HCF looks for new CMO after Williams departs

HCF has confirmed it’s on the hunt for a new chief marketing officer following the departure of Jenny Williams after two years in the role.

Williams left the organisation on 5 May after joining as its CMO in March 2015. During her time with the health insurance provider, she was given the remit of implementing change, and spearheaded a digital marketing transformation that included implementing a new marketing technology stack, customer segmentation approach, website, and marketing department restructure.

Williams was also responsible for relaunching the HCF brand nationally from May last year, work that revolved around the new brand proposition: ‘Health comes first’.

In a statement, HCF said the work undertaken on marketing transformation had progressed to a point where it’s now looking to shift its attention to growth and leads generation.

“As the marketing transformation journey is now well progressed and the business is looking to refocus on growth and leads generation, Jenny has decided to explore new options outside HCF that will best leverage her skills and experience,” the statement read.

“We are grateful for the contribution Jenny has made to HCF and we wish her all the best for the future.”

In an interview with CMO last year, Williams said she was working to three objectives: Customer centricity and shifting towards more needs-based communication; empowerment of customers; and marketing efficiency through measurement, cross-media optimisation and attribution, geo-targeting and offline/online connectivity.

The first manifestation of HCF’s transformation was a new customer-facing website, launched in May. Significant work had been done behind the scenes evaluating the customer journey around the initial decision stage, as well as on usability, Williams said.

“The second thing is about how we leverage engagement post-purchase so we can start to direct people towards services we may offer,” Williams said.

HCF also adopted Adobe’s Marketing Cloud suite, adopting new campaign, analytics, content management tools.

But the people change was just as important, and Williams realigned the marketing department against four core functional pillars, each with day-to-day tasks as well as more strategic responsibility across the various transformation work streams.

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