Inspiring tales of brands adapting to digital acceleration and reimagining CX are the positives to come out of tough COVID conditions, says Adobe’s vice-president and managing director for Australia and New Zealand, Suzanne Steele

Chris Brown is the first to admit he wasn’t quite sure what to expect when he switched from agency to client-side and became McDonald's Australia’s chief marketing officer in December last year.

A Net Promoter Score of +74 and 30 per cent year-on-year growth are just some of ways BizCover’s transformative investment into personalised and increasingly automated customer service and marketing has delivered.

Brands need to be in the business of hope and community if they’re to truly foster trust with their customers in this new world of Covid-normal, says Salesforce’s global chief marketing officer.

Want to transform your company’s customer and digital technology stack? Then don’t scrimp on strategy, expect more costs than you originally anticipated, put data at the centre of investment and make sure robust governance frameworks are in place.

Brands advocating vaccinations for all are working to present themselves as good citizens with a leadership role in the community that enables them to give consumers, and often their staff, advice on what we ought to do. Here’s a sample of the ways a dozen brands are approaching this controversial topic.

Reckitt has been busy creating wide-ranging and ongoing corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects in the last few years with results for the community and for consumer perception that please Reckitt’s hygiene A/NZ’s director of marketing, Saurabh Jain.

Bunnings and JB Hi-Fi have come out trumps for being dependable, inspirational and aspirational in a new survey aimed at finding the most loved retail brands locally and globally.

With a view of only four out of 36 official social channels, the University of Sydney’s corporate communications team found it impossible to coordinate messaging, content, or measurement and reporting - let alone work strategically with its eight faculty comms teams.

Discovering mentors was “life-changing” for Nick Bell, an AFR young rich-listed entrepreneur whose now more than 1000 employees in seven digital agencies are spread across 12 offices in eight countries.

Winning over the millennial generation of consumers and taking advantage of rapid digital take-up has led iconic 90-year-old Australian brand, Dri-Glo, to take its first steps into direct-to-consumer commerce.

Little Birdie, a new homepage for online shopping, has appointed ex-Uber marketer, David Jennings, as its CMO and Kogan.com’s former deputy CFO Joanne Smith as CFO.

Outdoor Media Australia (OMA) and its research partner, Neuro-Insight, are claiming to have found the holy grail of outdoor advertising in world-first results launched jointly today.

Harvey Norman has been the biggest loser in the latest Roy Morgan trust survey, skidding as other retailers benefited from record GDP 9.6 per cent growth for the year and maintained their trusted positions.

Bailey Nelson has seen online sales conversion lift by 400 per cent in Australia and more than 600 per cent in Canada off the back of an innovative virtual reality-based try-on solution for spectacle wearers.

A picture of the difficulties faced by many CMOs was painted by Gartner’s team in the opening keynote to the analyst firm’s Marketing Symposium in September.

Australia has had its fourth consecutive month of +40 per cent advertising growth across July and sales excluding digital are already up 15 per cent for the month of August.

Relationship building, curiosity, a high threshold for change and positive mindset are vital attributes marketing leaders look for when they recruit for regional marketing teams.

​Kmart has joined other retailers by invigorating its online content to engage customers with a series of ‘masterclasses’. The classes also market its expanding furniture range – another response to customers’ increasingly indoor lives.

Mining through the ‘minutiae’ of seemingly niche cultural phenomena could provide marketers with the toolkit for far stronger and more impactful engagement with consumers than purely relying on digital or survey data.

According to CMO’s annual State of the CMO research, marketing leaders rate the CEO/MD as their biggest champion and advocate within the organisation. So what does it take to truly build a great, strategic connection with your CEO/MD? We ask leading marketers from Greencross, MyDeal, Audi, NAB and West HQ for their valuable insights.