Profile of Peter Stringham of HSBC

Here's a piece that appeared in Advertising Age last year.

Marketers are often asked to do the impossible. That’s what Canadian beer company Molson asked of Peter Stringham in the mid-1990s when he ran BBDO in Canada. The brewer was the largest in the country, but by only a few percentage points ahead of Labatt Breweries, which was coming up and fast with innovative product lines. Stringham’s client wanted to move away from Labatt with new products, but nothing seemed like it would do the job.

So Molson went to Stringham shortly after the New Year asking for help. What management wanted seemed impossible: research, design, and develop a new product with a complete marketing campaign and have everything in hands of consumers by May. Five months.

“We went back to them and said alright, we can do this, but there’s going to have to be a team of people from the agency and people from the brewery,” Stringham says, “and that team has to be given complete authority to develop the product, develop the marketing communications, everything.” It would be a group that, collectively, could approve all aspects of the task, from formulation of the new beer, packaging, marketing, and distribution. It would have complete responsibility – and complete authority.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and Molson agreed. The group worked hard, challenging the basic perceptions of how beer companies promoted their products to their core audiences: young men. By the end of May, Molson had a new product called Red Dog. “The astonishing thing is that it actually did launch in late May,” Stringham says. “It was the most successful launch that Molson had ever had of a new beer and the most successful launch of a new beer that Miller [which was handing U.S. sales] ever had.”

What Stringham saw was that good ideas may come from the lone genius, but big ideas – those that can transform a product, a campaign, a department, company, or even an industry – more often than not come from a group that has a clear mandate of what it needs to achieve and authority to carry out its plan.

He continues depend on such groups in his current position as group general manager of marketing at global banking firm HSBC. “We only became a global brand by rebranding almost 80 different banks in almost as many countries in 2000 as HSBC,” he says. There was nothing new in the positioning of being a global collection of local feel and presence. “What was transformational was this whole idea of how you execute.” One of Stringham’s project groups (“I was the client, so I was able to create the team,” he jokes.) realized that people like dealing with a global company if they can still feel as though they’ll be treated as individuals.

“It’s particularly important in the banking world because people feel they’re being treated like a number,” he explains. “We don’t try to push the same products in France that we do in the UK.” And a clever and funny marketing campaign emphasized the trouble people can get into when they don’t recognize that life and culture can be very different around the world. From its beginning in 2001, the brand last year was rated by Interbrand the 29th most valuable one in the world.

Who in the group came up with the idea? Stringham doesn’t know, or even care. The method’s success speaks for itself – and for HSBC.