Author: admin

Amid heated conversation around Australia’s gender pay gap and women’s progress, Reckitt Benckiser brand, Nurofen, debuted its new campaign, ‘See my pain’ and first-ever Australian Gender Pain Gap Index Report. It reveals a 7 per cent gap existing between women and men nationally when it comes to pain diagnosis and management, and takes its cues from the debut of similar benchmark UK research kicked off by Nurofen last year. Beyond the supporting campaign, Nurofen is backing up its commitment to change by helping train 9,000-plus pharmacists on how to avoid unconscious bias when dealing with female consumers. It’s no commercial ploy to sell another packet of Zavance, says Reckitt marketing director health ANZ, Holly McCarthy, but a multi-year effort to wield brand power to progress action and advocacy against an all too real bias.

There’s ever-growing consumer concern around the way personal information is handled off the back of Australia’s high-profile data breaches at Optus, Medibank and Latitude as well as AI use, says former privacy and now information Commissioner, Angelene Falk – and brands should be worried. Prevention is better than cure when it comes to meeting consumer demands and forthcoming privacy legislative change, and Falk is urging businesses to ensure data breach plans are not gathering dust but are operationally ready. Where businesses also need to do better is around the human intersection with systems and information, Falk says. That’s especially the case with more AI on its way, consuming more and more data sets, often without the ethics of human oversight, from all edges of the internet.  

Faced with under-industry average ecommerce sales, a desire to win back lapsed customers, along with ambitions to increase replenishment and frequency rates, luxury beauty brand posterchild, Aesop, has embarked on a digital and martech strategic plan and personalisation journey. Now owned by industry giant L’Oreal, plans are underway to discover which tech stacks and capabilities can be leveraged to further Aesop’s omnichannel customer experience quest. Through all of it, Aesop’s digital strategy leader Richard Lindmark is only too well aware of the need to obtain zero and first-party data to drive its personalisation and experience ambitions. And that means putting customer trust before everything else.

Ahead of International Women’s Day (IWD), government pay gap data shows media, marketing, agency and tech industries are some way off gender equality. Release of the WGEA figures has women resetting their position on “lacklustre” programs designed to support fellow females in the workforce, but that aren’t in reality delivering. The accountability WGEA provides also has women in leadership questioning company policies that should be helping empower women, such as flexible work, as well as those that could hinder – they see promotion through meritocracy as one. Senior female leaders from Innocean, EssenceMediacom, Amaysim and Rackspace fear IWD is increasingly a tokenistic gesture instead of what is really required: Discussion – and action – that drives demonstrable change.