Leadership News, Features, and Interviews

A new Optus report has found only 12 per cent of Australian organisations are delivering outstanding customer experiences despite the fact that 95 per cent of consumers will remain loyal to organisations that do so.

Former Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) chief executive, Mark Crowe, has become the new head of Brand Finance Australia.

Given Tableau positions itself as bringing the power of data to individuals, it’s not surprising its global CMO, Elissa Fink, is a great believer in data-driven marketing. What’s a little more unexpected is that she’s also an advocate for intuition and gut feel.

Media recognition apps vendor, Shazam, has appointed Patricia Parra as its first chief marketing officer as it looks to improve its user engagement globally and expand its product offering.

A new consultancy group’s report on the changing role of marketing has stressed the importance of courage, collaboration and commercial instinct if marketing leaders want to continue to be successful.

Applying design principles to business is opening up a world of opportunity to co-create with customers and industry on everything from products to crime prevention.

The desire to make better decisions faster is one of the fundamental drivers of new big data analytics technologies and a general push toward data-driven decision-making. But the relationship between data and intuition -- the old 'gut feeling' -- is a complicated one, says Peter Swabey, senior editor, technology at the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the research and analysis division of The Economist Group.

Marketing must sit at the heart of business decision-making and the boardroom table if organisations want to stay ahead of the competition and embrace ever-higher customer expectations.

The CIO and CMO of Tourism Australia have joined forces to develop innovative storytelling aimed at bringing more visitors to Australia.

Marketing and technology are blurring and the relationship between CMO and CIO is increasingly vital to addressing the modern data and digital customer challenge, leading Australian marketers claim.

News Corp's Lachlan Murdoch believes newspapers still have a "tremendous amount of life left in the them" despite a huge shift to digital technologies.

Online home improvement directory, hipages Group, has brought on a new chief marketing officer (CMO) and created a chief customer office role as part of plans to lift its brand presence and might in Australia.

One-to-one engagement has become a catchcry of the marketing community, but in reality many still haven’t worked out how to act at such a personalised level. A massive organisation like Telstra would once have been placed firmly in this group, but its CMO, Mark Buckman, believes the company’s heft is actually helping drive its one-to-one strategy and improve customer services and advocacy.

Liz Allen, a former Apple marketing executive, has seen the volatile relationship between CMOs and CIOs evolving over the years. CMOs were worshipped and CIOs despised at Apple, but Allen isn't taking sides: 'If you're at odds, your competition is going to win.'

If you ask your customers what they think of you, your products and services, they may very well tell you. But what if the people using your products and services were the same ones that had designed them? How would that change their attitudes towards you, and what new ideas might the design process uncover?

Chief executive of Australia’s Taronga Zoo Cameron Kerr is a great believer in the power of people to transform brands as well as leadership. He discusses his rise from marketer to business leader

Digital strategies aimed at improving customer experience must be entrenched inside organisations and owned by the leadership team if they are to be effective.

Leading Australian CMOs and CIOs joined CMO and CIO magazines and ADMA for our first joint roundtable to discuss the issues around becoming a customer-centric organisation in Sydney on 22 May. The event was sponsored by Adobe.

Organisations that don’t make the transition to digital in the next 10 years will either be acquired by firms that have, or go out of business as new technologies transform the way companies interact with their customers.

The challenges of striking a successful relationship between marketing and IT are well documented, and yet we’re still not sure of the best way to get there. There’s no getting away from the fact that these two leaders come from different backgrounds and have, until now, been speaking very different languages.

The CIO and CMO must align their teams and strategies to achieve business success, according to marketers and IT officials.