BBC Studios’ Nicki Sheard on her transition from CMO to CEO
BBC Studios CEO of brands and licensing, Nicki Sheard, discusses the skills CMOs need to make the jump to CEO and scaling brands with “100 years of storytelling and care”.
As a CMO who made the leap to CEO, Nicki Sheard believes customer centricity, communication and “being able to cope in the face of huge change” are key skills CMOs can bring to the top job.
Sheard is the CEO of brands and licensing at BBC Studios. She joined the company as CMO on one of the most “terrible” days to start a new role – the first day of lockdown in 2020. Her original role as CMO was to help grow key brands within BBC Studios, an ambition Sheard and BBC Studios CEO Tom Fussell outlined for the business at the time.
“We had a vision,” she tells Marketing Week. “We are very ambitious at BBC Studios, and we only thought that BBC Studios could grow if we could grow the whole brands and licensing business as well.”
