Profile Mark Mortell: The Catholic Church has turned to Mark Mortell for help in communicating its message. So can we expect to hear bishops talk about 'image projection' and 'brand positioning', asks Emmet Oliver
There are as many definitions of marketing as there are marketers. But most professionals agree that marketing involves making sure you're continuing to meet the needs of your customers and getting value in return.
These activities include market research to find out, for example, what groups of potential customers exist, what their needs are, which of those needs you can meet, how you should meet them.
Marketing also includes analysing the competition, positioning your service (finding your market niche), pricing it and promoting through continued advertising, promotions, public relations and sales.
All fairly mundane concepts in the business world and familiar words in the marketing man or woman's lexicon. For someone like Mark Mortell, a man with more marketing credentials on his CV than most of his peers, this stuff must be laughably basic.
However, it's unlikely that such phrases are tossed around regularly when the country's 33 Catholic bishops meet for their quarterly meetings in Maynooth. But if Mortell has his way, bishops, parish priests, nuns and brothers could soon be talking about "brand positioning" and "image projection".
While any reforms in the marketing/ public relations sphere instituted by Mortell are unlikely to have an impact on the Catholic Church's foot-soldiers, Mortell is hoping some of the basic concepts of marketing and public relations can be imparted to the hierarchy
It is not going to be easy. The institutional church has taken a pounding in recent years and many other slick press-handlers have tried to dig the church out of its troubles before and failed.
Mortell, who is to chair a new committee to advise the Catholic communications staff, says his job will not involve engaging in day-to-day PR firefighting. He wants to put in place an infrastructure to do that, but he will be giving advice in a general sense and trying to steer the church in a direction where shortcomings are at least balanced by accounts of its good work.
While he is keeping his day job with the PR firm, Fleishman Hillard Saunders, working for the church is a logical extension for Mortell.
When you have worked with global brands such as Mars and Guinness, and Irish brands such as Aer Lingus and Ballygowan, why not have a go at the biggest brand of them all - the Catholic Church?
Although few devout members of that church would agree with using a term like brand, the organisation may increasingly have to see itself in those terms.
But why Mortell? His associations with Fine Gael are more widely known than any links to the church. However, Mortell did study to be a priest at Clonliffe College after leaving Presentation College, Bray. He spent 1979 there and says it was enjoyable but not his thing.
Nowadays you are more likely to meet him horse-riding in Carrickmines and playing golf at Foxrock Golf Club than sitting around with priests or nuns talking about papal encyclicals.
A friend who was also at Clonliffe at the time was Father Martin Clarke, the contact who brought Mortell into his new role. Father Clarke has for the last few years been principal spokesman for the bishops, so he knows a thing or two about crisis management.
Knowing Clarke seems to have been the important factor in putting Mortell in the frame for the role, and his beliefs would appear to have played no part. He describes himself as a regular Mass-goer, but "no more or no less" religious than anyone else.
His appointment can be looked at in two ways. The unfavourable one would disparage the church and say that, amid a flood of allegations, it is turning to the only remedy it has not tried yet - using corporate spin tactics to buy itself some badly needed credibility.
Or you could go with the more charitable view that the church is finally realising that communications skills are needed by everyone in modern society and that it's time the church entered the mainstream.
So what will Mortell be doing? He says his task will be two-fold.
Firstly, he will be dealing with the bad news. Church attendance is falling, vocations are way down, there have been the terrible revelations about child abuse - all of these have to be managed. Mortell says the church needs to communicate about these issues in a new way.
Secondly, he says the church in its pastoral role must give its views on things it feels are important. It needs to talk about the good things it is doing, more often and more clearly.
"There are a heap of good things going on," Mortell says. "We need to bring them to the public's attention."
However, the church is a long way from the kind of "products" Mortell is used to dealing with. His almost 20-year career in marketing and now public relations began with Guinness. He was involved in making the now defunct beer, Furstenburg, a popular tipple among young people in the 1980s.
After that, he did a two-year stint with Mars Ireland, where he learned how to manage and maintain a big global brand. While this was high-profile work within the marketing community, it wasn't until he took up a position with Ballygowan spring water that he became a public figure, constantly on radio and television, pumping out the message about one of Ireland's few 1980s success stories.
This was followed by a five-year spell in the world of financial marketing with Bank of Ireland's life and pensions division.
What lifted Mortell out of the corporate arena and into semi-State land were his political contacts. While Mortell is a south Dublin boy who spent time traversing the oak-panelled corridors of Blackrock College, he is a good friend of Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny, who hails from the west of Ireland. Mortell was also a Fine Gael councillor in Bray Urban District Council between 1983 and 1989.
Contacts with Kenny and John Bruton no doubt helped to propel Mortell to the chairmanship of Bord Fáilte in 1997. His time there was traumatic and he found himself doing his fair share of firefighting. There were controversies aplenty: the national conference centre debacle, the Gulliver travel booking system dispute, and a row about the future of the shamrock.
While Mortell got tourism numbers up and introduced more slick and modern ways of marketing the country ("we got rid of the cottages and the red hair"), he was a non-executive chairman, which was a tough assignment for someone who was also running the Dimension advertising agency at the time.
In 2000, Mortell joined Aer Lingus, this time as commercial director, another high-profile job. But it did not work, as one of his colleagues recalls:
"Mark has a lot of ideas and is often very focused on how something should look or work. But when he came into Aer Lingus, nobody really wanted to hear any of that stuff. The airline was soon fighting for its survival and fancy marketing plans weren't really relevant."
Mortell agrees to an extent and says that with the airline battling things like foot-and-mouth and the fallout from the Michael Foley departure, the plans he had for marketing Aer Lingus more effectively never found a home.
Last August, he decided to join an old friend, John Saunders, in Fleishman Hillard Saunders. He loves the work and says that dealing with different clients makes it absorbing.
The rapid succession of jobs he has held divides opinion among the marketing folk who know him. "He has had a lot of jobs and consequently has not been able to make a serious impression in any one," is the unflattering assessment of one peer.
But others point out that moving from job to job is the marketer's lot. "We are all essentially hired guns. It is basically project work and Mark is just following that trend. Also, his ambitions push him on," says one.
"He has managed to pick up some of the best marketing jobs in town. He is good; that is why," adds another.
Others say Mortell is a reformer, unlikely to accept tradition for tradition's sake. For example, he sat in on the recent review of Fine Gael and, in private, is believed to be strongly critical of how the party has performed in recent years.
"Pushing water up a hill" is how he once described trying to get Fine Gael to change, although he is believed to be more enamoured with recent efforts to restore its fortunes.