For MarCast‘s latest episode, we were joined by Fabian Marrone, CMO at Monash University.

As part of Marketing‘s partnership with the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI), we’re lucky enough to have access to a selection of 2019’s AMI Award Winners available for interview. The first guest of the Winners series is Fabian Marrone, Monash University CMO.

Marrone joined MarCast to fill us in on all things marketing at Monash University. It’s an interesting look into how a large, global institution leverages and empowers its network of academics, students and alumni to tell its stories freely, in their own ways, on a range of channels.

Part one and two are live now. Wrap your ears around it now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

Brands entering conversations on current issues

One of the things about working at a university is every day you go to work and the types of stories that you’re telling are stories around things like climate change and how you can improve that, or ways to combat domestic violence or ways to improve gender equality. Because that’s what our academics are actually doing research into; that’s what they’re spending their days doing. We’re spending our time trying to push those messages out more broadly to get broader engagement both domestically and internationally.

Empowering members of a network to become brand storytellers

We work in an organisation with 20,000 staff, and people are communicating with people every day. We work in a very empowered model where we try to provide people with the tools and the messaging to go out and talk to their audience members without having to be policed or go through an overly cumbersome governance process to communicate with people. As long as we’re building on the Monash message, then we really encourage the communications and marketing through individuals and different parts of the university.

On using Monash’s academics as influencers

Academics are the original influencers. They are the ones that have been, through many years, educating large portions of society and teaching large volumes of people at that most impressionable stage in life. So they are the original influencers, if you like, before this celebrity that we’ve had. Getting them to talk about their areas of discipline, and engaging people with what they’re doing research about, can really create that positive influence environment.

Part one is live now. Wrap your ears around it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

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Photo by Siora Photography on Unsplash