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Swapping banking for education: Swinburne Uni CMO Carolyn Bendall on category hopping for a 5-year contract she didn’t think she’d complete

Whether it’s switching from the banking sector to higher education, convincing cross-functional stakeholders to stop seeing marketing as a service function and instead a driver of growth, pivoting an annual student recruitment event into the virtual realm, or challenging her creative agency to let AI come up with new brand territories to explore, Swinburne University CMO, Carolyn Bendall, hasn’t been afraid to shake things up. Now, as she exits after a five-year stint even she didn’t think she’d complete, the former ANZ bank marketer shares the hurdles and wins from her attempts to modernise and digitise marketing in the tertiary and vocational education space – and what she’s about to do next.

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Banking on personalisation: TSB Bank CMO on delivering more magic than misery for customers – and 300% home loans boost

Personalised product rates, piping micro-segmentation into owned and paid channels for more effective and personalised messaging, making marketing as much about service as advertising and better consent management are all part of TSB CMO, Emma Springham’s plan to improve customer outcomes at the mutual bank. Having been hit with multi-million-dollar fines by the UK’s financial regulatory body for historically lacking suitable systems to address customers falling into arrears, plus confronted by more rigorous UK consumer duty laws cracking down on financial services players, you could argue there are hefty regulatory reasons why TSB should do so. But Springham views the new laws as an enabler that’s further supporting her proactive, cross-functional and data-driven approach. The aim is to provide more “magical” than “miserable” customer experiences by highlighting and prompting around personalised benefits, she says, improving money confidence and taking the anxiety out of increasingly complex products during a cost-of-living crisis. Plus, it helps the results are coming down the line already, including a 300 per cent home loan sales boost in one month.

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Flywheels over funnels, intimacy, ‘low martech’ and influence over mass ‘shotgun’ reach: Four Pillars cofounder on repeating the trick globally under Kirin-owned Lion

Four Pillars Gin is now four times the size of the entire Australian premium gin category when it started in 2013. Much of the category’s explosive growth is down to three cofounders having a crack, while seeing off the cops, who thought they were making meth. Now under Lion’s ownership, itself part of Japanese drinks giant Kirin, two of the founders – ex-Olympian Cameron Mackenzie and PR man Stuart Gregor – have “gracefully” exited. But the third founding partner, former global strategy boss at IPG’s Jack Morton Worldwide, Matt Jones, is still in. He thinks Australia deserves a global spirits business spearheaded by botanical alchemy, experience, craft, influence and intimacy over mass “shotgun messaging”. Jones is also a reluctant martech convert, valuing old school customer experience and its intangibles over measuring clicks and other marketing metrics. He likewise places far greater value on flywheels than marketing funnels. While the direct-to-consumer growth hacking playbook that fuelled start-ups a decade ago is now a relic of its time, Jones thinks many of the Four Pillars lessons and tricks are repeatable today for those that distil the fundamentals. But there are some key differences. Here’s his take on what made the business succeed and where Four Pillars – and Lion’s expanding spirits business – goes next.

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Drumstick unwraps ‘Classic’ brand platform with 20 out-of-home executions

Drumstick, in collaboration with longstanding creative agency partner, Sickdogwolfman, has launched a new brand platform titled ‘Classic’. The campaign includes a launch film and over 20 situational, contextual, and location-based out-of-home executions, as well as social and digital executions.

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