Career profile: Simon McDowell, marketing director, Coles

by Marketing ON 26 September 2012

Simon McDowell, director, Coles Group marketing, speaks to Marketing about a career that has spanned the business and communications industries, three seemingly very distinct sectors, and the globe.

Much to his parents’ relief, Simon McDowell’s big break came straight after graduation from the University of Sydney. The recipient of a scholarship from the Advertising Federation of Australia, McDowell scored a sponsored role with
Interpublic’s Lintas. He was gainfully employed in his first job.

And so his career launched in Agencyland, working in a big multinational agency, a client list replete with big multinational companies such as Unilever, Nestlé and Coca-Cola. After about six years in the role, he was transferred to London – it was McDowell’s first time overseas, a relocation that would set the tone for the next decade-plus of his career.

But he would not remain agency side for much longer. The lure of a wider breadth of marketing responsibilities was too great for McDowell, as was the chance to work for “one of the most famous brands in the world”, based in its heartland, Atlanta. It was the beginning of a stint with the Coca-Cola Company that would last more than a decade. Responsibility for Diet Coke’s global advertising and Coca-Cola’s Asia Pacific advertising turned into a marketing directorship for the company’s Asia Pacific operations, which later turned into what McDowell describes as “a very interesting job” – being the president’s chief of staff. When the president (of Coca-Cola Asia Pacific) moved from Hong Kong to London, so did his chief of staff.

Finally, McDowell had to get a “proper job” – managing director of Coca-Cola in the Netherlands. Full managerial responsibility for the entire territory. A significant step-up for anybody, but after four years in the role he was looking for greater challenges.

He remains a Coke fan to this day, but after 12 years with the Coca-Cola Company, McDowell decided it was time for a change of scenery. “I missed having a multi-territory role,” he says. So when an opportunity arose to join Sony Pictures Home Entertainment as managing director of its European operations, he took it, along with full profit and loss responsibilities for all the territories that entails.

Of this completely new industry McDowell admits he knew nothing at first, but sought to apply some of his FMCG skills – the more strategic aspects, the rigour, the discipline, process and planning – and apply it at Sony.

Marketing: After starting out in Agencyland, what drew you to the client side?

Simon McDowell: I loved the advertising industry and communications, but I saw advertising as just one part of marketing. So I left Lintas, and I left advertising, in London and my next job was then with the Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta. For me, that was: how can I broaden my advertising experience, but do it with a client? I spent a lot of time working with some of the best marketing and agency people in the world, in all sorts of countries and all sorts of places, and I absolutely loved it. And that job then led me on to become marketing director for Coca-Cola Asia Pacific. So that was when I had the full marketing responsibility, not just communication.

What was that transition like?

I think, obviously, advertising is just one part of marketing, as opposed to all aspects of marketing. Advertising is just one of the Ps. There used to be four – product, price, place and promotion, and obviously advertising was the promotion P – when I was at university. I don’t know how many there are now. But I wanted to experience and be accountable for all of the Ps of marketing as opposed to just one, and obviously the Coca-Cola Company is very famous in that regard, and to have the opportunity to learn all of those things at Coke for many years was fantastic.

Were there any key mentors from that time who have had a major influence on you?

When you become very senior at the Coca-Cola Company – one of the top four or five executives – you get what’s called a ‘chief of staff ’ who is somebody you work with side by side, and it really is a development opportunity for somebody to learn even more about how a big multinational business runs. So I did that for a couple of years in Hong Kong for a guy called Sandy Allan, who has since retired and, for me, he was definitely my mentor. He had been in the company 30-something years, and was an absolute fountain of knowledge and a real inspiration about life, love and all things business… and all things Coke. That was a fascinating job for a couple of years in Hong Kong.

What specific things did he instil that you carry with you?

Probably the two things are, one: be really single-minded and very focused. You can’t do everything. Focus on the key things that are really going to make the difference, and then [two] try to execute those few things perfectly. Sandy had a great skill at being able to make whatever was seemingly very complex in a very big complex business… a real skill in boiling it down, prioritising and making it simple and focused. That’s a real strength of the Coca-Cola Company, but a particular strength of Sandy. I learned an incredible amount from him. I was his chief of staff for a couple of years in Hong Kong, and then he moved to president of Europe, in London, and I moved with him as his chief of staff for another 18 months.

When you’re the chief of staff in a role like that, eventually they say you’re supposed to get a ‘proper job’, so I became the managing director of Coca-Cola in the Netherlands, based in Rotterdam, for four years. That was my first managing director job. I wasn’t the marketing person or the chief of staff anymore; I was the managing director responsible for the full P&L with all the functions. Doing that for the first time is always a bit scary.

How was that as a learning experience?

I’d like to think I did a pretty good job, but there’s nothing like doing it yourself for the first time, and I think I was as prepared as I could have been for the role, and loved it, and had a lot of great support from the company, but there’s nothing like doing it yourself. You’ve got to be managing director once first, somebody has got to believe in you that you can do it. Then I held hands and jumped… and absolutely loved it.

You spent a lot of time overseas after completing your tertiary education in Australia. Do you think international experience is essential to the learning process for marketers?

Like a lot of Aussies, I wanted to have the opportunity to work overseas so, after six or seven years at Lintas, I got transferred to London to run their Nestlé confectionary business in the UK, so that’s how I first went overseas. I can’t speak for everybody but, for me personally, getting a broader experience beyond just my home market was something I always wanted to do and found it something I had an absolute passion for, just to get a wider and… richer experience. It’s not for everybody, of course, but it was just something I was absolutely fanatical about, and I was glad that I got the chance.

Do you look for it in potential employees?

When hiring people, I’m always looking for multidimensional talent, and I think one of the ways you can demonstrate that is by living and working overseas. Is it essential? No. Is it something that definitely attracts my attention in potential hires? Absolutely.

You joined Coles a year into a five-year turnaround plan. Were you looking for a challenge?

To come back to Australia, to be on the board of Coles – the Coles Group is a $32 billion retail business, it’s a much-publicised turnaround business – I always say that the great thing about this job is it’s very high profile. And, of course, the bad thing about this job is, it’s very high profile. Everybody has a view, internally and also externally, and so it’s very challenging. But it feels like Coles is a $32 billion start-up. It’s a place with enormous passion and drive to change, and to be successful.

Our objective, of course, is clear for the business, but from a brand point of view, we are intent on building the most famous brand in Australia. Ian McLeod, the managing director of Coles, as my boss, said, “Let’s get on with seeing if we can build the most famous and most trusted brand in Australia,” and so that really is an offer too good to refuse. It never happens really that somebody gives you that brief on a business that has 100,000 people and sales of $32 billion. So you can’t let that one go through to the keeper.

The idea of a $32 billion start-up is an interesting one…

It is actually somewhat odd, I know, to say that it feels like a $32 billion start-up, but in my mind it absolutely does, because there’s a passion for the business, a passion for the brand, a passion for our customers. Of course we’re a big business, and there’s a lot of discipline and rigour and process and planning that goes behind the scenes, but, at the same time, we’re a brand and a business with massive aspirations to constantly do better, and to constantly look to innovate and do the most compelling, engaging and unique marketing we possibly can. For me, I’m trying to apply what I learned and what I did at a famous brand called Coca-Cola, or a famous brand called Sony.

Others will be the judge based on our results and, ultimately, customers will be the judge whether they think what we’re doing here, and specifically the marketing, is any good.

I wanted to also touch on social media and where it fits for a brand like Coles – I’m particularly keen to get your view on whether it should be kept in-house.

One thing perhaps your readers are interested in, one thing that makes Coles unique, I think, is that the vast majority of all of our marketing is done in-house. By design we have set up the marketing function across the Coles Group as an in-house model. We do all our own insights work, product development, design work, research work, online work, digital work, internal PR function. We have purposely built a team of people from all sorts of complementary backgrounds to build, in effect, an in-house resource for the Coles Group, because we believe that we know our brand better than anybody else. That said, we still use agencies, of course, to help us bring some of the things that we want to do to life. We absolutely value those agencies and see them as a physical extension of the marketing department.

SAS: Do you have plans to enhance Coles’ social media and real-time services?

Simon McDowell: Of course… it’s absolutely key. We look at all channels in the mix, whether online or otherwise, to see how best we can communicate to our customer base. But the number one channel we have above all others, of course, is our store, because we have over 13 million customers a week coming to Coles, which is a huge number. So the vast majority of their experience of us, and of our brand, and of our offering, comes through the stores themselves. So for us, our number one focus is the in-store experience, and that’s the very nature of retail.

What are the greatest challenges you experience when it comes to using analytics to compete?

I think, of course, marketing is very much a blend of art and science. We are very focused on the science aspect of what we do, the analysis of data, the research, the insights, the planning, all of those things. However, I’m also a firm believer that even with all the science in the world you still need to combine it with the art, because what you do is incredibly important when you’re building a brand, but, to me, equally as important is how you do it, and that’s why we’re as much focused on the science as we are on the art.

There are lots of companies with too much art and not enough science. There are also a lot of companies and brands out there that are too much science and probably not enough art. We’re trying to find a balance that works for us. We’ve had a reasonable run, I think, in the last few years. Are we satisfied? No. Is there more to come from Coles? Absolutely.

Career profile: Inese Kingsmill, director of corporate marketing, Telstra

by Marketing ON 30 August 2012

For country or company?

Aussie icon Telstra’s director of corporate marketing, Inese Kingsmill, joined as the telco giant geared up for its identity relaunch, the NBN began to roll out and one of Australia’s best known marketers took over as CMO. Marketing sits down and asks what it is like to live in interesting times…

After 16 years with Microsoft, Inese Kingsmill faced a decision: move countries or companies? She’d spent 12 years in marketing at Microsoft, primarily within Australia, but also some time in a regional group marketing role. She moved out of marketing and into running her own P&L – as small and medium business director. After nearly two and a half years in that role, Kingsmill went on to a role as partner strategy, marketing and programs director for just under three years.

“Microsoft’s sales model is that it doesn’t sell anything directly, per se. It sells through a network of around 14,000 partners. So there were some challenges in that space, and I was asked to take a look at that, and ended up running our channel business for a year and a half. But 16 years at Microsoft is a long time and then the opportunity arose to take up a role here at Telstra.”

Kingsmill knew, at heart, she was a marketer – she saw it in the approaches she took to problems she faced in her wider roles with Microsoft. Not that she regrets her four years outside of core marketing roles.

“It’s actually just made me a better marketer,” she says. “It’s made me more commercially astute, more aware of the pressures in other parts of the business, certainly more aware of customer demands and sensitivities.”

Kingsmill’s toes met marketing water originally at Amstrad – a PC company that, at the time Kingsmill assures me, was going head to head with Apple, and winning. She wasn’t always client-side and is quick to confess her appreciation for her agency partners – something Marketing rarely hears admitted. Her first days in the industry were spent as a suit at Bond Direct – defunct now, but in the early 90s a part of George Patterson.

Marketing: While we’re still on your career, I’d like to ask about the key influences throughout that time, and any specific lessons they taught you?

Inese Kingsmill: If I think about people, it’s everyone from my old managing director at Microsoft who really taught me to embrace diversity, and to really be able to value differences, and how the power of differences, when harnessed, can really drive very powerful outcomes. He also taught me curiosity – always be curious about understanding other perspectives – and not feeling like you need to be right all the time.

I’ve got close friends who run businesses, one who runs an advertising agency, and one of the things I’ve learned from him is really understanding the value of brand in the customer experience.

My husband, who is a successful business owner himself with a marketing background, is a huge leveller, and he’s also very good at calling out corporate jargon, for want of a better word, and trying to keep it real. Because one of the things that I found, when you’ve been in the corporate world for as long as I have, you don’t even realise when you’re being a wanker! And he’s very good at calling bullshit. He’s also taught me that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to achieve a great outcome, he’s the master of making two cents go a long way when it comes to his business, and I’ve really come to appreciate that as well.

In terms of situations and experiences, the GFC was pretty confronting a couple of years ago. I was in my first full financial year of running the small-to-medium business (SMB) business at Microsoft, and that experience taught me a number of things: how quickly things can change, and that you must never get complacent.

It also taught me agility, because you have to be really responsive in situations where external forces beyond your control impact your day-to-day business.

The other situation that really was a strong influence for me was many years ago, when I moved from being an individual contributor to being a manager and a leader of a team, and I learned very quickly, through staff feedback, that what had made me successful in the past was not going to make me successful in the future, and that when you move from being an individual contributor to a manager, your first and foremost accountability is to making sure that your team is set up for success, and doing everything – the strategic direction, clarification of role and responsibility, alignment, career development, clearing road blocks – getting those factors right [is key]. The people piece has to happen first for anything else to happen.

Coming out of a core marketing role, and into the running of a P&L, and channel management as well, did that give you a degree of entrepreneurialism to take back into this marketing role at Telstra?

Very much so, because, look, the pointy end of accountability really sits with P&L and, as marketers, we certainly feel that, but when you’re actually the person that the CEO is having the question with directly, “Why did you miss that number and why is your forecast not in line with where the actuals have landed?” you feel it in a different way. That’s not to say that marketers don’t feel accountability, but I think that having had that experience of being accountable for the P&L and having to pull the levers of strategy, marketing, channel, sales engagement and all of the mix really gives you a more rounded perspective of the critical nature that marketing plays when marketing is focused on solving business and corporate objectives.

You’re obviously at a huge advantage over certain industries – being a telco – in terms of the rich customer data you do have. What sort of advantages or opportunities in commercial partnerships do you think Telstra will have in the post-NBN world, to use and monetise that data?

Let me break that down. First of all, yes, because we have a billing relationship with our customers that gives us a level of data, and probably data quality, that not all organisations have the benefit of. That said, it’s what you do with the data that really matters. And it’s how you think about using it and using it for good. We have a very strong brand essence grounded in connection, so one of the things that we aim to do when we harness the richness of our data and our analytics capability is to be able to use it as a science, and to understand the needs of customers, and the perceived value of Telstra compared to our competitors.

That allows us to really be able to target our offerings. It allows us to tailor our products and services with quite a bit of richness… Now, I have to say that we’re not perfect, by any means, but we certainly do have very strong data and analytics capability here at Telstra and, yes, that is something that we will obviously be drawing on as we enter into an NBN world. So NBN is a great opportunity for us. It’s also an opportunity for us to be able to, through our data insights and our analytics capability, make sure that we’re having the right conversation with the right customer at the right time.

You’re not alone. Most marketing directors that I speak with currently are in the process of rationalising a lot of siloed data. Where would you say Telstra is at in this process across all of your different business units?

That’s a pretty difficult one to answer, and I would say that – we have an enterprise customer base, which of course is account managed… And I think that our data quality in relation to other companies is pretty good. I remember when I was at Microsoft, and some of the challenges that the SMB sector faced when I was in that role ended up being resolved by really getting into the quality of our data, building out the profiles of our customers, getting to know them better, applying analytics models across the top of those. And we had an ex-Telstra person who was the guru in my team, who had learned all of these wonderful skills at Telstra and was bringing them across to Microsoft. And I know the reality that we had there, and how it compares at Telstra. I’d say we’re in pretty good shape, relatively speaking, but, of course, any marketing director will tell you that data management – and the integrity of customer information and maintaining currency and accuracy of it – is a difficult, timely and can be an expensive challenge.

Your brand has got on board with social media CRM very early in the piece compared to other comparably sized companies. How have you been able to use that in your role in a corporate sense?

We’ve been listening to social commentary for a long time and, as you just highlighted, we were one of the first brands listening and responding to customer concerns. So what we find that our social media allows us to do is to really tap into the sentiment of Australians, and where they are reacting positively and where they are reacting negatively. And what that allows us to do is a couple of things: one, it allows us to improve our customer service offerings.

So, for example, one of the things that we launched a few months ago was CrowdSupport, which is a 24/7 community self-help program… what we created was a self-help forum where we maintained the integrity of the responses that customers are getting, because they’re getting the responses from other customers, and what we do is work with a couple of the key influential respondents in those forums, and we rate their responses with respect to how helpful they are to customers. But through monitoring those kinds of forums and other social commentary, we’re able to get a sense of sentiment, and how we can continue to improve our services.

Has social media been a cost-efficiency, and that you’ve been able to scale back a little by using digital channels to measure the same sorts of metrics?

I don’t know whether I would narrow that to social media specifically. But certainly we have a stated intention to shift our marketing mix, our marketing channel mix, more and more to the digital space. And, in fact, I just saw a breakdown of our current media profile, and I’m pleased to say it’s definitely shifting in the right direction, to the extent that our broadcast and our online investments are starting to come into parity.

How close are they at this point?

I mean in terms that where we’re placing our media, we’re getting closer and closer to, say, TV and online being not quite equal in terms of our investment… We’ve made massive inroads in shifting our mix.

Is that a long-term goal due to the ability to measure response, or is there a specific reason you’d like to shift it in favour of this?

Well, I think that this goes back to the data question, because we know that the better we know our customers, the more analytics and insight we can apply to the customer profiles, the more relevant we can be to them through the customer life cycle and create a much better customer experience… So, because we believe that direct communication in the digital space is so powerful when tailored on customer insight, yes, it makes sense for us to be moving more of our investment to the online space.

It’s an interesting idea. With that growing push to tailored marketing, and in-bound marketing, what sort of challenges have you seen for measuring the effectiveness at an individual campaign level on impact on brand rather than direct response?

Let me break that in two parts. Is it having a negative impact on our brand? I would say the opposite because we’re providing more relevant information to our customers. Is it impacting us being able to measure our brand? No. We track our brand very, very closely, and very, very carefully. We know what the drivers are of our brand health, and we’re acutely aware of how each of those measures performed to increase our consideration and preference.

Career profile: Andy Lark, CMO, Commonwealth Bank

by Marketing ON 19 July 2012

He has no interest in golf…

Or so his LinkedIn proudly declares. Andy Lark’s stepped into one of the longest shadows in the Australian marketing landscape, but having grown up under the long white cloud he’s no stranger to proving himself.

Andy Lark has had the best of both worlds. Born a New Zealander, Lark gained a wealth of Stateside experience and has landed in Australia. His day job is untraditionally marketing one of the most traditional of all categories (it just happens to be the second largest Australian listed company on the ASX by market capitalisation), but he is also a director at No 8 Ventures a New Zealand-based technology venture capital firm. He remembers sweeping the floor in his first gig at a small promotional company as he boards the innumerable flights that make him a difficult man to lock down on the phone. And it isn’t just a ‘line’: he humbly apologises as our interview is interrupted by another meeting, making time for a few extra questions even as the room fills.

He tells me his first boss – at the promotional company whose floors he swept – taught him not to value money and title so much, early on, but rather to make sure he was having great experiences that taught him something. He eventually moved up to production and design work and credits this lesson with driving his career down a path of seeking out places that allowed him to make a difference and do meaningful work.

More recently, Lark has worked with Gary Hamel – author of… well a lot, but specifically The Future of Management, Leading the Revolution and Competing for the Future – on a project worth your time checking out. He says Hamel challenged him to think of the new technologies such as social media as not just communications tools, but potentially devices to transform the way people work and create meaning at their day jobs.

Of course, no one who worked with Michael Dell could fail to cite the man as an influencer. For Lark, Dell inspired entrepreneurialism and the ability to drive results.

Lark made headlines globally last year when he decided to leave a highly successful 14 years with Dell – finally as vice president and general manager, large enterprise marketing and online – for Commonwealth Bank following Mark Buckman’s departure to Telstra. Banking seems a strange leap for a marketer with a pedigree of over two decades in the technology category, both B2B and B2C. Despite by his own admission bleeding Dell blue, it came down to a “soft and fluffy” reason: he wanted to make sure his kids got some “Down Under DNA” at the right age.

Marketing: You obviously value entrepreneurialism quite a bit. Do you think entrepreneurial experience is critical to corporate marketing roles today?

It’s funny, when you sit with marketers and you talk to marketers about what drives them. I did this yesterday with a group of our leaders in the business, and I said, “Why do you do this? Of all the things you could possibly do with your day, why the heck do you do this? You dreamed one day of being a fire fighter or a jet pilot or whatever you dreamt of doing, and somehow you ended up in marketing, and marketing doesn’t describe actually what you do anyway. So why do you do this?”

And it’s really interesting because it basically comes down to two things when you talk to people about it and you drill into it. And one of those things is they love change, they love changing people’s minds, and they love convincing people of things. So they’re the debaters, the arguers, the fighters, and that’s a real hallmark of being an entrepreneur.

The other thing is they love creating, they love creating stuff, writing stuff, designing stuff, building stuff; we’re all creators at heart, and so I think it’s a long answer to your question, but at the end of the day, it really helps to have been an entrepreneur.

It might be cynical but it’s a comment that is made about Australian marketers in comparison to American marketers, that they lack that courage and entrepreneurialism, and having worked in both markets at major organisations, what’s your comment on that?

I think there’s an element of truth to it. I think that you’ve got to challenge yourself down here. Australia works to a different clock than the high paced, high energy clock of the US market, so there’s also a different sense of entrepreneurial outputs or outcomes.

So in the US, when you’re surrounded by start ups and these 24 year-olds are making hundreds of millions of dollars off the back of their iPhone camera app, there’s a different sense of the entrepreneurial outcome, and there’s role models around you to follow.

So your newsstand is full of magazines like Fast Company and stuff that aren’t covering the mining industry; they’re covering start ups in Silicon Valley and Boston and New York and San Francisco and Dallas. The companies where young leaders doing really revolutionary things with different cultures, different approaches, different ways of doing stuff, and so you’re surrounded by all these role models or innovations that you don’t get so exposed to down here.

Comm bank

SAS: Forrester has come out with their CMOs Imperative Report for 2012 and it identified social as the number one imperative across all verticals for CMOs. You’ve taken CBA to the forefront within Australia, not only among the banks but also large B2C enterprises. How are you measuring the business results from that investment?

There’s two things. First, I’d say: number one is I only get a little tiny bit of the credit. I started here eight months ago, and the reality is that the social initiatives here were well in place before [me] – okay, I added some spice to them and lit a fire under some of it, but boy, they’ve been doing some amazing stuff in social for a long time here. So I just say that because it deserves to be said; they’ve got a great social team… But my predecessors deserve a lot of credit for embracing social and driving social, even before I got here. Second thing I’d say is Forrester is wrong, I don’t buy that. I think that marketers are struggling with a whole raft of issues, and social is just one of them. I think it’s convenient to make social a priority but we’re equally struggling with the accountability of marketing, with demand generation models, lead generation. Social is absolutely in our top four priorities, but it’s right there alongside building the brand and building brand resonance in the market. It’s right there alongside demand generation, marketing automation, CRM etc. falls into that bracket. Mobile, I would argue, is more important than social – arguably social is an inherent part of doing mobile well, but if you don’t get mobile right, social is really your second problem. Mobile is big.

How are you actually measuring your investments in mobile and social, in that case?

Direct revenue generated. I can tell you the direct revenue flow from social. I can tell you the value of the community members and engagement. we look at reduced service and support costs, we look at improved customer service. There’s a whole raft of metrics there that flow from social. Now, admittedly, I had a bit of a head start on that because at Dell we did a lot of this very early on, so we really understood the models for assessing our return on social, and we’re doing that a lot here at the Bank now. But we see significant returns from social, both internally and externally.

Scale is obviously one of the challenges, but also the advantages at your organisation. How are you managing to synchronise and measure the leads and service levels with the kind of volume of customer transaction and data you have across so many brands and channels?

We’re working really, really hard on it. It’s a big activity for us, and so frankly, you’ve really got to watch that you don’t spend most of your time measuring stuff as opposed to doing stuff, because there’s so much to measure; there’s so much data. So we’re putting a lot of effort into measurement, but we’re putting an equal amount of effort into doing, because there’s so much data. You could spend all your time measuring stuff.

Marketing: I see from your blog that you’re personally quite interested in content marketing. What role is data playing in the Commonwealth Bank’s content marketing deployment, and how does it work at an executional level?

Content, I really believe is the single biggest – one of the single biggest challenges facing all marketers. Because for the most part, marketers have been brought up not as domain experts but rather specialised experts, and so marketers aren’t necessarily experts and trained in financial planning and financial advice, they’re trained in demand generation and branding and all these other things. Content hinges on domain expertise as opposed to specialisation, right. And so your ability now to become creators of content, editors of content, reporters of content becomes really crucial.

Do you believe that these developments in content marketing means that marketers need to upskill into this, or is this something that you see agencies being able to handle for their clients?

I actually think marketers need to upskill. I think agencies will struggle because they’re too far away from the content itself. I think marketers need to become experts in great content and context – not just content but context. The ability to look at content and put it in the right context is what the game is going to be all about, because otherwise you just can’t speak to the audience in a way that’s relevant or relative to their life.

I’ve been talking to a lot of agency heads about working upstream lately, and I’m wondering if you work with any particular agency partners in this capacity, and if you do or don’t, why or why not?

We just started working with M&C [Saatchi] and they’re providing some interesting thoughts in that area, but as of yet, no I haven’t really seen any of them come to the table in that manner. But there’s certainly an opportunity for them to.

I actually just got off the phone with Dan Gregory, who was discussing the shift of interruptive advertising to utility advertising, and he’s putting forward the idea that marketers and agencies are now all in the entertainment industry.

Absolutely. I talk about the five new Ps of marketing, and one of the Ps is ‘Play’. I think every single one of us needs to tune our industries into play, whether it’s entertainment, whether it’s games, whatever it is. If you look at the highest yield marketing activities we do, they involve some form of play, and play drives engagement.

Do you actually see a difference in this between B2B and B2C marketing?

No. Exactly the same things happen right across the board, albeit with different constructs, right. There is no question that at the high end of the B2B market, where there are complex sales cycles and long funnels and you’re trying to reach the C-suite, it’s a slightly different game. And you’ve got to be far more sophisticated and clever about what you’re doing from a relationship standpoint. That’s a little different than the transactional B2B market or the B2C market, but they’re all following similar paths, albeit in different ways. So it’s like the earlier comment about context, right. It’s just the context that shifts. I do think that one of the major changes with seeing though that differentiates the B2C from the B2B market is in the collapse of the funnel. So this idea that you would build awareness, build preference, drive demand, sell off demand, build loyalty, that’s collapsing in a lot of the B2C funnels, because people now search, it does everything for you. You believe the algorithm on your device of whatever kind it is, is suited to every task from selecting a new mate and partner through to selecting a new book through to doing whatever you’re going to do next.

Q&A with Nick Baker – the strategy behind ‘There’s nothing like Australia’

by Marketing ON 13 June 2012

On launch day of phase two for ‘There’s nothing like Australia’, Marketing sat down to talk with executive general manager of marketing at Tourism Australia, Nick Baker, about the strategy behind the campaign.

Marketing: The new campaign marks the second phase of ‘There’s nothing like Australia’. Why have you chosen to stick with the same theme from the last campaign?

Nick Baker: When we first launched ‘There’s nothing like Australia’, it was creating a platform, if you like, and it was creating a rational argument why you believe there is nothing like Australia, our strategy for the future. Having said that, the next job was to prove it, so this is our proving, this is taking some of the most amazing experiences in really incredible places and bringing them to life, and set them against something in a very emotional way, because that’s what really sells.

This is the first time that a major tourism campaign has been launched overseas. Why was the decision made to do that?

It actually seems very rational when you think about it, the fact that most of the money that we’re spending on this, 90% of the money we’re spending on the campaign will be used overseas, and the biggest market that we’re going to be using for this year is going to be China. So therefore we wanted to launch it in China, although we’re launching in the UK and the US as well at the same time.

Why was China chosen? The opportunities in the East are well documented, but just how big is the opportunity in China for Australian tourism?

China experienced over 20% growth last year, so it’s the biggest growing of all of our markets. It’s becoming our biggest market by expenditure, and has certainly got the biggest growth trajectory for the next five or six years. When you take all those things into consideration, it’s a very logical market for us to do that in. We still spend a lot of our time marketing obviously in Europe and the US because they’re primary markets for us, but this is our chance to give China a red hot go. There is a lot of competitive activity in China now, everyone is competing for it. The number of direct flights are rising dramatically, so access is so much easier for people to get here. So when you combine access, spend, growth, actual and projected, it’s logical. And we really wanted to give it a really good go over there to show it, and we know that the Chinese consumer is very well disposed towards Australia; they think it’s a great place to come. It’s an antidote for a lot of the things over there, if you look at the comparison between living in Shanghai and living here. Just the stunning visuals work for them. We also found that when we launched the first iteration of ‘nothing like Australia’, I think it was about 91% of people who saw the ad went and did something about it… went and actually looked further into an Australian holiday, which is massive. So it showed us that we were hitting the market, and the market we were hitting were really interested and compelled by our story, if you like. The other element I probably should mention that I didn’t mention is Facebook, and social. You may have seen that we just hit three million, of which almost one million are from Australia and two million are from around the world. We’re great believers – our job at Tourism Australia is effectively to be storytellers, and as with all things storytellers, it’s often best to have other people tell your stories rather than yourselves. We have these fans out there that are great advocates for the country. They’re telling our story for us. We are launching today, in a couple of hours, our campaign on Facebook, and then we’ll back it up with a 24 hour roadblock tonight on Facebook, so Australians that are on Facebook will be served up our full ad tonight, our full three-minute version. We use those to push out the whole network effect that Facebook brings. There is a great sense of social advocacy that surrounds it because the underlying principle is that the world travels to experience difference, so therefore be different, differentiate yourself and know kind of what it is you’re going after. And the second is word of mouth is the most crucial part of any kind of marketing. Through Facebook and through Weibo Sina, and RenRen and others we’re a part of, we can amplify that message and create stories told by other people about this country.

One thing I noticed in the campaign is that there seemed to be a few luxury hooks in there; there were a couple of private boat cruises, there was one scene in a high rise that was full glass with a fantastic view, and there was a black tie function. Is that something that’s been chosen specifically for targeting the Chinese market?

Not specifically to target the Chinese market.

Is it important to the Chinese market though?

It is. But it’s not specifically for China. We’re doing that for the whole world. And the reason why we’re doing that is the world is in a constant state of change; we’ve got the occupying movements, the Arab Springs, the global meltdown, and why we’ve done that is we’ve been very much more targeted. The last year we spent a lot more time targeting who is coming to Australia and who are our target audience, and obviously they’re an affluent group because of the costs of coming down here; the currency and everything else coming to Australia is not a cheap holiday. What we’re doing is the same principle, I guess, that any fashion brand does or automotive brand, we’re pitching our best first to create a halo for the rest of the country. And in China, they go after a lot of luxury brands; there’s a great sense of status and symbolism that’s attached to it. So not just for them, but for everybody, we unashamedly pitched some of the upscale product that we’ve got in Australia. But what differentiates Australia from most of the other places – and we’re doing that; South Africa and New Zealand have been doing that with their lodges for a long time. What differentiates that is that nearly all the experiences that we’ve got in there that push upscale, can be done whether you’re spending $1000 a night or $20 a night. You mentioned the El Questro, whatever that title was. You can spend $1000 there, or you can go to the Emma Gorge camp site next to it and spend $20 a night, and I’ve done that. But you can still have all the experiences that are out there. So the great thing about Australia is that it offers these unique experiences, but at the same time, it doesn’t matter whether you’re on a beer bucket budget or a champagne budget.

In terms of fostering dispersal, where you’re trying to ensure that there is a share of the result from the campaign across all the different destinations, how does this campaign approach that?

What this campaign does is it moves away from just the normal icons, if you like. This is not just about the reef, the rock and the Opera House, and what we do is we show a greater diversity and a greater depth to the country than I think has ever been shown before. Going into places like the Kimberleys, going down into Tasmania, going into Kangaroo Island, these are dispersed areas, if you like, but these are the things that really differentiate Australia against the rest of the world. And when you see those images, they couldn’t be anywhere else in the world; they really strongly show why there is nothing like Australia. It’s part of showing the depth of the country, part of getting greater dispersal and part of just showing what is best in this country.

One of the criticisms that international national campaigns have had in the past is that they relied on the old stereotypes of both the Australian ocka, but also the icons. Has there has been a purposeful move away from that this time?

Yes, what there has been is there has been a definite approach to show the best of Australia, wherever it exists. So unashamedly, we’re still going to put the Opera House in because you’d be crazy not to; it’s an icon of this country. It is part of what makes this country unique, and in fact, as soon as you see it on the screen, it’s shorthand for Australia, and we all need, as marketers, to have that cut through. But at the same time, we’re showing some other incredible parts of this country that people don’t know about. And I think that one of the things is not just parts of the country but also experiences that you can have in the country, because really it’s about experiences, which is why everything in there is about an experience, not just here is a beautiful landscape, here is another beautiful landscape, here is another beautiful landscape; it’s about experiences. So we’re trying to get the people to see it, I guess, to imagine themselves, as it were, in that experience. And that is a different approach than we’ve taken before. But the remit was prove the line, prove why there’s nothing like Australia. That’s the challenge that I set myself, and that’s what hopefully we’ve done.

When you were targeting the different markets, are there nuanced versions of the TVC or slightly different things that you do?

Yeah, very good question. And that’s one of the key things because everyone says how can you make one campaign that’s going to fit everybody in the world? Well, the key inside this is that this has been built modularly, so I can take out segments that are more about cities, I can take beaches, I can take out segments that are just about a state, if a state wants to partner it. We have been extraordinarily careful in making sure that this could be broken down into different parts and reassembled either for a market, a customer type or for a partner, so they could build it. And that’s the great thing about the song and the way that we’ve built it; it’s lots of little stories, so you can take individual stories to make it.

This version that’s being launched today – is that the one that will be launched in the four locations that you’ve mentioned?

Yes, it will be. It is the same, as it exists now. Once you start getting down to the cut down versions, the 30 seconds and 15 seconds and 20 seconds, those kind of ones, that’s when it’s more likely to be broken up. So we’ll be partnering – last time we partnered with I think about 180 partners, when we launched this campaign two years ago, which we believe is a mark for success. And lots of times, they will take, for instance, 20 seconds of this footage, add their own 10 seconds for their airline on the end of it. That’s when we’ll do a lot more of the cut down versions of it. But an interesting point is when you do all the research around the world, and we do in-depth research and analysis on our customers, pretty much 80% of the things that inspire people, differentiate the countries, motivate people to make a booking, are the same regardless of the world over. People come here for our nature, they come here for the adventure, and they come here for this great freshness and lifestyle that Australia has. That’s right up there. It’s the other things that differentiate it further down, for instance, the German market really loves big sweeping landscapes and more drama, the Chinese market will like some more city and shopping experiences, those kinds of things. So that’s why we built it so that it can be tailored. But the majority of what we show unites everybody.

And given that there is a large focus on China, are there any cultural sensitivities that you’ve taken into account for that market in particular?

There is cultural sensitivities taken for all markets. Obviously Asia has some of those, Muslim countries have some of those. It’s everything from clothing through to alcohol, those kinds of things, always have to be taken into consideration when you’re doing this. The choice of talent, the experiences you portray people doing. You have to be very careful in a global campaign, and that doesn’t matter whether it’s China or whether it’s Arab states or whether it’s even America or the UK. There are certain things that you’ve got to do to bring the campaign to life, and it means that you have to be careful of all those nuances. So we work very closely with OMD on identifying these.

Can you give some examples of some of those that were selected for the Chinese market?

Again, some of those things are everything from showing bikinis, which a lot of Muslim and Asian markets just wouldn’t allow. The question of drinking alcohol is often a big one for certain markets. Those two are probably two classic examples, if you like. But also the China market, I guess, one other one that’s specific for them is, for them, it’s much better if they see activity. The Germans might like a big picture of sweeping open desert landscape, but for a lot of the Chinese market, they’ll go and say, “Crikey, that’s a bit daunting. How do I do it, all that open space?” Which is quite natural when you consider that they’re so highly urbanised. That’s why putting people in and having those experiences in them, which is what we wanted to do anyway, fits.

So there is a bit of comfort factor there for the Chinese market?

Yes, for the Chinese market – to be quite honest, for a lot of markets, because there’s not many markets – most people like to see people doing things, and certainly we want to show how it can be done, yes.

Are there any partners for this campaign?

A large partner domestically is going to be with Qantas, and we’re going to be partnering with loads – we’ve got a partnership with China Sun up in China, but there will be loads of partners all over the world that we’re doing this with.

Will Qantas be participating on an international level?

Yes, they will be participating in lots of different markets, but they are actually at launch today. And the reason why I’m saying that is that our launch in some of our other markets around the world takes place at different times.

How important is the TVC or video ad these days in the scheme of the campaign?

The TVC or the film, whatever you want to call it, is still vital, not because it plays out on TV necessarily, but because of the role that it plays out across all of your platforms and all of the mediums that you use, because that will probably be seen more online than it will be seen on the television, but it will be seen in the cinema, it will be seen in integrated outdoor and it will be seen digitally. But ultimately, there is always a manifestation of a brand that comes to life; there is always a spark of creativity, a spark of something that has to show the brand, and that’s the job this still has, which is still just as important as it ever was, and it just plays out differently now than it used to do. What is just as important is you can’t just sit there and go, “Here’s our TVC, that’s it. Fine, we’ll walk away now.” It’s how you bring that to life because the TVC, if you just show a TVC, you’ll get excited by it; there’s a long way of getting excited to actually buying and, these days, the proliferation of people trying to get in to stop you from doing what you hope it’s going to be, to do a lot of other things, is greater and greater. The media proliferation, fragmentation, all that stuff that we know about. So what we’re trying to use is social and digital to keep people on that story. And the great thing we know about with tablets is once you get somebody to actually interact with your brand, you leap frog ads on awareness, and on a connection front, because you really started a tangible conversation. Getting fans to interact with your brands is the most important thing today, whether it be on Facebook and liking it, or whether it be on a tablet and downloading it, or whether it be on aus.com or a mobile site. It’s all part of this multimedia storytelling, and the best way of storytelling is to have it two-way.

User-generated content is something that I think you used in the last phase of the campaign, and something that you use ongoing in social media. Does it form any of the key parts of this campaign?

It’s not included in the TVC, although references to all the places that excite people – and we got great learnings from the 60,000 stories that we had last time – shaped some of our direction. User-generated stuff will form because it will come through what we’re doing on Facebook. In other words, in Facebook, four weeks ago, we started seeding the idea of some of the things that were best of, and people just like telling their stories. So absolutely user generated through social media forms a big plank because the reason why we’re going out to all these Facebook people and we’re using Facebook at the centre of this is to get people talking about our brand, and that’s at the hub.

How is user-generated content received when it makes up the main part of the campaign?

When we launched ‘There’s nothing like Australia’ the first time and we got 30,000 people to tell us their stories of why there is nothing like Australia. It was really well received; it gave us a great footprint and it gave us a great tick to saying everyone believed in the strategy and everyone could easily show if it was truthful; in other words, nobody said that we went and represented the country untruthfully. It was very truthful. We then went out a second time last year and we asked again for ‘Nothing like’ and we got 40,000 people commented in 12 days. So the desire for people to tell stories about this country and tell stories about their holiday experiences, is absolutely alive and kicking, and we find that very powerful. Because you look at some of those stories, and if you ask any place, and you want to know how people think about a place, just log onto our There’s nothing like Australia, go onto that map, type in a location and you can see exactly what people think of that place, it’s real life. And now we’ve embedded that with TripAdvisor, with Facebook content. It really becomes a platform that people can interact with and get as much user-defined content as possible, if that’s the way that they went. So we are linking up all of these elements at the moment.

This campaign seems to tick a lot of boxes. Some of the criticisms that I’ve seen in the past, whether using the stereotypes or not showing anything new about Australia, whether it’s been more tailored towards Western audiences or Eastern audiences, it seems to cover off a lot of different angles this time.

Two years ago, it’s been a very interesting journey. When we had ‘Where the Bloody Hell Are You?’ stuff, it was like a punctuation mark for us, it was a stop. We used the Baz Luhrmann one to use that to tag on to Australia, the movie, quite naturally; it was something that had a big ball of energy that we sat behind, whilst we worked out what the next iteration was, what the future was. When you have something with that amount of power and voice out there, not necessarily all positive, to break away from it, it takes a bit of time to get the right thing. So we launched, ‘There’s nothing like’ two years ago as a start for that side of this journey, and this year was really about the incorporated knowledge that we gained over the last three or four years about what to do, what not to do, where the world is going, about working with our partners, all those learnings, and really trying to be on top in digital and social environments, because that’s where we really put a thrust, and we are against other countries in the world above them, to do something right this time. So it’s given us those learnings to do it.

And your greatest critics are always going to be at home, aren’t they?

Yes, which is why it’s very audacious to launch this campaign domestically, which we haven’t done before, but I really feel and hopefully you saw there, there was stuff that people in Australia don’t know about, that is quite emotionally inspiring, and certainly the research we did prior to launch of this showed that when people saw that, there was a sense of pride in their country and believability about their country. And also, a lot of people, when they came out of it, said, “I need to find out more about my own country.” So the research really gave us some fairly strong indications that we were on target.

Q&A with Martin Lindstrom – marketing thinker, author and consultant

by Marketing ON 20 March 2012

We sat down with the lauded marketing thinker, author and consultant to discuss professional image, faith in brand, the wastefulness of research, covert word of mouth and why the Western world is creatively bankrupt.

In many ways, Martin Lindstrom is a PR’s darling. He stays on message, but subtly weaves it into the context of whatever anecdote answers your question – demonstrating a respect for the journalist interviewing and the story to be produced. He speaks with energy and motion. He entered his speciality at a prodigious age. (At 12, by his account, he started an agency; creating a miniature Legoland in his backyard. No guests arrived on the first day. So he persuaded a local ad agency to sponsor him. On the third day he had 131 visitors. The 130th and 131st, apparently, were Lego’s lawyers. There to sue him.) Making him aware that we’re – having been sternly told so – limited to 45 minutes, he telephonically shrugs, “Just take your time. And listen, I know you want to spend some energy on this article, so if we feel that we have too little time, then we will just extend it to another day.” We do.

In other ways he’s the bête noire of PR. Take the above example – there was no benefit to granting a second interview, only risk. His Scandinavian accented English makes him an unlikely business celebrity in the US. The motivations behind his works aren’t entirely unit sales or populist; this piece in particular does have a difficult raison d’être. The subtext to the book he’s speaking to us to promote is the lack of ethical consideration, motivation and training in marketing, advertising and, more broadly, business communities.

Before writing Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy, Lindstrom engaged himself in a year-long brand detox in order to see more clearly the domination of brands in our world. The idea was that he would not allow himself to purchase any new branded products for an entire year. He would, however, allow himself to continue to wear or use branded products he already owned. As a marketer, for the purposes of this project he defined brand broadly – anything that one might identify with or use to symbolise identity. It ruled out most products – house wine, tap water, no new music, books etc. It’s unsurprising that, after this experience, he believes 50% of our conversations are about or involve brands. He made it six months before lapsing, due to an airline. My favour to Lindstrom in repayment for the second interview is to not reveal what happened. It’s in the first chapter of Brandwashed, however…

On the opposite end of this brand denial continuum, Lindstrom decided to covertly – albeit with a $3 million price tag – inseminate word of mouth into a community like never before. He installed a family, the Morgensons, into a Laguna Beach, California, community with the specific goal of promoting 10 brands to friends in the community. There were some surprising results:

men were more easily influenced by other men when it came to food and drink choices than women were by other women – even when it came to suggesting vodka-cranberry over beer!
social capital directly influenced not only brand selection, but choice of adjectives when repeating feelings about a brand, and the experiment influenced its subjects: afterwards the Morgensons continued to use six of the 10 brands they had been spruiking.

But there are some interviewees who speak best for themselves.

Marketing magazine: Your book is fairly scathing about the tactics employed by marketers, but you define yourself as one. Do you see the problem with today’s consumer capitalist society to be the marketing profession?

Martin Lindstrom: The concept of marketer needs to be rebranded, because the problem we have right now is that we are, image wise, down with used car salesmen and real estate agents. And I think the problem we have is that we’re selling out too much. We’re going too far in desperation to make sure that we make a buck. The reason I wrote this book is very simple: I’ve been in the industry since I was 12… and I think it’s very clear to me right now that we are seeing some trends where the consumer is locked in and really can’t get out anymore, for privacy’s sake and lots of other reasons. And I feel we need to – and ‘we’ is me as well – clean up our own act, and make sure we get to a stage where, really from an ethical point of view, we have made a clean cut. I do think that very soon we will see a WikiLeaks of brands appearing, a type of website, or whatever it is, which is really going to disclose things companies are doing behind the scenes.

Before that happens, I wanted to write a book that had two purposes: one was for me to work with the consumer to push companies to change their behaviour. [The other] was to work with companies behind the scenes and team up with them in order to create some new ethical guidelines they could follow, so we make sure that the change is happening before it’s too late. And that’s really the mission for this whole thing.

I do think that we have an image problem right now; the trust is simply fading away… I think though, the problem is two things:

I don’t think any marketer out there has ever gone to a course where they learn about ethics. I haven’t, for sure, and I don’t know anyone who has.
I think the second thing that is happening right now, which no-one has experience with, is the fact that the brand will no longer be owned by corporations, but by the consumer.

How do you think marketers can win back credibility?

To be honest, I think marketers need to shape up in terms of what their own ethical profile is and, if I was a marketer, I would say you need to determine what are your own ethical guidelines, and you need to plaster them on top of your website on the homepage… And it needs to be like a guarantee. Just like when you buy a Rolex, you know that there is a two-year guarantee on it. Well, the same guarantee will be the case when you team up with an advertising agency, or even an individual. And it may be that every individual marketer will have their own ethical guidelines they follow, because, as you know, ethical guidelines really vary depending on which culture you talk to. I assume if you talk to a smoker, a smoker will, in general, feel it’s OK to advertise for smoking, whereas an antismoker will have the opposite opinion.

In a future where brand is owned by the consumer, will a marketer’s role become one of new product development and product management?

If you take a look at it from a marketing perspective, what is happening right now is that some of the cleverer brands are engaging the consumer much, much earlier than they did previously. They are working with a teething period of typically nine to 12 months before the product is even released. What we’ve learned is that if a product is released, let’s say, a year before, and the consumer is involved in the research and development process, giving feedback, giving and sharing their concerns, and they’re also involved in word of mouth, and if this involvement is happening a year before the product’s release, the product is more than 300% more likely to become successful…

And I think the good news here, from a consumer point of view, is that the consumer, in many ways now, will start to have a bigger say in what’s going on, and that means that they can stop [problematic] things much earlier. That’s also the good news for [brands], because companies will detect errors in product, in marketing, whatever, much, much earlier… It’s a win/ win situation. But it also means that marketers need to be much better involving themselves in the R&D process. And I think that’s one of the biggest weaknesses today, in particular for advertising agencies, but also for marketing departments, that neither of those two functions involve themselves [regularly] in the whole R&D process…

And let me just elaborate on that: what I see happening is that advertising agencies in general assume what the consumer looks like, they go out and do a vox pop or two, perhaps buy some statistics from some company, but they very rarely spend time in the consumers’ homes.

There is growing public interest in the tactics advertisers use. There are your books, there is Morgan Spurlock’s film – The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, The Gruen Transfer, Mad Men. Why do you think the mainstream have become so fascinated by this world?

It’s not that we are fascinated by it; we are just fascinated by our irrational behaviour and how our brains work. I think we are fascinated by manipulation and cheating and subliminal messages – all those different topics, things which are not spoken about. It just happens to be that the concentration of those different topics is in the world of advertising, and because it still has that sexy image – which I think appeals to a lot of people. The reality is that this will continue for a long period of time, but I also do think that a lot of consumers, unfortunately, are strangely enough not going to learn a lot. I certainly have seen that.

Whenever I give advice to consumers about how to change shopping behaviour, [they] say, “Wow, that’s fascinating. I love it. I’m going to change my behaviour.” And then when I observe them two days later out in the supermarket, they haven’t learned a thing. Because the way we interact in our lives today has been ingrained from when we were very young, and it’s almost like learning how to speak a whole new language; it’s not just something you do. To change your shopping behaviour is almost like going on a diet; it really takes a long time and is very hard. I think even though all those different programs are running on the screen right now, I don’t think that will have a lot of effect. The only thing they will do is to make it even more appealing.

You say one of the main aims in the book is to educate people towards the tricks that marketers use. Does reading about them and learning about them actually make people immune, or is there a risk that it could have the opposite effect and fill consumers with a false confidence?

I do think that the reality today is that most of us feel we are immune to all this advertising out there, and we do know that as soon as you feel you’re immune, your guard goes down, and as the guard goes down, you’re more susceptible to advertising. So, of course there is that risk that people read about it and then they believe they’re immune to everything. However, I would say one thing: all the many, many people I’ve talked to who’ve read the book, consistently say they have changed their entire way of buying stuff forever, and they are much more cautiously buying stuff in the supermarket. They’re much more critical towards things, they’re much more critical towards how they share information about themselves.

The Morgenson family was a large part of your book, in which you insinuated them into a community to spread word of mouth promotion about particular products. You make the prediction that marketers will actually adopt this tactic. Which brands do you think would go this far?

Well, I think there will be different levels of it, but I think most companies actually will. One thing that we realised with the Morgenson project, is that if the consumer is told that they are involved in a persuasion process where the people surrounding them have one mission, that is, to persuade them to use a certain brand, if they are aware of that, they actually are even more susceptible to changing their mind. It’s really, really surprising. We learned that people were – I can’t remember – between four and six% more likely to follow the advice if they knew that person was being paid for it. It was really surprising data. But the reason is because people somehow both get a respect that people are pretty honest about it and, secondly, they are thinking, ‘Hey, that person really must know a lot about this product, since that person is receiving money from the company to talk about it and promote it.’

How do you see brands remunerating families and individuals that do enter into some sort of program like this?

I think there will be two or three remuneration [models]. I think the first will be an expanded Tupperware model, where there are parties, cocktail parties, dinner parties and barbecues going on, and where they get some sort of pay-off if people are buying the products, because they are giving them the ability to buy at a cheaper price. I think the second level will be where you will notice some sort of online activity where

they will systematically spread the word of mouth to friends, and the more they get their friends to befriend [brands], the more bonus points they’ll receive. And I think the third category will be where they get a flat fee – and the flat fee [will be] partly free products and partly payment.

I want to come back to your brand detox that you open the book with. You do talk about the effects it had on you, and how it did create this kind of pregnant desire for brands, but what were the professional impacts it had on you? And also, what personal impacts did it have on you long-term?

I think the professional impact it had on me was that a lot of the tricks I fell for during the detox were tricks developed by me. And I think I realised the responsibility I had, as a marketing guy, or a branding guy, to really value very carefully what I teach my clients to do, and what tricks I’m using in order to persuade people to buy. So, it made me become much more aware of the ethical responsibility I have, because if I fall for my own tricks, then I would say most people would fall for the tricks, right? That’s the first thing. I think the long-term impact it had on me is that this is a strange world we’re living in right now where consumption has become so integrated into our happiness level that really, if we remove this whole thing from the world, we would look very empty for a long time.

I realised when we did the experiment with the Morgensons – which is the last chapter, and that was really following the heels of this experiment – that we have nothing to talk about, that 51% of everything we talk about with each other at a dinner table in the US is about brands, which I find incredibly scary. That means if I removed the topic of brands, we wouldn’t have anything to talk to each other about.

So, I realised how we are influencing each other, and how brands have such a big role in our lives, that this is almost our next cultural heritage. So, that was a really interesting wake-up call. And I think, at the end of the day, I also realised that it’s fine for us to have relations with brands, and be dependent on them; it’s kind of a treat, and it’s fine. And I think it’s just hard for us in our society as it is right now, to get around it. I think most people would struggle, and I think most people would not even be able to survive half a year, as I did, because it’s just everywhere. And it’s just very nice, as a marketer, to realise that and get a sense for that, rather than looking at the consumer and believing it’s ‘us and them’ we’re talking about.

You’re obviously a brand guy. We’ve noticed, among Australian marketers, the idea of brand is taking a bit of a beating after the global financial crisis. Most activity is really judged on a very short-term ROI. What is your reaction to this trend?

I think the most important thing to say is that courage is disappearing from corporations today, and I think we need to see courage coming back. I spend so much time behind the scene working with [company] politics. I would probably estimate that around 75 to 80% of my time is managing politics, because people are afraid of losing their jobs. Because of that, they are also afraid of making bold and courageous decisions. People are slow, because they are afraid that they’re not ticking all the right boxes and, therefore,

if they’re slow, they miss a lot of opportunities. And I think a lot of people are incredibly conventional in their thinking, and that means because it’s safer, they don’t dare to use unusual media formats, or use their media formats in unusual ways.

So, my advice is, number one, get the courage back into the organisation. And courage for me is where you use your weakness and turn it into a strength. Let’s say you are a very small start-up company. The biggest strength you have when you’re small is that you’re fast and, because you’re fast, you can do bold moves very quickly, and quite often you’ll get a lot of attention around them. And I think a lot of small start-ups, are blinded by the fact that they don’t have enough money, but their strength is that they are incredibly fast.

If something happens in the news today, they would in reality be able to turn around and tomorrow have [a related] ad up and running or do something online, or produce a new product or whatever. And I think that strength is totally forgotten in this country. I think it just becomes so corporate and so boring that it’s not working anymore, it’s just showing the logo in different sizes, and that’s what people define as branding.

For the bigger corporations, I think there has to be a huge turnaround. The people sitting in the [big] jobs right now have absolutely no courage, and I tell you I have fights with them every day to make them wake up and realise that they need to break the conventional thinking, because it’s much cheaper…

I think the reality is we need to learn we cannot be friends with everyone, particularly in a world where everything is so connected; you will always be exposed for bad stuff, but so be it. I think that’s my advice. I do think that branding is going down the drain at the moment. I do think that companies are just totally forgetting about what the purpose is with branding. Branding for me is to create such a strong emotional tie to a product that you really don’t care about the price at the end of the day, because you love the product or the brand.

Absolutely. Do you find that there is a correlation between countries that still have that creativity and corporate courage?

Yes, I do think there is a correlation with it…

The good news here is that I think the Australian market is better than the US in terms of courage and all that stuff, but the bad news is the US is pretty bad at the moment, it’s really bad. There is so little courage over there. And the bad news is the third world countries, more and more, are going to be the epicentre of where new brands are being born.