Foxtel: Marketing is the customer growth engine

Collaboration across business units lies at the heart of how Foxtel is driving customer growth, according to its marketing chief.

Speaking in this week’s episode of Marketing Dividends presented by the AANA on Sky News, Foxtel executive director of sales and marketing, Ed Smith, set out what he called the “finely balanced harmonised set of investments” that the pay TV company regularly adjusts in order to improve customer interaction.

Smith said the dynamic between sales and marketing, was about sales and marketing working together as a collaborative unit to ascertain what will generate customer demand.

“Our whole process from driving demand, converting the demand into acquisition and then retaining the customer is all contained within the one sales and marketing business unit. That is really the customer growth engine,” he said.

However, Foxtel’s marketing and business units all share a collaborative vision which places the customer front and centre, Smith said. He also said every staff member’s voice is that of the customer, and that the business has unified behind several key pillars for growth. These include adding more value for existing customers, lowering entry price points to be affordable, and making Foxtel easier to do business with.

“Nobody owns the customer at Foxtel,” he continued. “Marketing is often the place where you get customer service, sales, engineering, product development and television all coming together to work out what’s the next story we want to tell, and the next perception that we want to shift.

“It is more a collaboration – a facilitation – then external storytelling, through the marcomms.”

According to Smith, contemporary marketers don’t have all the answers because things are too complicated today.

“But we can facilitate a process of collaboration that brings together all the other parts of the business. That will create something that the customers will value,” he said.

The Marketing Dividends series of interviews has been devised by the Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA) in partnership with MEC Global.

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