New director joins Wiltshire strategic marketing consultancy

A Wiltshire marketing company which specialises in creating and implementing marketing strategy is expanding with the addition of a new director.

Absolute Management & Marketing (AM&M) was founded in 2018 by Stuart Ball, who uses his 25 years plus experience in strategic corporate product marketing and applies this to an audience of SME clients.

Now Stuart is being joined on the Board by Venkat Vaidyanathan, whose experience complements Stuart’s. Both have an extensive background in B2B, but within different sectors.

“I’ve worked with Venkat in the past and when we both left the corporate world, we decided that when the time was right we would work together again,” said Stuart. “For AM&M, after getting through Covid and looking at how to adapt and grow the business, the time is definitely right!”

Stuart has a long career in strategic corporate product marketing for industrial sectors including oil and gas, fire and security, and defence.

He had his lightbulb moment while working away in the States and within months had left his corporate career and established AM&M, based in Royal Wootton Bassett, where he deploys his expertise in product marketing and pricing to support SMEs.

“My goal with AM&M was to use all the tools, processes and skills that big multinationals take for granted and apply them to small companies,” said Stuart.

“We look at how a business can grow by moving into new markets, or extending its reach into existing markets. We also look at pricing strategy, and how setting higher prices or using price to drive volume can increase the profit margin. On the product side, it’s all about management of current products and bringing new products to market.”

Stuart was determined that AM&M would not just create strategies, but also follow up with implementation.

He said: “In the corporate world, larger consulting firms will come up with a result from a consultation, or the answer if you like and then leave it to the company to implement it. With AM&M, we deliberately focus on the execution of our advice as well as the advice.”

The arrival of Venkat increases the depth of knowledge of the AM&M team. While Stuart’s background is in industrial, Venkat’s expertise crosses a range of sectors, including healthcare, technology and facilities services. He has spent more than 15 years as a pricing leader, managing pricing teams globally. For the last five years, he’s held interim and consultancy roles, and he specialises in strategic marketing and data driven decision-making.

Venkat said: “I only work with people whom I trust and I have a lot of trust in Stuart. He brings really great experience and we have a lot of complementary skills. We think slightly differently which is always a good thing, so we can bring different perspectives to our work. I am very much looking forward to us working together again.

“I am based in Buckinghamshire, Stuart in Wiltshire, so we cover a wider area, taking in Berkshire and Oxfordshire and the M4 corridor, but of course we can work with businesses wherever they are based.”

Digital transformation is the next area of focus for AM&M’s strategic support for SMEs.  This will be the adoption everything from ecommerce to social media and digital marketing, through to data visualisation.

For more information about Absolute Management & Marketing visit https://ammconsulting.co.uk/, email [email protected] or call 01793 987405.