Profiling business leaders

One of my journalistic strengths is interviewing key personalities from the world's of business and entertainment. Here's a recent profile published by Event magazine of Graham Kemp - the newly appointed chairman of RPM.

The recently appointed chairman of the RPM Group is the proud owner of nine acres of Surrey. Married to a qualified garden designer, Graham Kemp, his wife and five children have spent the last three years developing an old farmhouse into a family estate. The project seemed an ambitious one until he confesses that he has in fact rebuilt every home he has ever lived in, including the residency he occupied in Chicago for just three years during his nine-year tenure as global CEO of The Marketing Store Worldwide.
“It’s a bit of a disease,” he admits. “I’m not interested in being a property developer, I just enjoy refurbishing properties and the fun we have throughout the process.”
Kemp is the first chairman RPM Group has ever appointed since the agency, which specializes in experiential, field marketing, staffing and branding city centers, was founded in 1993.
He brings to the role, more than 20 years experience in the marketing communications industry. And since his appointment in August he has already launched an ‘Open Road’ initiative comprising 15 measurable objectives shared out across department heads for the next three years.
Contrary to the ‘Changing Rooms’ nature of his home interiors interest however, Kemp has not joined RPM to rebuild the company from the ground up. In his words: “I am here to mentor their next levels of management and coach better performance whilst providing fresh thinking, invention and inspiration.”
Initially the chairman’s position is a non-executive role, which puts pay to the observation that Kemp has most likely been brought in to prepare the group for a sale. “Currently I don’t own equity in RPM so it would be of no benefit to me,” he states. “The RPM directors are too ambitious to build the business to consider a sale. My experience tells me that you should always have it as a thought at the back of your mind when implementing strategy but preparing RPM for possible suitors is not part of my agenda.”
RPM managing director Hugh Robertson met his new chairman whilst on the board of the Marketing Communication Consultants Association, which Kemp has chaired since 2005. Kemp says he was impressed by Robertson’s professionalism and the RPM culture of genuinely caring about its people whilst actively encouraging them to express themselves. Robertson must have been impressed with Kemp’s track record for company growth.
In 1986, Kemp launched marketing promotions agency The Marketing Store and established its position within the retail sector. Within a month of starting the business, it won a promotion across 1,000 Argyll Group Presto stores (forerunner to Safeway) that equated to 80% of The Marketing Store’s first year projected turnover. Due to the nature of the supermarket retail industry at the time, Kemp’s contacts were often acquired, merged and dispersed across different retail companies. They would then turn back to him to run their in-store promotions and re-brand outlets that had been bought and needed transforming into names such as Gateway (forerunner to Somerfield). “The landscape was constantly changing and we always seemed to be on the right side of the fence whenever a merger occurred,” recalls Kemp. “The result was that we quadrupled the business in the first three years and went from three employees to a £4.5m business employing 30.”
At its peak, The Marketing Store had offices in Birmingham, Scotland and Leeds and employed 180 staff making it one of the top three promotional marketing firms in the UK. When a sale came, it was in March 1998 to MB Sales, a division of US company, the Havi Group. Kemp says: “The two companies were pulled together and called The Marketing Store Worldwide. I signed up for three years and ended up serving nine as global CEO, opening eight offices in countries such as Brazil, Australia, Canada and France and trebling the size of the operation.”
Kemp admits that staying longer in roles than he first intended is another of his personality traits and one that currently sees him serving on three boards within a music marketing rights company, a content provision publisher and an Irish marketing firm. His three-year plan for RPM therefore looks set to be only the beginning. And with an intent to become a fully-fledged share holding, equity-holding director, it may be that the long-term future for the RPM Group will also be of his hand.

Kemp on…
RPM’s portfolio of work. For me, the Sky Festival in Manchester stands out as a magnificent piece of work due to its sheer scale and logistics. The One Love campaign for Umbro is another incredible idea that shows the power of connecting to a global passion such as football.

Acquisitions as part of the RPM strategy. I think acquisitions should be looked at so I wouldn’t rule out that possibility. We are not on an acquisition trial but if they strategically help to build the business in the most effective way then they will be considered.

The marketing landscape. Where television advertising is loosing share, experiential and digital are gaining and they will grow closer together. The shift is away from efficiency (television, print, mass communication) and towards effectiveness. The most effective ways of marketing are no longer bound up in efficient methodologies. I don’t predict the demise of television advertising, I just see it being used in different ways and combined with more effective means.