Case study · Pro Global

Building a marketing function from nothing, inside a business that was growing fast.

Pro Global is a specialist insurance services group working across the London market and internationally. In 2020 it had no marketing function. Six years on it has a clear position, a brand the market recognises, an audience four times the size and a team of two that has never needed to grow.

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Client: Pro Global, insurance services
Role: Head of Marketing and External Communications, first hire in the function
Period: October 2020 to 2026
Team: Two, plus agencies

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01 · The situation

Six divisions, six stories, and nobody whose job it was to write one.

Pro Global had grown into six divisions, each with its own clients, its own way of describing itself and its own view of what the group was for. There was no marketing function, no shared story and no one whose job it was to write one. The people were the strength of the business, and almost nobody outside it knew.

The brief was to build the function from scratch, at a cost the business could carry, while the business itself was changing quickly.

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02 · What I did

Position first. Then brand, then the estate, then the machine.

The early work was listening: senior interviews across the business, a competitive audit and a map of who owned which territory in the market. That produced a position the divisions could all stand behind, and a rebrand and repositioning that was rolled out globally, from the offices to the employee values.

Then the estate. A five-site web estate was rebuilt around the new position so that the case study and brochure libraries did the work a sales team would otherwise have to do.

Then the machine. An agency ecosystem review and competitive tender put the right partners in the right roles at a lower running cost. The first digital campaign tested whether a specialist service could be sold to a cold audience in another market, and found it could. PR and external communications ran through the same small team.

Throughout, the function stayed at two people. The divisions began bringing their own conference, sponsorship and membership spend under marketing management, unasked, because it was working.

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03 · What the business got

The same function, doing a much bigger job.

A position the whole group could say in one breath, and a brand that made the market see the capability it had already built.
An audience four times the size, with search and the content library now doing a large share of the work of bringing the right people in.
A marketing function that ran on two people and a lean budget while the business grew quickly and profitably, without adding marketing headcount.

Capability had outgrown perception. The job was to close that gap without spending like a business twice the size.

Chris Buer

What this means for you

This is the job I do for clients now.

Build or reset the function, set the position, run the agencies and give the board a marketer who has sat on the other side of the table. One to three days a week, for a fixed term.

See how I work

Talk to Chris

Start with a thirty-minute conversation. No slides.

If what you are building looks anything like this, it is worth half an hour to find out whether I can help.

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