Former Staples A/NZ business brings on its first chief marketing officer
Office and education solutions provider, Winc (formerly Staples) has appointed its first chief marketing officer with a remit to reinvent the newly rebranded business’ digital officer and lead its customer engagement efforts.
George O’Neil joins Winc from James Hardie Building Products, where led a digital transformation across the Oceania business as Asia-Pacific marketing director. His resume also includes senior brand and marketing roles with Procter & Gamble and Unilever.
O’Neill’s appointment comes just three months after the group rebranded and embarked on a transformation program aimed at shifting perceptions of the business away from traditional office and education products, to more solutions-based offerings.
“The creation of the chief marketing officer role is a testament to how serious we are about building our fresh new brand and giving our customers the best possible experience when they shop with us online,” Winc CEO, Darren Fullerton, said.
“The Winc digital business model is one of the longest and most successful ecommerce businesses across Australia and as part of George’s remit, he will lead a transformation program that will re-invent this and allow us to get closer to our customers than ever before.”
The Staples A/NZ business was acquired by private equity firm, Platinum Equity, in March, and was swiftly followed by Platinum Equity’s acquisition of Office Depot’s OfficeMax business locally in April.
At the time of the rebrand, Fullerton told CMO the intention was to appoint a new executive-level marketing leader to oversee a centralised marketing function.
“We want to bring on a world-class CMO to sit at the executive table to be at the heart of this shift and bring marketing from a little ‘m’ to big ‘m’,” he said at the time. “We have historically been a traditional, sales-led organisation. This is a shift to move from pure sales to interacting with customers like we’ve never done before.”
Fullerton has also signalled plans to invest into automation, artificial intelligence and digital experience.
At the same time as announcing its new CMO, Winc also took the wrappers of a new six-part content marketing series entitled ‘Jeanette: Office Detective’, which takes a comedic look at what goes on the workplace. The six episodes kick off this week and run through to February.
Follow CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, take part in the CMO conversation on LinkedIn: CMO ANZ, join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CMOAustralia, or check us out on Google+:google.com/+CmoAu
In this latest episode of our Conversations over a Cuppa with CMO series, we catch up with Jane Power, who stepped into the director of marketing and transformation role at GenesisCare in April 2020.
Understanding the core principles of Behavioural Economics will give players in the travel industry a major competitive advantage when restrictions lift and travellers begin to book again. And there are a few insights in here for the rest of the marketing community, too.
Unicorns, the Sunken City of Atlantis, Zeus: They are very famous. So famous in fact, that we often think twice about whether they are real or not. Sometimes if we talk about something widely enough, and for long enough, even the strangest fiction can seem like fact. But ultimately it is still fiction - stories we make up and tell ourselves over and over until we believe.
At a time of uncertainty and economic hardship, customer retention takes on much greater importance. CX Lavender’s Linda O’Grady examines the big grey area between ‘all’ and ‘best’ customers when deciding who is worth fighting for and how.
Thanks for sharing. You might want to check this website https://lagimcardgame.com/. An up and coming strategic card game wherein the cha...
Pierce Fabreverg
Board games distributor partners with Deliveroo in business strategy pivot
Such an important campaign, dyslexia certainly need more awareness. Amazing to see the work Code Read is doing. On the same note we are a...
Hugo
New campaign aims to build understanding around scope and impact of dyslexia
Great Job on this article! It demonstrates how much creativity, strategy and effort actually goes to produce such unique logo and brandin...
Pierce Fabreverg
Does your brand need a personality review? - Brand vision - CMO Australia
Here’s an article on solving the most complex customer queries without a delay. Hope it helpswww.engati.com/blog/address...
soham
How to manage social media during Covid-19
Thank you for explaining the rules. This article covers the principles of design, which arrange the elements of art into a composition. ...
Pierce Fabreverg
Reports: Brands have an important role to play during the COVID-19 crisis - if they're useful