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Shaun Powell is swapping credit cards for buckets and spades. Sean Brierley delves into Powell's past for clues to his surprising move from Barclaycard to Thomson Holidays
Barclaycard commercial director Shaun Powell is leaving the company to join Thomson Holidays as marketing director.
He fills the role vacated by Richard Bowden-Doyle who was promoted to deputy managing director last autumn. Bowden-Doyle retained control of marketing until last week, when he was made managing director (MW April 24). In his new role, Powell will also be in charge of sales for the travel company.
Powell becomes marketing director of the Thomson division that is concerned with short- and long-haul beach holidays - by far the bulk of the company's holiday business. Thomson's other division handles specialised holidays. This division is headed by commercial director Steve Gatley.
Powell will be responsible for continuing Thomson's "Tells it like it is" campaign, launched last year. This is intended to position the company as unique in the market by "telling the truth" about its own holiday destinations through the results of customer surveys which appear in the company's brochures. The strategy is backed by an ad campaign through BMP DDB.
Powell has been with Barclaycard for four years. Before that he was marketing controller at Homepride, which he joined from Sterling Health.
Barclaycard's bungled announcement that its commercial director Shaun Powell is quitting the credit card giant was reminiscent of a scene from one of its own commercials.
In keeping with the secret service theme of the Rowan Atkinson advertising, Powell, 34, agreed with Barclaycard that his destination would be kept secret.
However, a bubbly press officer rang Marketing Week to say: "Shaun Powell has resigned and is going to Thomson Holidays to be marketing director." Half an hour later, the same flustered press officer rang back to ask, in the true style of Richard Latham (Rowan Atkinson), if we could ignore the second piece of information that she had inadvertently given us.
How could we ignore the fact that Powell is leaving a company with the single most successful financial services brand in the history of marketing, and as a result of which he...