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50 Australian CMOs have just been briefed on a “massive opportunity” for marketers to increase influence and impact with executive leadership colleagues via ‘humanised growth’. How? By offering their strategy and insights nous to help build out divisional and all-of-company stakeholder-employee management blueprints and programs. But it’s crucial to avoid making those cross-departmental overtures appear a land-grab, says former Unilever marketer turned Institute for Real Growth (IRG) co-founder Marc de Swaan Arons. In town with the IRG’s latest study across 475 CEOs, CFOs, CCOs, CMOs and HR chiefs, he rejected the idea that marketers are too crunched by exploding remits to drive higher order value creation by breaking down silos – they have teams to do the tactical legwork, he suggests. He’s also scathing on misguided purpose and ESG, which has trapped his former employer in the past and is acquiring “Voldemort” status among boards. Corporate purpose, he says, is not social purpose – and is a cornerstone of the IRG’s five-point plan to drive ‘Humanised Growth’. The likes of Suncorp and CMO Mim Haysom, reckons de Swaan Arons, are nailing it. 

Danielle Keighery’s last-minute backflip on joining Optus in favour of becoming the new group leader for corporate affairs at Qantas comes as her former employer, Crown Resorts, rounds out a major reshaping of its functional remits with new group executive GM of brand and marketing, Yolanda Uys. The former Coles Liquor, Reece, Cussons and Cadbury’s marketer takes the reins from Adam Ballesty, the former Domino’s and Diageo CMO who had joined Crown Resorts last April and helped execute the new brand platform, ‘Here’s where things get interesting’. Ballesty left before Christmas.

When Australian Red Cross CIO Brett Wilson turned the spotlight onto the organisation’s many applications, he discovered 89 per cent were shadow IT, bought without the knowledge or control of the tech group. It turns out most were necessary, because despite decommissioning almost 30 apps, he has still 240 apps three years later, as many as he started with. But there’s a big difference. Data now flows freely and securely around a software ecosystem built upon a bedrock of Microsoft’s marketing automation, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and HR. That’s delivering improved stakeholder experiences, great transparency and governance, and more organisational efficiency.