Happy New Year! Artificial intelligence, human intelligence and the art of the marketer
As 2025 begins we start by saying a massive 'thank you' to those who've helped make The Raikes Journal, we think - pound for pound - Gloucestershire’s best-read business email newsletter.
Dear readers,
Welcome to the first edition of The Raikes Journal of 2025. I hope you had a great Christmas and New Year.
We begin the year with an edition to give a massive ‘thank you’ to everyone who subscribed in 2024 and became part of our growing readership (more of which below).
And I wanted in particular to say a massive ‘thank you’ to those who have supported Raikes commercially and made it all possible so far.
Without the support of leadership development specialists QuoLux, accountants Randall & Payne, legal experts Willans LLP, Merrell People (an expert in helping businesses and organisations change) and Hartpury University and Hartpury College, Raikes would never have been able to relaunch.
These were our Founding Partners for 2024.
If you have read a story on one of our editions to date and enjoyed it, if you are one of the businesses we’ve written about, if you’ve had your event covered, if you’re one of the charities we’ve supported, or if you have learned more about your county via Raikes it’s because of those Founding Partners.
They put their faith in the vision of a credible, journalistically-led digital email magazine with a focus on business, education, training and charities. Their support has been incredibly humbling and their help with many articles since incredible.
Our stories are not press releases, listicles or other low-hanging fruit, but original reports and articles. We speak to members of our community, get their views and tell their stories. It’s the bit we really enjoy.
And less than 12 months into the relaunch, we think The Raikes Journal is already publishing perhaps the best-read email edition, pound for pound, in the county. And we have thousands of social media followers too. Think where we could be by the end of 2025!
If you would like to join those partners this year, please do contact us.
We now feel comfortable inviting new faces to step into the fold. You can even sponsor an edition this year (more on that below).
And then there are our Founding Members, those who backed us by paying more than the annual subscription. Their support for this small start-up was also vital.
We have written about some of those Founding Members over the last year and used stories they have fed us, but have never revealed their identity as they’ve wished to remain anonymous (that’s despite being allowed an article to shout about themselves in lieu of their support).
Until now. Towards the end of last year we finally convinced one of them to do an interview. That article, is below. Thank you, Darren Stevens!
And thank you to everyone who agreed to speak to The Raikes Journal and create the hundreds of original stories we wrote and published last year.
If good local journalism about Gloucestershire is important to you, if you want to help create something new, that is independent and fights the county’s corner, if you want to put that back in place in the county, then please support us too.
Andrew Merrell (editor).
NB: Raikes publishes probably the best-read business-related email ‘newsletter’, pound for pound, in Gloucestershire.
If you have a story, an issue, a news item, a charity or an interview you want us to write about or investigate, challenge the powers that be on, then please email me: andrew.merrell@raikesjournal.co.uk.
Some briefing Notes…
🗳️ Just before Christmas we did a big interview with the leader of Gloucestershire County Council, Stephen Davies, as the county learned it was about to begin the journey to become a unitary authority (you can read it here). It’s now emerged the county has asked the Government for permission to postpone its elections in May 2025 to give it time to prepare for that reorganisation. The challenge is to bring its six district local authorities - Gloucester, Cheltenham, Stroud, Tewkesbury, the Cotswolds and the Forest of Dean - under the control of a single county-wide authority. According to the BBC, if that application to postpone is successful, elections for the new shadow unitary authority would take place in 2026.
🌧️ Flood warnings remain in place across Gloucestershire today following a weekend of heavy rain and melting snow finding its way into rivers and onto roads across the county. Part of the A40 and M5 in the county were flooded overnight and Junction 11 slip road of the motorway was shut as a result. There was also flooding elsewhere, from Bishops Cleeve to Stroud and across to Berkeley and along the Golden Valley.
🎶 News that a Gloucestershire record shop has won a national award might bring a smile to the faces of vinyl lovers in the county. Sound Records in Stroud, based in George Street, has been named Record Shop of the Year in the Songs Behind the Music (SBTM) Awards 2024. Commenting on social media, SBTM said: ‘This year’s awards were by far our biggest and most competitive to date, with over 18,000 votes being submitted across the categories.” The result was decided by a public vote.
🎖️ There was recognition in the New Year’s Honours List for Gloucestershire campaigner against domestic violence and stalking, Nick Gazzard. The father of Hollie Gazzard was awarded an OBE for services to tackling violence against women. Hollie died after an attack by an ex-partner and for the last 10 years her father has made it his life’s work to help those affected by domestic abuse and stalking, founding the Hollie Gazzard Trust. Its work is rooted in prevention, education, and raising awareness and it now works UK-wide.
👨🏫 South Gloucestershire and Stroud College (SGS) has announced the appointment of David Withey (pictured below) as the new CEO and principal, effective from the end of March 2025. Withey will join SGS from the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA), where he is chief executive officer. He is said to bring ‘a wealth of experience and public service leadership gained in both the UK and Australia, whilst having a strong understanding of the further education sector through his time leading the delivery of funding of Colleges and Skills Providers within England. Withey will take over from Kevin Hamblin, CEO since October 2001.
💷 The Benefact Group, the Brockworth-headquartered financial services group and parent company of major county employer Ecclesiastical, is urging all of us to get voting for the charity, not-for-profit organisation or community interest group we think should receive £1,000 as part of its Movement for Good campaign. Fifty organisations are set to benefit from its handout with the first draw taking place on 27 January. So, in the words of Benefact Group, “it’s one nomination per charity, per person! So if you want to support numerous organisations, you don’t have to worry about choosing one, because you can nominate them all”. Find out more here.
💻 Fancy a new office space for 2025. Here’s your chance to try out one of Gloucestershire’s newest and most high profile buildings for free. Hub 8 by Plexal, the co-working space in Cheltenham’s MX Centre is offering a chance to locate yourself there and experience the buzz of its community all week, from Monday 20 January to Friday 24 January from 7.30am to 7.30pm. Find out more here.
Charity raises £21 million to transform 365-acres of Gloucestershire farmland
Hundreds of acres of Gloucestershire farmland will be allowed to flood and return to saltmarsh after a national charity based in the county raised £21 million to make the ambitious project possible. The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT), which runs Slimbridge nature reserve near Berkeley, has bought 365-acre (148-hectare) of farmland at Awre in the Forest of Dean, a peninsula described by an oxebode in the River Severn with a view to turning it back into salt marsh. According to the WWT the site was likely to have been salt marsh in the distant past. It claims restoring it will improve biodiversity, reduce issues with flooding and help the environment.
A date for your diary…
Investment property owners through to those considering investing in the residential rental market are invited to a seminar by Willans LLP solicitors. The event, called ‘A Guide to managing your investment property in 2025’ will feature the Cheltenham firm’s head of residential property, Suzanne O’Riordan, James Melvin-Bath, who heads Willans’ residential landlord and tenant disputes team, along with guest speakers Vanessa Clark (Azets) and Paul Davis (Ludice Wealth Management). Topics covered will include current landlord legal requirements and responsibilities, pitfalls to avoid, legal changes to consider following the Budget and the Renters’ Rights Bill, a look at current rental markets, funding your mortgage, financing to build your portfolio and more. Tuesday 14 January from 5.30pm to 7pm at Gloucester Guild Hall. Find out more here.
* Everything you read on The Raikes Journal is made possible by our incredible Founding Partners: QuoLux, Willans LLP, Gloucestershire College, Merrell People and Randall & Payne, our sponsors Hartpury University and Hartpury College, our Founding Members and wonderful paying subscribers.
If you upgrade to paid you’ll be part of this community interest company too. We are dedicated to delivering quality journalism for Gloucestershire, to championing the county, in particular its businesses, charities, education and training providers, and to helping create an even stronger community. If you upgrade to paid you will be able to see past the paywalls often put on our second and third email editions of the week, that lock all our archive after two weeks and lock our rolling Top 100 Businesses in Gloucestershire series. You will be able to comment on our stories too. You’ll be helping make this CIC sustainable.
You can sign up to receive your two extra editions a week and see past all our paywalls for just £2.30 a week - or £1.80 a week if two or more people sign up at once. Or go all in and become one of our Founding Partners or Founding Members!
Artificial intelligence, human intelligence and the art of the marketer
When The Raikes Journal was in its infancy various people stepped forward to become Founding Members, supporting it financially and with their expertise. We remain extremely grateful, and introduce you to one of those.
Our big interview today is with someone many of you may already know well if you are in business in Gloucestershire and prone to networking.
His clients will certainly know him well, and it is those relationships - as you are about to find out - that are key to him having the impact he does on their businesses.
For many the art of the marketer remains a mystery – it’s something about social media, about profile, about driving business - but they’re unclear whether it is also about sales directly or even what the point is. Until they find a good marketeer.
For Darren Stevens, a man whose business continues to thrive, despite change after change after change to the tools at a marketing person’s disposal, the same priorities remain – understand a client’s business, understand the targets, build the relationship and be accountable.
Marketing has for some become a focus on social media and followers, but Stevens will remind you of the need to measure its contribution and not to confuse vanity metrics with material ones.
If you’re going to talk about opens, clicks or a percentage mix, you need to connect those numbers to a strategic outcome. If you can’t, then it’s an “elevator music” metric.
We chat about artificial and social media, about the importance of trust from the business owner or manager, about good data, clear instruction and targets, and what it really means to deliver good marketing. And we talk abotu how he got to where he is.
When we meet for this interview Stevens has just come from a session with his personal trainer and we head for a cafe, but not for the expected coffee. Caught in the moment I find myself following his good example and ordering a banana smoothie.
Before I can ask what on earth we’re drinking (which was very nice, I might add) we get talking about his son, Matt Stevens, who has decided to postpone any forays into further or higher education and pursue a business he has been growing almost without realising it.
As a fan of Cheltenham Town FC his pre and post-match YouTube videos (@MattMS) have gained 2,800-plus followers and the odd trip to horseracing, something the town is also synonymous with, have also won attention and generated income.
Stevens senior is clearly loving the entrepreneurial drive and willingness to make the leap of faith to being self-employed he made all those years ago.
We are supposed to be talking about him and his long and successful career helping Gloucestershire firms through his own business, Prestbury Marketing.
We’ve sold the idea to him as pay-back for his business supporting The Raikes Journal as one of its Founding Members, those who overpaid their subscription to help us get off the ground this year (go to our subscribe page to find out more).
But it’s really an excuse to interview someone who knows marketing (that mysterious and often vital art) and the county’s business community intimately and has helped with the rise and rise of scores of firms here and beyond.
Who are those firms?
“One of those first clients, Glevum Windows, is still a client,” he adds, clearly proud of the long-standing relationship.
Many of the others he lists too, but not for the record.
He has sat at board level for the Forest of Dean-based firm and for other companies – a transition that developed from the trusted relationships he forged with each company and level of detail he was prepared to digest to understand the business.
Gary Jones, the founder of Glevum, describes Prestbury Marketing as “results orientated” and “brilliant marketers who add value across the business”.
Marketing, for Stevens, does not start and end with good social media and cannot be solved by artificial intelligence.
We discuss both of those and how he sees them too - as tools of his trade, but the real process starts with understanding the business.
And that brings us back to the detail.
“In an ideal world I need to look at the business as a whole. I need to understand what the turnover is, what the profitability is, the business split, profit splits, what services it offers, the trends for the last three years, I need to understand its priorities, values, sales processes, website figures,” he said, reeling off this list and more.
“I am on a retainer with a number of clients, but when I have done what I can I will say so. Those clients have chosen to keep me on anyway.
“If a business comes to me and I look at what they want and think I am not the right person, but know someone who is, I will tell them both those things. But I always say to people is ‘I will give you an hour for free to make sure’,” he said.
What that means is if someone wants simply social media, or something he believes can be best done by one of his associates and doesn’t need his level of attention, he will recommend them instead. It is a principal that pays back over time.
“I once spent an hour with a particular business. They were in a good place, the website was working well, social media was working well, they had good conversion rate and I had to say to them ‘I don’t think there is anything you need me for’.
“I set out four or five things I thought they could work on and gave them that information for free.
“It was a shame, as I would have liked to work with them, but they just didn’t need me.
“Then three or four months later I got an enquiry from someone who wanted help with their marketing and had been told ‘you need to speak to Darren Stevens’.
“That person had spoken to the business I had turned down all those months before.”
Stevens started his working life at Bang & Olufsen, the Danish high-end consumer electronics company that had a base in Gloucester way back when.
There was a particular focus on market research and analysis of that data, a skill set that he found he had an aptitude for, understood and has remained front and centre ever since.
Some may know the name Chelsea Building Society, now part of Yorkshire Building Society, but days were when it was the fourth largest society of its kind in the UK with assets of £13 billion and 35 branches and was headquartered in Cheltenham.
Stevens led its marketing team.
“I was at Chelsea for 22 years. That was 16 years ago,” he recalls, possibly wincing slightly at the passing of time.
Since then, it’s been about Prestbury Marketing. It is a role that’s made him a well-known face of the county’s business scene collaborating with Cheltenham Chamber of Trade, the former GFirst LEP, and numerous other business organisations.
The world may have been less electronic back when he started, barely online, but it was just as complicated for the marketeer facing tight deadlines.
“There was all sorts of media – commercial radio, print, direct mail, television, national and local newspapers,” he recalls, describing the logistics of moving hard copies of adverts, scripts, artwork between himself and the client at speed, to deadline and pre-internet.
What comes through again is the importance of managing relationships in order to properly understand what people want and how to deliver that by understanding their business.
Referencing the constant that remains a priority to this day, he adds: “Establishing return on investment was particularly hard. People think that is easier to do nowadays, but it is just different.
“You can look at how many new followers you get on social media or what your audience for a post was. Marketing in today’s world can seem easy when you look at it like that.
“But that doesn’t tell you enough. You have to look harder, and most people don’t
“Just who are you reaching through social media? Who is engaging with your posts? Is that social media audience clicking through to your website? If not, why not?
“You must always start with understanding what a business wants to achieve and then understand what is going on.
“Are they achieving what they want? Why do your customers like you? Why did you lose that sale? What could you change to make things better? That sort of information can be gold dust.”
He reels off a story about being asked to look at a new website in progress for someone as a favour.
He soon found himself seated in front of a project that had missed out the key functionality the business wanted to start with and would mean it failed to make the most of potentially valuable data.
It didn’t pay him to do so, but he felt obliged to help make sure everything that needed to be there was onboarded.
The project not only delivered, but the relationships between designer and client remained intact. Again, the payback was the mention of his name that went through the business community.
Not all challenges are so complex. One client, that despite a great reputation as a niche legal practice, did not appear top in any of the online searches and felt it was losing out and called Stevens.
“It wasn’t because people were not happy with their service. When we asked them, they were very happy.
“It was because the firm had never asked any of its clients to leave an online review.
“They now appear top in most searches,” he said.
He has lost count of the firms he has seen wake up to the potential value of marketing, take someone on in a rush, assume the problem is fixed and then get frustrated when the results are not what they want.
“The mistake a lot of small businesses make is they employ someone in marketing, and then don’t give them any direction. They need to give them targets. Often they expect them to do sales too. You have to be clear what you want.”
It’s those initial conversations Stevens takes seriously to assess whether both parties will get something from the relationship.
As well as a willingness to use associates, to ensure his own time is best spent and companies receive value for money too, he’s also found himself helping organisations solve their marketing challenges in other creative ways that use his skills and prove cost-effective.
“Simplicity (the Forest of Dean based finance house for the recruitment sector) asked me to help them recruit an intern while their marketing person was on maternity leave,” he said.
What he ended up doing was identifying talent already in Simplicity’s team and stepping into a coaching/mentoring role to help them develop. It was both cost-effective, produced excellent results and helped develop a staff member’s skills and career.
Influential Cheltenham-based cyber-focused sector group CyNam also brought Stevens in to help mentor its marketing apprentice. It’s a role he clearly enjoys.
As well as a lack of direction from business leaders, he said new marketeers also often suffered from becoming swamped by demands within organisations that believed the answer was simply more and more marketing.
“A loan marketeer may get demands from three or four different parts of the business. If a marketeer is a junior they can feel they cannot push back and end of reacting to people who shout the loudest just to stop them shouting.”
He gives an example of a large law firm he was asked to come in to look at when the managing partner was not happy with marketing.
The firm had just put some of its specific products front and centre on its website. He asked if this signposted the business’s priorities?
He was shocked to discover it did not. The marketeer had been following instructions of another manager within the firm.
“Businesses have to trust their marketeers. They have to tell them about future plans. Otherwise you are setting them up to fail. If the business is looking to sell, they have to market it in a certain way.
“If you ask a manager ‘what is your profit margin?’, ‘which are the most profitable products or services?’, and he doesn’t know, how can they tell the marketeer?”
What about AI?
“Do I feel AI will put marketeers out of a job? Maybe some large organisations that have a lot of staff, ‘yes’,” he says, before diving into an explanation of how he has been using it to speed up his own work – saving money for clients and making for quicker delivery too.
He will use it to source information, deliver the right kind of data, the right kind of copy for the right algorithms and search engines before customising it to suit the business’s needs.
“I’ve really tried to embrace and understand its capabilities. I think it’s a great tool, if used right. But you have to be aware it does not get things right all the time - and there are pitfalls.
“Google, for example, takes a dim view of AI-generated content,” he added, referring to search engine optimisation, the method by which the likes of Google analyse websites and direct people to them.
“But if you are putting together some copy, for example, what might have taken you one and a half hours might now take you 30 minutes and then you can personalise and check it, add specific detail. And you can give that value back to the client.”
In other words digital tools can simply make everything more efficient and help with accountability.
The human touch, the relationship between marketer and those who run the business, understanding exactly what the drivers and targets are, remains key.
And once more we’re back where we started, talking about the power of those personal relationships and the trust built within them, the understanding that comes from them, coupled with experience, that makes possible the ultimate goal - being to deliver on those business priorities. It can make it fun too.
For Stevens, the beautiful irony of the age of AI may just be that it is putting the power of good people front and centre, and for someone like Stevens, who intends to continue to drive Prestbury Marketing for some time yet, that’s no bad thing at all.
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