Stories by Brad Howarth

Rising expectations around customer experience is a common topic of conversation among consumer-facing brands. But as consumers come to expect faster delivery, greater personalisation and a more enjoyable overall purchasing experience, even the far reaches of the B2B industrial sector is starting to notice the difference.

The meal delivery market has undergone something of a boom in recent years, with a plethora of options emerging that offer everything from home-delivered fine dining through to pre-prepared fresh meals and packaged raw produce you prepare yourself.

The impending arrival of Amazon on Australian shores has left many brands and retailers scrambling to implement a response. And it’s the way in which Amazon will serve the market that arguably offers the biggest industry shake-up and reshape how consumers access products and services for brands and retailers alike.

While many Australian brands struggle with what impact Amazon’s arrival in Australia might have on their sales channel, at least one has had first-hand experience with the American online behemoth for years.

Digital technology has wrought unprecedented change on marketing, rewriting both the media landscape and the back-end systems and processes that marketers use to reach it. With so much focus on the technologies transforming marketing, it is not surprising managers and employees feel they are scrambling to keep up.

Sales and marketing are supposed to work in harmony, with one supporting the other to achieve the organisation’s revenue goals. In reality, the two functions often are at war. But a new social media strategy, coupled with some good old fashioned sales experience is helping Lenovo to finally bridge the gap.

Many business owners are familiar with seasonally-driven demand. But for Emma Garland, peak seasons lasts only three months of the year, and there is never any guarantee it will ever come again.

They say a problem shared is a problem halved. But when it comes to building a brand, sharing that problem with the wrong partner can have serious negative consequences.

The Gartner Hype Cycle can be remarkably useful in describing the acceptance curves for numerous technologies. And for programmatic ad buying, it has proven remarkably apt.

Just how useful is a traditional marketing background in a non-traditional business? And if the answer is ‘not so much’, then what sort of background would be?

The US$67 billion takeover in 2016 by Austin-based technology maker, Dell, of its Boston-based rival, EMC¸ represented the largest merger in the technology industry. In the months that followed, the two companies worked to bring disparate products and cultures together, relaunching as Dell EMC. Much of that integration work has now been done.

​Give a group of children a pile of plastic bricks and they will instinctively start building. With some experimentation, they might soon produce something recognisable. With so many organisations now striving to build a culture of innovation, could the same process work for a group of adults?

In a world where marketers are striving to learn everything they can about consumer behaviour through their digital signals, it’s no great leap to begin using digital signals to change consumer behaviour. But where is the line drawn between influence and manipulation?

From his studio in Auckland, Pat MacFie leads a team of video professionals that would put some independent production houses to shame. But he's not running an independent video production house. Instead, his group is part of an internal marketing agency producing content to help attract and retain customers for the online business software maker, Xero.

It’s been some years since every brand on earth decided it desperately needed an app to a forge a ‘meaningful’ connection with its loyal consumers. But with many of those apps now neglected or forgotten in the back folders of consumers’ phones, can apps still create a connection between the brand and its consumers?