APH to lead Barkers in London

Andrew Platt-Higgins has been named as managing director of Barkers' London operation with immediate effect.   He first joined Barkers twenty years ago and, following a brief hiatus in the early 1990s, has been at the company for all of the last thirteen years, most recently in the role of planning director.

Regarding the new appointment, chief executive John Tarrant told Ri5: "We had a number of internal and external candidates, some of whom put forward powerful cases for the role.  But I asked myself, what's the best thing for our people, the best thing for our clients and the best thing for P&L?  And - another bit of the decision-making process - what would our competitors really not want us to do?  Andrew brought all the right credentials and gravitas, while an external hire would have been a dilution of the ‘Barkers DNA' that makes us different and special."

Andrew himself takes up the thread:  "There's an enduring mystique to the Barkers brand - when everything's working well it's a great place to be, and we want our clients and our people to realise this."

On the broader business front, John reports that things are going pretty well year to date despite the difficult economic climate.  "We've had a steady and consistent year so far," he says.  "Income, profit and turnover are all up year on year.  We invested a great deal last year in Resourcing, Digital and Slough.  Of course, it could all stop tomorrow, although it doesn't feel like it's going to.  We've got a good spread of clients in terms of business type, and while some of them may have stopped their more frantic distress-purchase advertising, they've been saying to us ‘Can we talk to you about brand? or the internet?' instead.  And we're still picking up chunks of new business, of course.  However I wouldn't want to predict anything else for this year: ‘steady' is as good as it's going to get."

"We're working on a lot of high-value employer brand briefs right now - both public and private sector, interestingly," adds Andrew.  "And although we can't really see the pipeline more than two or three months ahead at the moment, things look encouraging so far."

There's also a strong focus on hiring people with more strategic skills to meet the challenges ahead.  "For the first hundred-odd years, Barkers was a business whose primary product was administration," says Andrew, "but of course those days are long gone.  Now, with our graduate recruitment programme, we're hiring people who meet the strategic competency right from the start.  That's the area we're really pushing, and it should help us to attain the status of preferred employer in the industry.  We've got the facility to recruit existing talent if it's out there, but at the moment we're focusing on growing our own."