Doug Fogwell is the senior vice president of marketing and sales services at AlliedBarton Security Services. He works to change perceptions of security personnel by referring to them as security officers rather than security guards. Fogwell draws on 30 years of marketing experience to position AlliedBarton as an industry leader through content creation, branding efforts, and raising awareness of issues like workplace violence prevention. He advises marketers to continuously learn through education, networking, and adapting to changes in the digital landscape.

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34 MARKETING NEWS | DECEMBER 2014
ONTHE
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35DECEMBER 2014 | MARKETING NEWS
As senior vice president of marketing
and sales services at AlliedBarton
Security Services, Doug Fogwell is
working to change customer perception
regarding private security employees.
Lessons learned from a 30-year
marketing career are helping him meet
that challenge head-on.
BY CHRISTINE BIRKNER | SENIOR STAFF WRITER
 cbirkner@ama.org
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ith terrorism and gun violence dominating today’s
headlines, security services are a serious business,
but they’re not always portrayed that way. In pop
culture, for example, security personnel often are
depicted as bungling and clueless employees,
security guards sleeping in bulletproof booths while the
criminals get away unnoticed. Doug Fogwell is working to
change those stereotypes.
For the past seven years, Fogwell has led marketing efforts for Conshohocken, Penn.-based
AlliedBarton Security Services, which hires and trains security personnel for thousands of clients
and hundreds of Fortune 500 companies around the U.S., including office buildings, chemical plants,
college campuses, banks, hospitals and gated communities. Fogwell’s role as senior vice president
of marketing and sales services includes working to change customer perception for the securities
services industry. He believes that security personnel should be referred to as “security officers,”
rather than “security guards,” to reflect the training that goes into the job and to garner them
more respect.
He’s a vocal advocate on the issue, contributing op-ed pieces to industry publications such as
Security magazine. He also leads all content and digital marketing efforts for the $1.9 billion
company. His team produces white papers and guides on industry issues such as workplace
safety and emergency preparedness.
Fogwell got his start in marketing after earning a business degree from Indiana University
Bloomington in 1981, taking his first job at Indianapolis-based marketing research firm Walker
Research. He spent the next two decades in U.S.-based marketing management positions for
international travel and hospitality corporations, including Official Airline Guides, a Bedfordshire,
U.K.-based provider of flight schedules and timetables; credit card provider Citicorp Diners Club
(now Diners Club International, based in Riverwoods, Ill.); and Madrid-based Amadeus Global
Travel Distribution, which provides IT services for the travel sector.
Fogwell juggled his marketing roles while earning an MBA in marketing and marketing
management from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in 1999. In 2003, he
became vice president of marketing at security services provider Initial Security, which was acquired
by AlliedBarton in 2006.
Marketing News spoke with Fogwell about the trajectory of his career, the challenges of marketing
security services and how marketers should continually invest in their own professional development.
W
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CAREERS AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT knowledgebase
QLet’s discuss your education and early career.
What inspired you to go into marketing?
AI was doing undergraduate work at Indiana
University, in the school of business. I took an
advertising class and was introduced to the whole
psychology of marketing, why people do the things
that they do. That fascinated me, understanding how
you can influence that, and it led me to focus my
attention on marketing.
QYou worked in the travel and hospitality
industries early in your career. Were there any
lessons from those days that you’ve carried over into
your current role at AlliedBarton?
AIn many respects, marketing is a transferrable
skill, no matter what industry, because you have to
start with the customer. Most of my work has been [in]
business-to-business marketing, but you really have to
understand what customers are looking for, what their
needs are, and craft your marketing strategy around that.
I was always fascinated by the travel industry because I
grew up not too far from the airport [in Fort Wayne, Ind.],
so there were planes in the air all of the time. I actually
interviewed with Official Airline Guides on campus my
senior year of college. The timing didn’t work out, so I
ended up taking the job with Walker Research, which
actually turned out to be a nice situation because I was
very interested in marketing research and I received a great
foundation to launch my marketing career there. I spent
just nine months at Walker Research before OAG called
and asked me back. I couldn’t resist the chance to move to
Chicago and start working with OAG.
One of the lessons I learned was how quickly things
change. To not miss opportunities, you have to be looking
far enough ahead to make sure you’re going to be, if not
ahead of, at least up to date with the marketplace. OAG
was a very straightforward business and it was a successful
business for a long time. They were a clearinghouse for
schedules and fares for the airlines around the world.
Their primary product was an Official Airline Guide book
that sat on every travel agent’s desk, and that’s what they
used to look up airline schedules and fares. When airline
automation systems started to take hold, obviously, those
books weren’t as valuable as they once were.
OAG did start to modify its models and started selling
information or data to those systems, but, really, those
systems took over, so it missed a big opportunity. OAG
is still around today but in a much different form than it
was back in its heyday. It’s a smaller company with one or
two products.
Being at the company, at the time, it was difficult to see
the [missed opportunities], but you see them in hindsight.
With technology moving so quickly, you learn from those
situations and start to apply it to your thinking, like, What
do we need to be doing next to serve the client in the most
efficient way? When you have a successful product and
company, it’s hard to make dramatic changes because you
don’t want to change what’s gotten you that far.
QWhy did you decide to take on the role at
AlliedBarton?
AI actually joined the company through a previous
company called Initial Security, which was acquired
by AlliedBarton in 2006. I joined Initial Security
because I felt like my marketing skills that I used in the
hospitality, travel and financial services industries were
very transferrable. I was presented an opportunity to
come in and help Initial Security, which hadn’t done a
lot, from a marketing standpoint, to develop an approach
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to positioning its brand, including new materials for the
sales process and programs to monitor client satisfaction.
[When] Initial Security was acquired by AlliedBarton, I
stepped into the senior vice president of marketing and
sales services role that I have today.
QAlliedBarton serves a wide variety of industries,
including commercial real estate, government,
manufacturing, higher education and healthcare.
What does it take to market security services within
these industries, and what goes into your marketing
efforts, in general?
AIt starts with what our clients are looking for. … It’s
a very serious business, and you need to understand
what the company’s really trying to accomplish with its
safety and security program. To some degree, that varies by
industry or by vertical.
For instance, in a high-rise office building, there’s
a lot of emphasis on customer service, being there to
protect, but also to welcome, to be a friendly face. In a
petrochemical facility, it’s more about safety and making
sure that nothing goes wrong. We have programs to
recruit and select the right type of person to fill those
different posts. A lot of people would think that one
security officer is the same as another, and that’s not the
case. Our clients are looking for something beyond what
may have previously been considered a ‘security guard.’ I
don’t like the term ‘security guard’ and we don’t use it at
AlliedBarton.
QYou wrote an article in Security magazine
about the need to refer to security personnel
as ‘security officers,’ rather than ‘security guards,’ to
better reflect the training and skills that go into the
job. Tell me more about working to change customer
perception within your industry.
“IN MANY RESPECTS, MARKETING IS
A TRANSFERRABLE SKILL, NO MATTER
WHAT INDUSTRY, BECAUSE YOU HAVE
TO START WITH THE CUSTOMER.”
ImagescourtesyofAlliedBartonSecurityServices.
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AThe physical security industry has had a bit of a
bad rap over the years. These movies that portray
the security guard as a bumbling person at a shopping
mall haven’t helped. There’s a stereotype in our industry,
and it’s not true because people serving in these roles are
well trained. A lot of people think it’s an hourly job to get
them from one thing to the next. For some people, it’s for
students or people in transition, but … at AlliedBarton, we
look at these jobs as a career. It’s been not just my personal
passion, but one of AlliedBarton’s to change the perception
of these employees. In many cases, employees are the first
line of defense when something happens on site. They’re
the first responders, so it’s a critical role, and you need
to make sure that the people in those roles have the right
training and know what to do when something happens.
We don’t put security guards on site. We put security
officers on site. The training, the professionalism, that’s
what we look to recruit and put to work on our clients’
sites. Some companies don’t have that same approach.
They’re looking to find people to fill a post. We want to
make sure that we’re giving the client the right type of
person, that they have the right training, that they’re
engaged in their work and that, ultimately, they’re
successful in their own careers. We have more than
60,000 employees and it’s the responsibility of the
company to make it a place where they can grow.
QHow do you highlight your employees’
accomplishments in your marketing efforts?
AWe’ve gone after several awards with regard to our
training and leadership development efforts, and
other awards are just given to us. We actually changed
our brand positioning a few years back. … We did a
little research and found out that we’re the most honored
security company out there, so in our [messaging], we just
leave it at that.
QMuch of AlliedBarton’s marketing focuses on
content, with guides for how much to pay
officers, what types of uniforms they should wear,
security program checklists and tips for emergency
preparedness. How have your content efforts helped
you build your brand and position the company as a
leader in the industry?
AWe do it for multiple reasons. One is to offer value
to our clients and to people who aren’t yet clients.
We have a lot of information that we’ve developed over the
years and it’s important for us to get that out there. It’s also
no secret that people do a lot of online investigation before
they buy. For 50, 60, 70% of people, we may not get in
touch with them from a sales standpoint until they’ve been
out and conducted about 60% of their [research] about
who they want to work with first. It’s important for us to be
out there, visible, ‘find-able,’ with not just a site that talks
about AlliedBarton, but to put out information that’s going
to be of value to them so that we can help them make the
right decisions.
QSecurity threats, from terrorism to gun
violence, dominate the news today. A lot of
your business is about giving your clients peace of
mind. How do you do that? How has the marketing
of security services changed since you joined the
industry in 2006?
APart of the effort is making sure our clients are
prepared, and making sure our security officers
are prepared for whatever instances they may face.
One example of this is something that’s near and dear
to CEO Bill Whitmore’s heart: workplace violence. Bill
saw workplace violence as an issue that needed more
attention. If you do a search on Amazon, you’ll find a
lot of books about it, but we decided to produce our
own book [Potential: Workplace Violence Prevention and
Your Organizational Success] about workplace violence
prevention, and, specifically, how this is an issue that the
C-suite needs to be aware of and get behind.
We did some research and found out that the fear of
workplace violence is rampant. If you ask people if they’re
concerned, they’ll tell you that they are, even though it
might not come up in everyday conversation, but our
research showed that the C-suite wasn’t engaged, either
before or after a workplace violence incident took place.
Bill’s message to the marketplace is, ‘We can impact
workplace violence by getting the C-suite engaged.’ It’s
really an issue of culture.
To some degree, that’s how some things have changed
in the industry. We’re not just going out and talking
“WE’RE NOT JUST GOING OUT AND
TALKING ABOUT HOW OUR SECURITY
OFFICERS ARE BETTER THAN THE NEXT.
WE HAVE TO DO THAT, OF COURSE, BUT
WE ALSO MARKET THROUGH THINGS LIKE
RAISING AWARENESS OF WORKPLACE
VIOLENCE PREVENTION.”
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42 MARKETING NEWS | DECEMBER 2014
about how our security officers are better than the
next. We have to do that, of course, but we also market
through things like raising awareness of workplace
violence prevention, not only by writing a book, but also,
we’ve had more than 30 workplace violence prevention
seminars, where we invite clients and prospects to come
in, and we bring in our own experts and other experts
to raise awareness of workplace violence and what
companies should be doing in terms of putting together
a plan to be prepared.
QWhat advice do you have for other marketers
for improving their professional development
and building successful careers?
ANever stop learning. I was 15 years into my career
before I went back and got my MBA. Because I did
it that way, I, of course, think it’s the right way to do it.
[Laughs.] It was really a great experience for me because
I went into a program at Kellogg where you learn as much
from your fellow students as you do from your professors.
The professors are excellent, but coming into a classroom
with 70 fellow executives, all of us having at least 10, 15
or 20 years of experience in the work world, and going
through a rigorous academic process was great. In some
cases, it was about learning new concepts and having that
work experience to apply it to.
It was a tremendous experience, and I find that same
thing to be true, whether it’s through a formal program
like an MBA or just in your everyday life, if you can get
out to seminars, if you can network with people. You just
have to keep learning, especially in marketing. So much has
changed in the last three or four years with regard to not
only using CRM applications, but marketing automation
applications and digital opportunities. When I think back
to my time at Citicorp Diners Club, we thought we were
cutting-edge there, but now, a few years later, so much
has changed. That would be my advice to anyone in the
marketing field: You have to look at it as a field where
you’re always going to be learning. m
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