How Bupa Global Rebuilt Its Marketing in Three Years
TL;DR: Bupa Global has grown sales and leads 84% since 2023 by treating marketing as a three-year turnaround — earning commercial credibility first, winning investment second, and only then going global — a sequence any under-pressure marketing team can copy.
The turnaround, in one number
When global marketing director Pardeep Duggal joined Bupa Global in January 2023, the health insurer's marketing team had just been through voluntary redundancies, two directorates had been merged, and the business was under financial strain. Three years on, sales and leads are up 84%, and the team was named Marketing Week's Marketing Team of the Year in 2025.
That figure is the headline, but the sequencing behind it is the real lesson. Duggal did not open with a rebrand or a big creative idea. She opened by proving marketing could move the commercial numbers the business already cared about.
Year one: earn your ticket to the game
In her first year, with most of the budget tied to lead generation, Duggal pointed marketing squarely at supporting it. The phrase she uses — earn your ticket to the game — captures a discipline many marketers skip: build credibility by delivering what the P&L needs before asking permission to do something more ambitious.
That credibility funded the next move. Once the team had shown it could deliver, it won internal buy-in for its We Can campaign and the audience segmentation work underneath it.
Years two and three: invest, then go global
Year two was about investment — in the website, the app and the campaign — in the areas Duggal already knew needed fixing but had previously lacked the mandate to touch. Year three was the global brand campaign. She calls the arc a three-year swoosh: fix the problem, earn your seat, then scale.
Growth itself, she says, came from unglamorous fundamentals: sharper segmentation, the right media partner and channels, genuine audience understanding, and creative that actually resonated with the customer base.
The part most teams ignore: the team itself
What makes this more than a campaign story is how much of it was internal. Duggal aligned marketing's KPIs with commercial and operations leaders — which, she says, earned her a seat on the executive leadership team. She rebuilt the structure from a blank sheet, mapping every role on Post-it notes until each marketer across six global hubs, from Cairo to Dubai, had something to lead.
Quarterly Achieving Your Potential sessions now cover progression, the grading structure and, pointedly, how to read a P&L. The result, she says, is a team whose engagement scores have risen alongside the financial ones.
What this means for your business
For any marketing leader walking into a struggling function, Bupa Global's arc is a usable template. Resist the urge to lead with a logo refresh. In year one, attach marketing to the metric the board already trusts, and hit it. Use that credibility — not a slide deck — to unlock investment. Save the brand-building ambition for when you have the standing to be believed. The 84% is the output; the sequence is the method.
Too many marketers try to win the brand argument on day one, before anyone trusts them with the numbers. Bupa Global did it the other way round — delivered the commercial result, earned the seat, then spent the capital. That order is the whole game, and it is the advice I give every business owner nervous about their marketing spend. — Daniel Nikolla, Founder of Merx Marketing
The fastest way to win investment for brand-building is to first prove marketing can move the numbers the board already cares about.
Is your marketing team still trying to win the brand argument before it has earned commercial credibility?
If you would like to know more about this topic, please contact us on danieln@merxmarketing.co.uk
Based on reporting by Marketing Week.
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Written by Daniel Nikolla, Founder of Merx Marketing Ltd and Marketing Minute
