From Madrid to Mayfair: the WBS alum building a career at Ralph Lauren

It’s been a busy summer in the Ralph Lauren marketing department – starting with Wimbledon and now looking forward to autumn with Paris Fashion Week – and Digital Performance Marketing Associate Luis Servet has just come off the phone to North America.

The Warwick Business School alum speaks to multiple people in multiple countries every day in his role managing paid media campaigns for the fashion giant.

“My main job is to act as a bridge between Ralph Lauren and a major London marketing agency that handles its account,” he says.

“I’m in charge of communicating Ralph Lauren’s needs and goals to the agency, and then communicating back to the company. So, I’m a bit of an operator between the two.”

It is a position that Luis has held since August 2024 and one which places him at the centre of a vast international operation. Based at Ralph Lauren’s office on Bond Street in London’s Mayfair, he manages paid search and shopping activity across the Google ecosystem for the company in 76 countries spanning Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. His days are defined by analysing performance across a wide range of marketing placements as well as diving into those calls with colleagues, agencies and specialists around the world.

“Every day, I’m talking to so many people from multiple countries and multiple industries,” he says. “This requires a very strong social component.”

That international outlook is especially visible during one of the most important periods in the fashion calendar. Luis’ team plays a key role in supporting Ralph Lauren’s long-standing partnership with Wimbledon, using paid media campaigns to amplify the brand’s presence around the tournament.

“I love being part of Wimbledon campaigns,” he says. “We are an official partner of Wimbledon and working with the tournament is just lovely. The engagement, the type of audiences, the type of advertising that’s involved with it, are all of the highest sophistication.”

While he is less directly involved in major awareness-building events such as Paris Fashion Week, the systems that Luis works with behind the scenes play a crucial role in turning public attention into commercial results.

“The demand-capture structures I manage for Ralph Lauren across the Google ecosystem will certainly be there to capture any additional interest and demand generated by Paris Fashion Week and ultimately convert it into traffic and revenue,” the graduate of the BSc Business & Management with Marketing says.

Those structures, he adds, have already demonstrated their value during moments ranging from Wimbledon and the Winter Olympics to celebrity-driven spikes in consumer attention such as Taylor Swift’s engagement.

“The marketing structures will be there to properly welcome users into the world of Ralph Lauren when they take that step from admiring the brand into online shopping,” he says.

Not that the Digital Performance Marketing Associate’s focus is only on revenue-led, ‘lower-funnel’ channels. He is also heavily involved in demand generation, building brand awareness among potential new audiences.

And with AI reshaping the way people discover and interact with brands, much of his time is spent testing the latest technologies to better align the firm’s marketing with rapidly changing search behaviour. 

Consumer behaviour

The journey to one of the world’s most recognisable fashion brands began a long way from Mayfair. Born and raised on the outskirts of Madrid, Luis developed an early fascination with life beyond Spain after following his older brother to schooling in the US. Although his own experience proved challenging, it planted a seed that would eventually lead him to the UK. “It sparked a small fire in me,” he recalls. “I wanted something else. I wanted something more.”

His academic interests initially centred on economics, politics and business. As a teenager, he found himself captivated by events such as Brexit, the US presidential election and the emergence of cryptocurrencies. Yet another fascination was quietly developing.

“I’ve always been really interested in psychology and understanding people – the individual, but also at the collective level,” the WBS alum says.

A turning point came when he read Contagious, the bestselling book by marketing professor Jonah Berger.

“It was probably my first encounter with marketing theory and consumer behaviour,” he says. “I just found it really, really interesting.”

That interest would find fertile ground at WBS. One reason he chose Warwick was the flexibility of the Business & Management degree, which enabled students to specialise later in their studies rather than committing to a career path from the outset.

“At a young age, and even deep into university, I didn’t have a defined career plan,” he says. “I wanted something that gave me strong fundamentals but also allowed me to open doors.”

Initially attracted by finance when he started his studies at WBS in 2018, Luis found his enthusiasm increasingly pulled towards marketing as he progressed through his degree. Consumer behaviour modules in particular left a lasting impression.

“It wasn’t until the second and third years that I started having consumer behaviour classes,” he says. “Some cases that we worked on I remember perfectly to this day because I just found them genuinely interesting.”

Beyond the classroom, Warwick’s broad curriculum and extracurricular opportunities helped translate academic curiosity into professional ambition. Luis became involved with the University’s Graphic Design and Marketing Society, where returning interns offered insights into the realities of agency and brand-side marketing.

“That definitely influenced me,” he says. “So I ended up going directly into digital marketing.”

Marketing roles

His first role was with digital marketing agency More2, where he spent three years honing expertise in paid media and performance marketing. The work combined data analysis with understanding consumers and the seasonality of consumer demand, giving him hands-on experience of how digital campaigns drive business outcomes.

That experience attracted the attention of Ralph Lauren, which approached him directly. The company’s recruitment process was demanding, involving multiple interview stages focusing both on his ability to carry out data analysis and his interpersonal skills.

Looking back, Luis believes his success rested on more than marketing knowledge alone. In an age when marketing is increasingly defined by data and technology, his story illustrates the enduring value of understanding people. “From the very beginning, my job at Ralph Lauren required a very strong social component,” he says. “And I think this is something that I excelled at.”

He traces those abilities back to Warwick. The University’s campus environment, he says, created a uniquely supportive setting for personal development.

“Warwick was a social environment in a protected bubble,” he recalls. “At first it was quite scary, but then you sink into it and you start to develop a confidence and a curiosity, as well as good social skills.”

This social confidence and curiosity continue to serve him today as he navigates conversations with senior executives, agency specialists and international teams. “I’m involved in conversations with people that two years ago I wouldn’t have even dreamed of,” he says. 

For a student who once worried that he lacked a clear sense of direction, the path has become considerably clearer. Warwick, he says, did not provide a blueprint for success. Instead, it gave him something more valuable: the foundations to discover it for himself.

“I was building the foundations,” he says. “Then I would walk the path and the path would disclose itself. Now I am on that path and walking freely with a spring in my step.”

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