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Commbank has usurped Woolworths to become Australia’s most valuable brand for the first time in five years. The shift comes as Australia’s supermarket duopoly face sustained negative reputational pressure due to allegations of price gouging. But corporate affairs and marketing chiefs needn’t think the sky’s falling in when crises hit, per Brand Finance MD, Mark Crowe. Customers are highly unlikely to go the extra mile to do the shop – and impacts can be managed. But he warns long-term reputational hits will do upstream damage. Meanwhile, though brand value scores indicate how brand contributes to profit and economic growth, Crowe cautions against using it as a KPI for marketing teams.

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.

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.