Bank of Queensland has confirmed Westpac marketing and digital chief, Martine Jager, as its new group executive of retail.

One of the staples of our editorial calendar is our profiles of chief marketing officers locally and internationally. And boy has it been an interesting year for these interviews.

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.

You’d be hard pressed to find a single CMO who hasn’t been significantly impacted by the COVID-19 global pandemic – positively, negatively or otherwise.

Here from CMO 50 marketers Movember Australia marketing director, Jason Olive, along with Tennis Australia chief marketing and insights officer, Josie Brown, Brownes Dairy director of sales and marketing, Natalie Sarich-Dayton, Nestlé Oceania
 director of eBusiness, strategy and marketing, Martin Brown and Amaysim CMO, Renee Garner about how their executing data-led marketing.

Innovation is one of those terms that gets bandied about. But it was clear during the COVID-19 crisis that ‘innovation’ was what marketing leaders and their teams needed to embrace in order to pivot and adapt to the rapidly changing consumer and market conditions.

Growing emphasis on soft skills, empathy and team resiliency, along with better data and customer behavioural insight, are just some of the ways modern marketing leaders are looking to strengthen the commercial muscle of their functions right now.

There’s no doubt marketing leadership has undergone massive transformation over the last 5-10 years with the rise of marketing technology, data and digitally driven marketing tools and insights, a push to personalise and be more customer experience-led, and more. So what does it take to ensure you remain a future-fit CMO?

In honour of this year's unique CMO50 2020 virtual event and the unprecedented challenges marketing leaders have had to navigate, we wanted to ask our CMO50 alumni what they'd learnt about being a CMO, as well as about their customers, from this time of crisis.

The ABC’s director of audiences, Leisa Bacon, has taken the number spot in this year’s CMO50 list among a list of familiar and new faces in the top 10 this year.

The battle lines between creative, brand-led marketing and CX, data-driven marketing have been drawn for some time and were in the spotlight during this year’s CMO50 judging.

One of the paradoxes of the COVID-19 crisis is the positives it’s created out of negatives. It’s something ABC’s director of audiences and this year’s CMO50 number one, Leisa Bacon is very conscious of.

Pausing a high profile, multi-million-dollar campaign in-market soon after launch, and just as it was getting great traction, was both a heartbreaking but very necessary decision, for Susan Coghill and Tourism Australia. And it was just the first of many pivots in 2020. “Within a matter of weeks, we had created an entirely new domestic unit within our business and launched an entirely new campaign to galvanise the nation to support the tourism industry in its recovery from the impacts of devastating summer bushfires,” Coghill told CMO. “Exhausting and motivating at the same time.”

This year, there were two key changes in Domino’s marketing it has never needed to do before - demonstrate the safety of its food preparation and delivery, including developing new operational methods like Zero Contact Delivery, and demonstrating why Domino’s should be trusted to continue operations when communities are in lockdown.

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.

Simon Cheng is the first to admit the period leading up to him joining the Menulog food delivery business was challenging. Consecutive quarters of negative year-on-year decline had seen morale and confidence in the business fall to record lows.

“I painted a brand mark on centre court of a Grand Slam mid-way through the tournament,” said Josie Brown. It was a dramatic, and symbolic, mark. “I barely dared to ask if we could paint “Australia is Open” on Rod Laver Arena, but with enormous support from the chief operating officer and tournament director, Craig Tiley. The impact was game-changing, not only for the reach of the message to the world, but also the cultural impact of how our purpose and values shaped our actions,” Brown said.

In the telco world, you can't spend a dollar without a clear sales return. So taking a step back and seeing what Melissa Hopkins has achieved at Optus over the past three years, the telco CMO realised the major shifts and impacts marketing has had not only on the organisation, but on the brand in the wider marketplace - and the bottom line.

“Finding the nuggets of gold in customer experience data” is vital to achieving innovative marketing that fills a customer need, says Monash University CMO, Fabian Marrone. Equally, systems and processes that allow scalability and consistency in message, motivation and action are a must. But don’t forget that third all-important ingredient. “Creativity will get you through anything”, Marrone says.

Since joining REA Group 18 months ago, Melina Cruickshank has deliberately placed emphasis on being as transparent as possible with her team and making sure they know what’s important to her as a leader.

Want a recipe for marketing innovation? Well how about a pinch of creativity, two spoonfuls of trend-watching, a one-quarter cup of design thinking and a big bowl of customer insights?