Norman Coburn graduated from University of Strathclyde in 1988 with joint honours in Economics & Marketing, then a year later, the CIM Diploma in Marketing. He worked in building products and later consumer magazines. He joined Noble Marketing in 1997, later working for SmithKline Beecham/GSK, Tetley GB, Seagram, Bernard Matthews, Warburtons and Nestle Purina Pet Care. He has supplied data expertise to Lego, Philips, Bayer, Hallmark cards and Pearson Academic Publishing These roles were primarily analytical in nature; organising, reporting and applying marketing data. He has high end Excel skills and is a persuasive presenter of fact based marketing.

 

Audrey Coburn (née Noble) graduated from University of Strathclyde in 1989 with joint honours in Marketing & German, to which she added the CIM Diploma in Marketing. She moved to Germany where she had a year-long marketing apprenticeship in a forerunner of GSK Consumer division, then returned to the UK to join AC Nielsen as an Account Director. This gave her extensive exposure to FMCG brands such as Nurofen, Oral B, Lucozade, Ribena and Aquafesh. Audrey’s fluency with marketing data made her a key member of trade marketing teams at P&G, Oral B, J&J and Kimberley Clarke where she helped achieve significant share of trade gains for corporate clients. In 1994 she started Noble Marketing, building a team of experienced sub-contractors to service mainly UK based clients. Audrey now splits her time between Noble Marketing and running a faith based charity called East Neuk Lighthouse.

Case study – Marketing Analysis

 

The soft drinks category is busy and fast changing. A few years back, GSK, then owners of the Lucozade brand, contacted us to provide support to the category team. During a blizzard of new launches, the team were under constant pressure to steer their new products to market as well as counter competitive threats. The principle retailers were only listening to fact-based arguments, so the pressure was on to design and refresh category analysis packages, support the trade teams in proposing data-based range recommendations and run ad hoc analysis across multiple data sources.

Years later, members of that original project team who have moved on to others firms and industries still call on us to supplement their local analysis teams.

Case Study – Conference Services

 

Refuel is a Christian Festival taking place on agricultural land near Fochabers, in the Scottish Highlands, for a week in July. We were first contacted in 2017 to do a post-event analysis. The site team had gathered paper questionnaires and a mass of ad hoc feedback. We were tasked with managing data entry and consolidating the responses into a document that would guide the future development of the festival.

Skip forward to 2019. The event had grown and the organizers recognized multiple sub-groups with the delegate list. From campers to day visitors; from a small army of volunteers through to a cluster of international speakers, the site team decided to evaluate them all. A series of questionnaires were targeted at the key sub groups and implemented on paper and online. This helped flush out key development points for future years as well as steer investment decisions.