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.

Personalisation has never been important in the way brands provide experiences to their customers. And in a world where digital is the primary vehicle of engagement, and data is exchanged, customer expectations on how personalised experiences need to be are higher than ever.

Fast-growing, independent telco, Mate, has signed up with SourseAI to synthesise Mate’s customer data and combine it with market data. The results include defined audience segments, characterised personas and customer and market behaviour insights as the basis for a brand refresh, customer engagement strategies and product development.

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.

For someone who claims no natural affinity with scheduling, it’s surprising Brett Chester finds himself in the role of CMO for a fast-growth technology company focused on making rostering easier. But it is through his own career experience Chester says he has developed an understanding of the client base of his company, Australian-born Deputy, and the pain scheduling can bring.

All the latest martech and adtech news from Salesforce, Optimizely, SugarCRM, Act-on Software, Zendesk, Oracle, Progress, Yotpo and Sendinblue.

Chief executives of emerging companies are looking for marketing and sales leaders to not only work together seamlessly to drive growth and revenue, but also base efforts on a shared view of the entire buyer journey.

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.

Australian FMCG brand, Carman’s Kitchen, has brought on a new marketing and innovation leader to drive its next phase of growth.

Senior marketers are increasingly looking to build their innovation and opportunity identification capabilities and recognise soft skills and collaboration as critically important across the marketing function. Yet there is clear gap in the way planning and execution knowledge is shared between senior leaders and their teams.

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.

A $10 million investment in Year13 has triggered a content, technology and executive recruitment spree by the edtech and youth digital engagement platform player.

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.

elstra’s customer loyalty rewards program, Telstra Plus, will be scaled out into a full sales and marketing channel, while predictive analytics and omnichannel choice will become key mechanisms in personalised engagement under the new T25 strategy released by the telco today.

There are a lot of insights out there into customer experience maturity across organisations today, but what about state of customer leadership itself? Just what does it mean to be a customer experience manager or leader today, what’s the remit, role and sphere of influence? And how do you gauge success and impact?

All the latest martech and adtech news from Intuit, Mailchimp, InMoment, Zeotap, Salesforce, Nielsen, PubMatic, Contxtful, Neustar and MessageMedia.

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.

Heightened consumer demand to connect authentically around cultural conversations as well as tentpole TV moments are triggering strong growth in the number of brands investing marketing dollars into Twitter globally and locally.

Former ANZ and Deakin University senior marketer, Trisca Scott-Branagan, has become the chief marketing officer for recently established growth capital firm, Australian Business Growth Fund (ABGF).

Lengthy lockdowns have left many of us feeling our social communication skills may have atrophied. But social communication has always been a difficult task for some, especially those coming from non-English speaking backgrounds. Now one entrepreneur has found a way to use the digitalisation of human interaction to create an AI-powered tool that’s helping people improve their verbal and non-verbal communication skills.