Leadership News, Features, and Interviews

Two new executive-level CMOs have joined Australia’s marketing leadership ranks this week following appointments at Bupa and SocietyOne.

There’s a transformation going on at Carsales, and CMO, Kellie Cordner, is playing an instrumental role in ensuring it’s a customer-led one.

Virgin’s Frequent Flyer program division has appointed Former American Express VP of consumer acquisition and product development as its new chief marketing officer.

Providing relevant customer experiences is about removing the barriers to a customer getting the services and solutions they want, Suncorp chief customer experience officer, ​Mark Reinke​, says.

Marketing may have gained importance and influence in terms of business focus over recent years, but it hasn’t necessarily helped CMOs rise up the executive ranks.

Cognitive computing and machine learning are among the top buzzwords of 2016, and judging from the product roadmaps of most martech and adtech vendors, they’re going to dominate headlines again in 2017.

Bupa’s marketing director, John Moore, has been promoted to a newly created role in the health insurance group’s corporate HQ from 2017.

Mercer’s chief customer and marketing officer, Renee McGowan, has been promoted to a global business operations role within the group and will relocate to New York later this month.

Moves to curb the types of jobs eligible for 457 work visas by the Australian Government should sound a warning bell to the marketing industry to do more to foster local talent, leading industry association chiefs say.

Both ADMA and the AANA have announced new board members this week in preparation for 2017.

Guzman y Gomez CMO, Anna Jones, has parted company with the fast food chain after just 15 months in the role.

The push to transform customer experiences through data-driven digital capability is empowering CMOs and giving the marketing function an increasingly important role to play in digital transformation, Microsoft’s Australian CMO and COO claims.

Marketers must tackle the power, trust and skills gaps in their organisation by harnessing true leadership qualities if they hope to attain their rightful place as influential business executives.

It’s been seven years since Sean Ellis coined the term ‘growth hacking’ to describe a process by which early-stage companies could align themselves for fast customer and market growth. And the former marketer for Dropbox, LogMeIn and Eventbrite and now CEO of GrowthHackers.com, agrees its application is changing over time.

Former Telstra consumer marketing chief, Inese Kingsmill, has resurfaced as the new head of marketing and customer engagement for Virgin Australia.

Unlocking and surfacing inherent staff knowledge, building adaptability into teams, and putting more emphasis on customer retention are just some of the methods marketers from LinkedIn, Facebook and Google are adopting for digital marketing success.

Legacies are the weak point of organisations today because they’re ripe for disruption internally and externally, Wunderman Bienalto CEO, Hurol Inan, claims.

Digital transformation is ultimately a cultural challenge that requires marketing and IT functions to unite and disrupt the status quo in order to create customer-led innovation.

A new executive-as-a-service consultancy is offering to provide part-time CMOs to smaller companies to help them with their go-to-market strategies.

Marketers wholly subscribing to a metrics-based, programmatic digital marketing approach could be risking brand growth through short-term thinking and optimisation overkill, The Hallway’s Jules Hall claims.

​While customer experience management and design is one of the fastest developing IT sectors in Australia and around the world, it isn’t well known - and very few experts are women. But Katja Forbes wants to change all of that.