When you’re looking to transform a business, it pays to have a former marketer at the helm, Nick Baker believes.

It’s by taking an unconventional but deliberately supportive role to middle managers that CMOs can truly lead radical change initiatives, a new academic paper claims.

In recent years, there has been a strong focus on organisations embracing ‘innovation’ as a means of gaining competitive advantage. But with the term innovation seemingly resisting definition, it is not surprising the paths organisations are taking to innovate are following a number of routes.

Meaningful business decisions in the digital era will no longer be made by leaders behind closed doors, but via engagement across collaboration channels.

Organisations looking to drive innovation need to analyse their company DNA to find it, not focus on what they’ve become or force change for change’s sake.

What does it take to become a well-known industry expert - someone who keynotes the biggest conferences, whose ideas are widely quoted and shared, and who is sought by the media for leadership and insight? And what value do these experts bring to their firms?

CRM isn’t the most exciting topic to discuss around the executive table, but its importance cannot be denied by organisations trying to become more customer-centric in their make-up and mindset.

‘Failure’ is a term that is seemingly in vogue, but are marketing leaders truly embracing what it stands for? We asked 4 Aussie CMOs to share how failure fits in their team’s innovation and development mindset.

Many of us feel as if we owe our mobile devices our undivided attention. Sometimes, we even give it a seat at the dinner table. I refer to this trend as the digital intrusion movement, or DIM.

Big data analytics is not about replacing intuition; it’s there to give business leaders and staff the tools to ask smarter questions and be more creative.

An increasing number of organisations, both new and well-established, are opting to appoint their first chief marketing officer. In this new series of profiles, we speak to the first dedicated marketing chiefs appointed at their respective Australian organisations to find out what it takes to be the maiden CMO, their views on modern marketing, and who their allies in executive leadership are.

Chief executive of Australia’s Taronga Zoo Cameron Kerr is a great believer in the power of people to transform brands as well as leadership. He discusses his rise from marketer to business leader

The Sixth Annual CMO Agenda report from US-based strategic consultants, CMG Partners, has set out to define the key principles marketers must embrace to become more responsive to market conditions.

Two very different approaches to tackling the fickle issue of customer experience and engagement were presented by Dell and Expedia at the recent Customer360 Symposium.

Leaders must embrace empathy, courage and vulnerability if they’re to successfully transition their businesses from the industrial to human era.

Customer engagement is top of mind for increasing numbers of organisations, but it was apparent at the Customer360 Symposium that brands are finding it difficult to demonstrate and justify the value of these efforts in a way that resonates with executive leadership.

Efficiency is a requirement of business today but it is empathy and creativity that customers demand from organisations and that comes down to your culture, a leading corporate anthropologist claims.

Creativity and business are intertwined and one cannot exist without the other, respected US actor and director, Robert Redford, told attendees at this year’s Adobe Summit.