What kept you awake at night during 2017?

Not much keeps me awake as I am a great sleeper! Certainly a focus of mine, however, has been to identify approaches to affect greater influence amongst our Executive team and Board, so we can achieve our outcomes faster.

What have you achieved this year?

Aligning the broader company, not just marketing, to have even more focus on the customer so that we can better align ‘supply’ of our services, with validated ‘demand’ of our customers.

The focus this year has been on transforming the marketing function by turning it from a cost centre to a revenue generator by taking a strategic, overarching approach and by leveraging technology to automate and streamline processes. This approach has delivered significant return on investment within the first year, and stands to deliver even greater benefits as time goes by.

What is your marketing prediction for 2018?

If only we all had a crystal ball! Clearly the trend towards customer experience and service delivery is increasing in prominence, so I think we will see more of a shift towards marketing leaders starting to drive the company strategy and priorities. No longer is it just the CFO pulling key levers, but the person representing the customers (i.e. usually marketing) will start to have a seat at the executive table.

Vanessa Lyons, Group Head of Marketing, AUB Group Limited

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