Stories by Brad Howarth

They are two of the most important functions within any business, but it seems that for many organisations, the gulf between executive management and marketing remains as wide as it has ever been.

Getting Australians to talk about sport isn’t hard. But bringing them to your website to do it takes a little effort. This was the task for Fox Sports at the launch of its sports community site, The Crowd, in February this year.

Publishers have always known social media likes and shares does not paint a complete picture of how their content is being passed along. Social sharing and search has never been able to entirely account for the number of visitors they receive via deep links.

If digital marketing campaigns have one major drawback, it is that they are effectively invisible to anyone who is not using that specific digital service.

Social media and digital have not only changed the way customers perceive brands, they’ve also changed the way brands perceive the input of their customers. Brad Howarth reports on the rise of co-creation and how it’s transforming innovation

Disruption may be a major motivator for business change, but it need not be a bad thing, according to the practice leader for Deloitte Digital, Steven Hallam.

Agile development abandons traditional notions of lengthy planning and development cycles with testing at the end in favour of rapid prototyping, development and ongoing testing. That same thinking is starting to find its way into other business processes, and marketing is no exception.

A dozen Victoria-based food manufacturers are now exporting into the Chinese mainland thanks to an innovative partnership between export-oriented Australian ecommerce company, Premium Australia Foods, and global ecommerce specialist, ChannelAdvisor.

It makes sense to embrace the same media used by the people you are trying to reach. For German carmaker Audi’s push into the Korean market, that has meant a very high investment in one of the newest marketing channels – mobile.

Applying design principles to business is opening up a world of opportunity to co-create with customers and industry on everything from products to crime prevention.

If you ask your customers what they think of you, your products and services, they may very well tell you. But what if the people using your products and services were the same ones that had designed them? How would that change their attitudes towards you, and what new ideas might the design process uncover?

Australians sure do like to ask a lot of questions. Of all the countries where the US online survey tool, SurveyMonkey, is available, it turns out Australia has the highest per capita use.

While traditional retailers are often derided for their standards of customer service, they have held one advantage over their ecommerce competitors – their ability to put a live person in front of a sales prospect.

For any marketer struggling under the weight of the data generated by CRM and other marketing systems, the last thing you may want to hear is that there is another class of data just waiting to be exploited.

Website analytics can be a powerful tool for increasing sales. But they can also prove useful in helping people in a time of crisis.