Interview With Jonathan Wall, Marketing Director, Dabs.com Plc

I look after the traditional PPPs of marketing so have to ensure that our Proposition to our customer base is right in terms of product. Our customer marketing is acquiring and then retaining our customers and that we are competitive on price. I also head up our Consumer business including more recently the BT Shop that we took responsibility for last year. Half of my time is spent on product and working with our manufacturers such as Apple or HP and half of my time is spent on more traditional customer marketing.

I started as Sales Manager after a chance introduction with the founder of Dabs, Dave Atherton. Definitely a good introduction by an old friend and I still owe him a drink to this day.

Think you'd have to ask my team about that or our CEO but I think the fact that I enjoy my job and the challenges that we face is probably a key skill. Other than that I always believe that common business sense is still the centre of the Digital Retailing world and acknowledging this is a key skill that I seem to have.

Testing the latest products being a technology retailer but also the feeling that all of us in the Digital Era are still licking the envelope and opening new opportunities every day.

Increase our margins and if that wasn't possible I'd want to see more opportunities within Higher Education for Digital Marketing courses as it still seems to be a periphery course rather than a central one.

Never without an 'angle', either on an opportunity or a challenge

• Retail Director for family ski mail order and travel business 1984-1995
• Sales Manager at Crown Computer Products 1995-97

• Catering size pack of Wrigley's Extra to chew on when making those difficult decisions
• Toshiba R500 laptop, rarely go anywhere without it
• HTC windows phone, ditto above
• Cold Diet Coke
• Car Hire voucher for summer holiday

Chief Operating Officer for Whistler/Blackcomb ski resort in Canada has always been the job that would excite me the most, I'd obviously have to make sure the resort was running well and that the runs were groomed and off piste in great condition!

Apart from Liverpool FC winning their 19th League title seeing my children prosper in a Digital World is my main ambition. The opportunities that abound now are greater than at any time since the start of the industrial revolution. We are only at the start still of the Digital Revolution and I hope they can prosper in this World and failing that just to see them happy.

I failed educationally for a number of reasons and my main driver has always been to make up for those wasted years of (paid for) education that my parents spent their money on. Being in the right place at the right time is always a good recommendation to give but of course hard to ensure that you are. My main recommendation would be that Online Marketing is an exciting and obviously thriving part of the Marketing World but changing all the time, so enter with an open eye as you will be expected to learn something new everyday and hopefully rewarded for it tool.