Stories by Brad Howarth

With a history that stretches back over 100 years, SPC has been a familiar brand in Australian pantries and on supermarket shelves. But the company had languished in recent years following its acquisition by Coca Cola Amatil in 2005, recording falling sales and significant losses.

​With 50,000 students studying more than 200 courses across five physical sites and one virtual campus, South East Queensland’s Griffith University is a large and complex organisation to manage.

It’s not often a technology which was once thought would signal the decline of an industry actually ends up revitalising it. But somewhere in the 2000s other technologies began to emerge that would start to describe a future for audio.

Of the many trends in marketing content that have emerged through 2020, one of the most common has been displays of empathy. But how well those messages landed probably had more to do with how people felt about the brands to begin with rather than the quality of the communications themselves.

The COVID-19 crisis had a devastating impact on numerous sporting codes in 2020, forcing cancellations and scheduling changes around the world. One of the legacies for the Australian Football League will be a greater focus on use of digital media to connect directly with fans – before, during and after the games.

While the software industry’s products may be virtual, physical activities still play an important role in forging connections with customers. So when the COVID-19 crisis hit Australia, Microsoft Australia’s CMO and communications director Pip Arthur and her team found themselves quickly readjusting to the new reality.

Sometimes doing the right thing for your customers means stepping outside of the conventional practices of the organisation you represent. Daniel McDermott is one marketer who has taken on this challenge in the past year. As the marketing director for A/NZ at IT security company, Mimecast, he leads a team of 15 dedicated to building the Mimecast brand and driving sales opportunities.

The legal sector is not commonly renowned for being a hotbed of innovation, let alone for progressive marketing thinking. But when LegalVision was founded in 2012 it was done so with the objective of turning that perception on its head and disrupting an otherwise staid industry.

Marketers often talk about building a deep connection with their customers. But for marketers in the pet care sector, they also need to take into account the deep connections that already exist between owners and their pets. At Mars, this relationship resides at the core of all decisions made by marketing director Emma Dowling and her team, and is reflected in the way her customers are referred to as ‘pet parents’.

Examination of the composition of many marketing teams will often show a skew towards a younger working population. It’s not until you get into the senior roles you start seeing people in the 40s and 50s, and those roles by design are somewhat scare. This can of course cause problems when your target audience resides in a demographic more akin to the parents of your team members.

While the rest of the world was cancelling events earlier this year, Bianca Bryson had a different idea.

For the past few years, Scott Koetsier and the sales and marketing team at Emerald Foods have been pondering exactly where the boundaries lie for one of his company’s most prized ice cream brands, New Zealand Natural, and asking how they can be expanded.

Rebranding a company is rarely easy, and that task can be made even more difficult when you are also trying to change perceptions of the category within which you operate. But then to do that in an economy already been buffeted by COVID-19 lockdowns and a looming recession?

With Australia entering the uncharted waters of a pandemic-driven recession, it is becoming harder and harder make predictions about future customer sentiment and behaviour. There are signals and trends, however, that are evident today which begin to describe likely scenarios and outcomes. So here are four factors marketers need to prepare for in the post-COVID recession.

The words ‘new normal’ have quickly emerged as the go-to phrase for describing the world created by the COVID-19 crisis and its impact on the economy and national psyche. But have we even reached the ‘new normal’ yet?