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January, 2025

Swapping banking for education: Swinburne Uni CMO Carolyn Bendall on category hopping for a 5-year contract she didn’t think she’d complete

What you need to know:

  • Carolyn Bendall has left Swinburne University after 5 years as its CMO – her first role in the higher education sector.
  • The experienced marketer, who previously spent 12 years at ANZ and who had a background in financial services, says accelerated learning, a commitment to digitising marketing’s ways of working, agile workflows and reframing marketing from service function to growth strategy department have been the big wins over her aboveaverage CMO tenure.
  • Having kicked off the job just days before Melbourne’s first of six Covid19 lockdowns, she was also thrown in the deep end of proving marketing’s worth by translating the all-important annual student open day into the virtual, gamified experience called Swintopia – a job she says required narrow decision making and a willingness to be brave.
  • Bendall was also behind Swinburne’s brand repositioning to next_gen, work done in partnership with Deloitte Digital she says required a deep dive and commitment to understanding choice drivers. It’s a partnership that’s recently seen AI brought in to find the next brand green space for Swinburne.

Committing to five years upfront as a chief marketing officer is a big ask given the average tenure of a CMO sits somewhere around 40 months, or three-and-a-half years globally. Add in a category switch – financial services to higher education – plus six Melbourne lockdowns and a see-saw of government policy around international student migration and residency in Australia, and it’s no wonder outgoing Swinburne University’s CMO, Carolyn Bendall, wasn’t sure she’d make it through her contract.

But that she did. Bendall officially hung up her Swinburne CMO’s hat in December after a five-year stint which commenced just four days before the Covid-19 pandemic forced university staff and students into lockdown. Within six weeks, her team along with partner, Merkle, made what Bendall calls the “biggest and quickest pivot of all time” by transforming the university’s annual open day into the digital bonanza, Swintopia. The gamified virtual campus took potential students through an interactive tour of its Hawthorn site, with personalised itineraries and experiences along the way of courses, clubs, labs and facilities, student life highlights, alumni talks and hangouts.

“Open Days for pretty much any university are a marquee event and they put an enormous amount of funding and team effort into producing a one-day event that brings thousands of people through the door. It’s often that moment that matters in terms of an experience that either takes it to someone or doesn’t,” Bendall tells Mi3. “Within four or five weeks, it was becoming really evident we needed plan B… So we built out a decision framework around not only developing plan B, but then how we actually decide. Because there comes a point where you can’t keep investing in both and there’s finite budgets to do it.”

Swintopia has since gained several trade and industry plaudits as a solid solution to a big business challenge.

For her part, Bendall credits tight decision-making structures, kind (not soft) leadership, and agile ways of working homed during 12 years at ANZ bank. Upon joining Swinburne, she swiftly moved teams into daily virtual standups, and cross-functional squads tasked with designing and building the totally new solution.

“I’m a big believer in narrow decision approval points. If you have too many stakeholders, you never get this stuff done,” Bendall says. “We had a very thing line of saying ok, we’re going to make a call at this date and actually start building and investing. We built that platform in eight weeks. And then had to deliver it.

“Part of my mission coming in was to rebuild and mature the marketing organisation. But I agree, that was doing it a little bit more quickly than expected.”

I walked into a marketing team that frankly was pretty much a service team,” she says. “We needed to reframe that to say no, we are the growth drivers and therefore we need to take a much stronger hold of our own strategy and prioritise our own work for value as opposed to fulfilling orders from others. There’s no doubt that takes some navigating with stakeholders who would like to have their posters made or see their own LinkedIn post.

Carolyn Bendall, outgoing CMO, Swinburne University

Modernising marketing, switching categories

Modernising Swinburne’s marketing function, according to Bendall, meant bringing digitisation and processes into the centre of day-to-day marketing. It also required her to reframe marketing from service centre to the driver of growth. But the third key ingredient was the university’s willingness to hire an out-of-category marketer in the first place.

At the time of Bendall’s appointment in 2020, the university’s digital experience platform project was coming to an end and there was a need to transition to business-as-usual. The new CMO job meant establishing a new marketing team with fresh ways of working that could deliver outcomes across the business. Swinburne operates the full Adobe Marketing Cloud stack.

“I think Swinburne – correctly – recognised banking as a sector was more advanced in terms of its digital developments, and was better funded too by the way in terms of investment into marketing. But they could see the experience against the need,” Bendall says.

Trying another sector was already a must for Bendall and she worked with a coach to make it happen. Having been on Deakin University’s Business School advisory board for several years, including a stint as chair, Bendall had gained peripheral exposure to the university sector and its purpose-led nature, which appealed. The fact Swinburne is a challenger university and was looking for a truly strategic change and fundamental repositioning all added up.

Bendall also credits her category switch success to “accelerating her learning”, a principle she attributes to Michael Watkins and his first 90 days approach. External support came in the form of a large consulting firm and its higher education partner, who immersed Bendall in a series of sessions around the ins and outs of the higher education sector.

“I call it building your organisational acumen really quickly,” she says. “Like all industries, higher education is complex – the funding models are complex, the political and government relationships and volatility we have seen both domestically and internationally. Swinburne is also dual sector, and higher education and vocational education are funded entirely differently. There was lots to get my head around.”

Internally, a critical partner was Swinburne’s commercial and strategy head, who offered up some side coaching. Bendall then put her stakeholder management skills to work.

“I walked into a marketing team that frankly was pretty much a service team,” she says. “We needed to reframe that to say no, we are the growth drivers and therefore we need to take a much stronger hold of our own strategy and prioritise our own work for value as opposed to fulfilling orders from others. There’s no doubt that takes some navigating with stakeholders who would like to have their posters made or see their own LinkedIn post.”

Mission on

Defining a mission around growth became Bendall’s foundation.

“I always framed our missions as shaping the experiences and moments that matter across that whole continuum of consideration right through to acquisition, retention and advocacy,” she says. “Advocacy plays such a huge role in universities; it’s the word of mouth and lived experience that really works.”

Brand repositioning became inevitable, and in 2021, Swinburne took the wrappers of fresh positioning, centred around the ‘next gen_now’ tagline and experience. The brand proposition is a hat tip to its technology heritage and credentials as well as its creative and innovative education focus. The group recruited Deloitte Digital as its creative agency, a partnership that has been sustained even after Adrian Mills and Matt Lawson exited Deloitte Digital last September to set up their own agency, ATime&Place.

“First and foremost, what we needed to do is really understand the drivers of choice,” she explains. “I did then run a creative pitch process because if we were really clear on the positioning and we’d come up with the brand strategy and got that fully endorsed, I knew it would be the creative agency that could really take us to market in a different way.

“Adrian and team [when at Deloitte Digital] pitched us a really rich brand platform around next gen. Then it became about the way we articulated that promise. And always, it’s about getting that out to market in a hopefully distinctive way that cuts through, but is all about the proof. Key was being to work with different faculties and different areas so that the way we go to market and what we’re delivering is actually next gen – we’re not just saying it, we’re showing it.”

AI creative

Not afraid to challenge thinking and bring in emerging tools, Bendall more recently has been working with Forethought to use AI to ingest all of Swinburne’s brand choice data and driver modelling, which extend across five different segments, to give the team prompts around creative territories it could explore to take the brand into its next direction.

“That was quite challenging for the creative agency, but these are starting points, not the end points,” Bendall says. “For me, it’s a great opportunity to see if we can leverage AI without replacing anyone’s role, but to give us something different.

“It’s then about having real, good, trusted conversations about the fact we’re not trying to take over your role, or that we’re not disrespecting the role of creative. But we are trying to employ AI to give us some insights and a leap ahead. But through all of that, humanity has to be part of it.”

Measuring success

Key success measures for Bendall have included Swinburne’s consideration against Victoria’s eight domestic universities, how successfully it positions itself at the forefront of technology and science, and how it’s perceived as a university with deep industry connections and partnerships.

As she heads out the door, Bendall quotes double-digit growth in brand consideration for Swinburne, along with key perception measures over the three years since she tackled new brand positioning. She additionally cites media share of voice lift against key competitors to above-market position in a highly cluttered environment.

“But it can’t just be about marketing metrics there are also business metrics,” she says. “To that, there have been a lot of headwinds to work with and huge domestic competition. We then found recovery out of Covid into international markets was faster than anyone anticipated, so we were really able to get the international student numbers back up.”

With more recent government policies – either Labor or Coalition – limiting international student numbers once more, Bendall says it’s been “headwind after headwind” in that space. “But I do think Swinburne has managed to reposition itself and still get the numbers it needs through the door,” she adds.

“The other real success story is our vocational education… we’ve driven some significant growth in Swinburne’s TAFE offering. For all organisations to have alternatives and be able to ramp up revenue in other spaces when certain areas are impacted is key and that’s been a real success.

“We are going to see that traditional path of a three or four-year degree out of school starting to get smaller percentage wise and I think it’s going to stay that way.”

What’s next

Bendall’s “third act” professionally is about building out a portfolio career, mixing board roles with mentoring and fractional CMO work. In the last two years, Bendall added board work into her resume with Melbourne Cricket Club and Australian Sports Museum. She’s also joined both Mark Lollback’s Global Mentorship network and works with the Minerva Network, which mentors professional sports women for a business career post-sport.

As to her final words of wisdom for aspiring marketing and industry leaders, Bendall advises challenging “the self-talk” that you can’t switch categories or go from agencies into client-side marketing roles successfully.

“I do believe in really having a plan – and not just a short-term one, but a long-term plan,” she says.

“What am I going to be learning at these points? What’s the experience I need? What’s the networking and the value? And be visible – push yourself out there and make sure you are building a profile and being known for being brave.”