Strategy News, Features, and Interviews

One of the clear trends to emerge during 2020 was brands striking external partnerships. And if Deloitte’s recent Marketing Trends 2021 report is to go by, such partnership aspirations remain firmly in the spotlight this year as a way to drive growth, meet changing customer needs, lift cultural credentials and drive innovation.

Empired recently launched a new digital experience platform as well as a refreshed brand identity, reflecting the evolving nature of the business.

Future proofing by making the big transition from physical to digital proposition and engagement has seen Australia lifestyle offer business, Entertainment, embark on simultaneous digital and brand transformation.

This past year upended how people work, are entertained, consume and transact. Yet most of these trends aren’t being disrupted, they are accelerating in a direction already anticipated pre-COVID-19.

As the new year dawns, marketers need an updated playbook to connect with consumers is the new and changing landscape. In this CES panel, three marketing chiefs share their advice and predictions on making sense of the new normal.

Pivoting marketing and customer efforts to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic clearly took centre stage this year, as this year’s CMO list of most read stories in 2020 shows.

​In 2021, brands will need to go further than ever with CX to attract and retain customers and incentivise loyalty. Coming to grips with the newly digital consumer while also finding purpose and empathy to connect with those consumers looking for authentic brands are just some of the challenges. Finding the tools to bridge offline and online will create new challenges, while rising demands for privacy willneed to be balance against the benefits of personalisation.

​One of the interesting things to come out of this year’s unprecedented market conditions was a rethink around external partnerships and collaborations by local and global brands. Here, we highlight a few of the more unusual, unlikely pairings we saw during 2020 and why they were explored by the brands engaging in them.

Data management, reporting and action are the holy trinity for Aware Super’s first group head of data sciences as the organisation works to build a data-driven capability that drives bigger rewards for members, employers and stakeholders.

Australian mattress and furniture online retailer, Koala, is spending the next six months undergoing a large-scale data transformation to bring customer insight into every step of its decision-making processes.

Learning fast and adapting quickly have become catchcries for Accent Group’s customer experience (CX) team as it gathers lessons from 2020 to take into the festive shopping season and beyond.

Building your organisation’s customer experience (CX) engine is increasingly becoming the prerogative for chief marketing officers. But how you tackle it is a tough ask.

When incoming JAX Tyres & Auto CEO, Steve Grossrieder, took the reins in 2017, he soon discovered the company had been quite good at customer service, yet was lacking the consistency of an embedded customer experience platform and approach.

Wanting to address the problem of customer feedback in silos, ANZ has extended its Qualtrics integration to better utilise valuable customer feedback and feed it directly into developing new propositions around banking products or services.

Putting the emphasis on customer and employee experience has not only been Mecca’s most powerful marketing lever to date, it’s led the brand to open its biggest physical store yet in Sydney.

Instant maintenance support notifications, self-service customer tools and customer feedback follow-up are now on the cards for Fisher & Paykel following its latest technology program of work.

Three in four Australian consumers believe brands are lying in their marketing communications and more than half are not convinced they’re being rewarded for their loyalty, a new survey has found.

Mobile engagement platform, Plexure, which was recently named in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for mobile marketing platforms, is eyeing an Australian ASX listing and a move into the competitive supermarket space.

The humble local library, once the domain for school kids and older people checking out a few books, has been transformed into a digital destination, where a customer focus has given rise to improved services and a raft of new digital tools. At least that’s the experience with Casey Cardinia Library, one of Victoria’s largest public library networks.

Twilio is set to acquire customer data platform, Segment, for approximately US$3.2 billion, a deal analysts say reflects the maturity of the CDP space and will be one of many such acquisitions to come.

Planning, embracing change and transforming familiar approaches will be critical to success for B2B leaders, according to Forrester's SiriusDecisions research team​. And leaders across the revenue engine will need to accelerate the shift toward digitisation, buyer-centricity and customer obsession.