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B2B marketers are being told to regear marketing to a hefty brand orientation, but Airwallex VP, global marketing Jon Stona says there’s a third leg to making marketing pay that many forget: Product marketing. As Australia’s next tech darling soars to a US$6.2bn market cap and seals its latest $300m financing round, Stona caught up with Mi3 to share what he believes it takes to build trust and brand as a next-gen, fast-growth financial services scale-up.

A combination of brand-led investment, bold and emotive campaigns, embedding data-driven decision making and testing across creative and media has seen Tassal retain its pricing power, double return on investment and watch marketing’s contribution to business rocket. That’s while pushing a 40 per cent price increase to the supermarkets and losing more than a million dollars off the marketing budget. But with some big runs on the board, the brand’s chief commercial officer turned CMO has now secured a 25 per cent increase in media budget in a bid to become one of Australia’s most iconic brands by 2030 – and keep tipping the sales scales.

Weekly and monthly goals from baking prototypes to full-scale bakery, plus key consumers milestones on acceptance, were critical to realising Arnott’s gluten free growth opportunity, its most incremental launch to date, says CMO, Jenni Dill. For Australian pricing software player, Flintfox International, take two on European market expansion meant going all-in on native product extension and out-of-the-box compatibility and building a market presence from scratch. Meanwhile, former Curtin Uni CMO and now Growth Generators chief, Ty Hayes, sees foresight, insight and experimentation – then engineering with purpose – as the magic ingredients for making explosive growth happen. In our latest CMO Awards podcast episode celebrating this year’s inaugural Best Growth Initiative of the Year winners and highly commended brands, we explore what it takes to unlock growth.

Brand score improvements, better converting leads and award accolades have been chalking up since Workday’s global CMO Emma Chalwin recruited a swathe of well-known rockstars for a fun, decidedly consumer-oriented brand campaign – complete with top 10 ranking Super Bowl ad – to tell the story of its people and finance management solutions. Now, two years in, the campaign platform has taken on a life of its own as the business adapts and stretches the brand and narrative downstream, into more channels, its personalised demand gen play and very first real rockstar profile on LinkedIn. It’s no mere creative play however – Chalwin has regeared her own CMO metrics dashboard and oriented her team around annual contract value as she proves out the impact of their efforts.

Salesforce global CMO Ariel Kelman a few months ago set an autonomous agent on the $240bn tech giant’s own website to answer queries like a human and “route leads to our sales people” – 70,000 conversations later, sales teams are spending 40 per cent less time processing leads. Last week Kelman and team launched the next wave of agentics for marketing at its annual Connections commerce and marketing conference in Chicago, which he says is effectively a digital labour force, building campaign briefs, launching campaigns live in market and turning 2 trillion one-way messages sent annually by Salesforce clients “into conversations”.