Stories by Brad Howarth

It’s not always possible for a brand to provide personalised contact through every engagement with a customer. But for workplace injury insurance provider, Employers Mutual Limited (EML), it may have found the next best thing.

Car makers know the power of a test drive in convincing a would-be buyer. But how do you get a person to test a car they would never have considered?

Few charities put the people they help at the apex of their branding strategy. But for The Big Issue, those homeless or disadvantaged people who don the bright yellow vest don’t just sell the fortnightly magazine, they are also the public expression of the organisation’s ethos as a social enterprise.

It was while selling B2B services at Google in the US that Chris Rothstein and his colleagues first started to see how broken a sales process could be.

While most data professionals are tasked with driving growth for their organisation, for Rachel Green, the opposite is true.

We may not be consciously aware of it, but each of us carries dozens of digital tokens around with us.Our ability to use each of these services is governed by a string of numbers – a digital token. And according to the proponents of the open source crypto-wallet called the Pillar Project, the way they are managed is fundamentally broken.

Driverless cars will very likely save lives and reduce congestion. But for those of us enslaved to the daily commute, they might also mean the emancipation of countless minutes and hours spent stuck behind the wheel. So what will we do with our regained time, now that we are no longer distracted with the task of actually driving?

While explosive growth in data volumes presents a challenge for many marketers, for US-based data storage technology company, NetApp, servicing that storage need has helped it grow to US$5.5 billion in annual revenue. But the company’s success has also come at a cost, serving to typecast and limit its visibility. Enter the CMO.

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.