Key takeaways from Original Thinker, Michele Gettins

Key takeaways from Original Thinker, Michele Gettins

Is there really such a big difference between marketing to businesses and marketing to people?

Not according to Michele Gettins, CMO at iamproperty.

In the latest episode of our Original Thinking podcast, we sat down with Michele to talk about 23 years in marketing, from starting out at Sage and working in fintech, to taking on global category work for Tommee Tippee, and now leading the marketing team at one of the UK’s fastest-growing proptech brands.

When Michele joined iamproperty, the business had around 220 people. Today, it has grown to more than 700, working with 7,000 partner agents across the UK.

That kind of growth needs a brand people understand, a team that keeps asking better questions and a marketing approach that remembers that whether you’re selling to a customer, a client, an agent, an investor or a boardroom, you’re still talking to a human being.

Here are three takeaways from Michele’s episode that every growing business can learn from…

1. B2B marketing still needs to feel human

Michele has worked across B2B, B2C, tech and consumer brands and her view is that people don’t stop being people when they get to work.

We all still have preferences, we respond to stories, personality, clarity and ideas that make us feel something. A CMO looking at a software brand is still the same person who goes home, makes decisions for their family, scrolls past boring content and remembers the things that actually catch their attention. That’s why the best B2B brands understand who they are speaking to and what that person needs to hear and feel.

For Michele, great marketing starts by recognising there’s a human at the other end.

2. Brand personality is not the fluffy bit

In competitive markets, especially tech-led ones, brand can be the thing that makes people remember you. For iamproperty, that personality has always come from the business itself. Michele talks about the importance of building a brand that reflects the people behind it, including its entrepreneurial founders, its energy and its clear sense of purpose.

At iamproperty, the brand has helped create consistency and authenticity and has stood out through a period of major growth, including investment, acquisitions and expansion. It has given the business permission to do bold things, but in a way that still feels true to who they are.

That’s where their brand became commercially powerful, helping customers understand them and helping teams believe in the same direction. It also helps investors see the ambition and when a business is growing quickly, it gives everything a bit more glue.

3. Original thinking does not always have to be the big shiny idea

One of Michele’s strongest points in the episode is that creativity is often about making something better, looking at a problem differently or asking what the audience actually needs. It’s finding the simple idea that suddenly makes everything click.

Michele shares an example from her early career at Sage, where the challenge was helping a huge reseller network engage with new product launches. The answer was not a huge campaign or complicated creative route, but a practical reseller pack that brought everything into one place – the product features, benefits, sales tools, collateral and the story they needed to take to market. It was simple, useful and genuinely effective.

The same thinking sits behind National Estate Agent Day, the campaign we helped iamproperty launch to celebrate estate agents and give the whole industry a moment to feel proud of the work they do. The idea was simple, but agents and suppliers got behind it. The iamproperty team loved it an even competitors supported it. Original thinking at its best!

There’s plenty more in the full episode, from building brand equity through major growth and keeping creativity alive in marketing teams, to Michele’s take on AI and why businesses need to be clear on where technology helps and where humans still need to own the outcome.