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A commitment to building brand awareness coupled with running’s explosive popularity and a diversifying product portfolio have seen Hoka power 25x in under a decade: In 2015 it sold 40,000 pairs of shoes in Australia, today it sells more than 1 million. Now it’s aiming to double that. Local success is indicative of rapid global growth for the running and trail shoe brand, which reported a 34 per cent increase in sales in the last quarter to 31 March 2024, bringing quarterly revenue to US$533 million and global revenue to US$1.8 billion, up 29.7 per cent year-on-year. Hot on the heels of a successful five-day experiential-led campaign in Sydney with its Hoka FlyLab cube and content program, Hoka ANZ chief, Matt Adams, and Emotive founder and CEO, Simon Joyce, unpack what it takes to balance brand investment with commercial return – and take a proactive over reactive marketing approach. Once people try the shoes, says Adams, 80 per cent of them buy. 

During last week’s Ad Council breakfast to profile Effie winning entries from Arnott’s Group / Publicis Groupe, Aldi / BMF and Uber / Special, the alignment of agency and client-side marketing teams was touted as one of the most important ingredients in achieving modern creative effectiveness. In an environment where dollars are constrained, agency compensation remains a concern, and a definite skew towards in-house agency models, the trio extolled the benefits of a long-term, strategic relationship between brand and agency. And the reasons for this are about as human as they get: Number one for all is the value of creating a safe psychological space to discuss what’s worked and most importantly, what hasn’t. 

Despite massive investments in digital transformation, the quality of customer experience in industries such as banking and superannuation, government, and investment is mostly poor and getting worse. Even the best results are merely flatlines, while CX itself is rarely proving to be a differentiator, according to the last CX Index report from Forrester Research. That’s a tough read for CX professionals, but probably not a surprising one. CX and programs like Voice of the Customer (VOC) are getting crunched just as much as marketing. To make matters worse, the budget headwinds are hitting at the very moment when the CX and VOC world should be investing in technologies to contemporise their approaches, as leaders from NAB, News Corp, Flight Centre, and Service Australia told their industry peers at the recent Forrester CX conference in Sydney.

Marketing teams around the world are both leading AI adoption in their companies but are equally restraining its deployment over increasing concerns about the security and scraping of their prompts and data to keep the large language models (LLMs) of AI developers learning and getting smarter. Salesforce Marketing Cloud CMO Bobby Jania says the Scarlett Johansson furore with Open AI two weeks ago over the likeness of her voice in the unveiling of “Skye”, typifies every conversation he has with a marketing team: it starts with concerns and questions of “where their data goes, who is going to have access to it, who learns from it, who trained off it”. The opaqueness on what data LLMs are ingesting is proving a boon for Salesforce and its position on retaining no customer prompts or data on any LLM’s plugged into its various cloud products. “The reality is right now it’s a differentiator for us because we’re able to talk about the fact that our business is not our customer’s data at all,” says Jania. “It should be table stakes for the industry. For a lot of solutions out there, their preference would be to continue to train an LLM using the data that goes in, which could be that customer data. And from who I talk to, every customer is very concerned about where their data goes”.