sort of feels like I'm I'm back in Gleebroad yeah it definitely does um so just before we wrap up I wanted to say a massive thank you to everyone that has listened to the podcast whether that's just this one or all 80 episodes if you are fairly new to the show please feel free to go back and check out some of our older episodes I would love it if you gave them a listen.

I really appreciate your support. It's allowed me to do something really fun for the past two years. I'm sure I'll be doing something fun in the near future. So if we're not already connected on LinkedIn, I'd love for you to send me a request so that we can stay in touch.

And until then, have a great week and I'll see you soon.