The first CMO for Australia's supermarket giant shares his marketing strategy and ambitions for the brand
When Tony Phillips took his first steps out of the advertising agency world and into Coles’ marketing team in 2007, doing a good job largely meant producing an ad on time.
“Forget about it being a ‘marketing department’ – it wasn’t even an advertising department, it was the production department of the merchants,” he tells CMO. “They would send up a request for an ad for Coca-Cola for tomorrow and you’d produce it. You felt you were doing a good job if you produced that ad on time.”
Fast forward to today and his position as Woolworths’ first CMO, reporting directly to the MD, and you can see how much the role of marketing has changed, Phillips says.
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