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A decade after launching Australian beauty brand Frank Body and going global, co-founder Bree Johnson invested in the $20.5m Series A funding round last month of New Zealand brand tracking start-up, Tracksuit, along with a star line-up of Silicon Valley VCs and high profile investors. Tracksuit is taking on the global research giants and expanding into the UK and US markets with a faster and cheaper platform that sits inside companies – not research houses. Johnson’s investment was born out of her own experience – like many start-ups, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram used to be a powerhouse for customer acquisition but that lower funnel cash cow today has less kick.

Little did Westpac’s Executive Management Team (EMT) realise in 2019 when it ignored the advice of its own staff who told it to buy the Pega decisioning engine that five years later its choice would leave the bank trailing rivals in what has emerged as a key competitive capability — real time interaction management, often referred to as real time decisioning. Commbank now has a decade’s head start, while ANZ and NAB are bidding to catch it. Likewise Suncorp. Instead the EMT backed a management decision to accept a pitch from EY to build the bank a decisioning solution from scratch in a project code-named In the Moment. The circa $70m project failed. Much of the work was written off in 2021, buried amongst almost $344m in software impairment charges that hit the balance sheet that year. However, due to the commercial terms of its agreement with the bank, EY owned the IP and has subsequently launched EY Data Cloud IQ. Five years after In the Moment first began, and despite Westpac footing the bill for another company’s product development, there is still no real-time decisioning solution in place with capabilities comparable to its competitors’ Pega-based platforms.

It’s been a big flip from performance-led marketing to global brand play, but 12 months on, the results are showing it’s paying off for Intrepid. Lifts in brand awareness, brand search and engagement across markets are on the scorecard, and there’s record revenue of $621m – the majority of which comes through owned channels – on the balance sheet. Not bad for a ‘phantom brand’ and tour operator that has been helping deliver experiences for 35 years but hasn’t always had the logoed T-shirt, branded bus or social feed recognition to prove it. While climbing that brand mountain, Intrepid chief customer officer, Leigh Barnes, has been working on his bigger, multi-year plan to firstly get to know customers better, then drive more ways for them to interact, engage and book. It’s a strategy fuelling digital and personalisation investment, as well as diversification outside tour products into accommodation – and the latest foray, book publishing.