Name: John Stubbs

Position: Chief executive, The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM)

Born: August 28, 1941, High Beach, Essex

Education: Aldenham School, Hertfordshire; St Peter's Oxford University - Hon Moderations in Classics and Hons Degree in English

Lives: Kent, married with three children

WHEN I left school I was going to read law. I went to work in Paris translating legal documents just for a few months and decided it was not for me. I went to university instead.

After leaving Oxford, I was a graduate trainee at Unilever, at the age of 24. At that time it was a three-year apprenticeship doing everything from cleaning the floors to sitting on a committee to review the trainee scheme where we unanimously decided to halve the time of the graduate training scheme.

I became a brand manager at Van Den Berghs on the new product development side with the sales people reporting to me. We tried to create cakes as mother baked them and jellified milk products. It was great fun.

I then joined advertising agency J Walter Thompson where I was an account planner, recruited by the great Stephen King who had a highly analytical approach to marketing and communications. I worked on accounts such as biological detergents and Lux toilet soap.

I was learning the craft of marketing. King was a superb analyst and JWT was very much the top dog in terms of ability and the quality of the people who worked there.

Marketing was still in its infancy it did not have the right pricing or positioning and quite often did not have the right research.

At the age of 27 I became an account director. I stayed on for another couple of years then emigrated to Ireland where I became sales director of an animal feed business. I learned about business to business marketing and the joys of government intervention.

I was also planning new factories which were opened in Ireland at the time to enable modern production.

The big lesson for me was how important the supply chain was in marketing and selling, how close it was to the raw materials, how close to the customer base and how efficiently you can move products to the customer.

After about five years, during which time I got married to Pauline, I headed for the Middle East. It was primarily my wife's idea and we went to the Sultanate of Oman where I ran a business which was into a fantastic mixture of everything from refrigeration to water treatment. We had an Arab partner and I had to absorb some very interesting differences in behaviour and culture.

It was a very exciting place to live. I got a very different perspective on how people live and what their needs are.

Then in 1980 I became MD of the holding company of African and Near East Ltd - a very old company originally operating in Iran and the Middle East which had lots of little businesses, including insurance and office equipment.

A year later I came back to the UK, where I took on a job of regional manager for the United Africa Company, an old-established trading company which was part of Unilever. That meant that a number of companies in English-speaking countries in Africa, such as Kenya and Ghana, responded to me. I was involved in the reorganisation of the way we did business and which sort of business we did.

I responded ultimately to Michael Perry, now Sir Michael Perry, who then became chairman at Unilever.

Again I was learning about completely different markets and had to do business in places which were politically volatile. I then moved on to become operations director of the Unilever Export Group before Sir Michael Perry invited me to go in as number two in the international marketing function of Unilever's marketing division.

I was providing the support systems on the way to do marketing to hundreds of Unilever companies worldwide and spent time in places such as India, the USA all over.

Indirectly I was also responsible for the training, which I found very interesting.

At Unilever they got senior marketing people together to try to solve major strategic problems. What the company learned from that they made available to people down the line. It gave people a marketing focus and was the most interesting market learning curve I have ever been involved in learning from experience rather than from books.

I was in the job for about five years when Sir Michael suggested that I talk to Sir Colin Marshall, now Lord Marshall, to create The Marketing Council. This was formed in the early 1990s to promote marketing improvements and education in liaison with government.

We went to see Ministers Portillo and Heseltine who fully recognised what marketing could do. I was seconded from Unilever for a year, then Sir Colin offered me the chief executive's job full time.

Two years ago, because I had been working in conjunction with the CIM, they invited me to take on the chief executive's job at the CIM.

I am learning how an institute works, finding out what people want and finding the way to provide it in a unique, highly differential way.

We have good relationships with other organisations, such as the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply. The more we can invest in knowledge and support services to business the better business can perform in the UK.

I had no idea how different my career would be.