‘Marketers need to be involved in product’: Octopus Energy’s top marketer on what’s driven her career
Rebecca Dibb-Simkin has been the chief product and marketing officer at Octopus Energy during a period of remarkable growth for the challenger brand. Her career to this point has taken her from agency to brand-side and she has learned the value of marketers being in control of product.
Growing up surrounded by marketing wasn’t initially enough to convince Rebecca Dibb-Simkin it was the right career for her. Indeed, a chance to follow her mother – a professor of marketing at Coventry University – and her stepdad (also a marketer) into the family profession wasn’t on the cards.
Instead she had her heart set on a career in business. “I did a business degree at Nottingham and was actually quite good at accounting,” Dibb-Simkin tells Marketing Week. So much so, in fact, that she won an accountancy prize in her class and was tapped up to work at KPMG. The career path was set – or so it seemed. A chance advert on the back of a student union magazine caught her eye and changed her life.
