There’s always something going on. Always. In 2011 alone, we’ve had to deal with snow on runways, volcanic ash, the political situation in Tunisia, when we needed to get people out, and the same in Egypt when we kept 11,500 people out in Sharm El-Sheikh. Most of that had happened before February.”

Welcome to a year in the life of Christian Cull, communications director of TUI Travel, Europe’s biggest holiday firm incorporating Thomson Holidays, First Choice and Thomson Airways. The man charged with telling the story of this large if little-recognised corporate name, he’s also the go-to man when crises strike. And in the travel industry, they strike often.

“But it’s been a privilege to see how well the airlines manage a crisis,” he says. “They’re outstanding. When we had the volcanic ash cloud, we had to get 90,000 people home. Seeing this place in the thick of something like that, it’s quite extraordinary.”

The challenge of course is to make sure reactive comms don’t get in the way of the proactive. Fortunately, Christian has a wealth of experience communicating on behalf of several consumer-facing brands – and has the zeal of someone playing catch up after deciding on this career path later than most.

“You could say I’m a late developer,” he says. “Unlike a lot of my peers, I didn’t leave university with any clear understanding of what I wanted to do. In fact, I didn’t for some time.”

In fact, it wasn’t until he started out in trade publishing at the age of 28, working for William Reed Publishing near Crawley, that he developed an insight into the world of PR. This was 1995 and Christian was busy as features editor and news reporter for Value Retailing (now Multiple Buyer & Retailer).

“It was only when I was in journalism that I began to consider what communicators do,” he admits. “I suppose it was a consequence of working in the magazine world which introduced me to the daily lives of communicators. I got to interview them, understand them and get into their heads.”

Christian moved titles, becoming special projects editor for The Grocer, the trade magazine for the FMCG and grocery retail sector. In a bid to strengthen his grasp on the subject matter – and knowing that a solid understanding of the interface between PR and journalism can help a canny journalist – Christian took a CIM marketing diploma. “I thought it might be a useful thing to have up my sleeve as a journalist.”

This opened his eyes to the world of communications. But he was still enjoying journalism. “At The Grocer, I was able to do a bit of everything – news, features, analysis, the lot. It was great.”

And all the while, he was encountering more and more PR agencies, getting to know individuals in the industry and enjoying a better view of what the work entailed. Before long, he’d crossed the barricades and taken a job in PR. “Tina Fotherby phoned me up from Nexus PR and she offered me a chance to come in and talk.”

In close contact with so many PR professionals, Christian had been courted before. But Nexus seemed like an unusually interesting opportunity. At the time, it had three main accounts: McVities, Tropicana and Muller. He’s not looked back.

“It wasn’t that big a wrench for me to leave journalism,” he says. “I’d never really looked on PR as the ‘dark side’. If I’d gone into journalism more quickly after university, I might have spent more time in that field. But I didn’t.”

Besides, Christian admits that for him the world of journalism lacked a certain something. “Here, on the other side of the fence, you get the opportunity to immerse yourself in something by working for the client, and that’s even deeper when you’re working in-house. I liked that. So I kind of looked on the opportunity to move into PR as a positive.”

It no doubt helped that his media experience precluded him from having to start at the bottom of the ladder. He joined Nexus as an account director – although it was still something of an alien environment. “But I was lucky to have good account managers who looked on my arrival as something that would benefit the team,” he says. “They helped me to assimilate in what was a small, busy and fun agency.”

Of course, the work was far removed from the editorial remit he’d known. “It was a new opportunity and I was learning new disciplines: managing a team, contact reports, client relations.”

 

“I actually missed crisis communications when I was at Sky. When I was at Waitrose, we had plenty of crises and TUI Travel has its fair share as well. But I do enjoy it when things go wrong and I get to focus on dealing with it.”

 

Christian stayed at Nexus for 18 months, before another firm approached him. Nigel Dickie was managing director of Counsel PR, the firm retained by food giant Heinz, and offered Christian a promotion and the chance to work on the Heinz account. Nigel remembers Christian fondly. “He knows what makes a good story and how to tell it in a compelling way,” he says. “A great team player, he brings his strong intellect to any PR challenge.”

Joining the firm as associate director, Christian saw it as “another chance to learn a huge amount – Heinz has its fingers in so many different pies”.

Focused largely on the fortunes of a single major client, it’s no surprise that Christian found himself attracted to the lure of an inhouse role. And so it was that in 2001, he moved to supermarket group Waitrose as its head of press, PR and publications.

“It wasn’t until I moved into Waitrose that I began to feel I was truly finding my feet in public relations,” he says. “But the opportunity was a good one.”

At that time, Waitrose had had only one previous head of PR. Recruited by current managing director Mark Price, Christian was well aware that Waitrose hadn’t been very proactive in its approach to comms. “So I saw it as a good chance to go and make my mark,” he says.

It didn’t take long for him to identify the story that the company should be telling. “Waitrose was just latching onto the recognition that consumers were taking a long hard long at where and who their food was coming from,” he says. “And at Waitrose, we had buyer after buyer telling these fantastic stories about their food. It was a bit of a goldmine. And having won the company’s confidence, I realised I could show the immediate impact comms could have.”

Christian took some bold and unusual steps. He let journalists go directly to Waitrose suppliers – a risky proposition. “But it paid off,” he says. “They had good stories to tell.”

As head of PR, Christian was working closely alongside the head of marketing – and even covered her maternity leave, becoming the firm’s acting head of marketing on top of his existing role. “Believe me, I’ve never worked harder,” he says.

Responsible for the whole communications output, Christian was fortunate that his PR approach had been largely mirrored in marketing anyway. His role also included managing the publications function. (Christian’s journalism background meant that he could look at the portfolio of customer publications).

“As I’d arrived, Waitrose was just launching its first TV adverts – this was only about 10 years ago,” he says. “But it was consistent with the PR strategy of focusing on the story behind the food, not just the food.’

But there were soon changes afoot. It became clear that the MD was retiring and there were to be changes at the top. In 2005, Christian was offered the role of permanent marketing director, a role he held for two years.

“It was unusual to get there from a comms background,” he admits. “I’d never claimed to be an FMCG marketer. But I could see the overarching picture and used that to my advantage – that’s how I’ve always done it.”

By 2007, it felt like time for a change and Christian moved to Sky where he was named director of customer communications.

“They came to me with an unusual mixture of a job role,” he says. “I was intrigued. I’d had six years at Waitrose – this was an opportunity to move to a very different culture. And I really enjoyed meeting Matthew Anderson at Sky, who was putting his team together. It felt like an exciting opportunity.”

An unusual mixture it certainly was. The role incorporated consumer PR and magazines as well as responsibility for corporate sponsorship and customer loyalty.

But, says Christian, “I was lucky that I inherited a really good team. And I also realised that I’d moved from one excellent culture to another. Waitrose is half of the John Lewis Partnership, which has a culture of co-operation, support and democratic structures. Sky was a very different world but it’d moved on from what people thought it was. It’d become much less aggressive under the leadership of James Murdoch. It was very much a can-do attitude.”

With that in mind, one of Christian’s key tasks was to try to translate the ongoing internal change into an external message and “communicate that we did care and were proud of our products and brands”.

Sky was also a business that didn’t need to be persuaded to communicate. “At Waitrose, the question that needed answering was ‘Why should we bother with marketing?’ At Sky, the question was ‘Why can’t we do even more of it?’”

But, for all Sky’s willingness to communicate, Christian identified the need for a change in tone. “There’s a big challenge in communicating Sky to certain media. Some are reluctant to give it the benefit of the doubt. So I felt we needed to introduce a sense of humour, a lightness.”

Christian was at Sky for two and half years but in August 2009, TUI Travel came calling. Christian was offered a newly created role on the UK board and was enthralled by the challenge of telling the story of TUI to an audience unfamiliar with the name.

“TUI is not a known brand here,” he says. “It’s a household name in Germany – up there with BMW. But we are the main holiday provider in the UK too. With 850 shops across the High St and its own airline, Thomson is the market’s largest brand.”

And in fact, he doesn’t regard ignorance of the corporate brand as a problem. “I don’t think it’s a huge issue – it doesn’t seem to slow us down,” he says. “In terms of PR, though, we do need to differentiate between First Choice and Thomson, to make sure our product range is differentiated and can’t be emulated. They’re both well known brands, so our challenge is to develop real clarity between the two of them.”

Indeed, clarifying the corporate strategy is a priority for Christian. “With a disparate workforce it’s important that there’s a good understanding of the strategy. That needs to be worked on and it’s a key focus for us.”

The corporate entity is, of course, the product of the 2007 merger of First Choice Holidays and the Tourism Division of TUI AG. And the internal comms challenge this throws up is one strand of his role.

“Fundamental to the success of my time here has been the importance and value placed on internal comms,” he says. “It’s an interesting time. We’ve spent a lot of time on bringing the cultures together. That’s the internal comms part of my brief – it’s interesting. It’s never been part of my remit before now.”

Sustainability is the third part of his role, with “half a dozen” areas of focus, including a couple of charities in the UK. With an airline in the group, CSR is bound to be important. “But it’s not all about the airline. As a group, we want to be a positive part of the community and our Holidays Forever public commitments are market leading. It’s a balancing act though – people don’t necessarily want to think about sustainability messages on their holiday.”

As you’d expect from the industry he’s now in, much of his role is reacting to the various crises that weather, industrial action, and more leftfield problems.

“I actually missed crisis communications when I was at Sky,” he says. “Waitrose had plenty of crises and TUI Travel has its fair share as well. But I do enjoy it when things go wrong and I get to focus on it.” It’s not that he’s a glutton for punishment – more that he gets to see the vital role that effective communications play in the smooth running of the business. “That’s one of the beauties of communications,” he says. “As a communicator, when people in the business know you’re coping with it, it keeps momentum and morale up. And it also helps us to keep the pulse of the business and make sure people are pulling together.” 

 

Curriculum Vitae: Adam Liversage

2009 – present Communications director, TUI UK & Ireland

2007 – 2009 Director of customer communications, BSkyB

2005 – 2007 Marketing Director, Waitrose

2001 – 2005 Head of press, PR and publications, Waitrose

1999 – 2001 Associate director, Holmes & Marchant Counsel

1998 – 1999 Account director, Nexus PR

1997 – 1999 Special projects editor, The Grocer

1995 – 1997 Features editor and reporter, Value Retailing

Education: MA (Hons) English, Oriel College, Oxford University

Interests Travel, running, reading, music