BA raids Dulux owner for head of global marketing

Airline fills global marketing role as Q3 financial results show return to profit

Kerris Bright
Kerris Bright: Joins BA from AkzoNobel, where she is CMO

British Airways has named AkzoNobel marketer Kerris Bright as head of global marketing.

Bright is currently chief marketing officer of global paints company AkzoNobel. Before that she was CMO at ICI, which was taken over by AkzoNobel in 2008.

She joined ICI in 2001 as UK marketing director and oversaw marketing for the Dulux brand, including the We Know The Colours That Go campaign. Dulux handed its £60m advertising account to Euro RSCG last autumn, ending a long relationship with AMV.BBDO.

Bright will report to sales and marketing director Andrew Crawley at the airline. BA’s lead creative agency is Bartle Bogle Hegarty.

Bright began her career in 1991 as a marketing graduate trainee with Unilever and went on to senior marketing and general management roles at Quest International and Unipath Limited.

BA overhauled its marketing department last year as a part of a restructure. Head of marketing communications Katherine Whitton resigned in October 2008 and has since joined Barclaycard as UK marketing director.

The airline unveiled third-quarter results last week that showed a return to operating profit for the quarter.

However, the airline’s figures for the first nine months of the year show a pre-tax loss of £342m compared with a loss of £70m for the same period in 2008.

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