Author: admin

Ecommerce revenues at Australia’s two giant grocery chains Coles and Woolworths are roaring back into life, barely 18 months after pandemic-fuelled growth went into sharp reverse. Big long-term investments across retail media, loyalty, digital transformation, supply chain, and fulfilment upgrades are paying off. They say timing is everything and new Coles CEO Leah Weckert and incoming Woolies counterpart Amanda Bardwell have landed just as the sun has started shining again on online sales. But there’s still a lot of work to do. Outgoing Woolworths CEO Brad Banducci for instance flagged slowing growth at Cartology which grew ‘just’ 9 per cent – although that’s after half a decade of robust growth (and a 34 per cent CAGR over five years). Its younger, smaller retail media rival, Coles 360, grew north of 20 per cent. Both of the retail giants also flagged the growing importance of AI within their operations – but their strategies are divergent. 

A swathe of B2B firms sceptical of the new crowd arguing for B2B marketing to invest more in brand and reputation building face a second wave of compelling evidence challenging the effectiveness of conventional B2B tactics, marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and the impact of the sales function in influencing the “dark funnel” of hidden executives in corporate buying groups who influence half the buying process – but don’t show up on sales team radars, CRM systems and focus on risk and reputation over features and specs. Killer stats? B2B buyers don’t reach out to sellers until they’re 73 per cent through the buying journey and 82 per cent of the time the first vendor contacted by the buyer lands the deal. “So it’s not sales calling you, it’s you calling sales,” says former BMW marketer Stuart Jaffray, now Managing Director of B2B agency Green Hat, which co-commissioned the latest B2B buying study across Australia and APAC markets.   

The effectiveness “revolution” is colliding with the AI-spawned efficiency uprising and it’s leapfrogging the early consensus on AI use cases in marketing around automating personalised content and communications. So much so Mark Ritson choked on his Wellfleet oysters when Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg told him they were leaving top jobs at LinkedIn-backed thinktank, the B2B Institute. Then they told him why. Ritson promptly joined their venture, along with what Weinberg calls “the advisory board to end all advisory boards”.  Thus the synthetically-enhanced AI marketing outfit Evidenza was born. The founders claim their new piece of “synthetic customer” tech – which starts with creating AI copies of target customers – creates 95 per cent accurate customer responses. I.e. it mimics company CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, CIOs, CROs and the rest with strong correlation to the real thing. Those customers are really hard to find within B2B markets, which is why research is so expensive and takes so long. EY’s CMO – and a long list of others – verify that claim, because they’ve tested it head-to-head. “It can imitate essentially anyone by gathering and synthesising massive amounts of data,” per Weinberg. Evidenza claims it can also synthesise marketing strategy, science and the “pantheon” of effectiveness gurus, like Byron Sharp, Jenni Romaniuk, Karen Nelson-Field, Les Binet and Peter Field. Which means marketers can ask them what they ‘think’ of their plans. Evidenza has already cloned Ritson to deliver “a finance friendly marketing plan that used to take months in minutes”, per Lombardo. “Well, maybe a day.” Weinberg acknowledges cussing is a challenge. But they are actively debugging.

Retail brands are facing no less than a complete reimagining of what it means to be a consumer by 2030, according to a fresh report from The Future Laboratory in partnership with Afterpay. It’s a near future requiring commerce to not only recalibrate around community, values and experience, but necessitates empathetic technologies and systems that operate in the service of people, not transactions or zealous CFOs, according to E&S customer experience chief, Barry Mowszowski, plus futurist and academic, Dr Catherine Ball, speaking at an Afterpay event last week. It’s also going to mean rewiring outdated financial systems and processes that are increasingly shutting down access to credit to ensure they can deliver solutions rather than create more problems for consumers, agreed fellow panellist, Mark Bouris, the founder of Wizard Home Loans, executive chair of Yellow Brick Road, and recognised financial and business commentator.