Sam Walker - Marketing Director, Co-op
The brief was simple enough: convince people that popping to the Co-op isn’t the expensive option. Sam Walker is now two instalments into “Pop to Co-op”, a platform built around the reasons people actually shop convenience, from meal-for-tonight to top-up missions to treats. He wanted something lasting rather than another campaign-to-campaign cycle, and the autumn chapter, soundtracked by Kurupt FM, leans into value as shoppers worry about rising costs. His own verdict on progress is characteristically measured: encouraging early signs, and “definitely not job done.” This is his second spell at Co-op. The first, as head of customer campaigns, included a fast-turnaround pandemic campaign that raised money for people in need and was named one of Twitter’s campaigns of the year. In between he spent four years at N Brown, rising to group marketing and creative director. Before all of it came a decade at Tesco that started with a graduate market research role in 2005.
Nicola McGee - Group Brand & Marketing Director, Bruntwood
Nicola McGee came to property from fast fashion, and the move was bigger than it looks. She spent nearly three years at Missguided running affiliates, then performance marketing, then media investment, after more than six years in affiliate marketing at Awin and MediaCom. In January 2021 she joined Bruntwood as group brand and marketing director, taking charge of the brand for a company whose workspaces and science campuses shape a good part of Manchester’s skyline. She has spoken candidly about the gap she saw between fashion brands that championed female empowerment in their campaigns and companies that didn’t live it internally. Her view is that real change has to start at leadership level and run through everything a business does. She has also been open about imposter syndrome, and about the relief of focusing less on other people’s opinions.
Janine Ferrie - CMO, Slater and Gordon Lawyers (UK)
Most of Janine Ferrie’s career has been spent making complicated, heavily regulated products feel approachable. Retirement housing at McCarthy & Stone for seven years. Chemicals at BASF. Banking at the Co-operative Bank during a period of upheaval for the institution. Then eight years at Together, the specialist lender, where she rose from head of marketing communications to group head of marketing. Slater and Gordon brought her in as chief marketing officer in April 2025, and the brief is familiar territory: raise the profile of a consumer law firm, sharpen its digital marketing, and connect the brand to its promise of accessible legal services. Nearly two decades of brand strategy across sectors that don’t sell themselves sit behind it, with most of the work done from Manchester.
Liz Chapman - CMO, Sedulo
For 24 years Liz Chapman worked the agency side, planning and buying media for brands including P&G, Nintendo, Iceland, Virgin, Greggs, Holland & Barrett and the Co-op. At Carat she sat on the UK senior leadership team and played a part in a collaboration between Microsoft and Virgin to build a 3D avatar. In August 2025 she crossed to the client side as chief marketing officer of Sedulo, the Manchester-headquartered advisory group, where she leads marketing, events and brand across its UK offices, including its “Be The Standard” leadership network. Her remit is to formalise and monetise those capabilities as the firm grows beyond financial advice. The move was less of a leap than it looks: she had already spent a year as a trustee of the Sedulo Foundation, which supports underprivileged children. She also sits on the board of the Manchester Publicity Association.
Vicky Monk - Director of Customer & Brand, AO
AO became the first company in the world to pass one million Trustpilot reviews this year, holding a 4.9 rating, and Vicky Monk is the person most responsible for protecting that number. Her argument is that in a market where product range, pricing and delivery look much the same everywhere, trust is the only real differentiator. She has backed it with money and nerve, cutting back on branded TV advertising, which she considers less targeted and more expensive, and moving spend into sponsorships, CRM, paid social, radio and out-of-home. AO’s marketing budget rose to £53.5 million in the year to March, alongside record profit. Monk joined the Bolton retailer straight from university in 2009 and has never worked anywhere else, still holding an operations director remit alongside customer and brand. Marketing Week named her to its 2026 Top 100.
Laura Proctor - CMO, Summize
“Rebrands are easy to be cynical about.” Laura Proctor said as much when Summize relaunched this year, and then explained why this one was different: the product changed first, and the brand caught up. The contract management company now describes itself as a contract intelligence system, with AI agents that answer legal questions inside Outlook, Teams, Slack and Word. Proctor joined as VP of marketing in 2022, relaunched the messaging within two months, and became CMO in 2023, sitting on the board. Her route here ran through Manchester’s tech scale-ups. At Avecto she built global content from scratch and launched the Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report, the most successful campaign in the company’s history, before BeyondTrust acquired it. Marketing leadership roles at Netacea, AppLearn and Apadmi followed. Content is still where she lives: product workshops, creative direction, the writing itself.
Kelly Waring - Marketing Director, LIMA
Kelly Waring once interviewed Shane Lynch of Boyzone and Tom Gray of Gomez. That was at Confidential Publishing, where she started as the in-house designer for Manchester Confidential and spent nearly nine years running production, websites, events including the North West Comedy Awards, and a regular poker tournament. Technology took over from there. UKFast kept her nine years as head of marketing operations, and she held the same role at ANS after its acquisition. LIMA, the Manchester IT services firm, hired her as head of marketing in 2023 and made her marketing director in January 2026, where she leads a small team working closely with sales and product. Her stated aim is creativity with clarity, backed by data. She won a CRN Women in Channel award in 2025.
Clare Anderton - CMO, My Expert Midwife
Clare Anderton was a customer before she was the CMO. She used My Expert Midwife’s products through both of her pregnancies, and joined the maternity and women’s health brand in August 2026. The thing she says makes it unusual is the midwives themselves, who appear in the brand’s content and approach subjects other brands avoid with the matter-of-fact humour of people who have seen everything. Her approach to social is deliberately less polished than the fashion and beauty shoots of her past. Twelve years at THG trained her, from PR executive on MyBag and AllSole through heading marketing for luxury fashion and boutique beauty, then head of brand communications for Myprotein, where she helped reposition it from discount retailer to wellness brand. She then led brand at the packaging scale-up Sourceful and rebranded CuddleCo as its marketing director.
Sara Piper - Marketing Director, Science in Sport Group
Before Manchester, Sara Piper built a sports marketing career in Australia: art director at McCann in Melbourne on Holden and L’Oréal, then marketing at the Sydney Cricket Ground, then digital for the NRL. She ran digital for the 2017 Rugby League World Cup in Sydney and was invited to do the same for the 2021 tournament in England, where she built the content team behind record live engagement and drove ticket sales. At British Cycling she spent three years as head of marketing, owning membership, one of the federation’s biggest revenue lines, and leading marketing for the special purpose vehicle delivering the Tour de France Grand Départ 2027. Science in Sport Group named her marketing director in September 2026, taking her from governing sport to fuelling the people who do it.
Sohayla Worth - Global Marketing Director, SMG
Sohayla Worth was on the founding team that launched UA92, the university backed by Gary Neville, into a higher education market that had never seen anything quite like it. The experience taught her how to build a brand that wins attention by refusing to look like everyone else. She grew Vivify from around 50 partners to more than 200 as marketing manager, then joined SMG in 2024, where she now leads brand development as global marketing director for the retail media networks it builds and runs for Boots, Co-op, Very and Deliveroo. Her career began in events at Manchester Met and Salford universities, and her guiding principle is one she repeats often: B2B marketing is not boring.
A City That Taught Itself Online
What connects these careers is less a sector than a moment. Manchester’s online retailers and tech scale-ups grew quickly and needed marketers who could learn as fast as they did, and the people here took those habits with them when they moved on. You can see it in Monk’s willingness to cut TV for channels she can measure, in Proctor’s content-first approach to B2B software, in Walker’s insistence on building a platform rather than chasing campaigns. The city’s newer arrivals, from law and property to sports nutrition and retail media, are now inheriting marketers who already know how to grow something from the inside.