Gordon Reece, a former television producer, has been widely credited with masterminding Mrs Thatcher’s change of image, advising her to adopt a softer hairstyle, get rid of her “fussy” clothes and stick to a high neckline and pastel shades. Crucially, he also advised her to lower the tone of her voice and speak more slowly and closer to the microphone to make her voice husky, intimate and, above all, less hectoring….
A team of well-known experts in their respective fields then focused on each aspect and helped to bring about the subtle changes that all boiled down to being herself, with emphasis..
Politics apart, in terms of learnings for your NAM role, by all means wear a ring in your nose, a pony-tail and goth-gear if that is your preferred weekend presentational mode but it just means that you have to work a bit harder to neutralise the resulting ‘negative‘ influence on a more conventional buyer, more accustomed to visits from competitor NAMs wearing horn-rimmed glasses and hair parted on the left…
However, whilst you may (or have to) be open to corporate advice on how best to present yourself to the buyer, ultimately, like Maggie, you are the one in charge…
