Vladka Kazda joins Xero as head of marketing
Former Carsales marketer and chief customer officer, Vladka Kazda, has joined the Xero team to head up marketing.
Kazda joined the team officially on 13 May and is responsible for Xero’s brand and go-to-market strategy in Australia, a role which incorporates marketing operations, channel mix, analytics, automation and customer loyalty programs. She reports into Xero’s local managing director, Trent Innes.
Kazda replaces Penny Elmslie, who has been promoted to a newly created global role of brand and community director but remains based in Melbourne.
In a statement to CMO, Xero said Kazda will work closely with Innes on reaching, engaging and growing the cloud-based accounting software group’s share of small business customers, accountants and bookkeeper partners. The company highlighted her digital experiences and 17 years in customer-focused, marketing roles as key reasons for her appointment.
“I’m thrilled to have joined the Xero Australia team at what is such an exciting time for the company,” Kazda said. “I’ve admired Xero as a business and as a brand for some time now, and it’s a privilege to be joining during a period of such rapid growth, but here and in overseas markets.”
Prior to the new role, Kazda spent 15 years at Carsales, the last three years as its chief customer officer with responsibility for converting its 6 million members email addresses into enriched data profiles to bolster personalisation and engagement.
Read more: 9 lessons in tackling customer retention and a single customer view at Carsales
Prior to this, she spent five years as its chief marketing officer, a role held by Kellie Cordiner since 2016.
“We are delighted to welcome Vladka to Xero,” said Innes. “She is an authentic leader and a commercially savvy strategic marketer with an impressive track record in helping businesses scale. Vladka adds another dimension to our senior leadership team in Australia and will play a pivotal role in helping us reach, engage and grow our market share of small business customers and accountant and bookkeeper partners in the region.”
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
Big brands were once protected from small brands by high barriers to entry. Big brands had the resources to employ big agencies, to crack big ideas and to invest in big campaigns. They had the luxury of time to debate strategies and work on long-term innovation pipelines. Retailers used to partner with big brands.
According to the World Economic Forum in its most recent The Future of Jobs report, the most important skills for the future are not technical, task-oriented skills, but higher-order skills such as creativity, social influence, active learning, and analytical thinking.
Businesses continue to highly value the attention they buy through paid media, yet at the same time, many continue to disregard and under-value opportunities to connect with customers using their owned media.
In this bonus last episode of this new podcast series, BrandHook MD, Pip Stocks, talks with former ANZ group general manager of marketing, Louise Eyres, talks about the importance of thinking like a customer and using intuition to solve customer painpoints.
Well written Vanessa!! Agreed with your view that human experience is marketing's next frontier. Those businesses who are focused on the ...
Clyde Griffith
Forget customer experience, human experience is marketing's next frontier
Great tips for tops skills need to develop and stay competitive
Nick
The top skills needed to stay competitive in a rapidly changing workforce
The popularity of loyalty programs is diminishing, though I'd say it is because customers are savvy enough to recognise when a loyalty pr...
Heather
It’s time for marketers to rethink their approach to ‘loyalty’
Thanks Nadia for sharing this blog. It has really useful and amazing information about Salesforce Commerce Cloud and digital engagement w...
Holly Smith
Adidas taps data and technology smarts to build personalised digital engagement with consumers
clearly someone who's jealous and only comments from the safety of being behind their keyboard
Peter Sibson
The purpose of purpose - Brand science - CMO Australia