Tamara Littleton 00:12
This is the Genuine Humans podcast brought to you by Social Element. I’m Tamara Littleton
Wendy Christie 00:18
and I’m Wendy Christie
Tamara Littleton 00:22
in our podcast. We’ll discover the stories of the leaders behind the brands and the trailblazers who are making a real difference in our industry. We’ll delve into how they got to where they are today,
Wendy Christie 00:33
and we’ll hear about the genuine humans who supported and influenced them along the way.
Tamara Littleton 00:44
Welcome back to Genuine Humans podcast, and I’m here as ever with my lovely co-host, Wendy. Wendy, how are you doing on this…it’s actually sunny here in London, not sure about how it’s doing in Aberdeen?
Wendy Christie 00:55
Yeah, not much, to be honest, but that’s okay. It’s better than rain. Yeah, I’m all good. Thanks, Tamara. How are you?
Tamara Littleton 01:01
Very good, very good. And I’m really delighted that we’re going to be joined today by a very special, Genuine Humans guest. So it’s Abbie Hickman, and Abbie is Head of Restaurant Marketing for UK and Ireland at Nando’s. So welcome to the podcast Abbie!
Abbie Hickman 01:18
Oh, thank you so much for having me. This is my first podcast, so please be nice.
Tamara Littleton 01:23
Oh, that’s so wonderful. Okay, well, this is a very relaxed environment. Don’t worry. You’re in safe, safe hands.
Abbie Hickman 01:30
Fabulous!
Tamara Littleton 01:30
So, let’s kick off with a nice, easy one, which is your entire career!
Abbie Hickman 01:35
Easy peasy!
Tamara Littleton 01:37
So do you want to just share what it is that you’re doing now. And also I’d be so interested to know what has been your path to getting here?
Abbie Hickman 01:46
Yeah, sure. Well, so if I start off with where I am, so, as Head of Restaurant Marketing for Nando’s, it’s a newly created role. So we’re about a year old, and there are two parts of the job. The first side is easy to explain. It’s a customer support side. So anything, basically, we look after anything that has to do with customer experience within restaurants, so customer support side, and then we also have, I’ve got a team of six wonderful regional folks who work across our six regions, and they’re responsible for making sure restaurants are delivering brilliant customer service, creating wonderful experiences, and also regional marketing. So how do we do kind of local marketing within restaurants and in their local communities as well? So it’s a pretty varied role, like I say. It’s only a year old, so we’re still slightly finding our feet, but it’s been a really wonderful experience so far.
Abbie Hickman 02:35
I don’t know whether to go back right to the beginning and then do a flow chart. I’ll draw you a flow chart.
Tamara Littleton 02:42
We want a flow chart.
Abbie Hickman 02:43
I haven’t. I mean, getting into marketing for me was, was not so… I don’t have any contacts in marketing. I don’t have connections. It’s not like it’s a family trade. Or, I don’t know if marketing is a family trade for many people, but it certainly wasn’t for me. And when I got to university…school, I wasn’t much of a learner. It must be said, school was not my forte. So when I got to uni, and I mean, there was a question mark of was uni the right route for me. I just wanted to do the one thing that I had found quite easy was business. So I studied International Business and Management, and there was a marketing module within that. And one of our, one of the exams in the final year was we had to rebrand Horlicks,
Tamara Littleton 03:26
Wow!
Abbie Hickman 03:26
Good old Horlicks! And, and then we actually got to present to, I’m sure the Brand Manager was there and the Account Director of their agency. So they came in, and we had to pitch to them, holy moly, like our pitch was looking back on it now, now you know stuff, some stuff we were talking about glamorising Horlicks to make it this, this kind of pre-evening drink, like a cocktail anyway, hilarious. Somehow, out of that experience, James, who was the guy who came from the creative agency to kind of judge us, said you won a place on our grad scheme and invited me to join the agency Billington Cartmell. So that was my first and it was around the time I remember that the year above us at uni had graduated, and we’re all finding it quite tough to find jobs. It seemed to be around the time when things were getting harder.
Abbie Hickman 04:20
So when this opportunity came up, I was just delighted to have a job, and I didn’t give it much more thought than that. And I live in Birmingham, so I, you know, packed my bag and traipsed my way down to London, and I just had the most wonderful three years. I mean, it’s quite I feel when you’re how old was I? 22 something? It’s a good time to be in a marketing agency and a creative agency. You know, I was introduced to wine and credit cards, and that was pretty much set up the rest of my life. But I think that that grounding in an agency, I’m just really appreciative now that I had that, because I feel like as a client, we’re not always the easiest bunch, we can be a bit tricky. And I think that experience has kind of left me with a huge degree of empathy for our agency partners and for all the agencies I’ve worked with over the years. So I think alongside that, it also gave me a good understanding of the creative process and kind of how ideas are generated, and the planning process. And I think that was quite a good bedrock into marketing. So I was really grateful that it was my first experience. And from there, I went to something slightly different. So I went to, what was called at the time, i2C, which is now Nectar 360, so Sainsbury’s kind of…
Tamara Littleton 05:41
Loyalty card.
Abbie Hickman 05:42
Exactly, yeah, and their retail marketing agency in house. So that Job was all about working with brands to activate their brand in stores, essentially. And it was a very, again, a wonderful company, a wonderful team, a very different experience, because it was all about data. I hadn’t used data before. You know, that was for the planners, so getting stuck into data, that was my first experience of that. I really enjoyed my time there. Like I said, it was a wonderful team. I found it quite easy. I didn’t feel particularly challenged, because brands had to work with us. They had JBPs – joint business plans with Sainsburys, so they had to spend their money with us. The challenge was, how much money could we get out of them? Quite frankly. And it didn’t fill me with joy. I would say the people very much did, but, but it didn’t fill me with joy.
Abbie Hickman 06:33
But I was really lucky that one of my clients who was working at Premier Foods at the time moved to Alpro, the plant based brand. And he had kind of been renowned as being, if he listens to this, he I don’t think he’ll mind me saying he was slightly renowned as being a real grump. It was like no one wanted to work with Andy, because he was just a grump. And I had somehow wangled my way into his good graces. So he phoned me up one day and said, “I’m going to Alpro. I’m setting up a shop and marketing team. Would you be interested?” So that was strangely back in Birmingham, so I packed my bags and went back the other way and applied for the job, and was successful in getting it, which was great. I was very much the baby of the team. So the rest of them have been doing this for a fair few years, and Alpro was a very grocery-led business, so the Big Five were very much where our focus was. And I worked in what we call the developing channels team, which was essentially everything else.
Tamara Littleton 07:33
Right.
Abbie Hickman 07:33
So, there was convenience and wholesale and health food, and Ireland, just the whole country and what else? And then there was coffee. I feel like I’m missing some. But then there was coffee as well. And it was it that was, again, it was a wonderful team of people, a smart bunch. And when I joined Alpro, it was obviously setting up a new team. So they hadn’t had this function before. It was a very sales driven business. So this role was quite integral in bringing a brand into the sales conversations and vice versa. And I was in this team with a wonderful Irishman called Declan Mackle, and he very much liked being under the radar. You know, he liked just taking it easy, not having much pressure. The channels that we were working in were very volume -they were the volume driver for the business. So there wasn’t, it wasn’t kind of a big degree of, okay, what could the brand do here?
Abbie Hickman 08:30
And it was probably about, probably about a year in, we just started talking a bit differently, because what I had noticed in having worked with the likes of Costa and Starbucks and Pret and Nero, o the big coffee brands over the past year, was that people will spend £3 on a Coconut hot chocolate once, but buying, you know, a litre or two litres of Coconut milk for £2 is a stretch for them. It’s too much of a commitment. So it was, it was quite an interesting space of just the feeling that this channel could be doing something different for the brand. So we started approaching it much more as almost like a sampling opportunity. So it was, how can we work with these coffee shops to get our products into drinks so it’s no longer just an option on the menu? You present customers with a drink instead. So a whole solution to inspire them, and, you know, tickle their taste buds and get them, get them to give us a try and it just really worked. The brand was in enormous growth anyway, but that really helped to get beyond the, we used to call them the 1 in 3, the people who were probably quite susceptible to plant based things, the plant based trend anyway, and getting to people’s hands who were perhaps not quite such, the first uptake of that kind of stuff. And when I left Alpro, the coffee channel was one of the five growth killers.
Abbie Hickman 09:59
So, it really went on the journey, much to Declan’s disdain, that he had gone from being like a baby in the corner to now being front and centre. So that was a real, really wonderful journey to go on. And I was mainly, I mean, that role, I was in that role, and versions of that role. So, it kind of grew to me managing at the time. It was called The For Professionals Brand, very catchy. We rebranded to the Barista Brand and what could happen with it. So we, like I say, rebranded the products. We entered new channels. So as well as the Big Four coffee chains, we also were trying to go after the independent market. So it was quite a good lesson in typical brand management, which, even though it was, B2B, still super exciting.
Abbie Hickman 10:52
And I think I’d been doing that for about four years, and I started to get kind of itchy feet, and it had grown and grown, and that was really rewarding, but it was almost kind of like, “what’s next?”. So I had the grand idea. One of my friends had lived in Canada before in their youth movement programme thingy-bob, so very easy to get a visa before you’re 30. And I thought, “well, that sounds fun, let’s just do that!” So I had this grand plan to move to Canada, and I quit my job, and I booked my flights, and I booked the accommodation, and I was due to go in April 2020.
Tamara Littleton 11:28
Oh, gosh, okay.And then stay put.
Abbie Hickman 11:33
Exactly! So in March, I remember my, I mean, work, husband equivalent, came sauntering over to me in the office, because he hadn’t been convinced that I would actually leave, because I’d kind of been there for a long time and was a bit part of the furniture. And he just said with a smug smile on his face, have you seen the news and sure enough the borders had come down. I was like, “Great! Okay, what now?” And it was, you know, terrifying for 48 hours because I had quit my job. It was so hard to get another job at that time. You know, there weren’t a lot around. So I kind of sidled up to my boss at the time and just said,” is that, is there anything that I could do? Could you give me anything?” And we were back-filling my role with someone else in the team who worked in the product development team, and he said, “Well, there’s, you know, there’s Grace’s job, but it’s a, technically, a downward step I guess.” And I mean, part of me was like, “I’ll take anything!” and the other part of me also thought, “but actually, I haven’t done that before, and that would be really handy, you know, it would mean getting into the kind of the grocers side of the business that was really interesting.”
Abbie Hickman 12:42
So, we did a job switch, he made me interview for it, which, you know, full respect as you should do. And I had this perception of myself, and also slightly from him, that I was not good at data, like I couldn’t do data. He said to me, “you’ll need to interview for it. And you know, it’s quite a data insight driven role. So, yeah, no, you need to, you need to pull your socks up on that side.”. And I was like, okay, so I took it really seriously, and I put so much effort and prep into this interview. And when it finally happened, one of my dearest friends was going to be my boss. So they were both sitting there looking at me, and they went, that was surprisingly good.
Tamara Littleton 13:27
What wonderful feedback. That wasn’t terrible.
Abbie Hickman 13:31
It was, wasn’t it? And he said, “Why haven’t you been doing this kind of thinking?” And I was like, “well, because in the channels I work in, we don’t have access to data.” And it was really kind of a lesson to me of, don’t let people or yourself tell you a story about yourself, because it was simply that, because I didn’t have, you know, the shopper insights that Kantar provide for X, Y and Z retailer we couldn’t tell particularly data led stories, and we went very much on our gut within that kind of developing channels channel. So that was a good lesson of, don’t write yourself off for something before you’ve tried for sure.
Abbie Hickman 14:10
So that was so I did that role, and I’d been doing it for that year, so for the remainder of that year, and you know, I was very happily bubbling along and thinking, well, this is a good learning experience for the next couple of years, and then in the December of that year, so I went on holiday on I broke up for Christmas early on the 11th of December, and on the 12th of December, we unfortunately lost my Dad.
Tamara Littleton 14:37
Woah.
Abbie Hickman 14:38
And it was, I was, I am – was a real daddy’s girl. So, yeah, it hit me hard.
Tamara Littleton 14:46
I’m so sorry.
Abbie Hickman 14:47
Thank you. I had about six weeks off, Alpro was wonderful. I had about six weeks off just trying to pull myself together, into any semblance of normality. I went back to work and I was doing the next iteration of the deck that I had been doing when I left before, just, you know, the day before he died. And I just remember thinking, “My whole life has fallen apart and this hasn’t changed.” You know, this is just the same. And I was really struggling to line those two things up in my mind of how that was possible and but at the same time, I knew I didn’t have the kind of emotional energy and resilience to go and start job hunting, you know, I was in no place to try and sell myself to recruiters.
Abbie Hickman 15:31
And then, you know, stars aligned, and my previous Marketing Director at Alpro, a lady called Vicky, had moved to Nando’s, and phoned me up and said, “I’ve got this opportunity, and I think you could do it. Would you consider it?” And I was like, “yes, yes please!” And just the to have the opportunity to do something with a safe space that that was really it, you know, the there was a thing of, oh god, I’ve got to interview for a job, but also then I’ve got to join a job, not being myself, you know, still being trying to pick parts of me up off the floor. So the fact that I could, I could have this opportunity, I applied, was successful, and then meant that I was working with Vickiy who knew what had happened and knew me before. So yeah, was giving me the grace, you know, and the space so that that was, I was really fortunate, and I feel very, very lucky for that.
Abbie Hickman 16:26
So, I joined Nando’s as their Head of Consumer Marketing for their grocery business. So, a £60m business within a billion-pound brand. So we were very much the smaller cousin. And at that time it was a separate business unit. So we had our own CEO, and all the markets worked under him. That was in May, and then in August, they announced that they were going to be moving the grocery channel into the local market. So we’re going to shift again and I would now be sitting in the UK team. So four of us moved over, and it was, you know, a completely new way of working. We kind of did that thing where we just kept ourselves to ourselves for the first couple of months, and then, and then my boss left, and Sarah, who is now my boss, said, “we’re not going to backfill that role. You just step up. I’ll help you. You’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it.” And I was like, okay….
Tamara Littleton 17:21
Fantastic. Good. How wonderful, yeah, how wonderful to have people sort of really believing you and as well, and pushing you to that next level.
Abbie Hickman 17:28
I also just don’t think she really thought about it much.
Tamara Littleton 17:33
I’m sure that’s not the case.
Abbie Hickman 17:35
You speak to Sarah now, I think there was a degree of just she didn’t really know what it was about yet. And she went, “Yeah, that’s fine. That’ll be fine. I’ll lean in. It’s all fine”.
Tamara Littleton 17:45
I’m sure you give off an air of, “yep, I can be trusted to step up!”
Abbie Hickman 17:50
Well, so we did that, and it was a really wonderful experience, because that was all about creating new ways of working, because we were the same brand, but we very much acted as a separate business unit before. So it was trying to work out, how do we fit within this bigger world? You know? It was great because we had access to resources, people, expertise that we hadn’t really had before, but we still needed to kind of protect a little bit, okay, this is what we need to do for our shoppers and for our customers, and this is what’s right for us.
Abbie Hickman 18:25
So, that was a great experience in leading a brand strategy and working actually with a licensee on the sales and category side of things, so which wasn’t the easiest relationship. So that was a learning experience, for sure. And I think that that whole role gave Sarah the impression that I was pretty okay at managing people and matrix situations and difficult stakeholders. And anyway, she was relatively okay.
Abbie Hickman 18:58
So she phoned me up in February of last year, and said, “we’re creating this new role. And I, you know, I think, I think you’d be great at it. It kind of sits in between ops and the customer team as the bridge. So, you know, you need to make friends with everyone.” And I was like, “That sounds fun. Give that a go.”
Abbie Hickman 19:17
So, that was it. And that was a year ago. And like I say, we’re still trying to find our feet. To find our feet, but it’s certainly been a step up. It’s, you know, managing a team of 21 so there’s a lot of a lot of them, and taking that new role as not the doer, because you can’t possibly be the doer when you’re looking after that many people, and trying to find my value in other ways. I think that’s probably been the biggest challenge of, how do I get that tick box without literally presenting something or creating something? But it’s been a wonderful challenge that is me on a page.
Tamara Littleton 19:56
I love that!
Abbie Hickman 19:57
Whole CV!
Tamara Littleton 19:58
That’s wonderful!
Wendy Christie 19:59
Love it! Thank you. If you don’t mind, I’d like to sort of go back even further than the early part of your career, yeah, and talk about what you were like as a child and see if we can figure out how any of your childhood experiences impacted your adult life. So what were you like as a child?
Abbie Hickman 20:17
I was friends with everyone, I kind of didn’t belong anywhere, but also belonged everywhere.
Abbie Hickman 20:30
So I just kind of floated around, and I could very easily dip into different friendship groups, and the doors were always open. And so I suppose, quite easy going, and also quite protective. I was – so I’m six foot thereabouts, and I was five foot eight when I was 12. So I was, I was quite the gangly child, but I kind of found myself taking on this protector role, you know, defender. That’s maybe a better, not protector. But you know, I really didn’t like it if someone was being treated badly, or if someone was being mean to someone, or if, if the boys were picking on, you know, whatever it was. So I certainly had that kind of defender stance, if that’s the right thing, right way of describing it. And, as I mentioned before, school didn’t come easily to me, but I always got that “Abbie tries really hard”.
Wendy Christie 21:29
Right.
Abbie Hickman 21:29
Comment on the report card,
Wendy Christie 21:31
Not particularly that you didn’t like school, then perhaps found it difficult?
Abbie Hickman 21:36
Yeah, I don’t remember this. I don’t remember waking up and thinking, God, I really wish I didn’t have to go. I was good at sports. That was something. And I never really remember feeling that I wasn’t good enough. You know, I don’t, I don’t remember thinking, this is tough, and I’m not good enough and I’m failing. I just remember giving it my best shot, and I do. I do now there is one. I’ve reflected, as I’ve gotten older, that whenever there was a test, I used to come home and I’d say,”Oh, I got this on the test.” And my mum and dad would always ask, What did everyone else get right? And I, in my mind, I feel like that should have created some kind of competition, or competitive energy or something in me, but I just didn’t. It was kind of like water off a duck’s back. I didn’t, yeah, certainly a certain degree of easy goingness, I’d say, maybe quite comfortable in my own skin, yeah, even then, which, you know, for someone who was five foot eight when they were 12 and had braces and a fringe that started like at the back of my head and came down to hear that my mum used to cut so it was always wonky. That’s saying something. I don’t know where I got it from, but I got it from somewhere.
Wendy Christie 22:48
Yeah, and interesting that you then decided to go on to university. So how did that decision come about?
Abbie Hickman 22:57
I have an older brother. I have an extended family, but within our kind of unit, there’s four of us, and Mark was the smart one. Is the smart one. So for him, school came quite easily. And then when he got to about 15, he fell off the rails, ever so slightly bunked off school. You know, stop going and blah, blah, blah. And then when he was 17, he was in an accident. He broke his collarbone. He was knocked off his bike and broke his collarbone, and he got some compensation for it, and he decided at that point that he was going to go travelling. So he just, he just decided to go off to, I can’t remember where he went, but went off for six months, came back. Loved it, worked for six months, and then basically disappeared until he was 30. He’d come back and earn some money and then go again. He spent a lot of time in India. He spent time in Africa and everywhere.
Abbie Hickman 23:53
So I think that was probably what drove me to go to uni was almost the obligation of that, that is what you should do.
Abbie Hickman 23:53
I idolised Mark, but we had quite traditional parents. I would say that, like the most important thing was that we were happy and healthy and loved, but they didn’t, you know it was you go to school, they didn’t go to university. But okay, if that’s what you want to do, you get a job, you get married, you have children, you do this, do this. That’s your life. So the fact that he had done this, I think even at that age, I felt some kind of obligation of he’s not going to so I need to do this right, because Mum and Dad sacrificed a lot, like we were very fortunate enough to be sent to private schools, which, which really did help help me, not so much Mark, but really did help me until, until things became a bit more difficult financially, and then, and then we moved, or I certainly moved schools, and they had given up so much to give us that opportunity that I think I just felt like I should, you know, I needed, I needed to, to be the kid who they could say, “Abbie’s doing that.” You know, not that they spoke about Mark without pride, but it was just they just didn’t understand. Their friends didn’t understand. It was like, “What’s Mark doing? Travelling so bumming around then.” You know? And in part, he was, but he was having incredible life experiences, which have set him up wonderfully for the work he does now. So, I think that’s probably what drove me to go to uni, was almost the obligation of “that’s what you should do”
Wendy Christie 25:24
That’s a big deal.
Abbie Hickman 25:26
Yeah.
Wendy Christie 25:26
And it seems to have worked out, though, seems to have been the right thing for you, which is wonderful. Did you have any sense – when you were little, did you have any sense of what you wanted to be when you grew up?
Abbie Hickman 25:37
There were two things I remember wanting to be. First, when I was very little, I told my friends I wanted to be a comedian, and they laughed at me.
Wendy Christie 25:45
There we go. It’s working already!
Abbie Hickman 25:48
Not with me. At me. And I went, “Oh, okay, maybe I won’t do that.” And then I remember wanting to be a journalist. And my dad had worked in papers for a little while. Well, he had set up a newspaper business when he was younger. And I remember doing work experience with someone who knew, someone who used to do something, and they sent me off to write a report about, you know, Mrs. Jones, who lost her cat or something. And I thought it was the best thing ever. So I remember wanting to be a journalist, but I can’t really remember when that dream faded away. Really, maybe because it’s a tough thing to get into if you don’t know the right people or whatever it might be, but, yeah, I didn’t go down that path. But journalism and you know, staying up to date with what’s going on in the world is still something that I have huge amounts of interest and curiosity in. So maybe that was a missed calling. Who knows!
Wendy Christie 26:46
We’ve talked about your parents and your brother, but were there other people who you looked up to as a child?
Abbie Hickman 26:56
Yeah, well, Mark certainly was my trendsetter, so I did idolise him as whatever he thinks is cool, must be cool. And then I really wish I had someone highly impressive who I looked up to, like Maya Angelou or someone like that, when I was a child, but I did not. I remember, and I don’t, I don’t remember when I was young, thinking, I look up to you, but I do remember both of these people giving me a sense of something belonging or something so the first is my Auntie Carrie, who’s my mum’s sister, who unfortunately also passed away when she was very young, so only 46 but she was quite a powerhouse of a woman. She was a solicitor. She hadn’t been able to have children, so she didn’t have children, and just had the most fabulous life, kind of, going to wonderful restaurants and holidays all the time, and she didn’t suffer fools one bit. And I remember my mum saying to me when you were young, you’re just like your Auntie Carrie, because I don’t know, someone had said something to me, and I went, “no, it’s not”, or something like that. I called them out on their nonsense. I remember thinking when she said that that’s, I would love to be like Auntie Carrie. You know, she’s, she’s, she’s smart and successful and capable. And, yeah, that sounds good. Let’s try and do that.
Abbie Hickman 28:16
So I remember, I remember looking up to her, and then the other one, again, another woman is a lady I call Auntie Jan, who is not my Auntie Jan. She’s my dad’s ex-wife, but we have a very well together, still together family. And she, when I was growing up, she behaves herself now, but she drank too much and smoked too much and swore too much, and again, a real kind of career driven woman. And I remember she used to have boot sales, car boot sales on as she used to organise. And then I went along with her one day, and I remember selling this jacket to this bloke, and the jacket was about seven times too big for him, and I was just adamant that he was going to buy this jacket. And I remember him saying, I remember Auntie Jan saying to me, you’re like me. “You get that from me, the gift of the gab, whatever that is, you get that from me.” And again, it was, it was all it was this sense of belonging. It was this sense of these are two people who I can look up to and go, that’s what I could be like. That’s what the potential is. And also, my dad left her for my mum. I have a half brother, and I remember one of his girlfriends asking her or saying something about, like, how do you do this? I was sitting in the corner, and she was like, how does this work? I remember her saying he’s the father of my child and I care about him. Why would I not? And just that generosity of spirit and that sense of everyone being welcome, and you know, hard things don’t have to lead to bad outcomes. You know that? Really beautiful. Our family is a really beautiful thing that has come out of what was a really awful thing.
Wendy Christie 30:05
Yeah.
Abbie Hickman 30:06
for her. So I think those are the two people who spring to mind when I think about that, different sides, two women on two sides of my family.
Wendy Christie 30:13
Yeah, very, very admirable, but not easy. No, exactly. Not everyone could do that.
Abbie Hickman 30:19
No.
Wendy Christie 30:20
So coming, you know, back, thinking about your career again, and people who you look up to, have there been people who’ve given you that extra bit of support, or who have really influenced you along the way?
Abbie Hickman 30:31
I think that various people throughout my career, such as Vicky, who I mentioned earlier, who phoned me about the Nando’s job. It was a job, which, you know, I was, I was thankful for her for thinking, for giving me the chance, because it was, it was a step up and into consumer marketing, which isn’t, you know, if you were purely looking at my CV, you could say, “Well, you haven’t got this.” I hate it when recruiters do this. But, you know, they do tend to sometimes say, unless you’ve ticked this box and this box and that box and this box, you’re not for me. So the fact that she didn’t do that, and she just saw the transferable skills and gave me the opportunity that I will always appreciate.
Abbie Hickman 31:12
In my first job, there was again, another, another lady called Yaz. I have never been the most organised person or the most detail oriented person. And when I joined as a grad, I was very much expected to do the grad stuff, you know, do the admin, do the competitor reviews, do that kind of stuff. And my manager at the time, a guy called Johnny, was very blue, lots of blue energy. So very detail oriented, liked things just so, and we just didn’t… that I mean, it was such a clash of personalities and everything, nothing, nothing, gelled with us. So he was asking me to do this stuff. I was not doing it. He was seeing that as failure to do the stuff, and therefore failure, and therefore failure, and therefore you need to be on a performance plan and this and this and this. And there was an Account Director, and Yaz, who was another Account Director in the team, just, I don’t know what conversation that they had, but Johnny and I had been not arguing, but, you know, kind of having a slightly heated discussion at the desk one day. And I remember her saying to Johnny, “can we, can I have a word?” They went into a room for about an hour, and they came out. And when she came out, she went, “Abbie, you’re going to work with me now.” And everything that I was being asked to do, fell away. She asked me to write briefs, talk to clients, and be part of the creative process. And all of a sudden, all the stuff that I was doing which played only to my weaknesses, you know, my areas for development, went away, and I was suddenly being asked to do the things that played to my strengths. And sure enough, it went better for everyone.
Wendy Christie 32:57
Yes, better for everyone, definitely, including Johnny.
Abbie Hickman 33:00
That’s… he was happy to be rid of me, but he, you know, that was a real lesson for me. I know that there’s an expectation that when you’re in a certain role, you know you need to do certain things, but it’ll always live with me that if I have people who are sparky in a different way, how can I get that out of them? How can I give them the opportunity to do that, rather than just hammering them with the same “what you should be doing?” So that certainly has really lived with me.
Abbie Hickman 33:31
A dear friend of mine now I am godmother to her child, Jackie, who I met when I was at Alpro keeps me… I don’t know if you guys experience this, but you know how much easier it is to give advice to other people. Jackie is the one who gives all the advice that I would give to her back to me. So she is my champion. She makes me believe in myself when I absolutely am not. She put me forward for the Marketing Academy Scholarship, which I was lucky enough to do a couple of years ago. And I think having someone in your life who’s been really helpful to me is that she knows my world. She’s also in marketing so we can talk about work and get it. And having someone who you can bounce off the stuff that takes up so much of your life, you know, on your day job, but also someone who has an outside perspective is just invaluable. And having her, you know, being my champion. And like I say, believing in me when I don’t believe in myself is enormous.
Abbie Hickman 34:34
And then the Marketing Academy, I would say, has been another enormous life changing experience. And for people who are listening who don’t know, it’s a, it’s a two parts of it a scholarship or a fellowship. But I was lucky enough to be on the scholarship. It’s a pretty exclusive programme, so 30 scholars per year chosen from, you know, 600 applicants, and it is not a course in marketing, it’s a course in leadership and better understanding yourself, better understanding how you show up for others, better understanding what good leadership looks like, and really, God, putting you through your paces of tears and wine and more tears and then more wine. And it’s a wonderful experience. And that that, really, I would say, has, has shaped, certainly, where I am now and the job that I’m doing.
Tamara Littleton 35:26
And can I jump in there, actually? Because I think that’s obviously, you know, that I’m a big fan of The Marketing Academy and one of the trainers there as well. So how would you define great leadership generally? And you know, perhaps, what is the sense of it for you now?
Abbie Hickman 35:44
I think great leadership for me has always, there’s certainly coming back to when I was a kid in that kind of defender role. There’s something in great leadership for me, which is about speaking up and using your voice and not letting things just be, if they could be better, they should be better. And I think particularly that the more I’ve grown in my career, I feel I have more of a responsibility to call out when I when I see things that are wrong in just discriminatory, you know, unfair, whatever it is, however, however difficult and scary that might be, I think there’s a an enormous role that we have to play as leaders to do that, to react to the stuff that we see and to call it out.
Abbie Hickman 36:35
Because if we don’t, then who will, quite frankly, and the thing that really motivates me is …so here’s an example, I had a situation with a previous CEO, actually, who was sexually harassing, like it is probably the best way to describe it. We were in a situation where we were having drinks, he was actually his leaving do, we were having drinks, and he came over to me in a bar and asked me what positions I liked. Did I like dressing up, you know? And I was just in the middle of this bar, just not knowing what to say and, and I’m fortunate enough that I have enough gumption that I just walked away, you know
Tamara Littleton 37:22
So sorry that happened.
Abbie Hickman 37:23
Oh, thank you. But nothing, nothing is gonna… I am lucky enough that the experiences in my life have taught me that that is not my fault. That is him, and I spoke up about it, and I went to HR the next day, and blah, blah, blah things, you know, went from there. The biggest motivating factor that I had is that, if he’s doing this to me, and, you know, I wasn’t, I was a senior brand manager, equivalent kind of level. I’d been there for, for five years, probably four years at this point. I wasn’t senior, but there were junior brand managers in our team, and there was a receptionist, and there were admin people, and if he was going to do that to me, what could he do to them, to people who don’t feel like they can have a voice or they can stand up to him, and they’re too worried about what it will do to their career if they do so for me, reacting to that stuff Is is really important. I know it’s hard, but I think, I think we have to… sorry.
Tamara Littleton 38:25
No, no don’t say sorry. It’s absolutely fine. Now I think I was actually just going to build on that, because you used a very important phrase there, if not me, then who? I think that’s what you said. And I just want to dig into that a little bit more, because there is the speaking out for those who don’t have a voice. And it feels like we’re in that place at the moment, in many senses, with, you know, DEI rollbacks and the geopolitical landscape. But would you say that that’s a sort of a similar thing, that we need leaders to sort of stand up for, what is right at the moment?
Abbie Hickman 39:03
Yes. I know it’s really hard, and it’s really, you know, I am in a privately owned business. I’m very fortunate. I know it’s very easy for me to sit here and say yes, when my business is not threatened by that. But it comes back to, if not us and who? And you know, if we just go along with the people out there, the, you know, the bad leaders, the typical good old fashioned alpha leaders who think that domination over collaboration and empowering people and building them up is the way to win. The people who think that it is a zero sum game, the ones who think you have to lose in order for me to win, I can’t see how giving in to them ends. Well, I really don’t. And you know, I’m not, I’m not completely convinced. Well actually, I am a consumer who, it’s probably because I’m in marketing. I own a Tesla, and I regret buying that car, and I have ordered a bumper sticker that says “I regret buying this car”, because for me, that is now a signal of, “Oh, geez. Who do they think I believe in?” I know that that isn’t often the case for consumers. You know, they’re not going to look at who is rolling back their DEI programmes, or who is giving in to negative powers that be, but at the very least, it is affecting your people.
Tamara Littleton 40:29
Yeah.
Abbie Hickman 40:29
At the very least, you know those who work for you are losing hope, are losing belief in what you do and what you stand for. And I think that uncertainty, disillusionment. There was the marketing week survey which came out, which spoke about engagement and and, and the Gallup survey as well, which spoke about disengagement in the workforce. The world is exhausting, and if you also go to work and face if work is not a bit of a safety net, where you feel and see people who look like you, who are like you, who think like you, not not, I don’t say, think like you in a in a kind of generic everyone must think the same. I mean, in a sense of people who will stand up for whatever they believe is right. That becomes really disheartening, and that makes me worry. That I find, I find that concerning.
Tamara Littleton 40:49
Well, I’m just so pleased to hear that we have more leaders like you who are sort of, you know, willing to put your neck out and and, you know, hopefully make changes, because that’s what we do need now. And I know it’s something that the Marketing Academy is also looking at. So it’s a kind of, watch this space absolutely going. Let’s shift from here, though, because now it’s time to move into more of a fast paced Q&A. So I’m going to hand it back to Wendy with the first question.
Wendy Christie 41:55
Thank you, Tamara. What’s your idea of a perfect weekend?
Abbie Hickman 41:59
Oh, the Bank Holiday was my perfect weekend. I read a cosy crime book. Agatha Christie, mainly. Excellent. Ben, my partner, is a chef. He cooked for me. Delightful. I did a jigsaw puzzle with my mum. Happy. And I’ve got my eight godchildren, so I saw one of them.
Wendy Christie 42:21
Fantastic, lovely, very wholesome. If you could time travel to any point, it could be the past or the future with no consequence, where and when would you travel to?
Abbie Hickman 42:35
Can I have two?
Wendy Christie 42:36
Yes, you can, of course.
Abbie Hickman 42:38
First would be some point in the future. I don’t know when I want to with everything that we’ve just spoken Tamara about what’s going on, to go forwards and see how this ends, see what happens, see in four years time when Trump is a goner. Hopefully, fingers crossed, good lord, I hope other things are happening and to see what happened until then and be able to go, Okay, this is scary. This is, this is what. What flags can I raise? If I could do that, that would be dreamy. And I would also love to go back to… my birthday is in July. So when I was young, we always used to have a family barbecue for my birthday, and everyone would come. And when I say everyone, I mean dad and ex wife and side of family, mum and sister and side of family, cousins, everyone. I would love to go back to one of those birthdays and just you know, when I was like seven, just see me running around my cousins having a lovely time, and listen to the conversation and be surrounded by that many people who love each other again.
Wendy Christie 43:42
Oh, that does sound really lovely, being able to do that, also with the benefit of knowing, knowing now the value of it. When you’re seven, you’re not thinking about that stuff. That does sound wonderful. Yeah. How would your friends describe you?
Abbie Hickman 43:57
Right, I started off asking my brother this question. He said, tall, female and 36.
Wendy Christie 44:03
Ah, man. Then you asked some women
Abbie Hickman 44:05
Exactly! So generous was a word that always came up, curious, intuitive and empathetic. Those were the words that came up the most. And I think generous and empathetic are words that I pride myself on. So I was very happy to hear those.
Wendy Christie 44:27
Lovely
Tamara Littleton 44:29
Those are great descriptions. Are you a karaoke kind of person? Okay, do you have a go to song?
Abbie Hickman 44:35
Proud Mary, I absolutely butcher it like rubbish. I’m so bad, so bad.
Tamara Littleton 44:42
Do you do the slow intro?
Abbie Hickman 44:43
I try and do the slow intro. I get a bit impatient. I have a drink whilst I wait for it to finish, and then I jump up dance moves and all fantastic.
Tamara Littleton 44:53
Okay, how would you fare in a zombie apocalypse?
Abbie Hickman 44:57
Awfully terrible. I. Like home comforts. I like home comforts. And I also would not be able to look at a stray dog like I would. I would adopt all the animals, and I would just be given away to the zombies by the animals who were around me. That’s what I suspect. Or, I’d be protected. Maybe that is a survival technique.
Wendy Christie 45:19
Yes.
Abbie Hickman 45:19
Maybe, who knows.
Tamara Littleton 45:21
They would hide you in the woods or something.
Abbie Hickman 45:22
Yeah, bury me.
Tamara Littleton 45:26
If you could be remembered for one thing, what would it be?
Tamara Littleton 45:29
Gosh, this sounds incredibly arrogant. So having an impact is one of my core values. I need to be feeling like I have, I have, again, I’m having an impact, but I want to be remembered for being significant. I don’t mean like, significant on a world stage. I just mean in the lives of the people I know. I want them to feel I mattered, I made a difference, and, like, there was something unique that I bought. I think that’s what I mean by the significant bit, you know, I’m not just a friend. I’m that friend.
Wendy Christie 46:02
Right.
Abbie Hickman 46:03
Yeah, very needy.
Tamara Littleton 46:04
Love that!
Abbie Hickman 46:04
I’m a very needy person.
Wendy Christie 46:06
I think, very honest person. If Tamara and I could gift you one extra hour every day, what would you do with it?
Abbie Hickman 46:15
My head says I would do exercise. I hate exercise. My head says exercise. My heart says I would cook and make lots more food, and realistically, I’d probably just whittle it away. You know, during the washing I’m not, I’m not a good organiser of my own time. You would, I’d be like, Oh that extra hour, I just finished a spreadsheet I could have done in half the time.
Tamara Littleton 46:36
That’s the problem with it. When you start going down the route of the truth. I mean, I’d probably waste it on social media, but is it wasting it? I’ve learned.
Abbie Hickman 46:45
if you’re happy.
Tamara Littleton 46:49
Thank you, Abbie, thank you. It’s been an absolute joy to have you on the podcast. Thank you for inviting me before we go. I just want to sort of give you the opportunity to have the platform to just leave us with any closing thoughts.
Abbie Hickman 47:01
I think the closing thought is repetition, but if not you, then who? And if not now, then when?
Wendy Christie 47:13
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