12 Marketing Matters that Matter with Andrew Baxter
Host Mark Jones is joined by Andrew Baxter for a reflection on where we are right now and how best to prepare for the year ahead.
After a couple of years of disruption, consumer confidence in Australia at its lowest in 20 years.
The pandemic has done more than just create uncertainty, it has impacted and changed how consumers behave. People are more likely to look and shop locally, connecting them with different communities.
According to Andrew Baxter, now is the time for brands to push through. Habits are formed in an average of 66 days, according to research in the European Journal of Social Psychology. Given the lengths of lockdowns over the past two years, it was inevitable that new habits have been formed.
“As a marketer you've got to figure out, are those behaviour changes that have happened in that period of time good for your business and therefore you need to encourage those to continue, or do you want to reverse them as quickly as possible once we get out the other side of whichever wave of a COVID outbreak we're in? I think that's something that not as many marketers are asking themselves as they should,” says Andrew.
In his ‘12 Marketing Matters that Matter’, Andrew lists trust as the number one matter that should matter most to marketers. In fact, it's the question he is most often asked by CEOs and board members about marketing. CEOs often ask how to build trust with customers and how do to maintain it. If we lose trust, how do we get it back?
“It all sounds quite fundamental, but there's a great saying that trust is won in drops and lost in buckets. In other words, you've got to do lots and lots of little things to build up trust with your customer, particularly in the B2B space. But one thing that goes wrong, you could potentially lose that trust,” says Andrew.
And as always, marketing leaders are the bridge between consumer sentiment and an organisation’s growth agenda. Marketers find opportunities, creative angles and tell stories that connect.
Covering trust and consumer behaviour, to Influencers, AI and Martech, data transparency through to the good old-fashioned power of creativity, there’s a lot on Andrew’s mind this year.
Find out which 12 marketing topics should be at the top of your mind in this episode of The CMO Show.
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Producers – Candice Witton & Charlotte Woodford
Audio Engineers – Ed Cheng & Daniel Marr
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[Transcript]
Participants:
Host: Mark Jones
Guest: Andrew Baxter
Mark Jones:
With consumer confidence in Australia at its lowest in 20 years, trust and confidence go hand-in-hand. As always, marketing leaders are the bridge between consumer sentiment and an organisation’s growth agenda. We find opportunities, creative angles and tell stories that connect. So as 2022 gathers pace, what’s on your strategic agenda?
Mark Jones:
Hello friends! Mark Jones here. Welcome back to The CMO Show.
We’re welcoming in the new year and a new season of the show, with conversations with leaders who are making a positive, sustainable, and measurable impact.
Today my guest is Andrew Baxter. To that theme, he’s worked with many of Australia's largest companies, brands and government bodies, as the CEO of Publicis and Ogilvy, and now as a Senior Advisor at both KPMG and BGH Capital, as well as the Adjunct Professor of Marketing at the University of Sydney.
He’s a fellow podcaster, and Chair of Australian Pork and Commtract, amongst many other board appointments and accomplishments.
Andrew joins us for a great episode. He’s going to walk us through his top 12 Marketing Matters that Matter for 2022.
It’s a reflection on where we are right now and how best to prepare for the year ahead. There’s some great practical takeaways.
So without any further ado, let’s go to my conversation with Andrew Baxter.
Mark Jones:
Welcome back to The CMO Show. Mark Jones here. My guest today is Andrew Baxter. Great to have you on the show, Andrew.
Andrew Baxter:
Great to be here. Really going to enjoy this. My first one for the year.
Mark Jones:
There you go. We're off and running. Now, you've got your own podcast as well. A very quick overview, you've worked with many of Australia's largest companies and brands. You were CEO at Publicis and Ogilvy, and you are senior advisor at KPMG and at BGH Capital, Now, it's a brand-new year, how are you feeling?
Andrew Baxter:
I'm feeling positive because I think I'm a positive person, but I did just see the consumer confidence survey came out, showing that we had the lowest consumer confidence in the country since 1992. That's slightly problematic as a marketer. But look, I think we've got to push through, from a marketing point of view and a business point of view and try and make this year as good a year as we can after the last couple of years of some fairly major disruptions.
Mark Jones:
Actually, that's a really good point because consumer confidence and I think B2B marketing confidence as well are really important. In other words, leaders within the B2B community, that sentiment, I don't know how widely tracked that is, but we tend to use consumer confidence as the catch-all.
Mark Jones:
I think Omicron really has thrown everything up into the air yet again, and my view seems to be there's just more, if it's even possible, even more uncertainty. A self-imposed lockdown in many parts of the country. What do you think marketers should be thinking about in that context?
Andrew Baxter:
I've spoken a bit in the past about, there's a great piece of research that came out of London in 2009 that showed that habits are formed in 66 days. I think when you think about our lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, whether you're in Sydney, Melbourne, wherever you were around the country, the majority of those lockdowns were for longer than 66 days. So, people did form new habits.
Andrew Baxter:
From a marketing point of view for me and certainly this has already been going for close to that period of time, even though we aren't technically in a lockdown, as you said, we are almost self-lockdown in many parts of the country. As a marketer, you've got to figure out are those behaviour changes that have happened in that period of time good for your business and therefore you need to encourage those to continue, or do you want to reverse them as quickly as possible once we get out the other side of whichever wave of a COVID outbreak we're in? I think that's something that not as many marketers are asking themselves as they should.
Mark Jones:
Give me some examples. A behaviour change quite obviously would be signing in and out of venues, for example. We've seen different behaviours possibly in shopping, online, in physical stores. What are some other things that I think are probably maybe less noticeable, but equally as important?
Andrew Baxter:
Well, I think both of those ones that you talk about are probably the two biggest ones. I think people's, I suppose, confidence in using QR codes or other forms of codes now is interesting. I think there's some other ones about shopping locally. Obviously, when people are locked down, they've shopped more locally. There's some great stats around that.
Andrew Baxter:
People over the last couple of years have really gotten to know their local cafe or butcher, or they're not necessarily going to the places they would always go to. I think they've opened their minds up to other things, even places that they might eat or get take away from has changed. There's some of the other ones that are popping up. But it's the eCommerce one, people buying online, that's been the biggest change clearly, and companies have had to move really quickly to that.
Mark Jones:
Last year you spoke to a group of agency leaders. It's a group that we're a part of here at ImpactInstitute it's called PROI Worldwide. You came and spoke to us about what you call 12 Marketing Matters that Matter, which is a fun title. It was what CEOs have been talking to you about, but I thought it might be fun actually, if I could call out the word, the topic, if you like, because there's 12 topics. I wondered if you could give me the 2022 fresh version of it. In other words, what really matters this year or what will matter?
Let's get stuck into it. The first one is trust.
Andrew Baxter:
Trust has been at the top of this list for the last three years. It's the question I most get asked by CEOs and board members about marketing. How do we build trust with our customers? Whether it's B2B or B2C and how do we maintain it? If we lose it for some reason, how do we get it back? It all sounds quite fundamental, but there's a great saying that trust is won in drops and lost in buckets. In other words, you've got to do lots and lots of little things to build up trust with your customer, particularly in the B2B space. But one thing that goes wrong, you could potentially lose that trust.
Andrew Baxter:
Now, having said that, brands and companies with their customers are a bit like people. We tend to forgive people for one mistake. If you think about Vodafone in 2013, what was called the #vodafail, there's still millions of people in Australia that very comfortably and love using Vodafone. It was one moment in time, it was a big thing for them, but they got through the other side of it and have done very well ever since.
Andrew Baxter:
The key is with trust is to not lose that multiple times. I think trust has been at the forefront for the last few years because we've had things like Royal commissions into whether it be the aged care or the banking sector. We've had some an Edelman who do a trust survey every year, it's certainly not been going in the right direction.
Andrew Baxter:
Funnily enough, after the first year of COVID businesses in particular responded very well and very meaningfully, and that also has seemed to drop off in recent times. It's about doing the right thing.
Mark Jones:
I just want to know briefly, on this one, how can companies build trust this year? I note that the traditional role of the CEO as thought leader tends to not be quite as strong as a company technical expert. Maybe the question is, what's the future of thought leadership?
Andrew Baxter:
For me, it's that authentic leadership. That's what we're crying out for. That's what we're not seeing with many of our higher order things we look to, to build trust in. Whether it is our government or businesses, sporting bodies, whatever it might be, we are looking for authenticity, meaningful conversation, honesty, truth, et cetera.
Mark Jones:
Let's go to number two, which is technology, what's really going to matter this year?
Andrew Baxter:
For me, the marketing technology space is ever evolving. There's now so many more options. There's certainly a lot more cost-effective option. There's new companies opening up every day that are adding to that marketing technology stack. It's really being open minded about what is there, because I think so sometimes, we think that they can be either too expensive or a little bit too complicated for our needs, particularly in the B2B space.
Andrew Baxter:
Whereas, I think, I think there's plenty of options out there and, and be open minded to it. Tied to that marketing technology is a few of the other 12 we talked about, like 5G is here. Many of our phones have already got that on there. That means we can and transfer data 100 or 1,000 times faster, depending on who you believe. That means a lot of the technology we've had for a while, particularly in our retail spaces, it's all there, we can now unlock it and the data can be transferred a lot more quickly.
Andrew Baxter:
I think there's opportunities off the back of the roll out of 5G and more and more Australians in particular getting their phones with 5G capability. Then, I think the AI is one of the fastest growing areas in this whole marketing technology space. This is anything. It's anything from content being automated.
Andrew Baxter:
Often, I talk about, I used to be on the board of the National Basketball League, and they've got some great technology in the social media space that the AI actually picks up when there might be a slam dunk and automatically cuts together the social post and feeds that back to the marketing team almost in real time to say that Chris Golding from Melbourne United, big slam dunk or big three pointer. They can literally post that stuff in real time.
Andrew Baxter:
In the past, if you went back five years ago, everyone afterwards was going okay, where was that highlight? At what time during the game was it? We better cut that together into a little piece. We might put that up on Facebook. People want that real time experience and AI can drive that.
Andrew Baxter:
Certainly, chatbots are on the rise, and our younger generation love those, our older generation, not so much. They still prefer talking to a real person, chatting on the phone to somebody, talking face-to-face, which has clearly been a bit more difficult during this time. There's so many opportunities in that AI space. One of the things I am seeing is filling in forms.
Andrew Baxter:
Some of the call centres now are using that technology. They're listening to a conversation and they're pre-populating a form, if you happen to mention your address. What we all hate is consumers, again, in the B2B or B2C space is when you've given someone some information on a phone call and then they ask for it again.
Andrew Baxter:
I think there's some really exciting things in that AI space.
Mark Jones:
Let's go to number three, personalisation and the customer experience. This is a big one.
Andrew Baxter:
It is. My point that I'm making around personalization is, everyone's racing towards digital personalization. Utilising some of that AI technology or marketing technology to drive personalization. But it's not just all about digital. People still want a seamless, digital and human experience. I know some of the fast-food stores have been trialling and rolling out, obviously for many years now, the kiosks.
Andrew Baxter:
Now, I remember seeing one of the stores a few years ago that only had kiosks. You couldn't actually order a coffee or a cheeseburger directly from someone at the counter. It was almost like it had gone too far. If we go back to many of us, funnily enough, have our, I mentioned coffee shops before. I still think coffee shops are often one of the best examples of personalization. They see you coming from 50 metres away and they've already started making your coffee by the time you get there, you can now pay with your phone, or you can order it ahead of you want to. They have a chat. They ask how your dog, or your kids are. They know quite a bit about you. But it's a combination of the digital technology and the human interface that makes that such a strong, personalised experience.
Andrew Baxter:
There's a lot of statistics around just getting the basics right. How many times have we ended up getting an email that doesn't even have our name at the top of it, or it just has your surname by mistake, or it might have XXXX. We've all seen those. You straight away, you just go, no, this company doesn't know what it's up to.
Andrew Baxter:
As I said before, it really does drive trust. People are looking for personalization and it's not within your sector. I think the mistake often we make as market as we go, oh, okay, we're selling trucks and we're comparing ourselves to other truck companies and how they're rolling out... No, no, no, you're comparing yourself to Apple, because those B2B truck buyers are the same people who on a weekend are going in to buy a Mac from an Apple store and they're getting an incredible experience, and that's the experience that they're looking for.
Mark Jones:
I think what I'm hearing you talk about here with personalization and CX is that we just finally need to make it work. Is that right? Again, tapping back into that idea of the thought leadership and trust, it's kind of essential, people want to actually feel valued.
Andrew Baxter:
They do. That's what the coffee shop or the butcher, they empathise with you. They give you recommendations. Because they know you genuinely, they're able to offer that far more personalised experience. When I run workshops and I say to people, "Tell me the best customer experience you've had in the last six months." It is often the coffee shops, the butchers, the local shops that come up. I say, "Well, why can't you, at a larger scale provide that sort of experience?" Whether if you're a technology company selling to another business, why can't you be like that?
Mark Jones:
Let's go to number four, digital media.
Andrew Baxter:
I think this is interesting because people have felt for a few years that the Facebooks and the Instagram's, the Twitters, the Pinterest's, the Snapchats are all going to slow down. In fact, over the last two of years during COVID, they've grown faster. I'm talking from not only users, but in terms of advertising revenue, which is where marketing comes back. As marketers, we're always trying to get our messages across to a targeted audience in the best way possible.
Andrew Baxter:
During the last, I think two or three quarters, we're not seeing 10% growth, we're not seeing 20% growth in this space, we're seeing year on year, quarter on quarter, 40%, 50% growth, which is huge. It's not going away. I think the last point that people are not quite realising yet, is that the number three company in the world for advertising revenue is Amazon.
Andrew Baxter:
It's a retailer, who obviously has a huge amount of people going to their site, and therefore they're able to offer advertising opportunities digitally to customers that are going to that site. I think we're going to see the rise of retail and certainly, some of the more popular retail sites as advertising opportunities.
Mark Jones:
Yeah, and we're starting to see that actually with media buying agencies, having Amazon as one of the channels. It's just going to become quite normal. The other thing to briefly mention too here is that I just saw today, TikTok has overtaken Google as the most popular website in 2021. I think that's like a sign at the times, too, in terms of your point around these social platforms, their growth and their popularity. I got to confess, I thought it would always be google.com, right? Just the homepage of the internet. It feels like a tectonic shift to me.
Let's move on to artificial intelligence, number five.
Andrew Baxter:
We talked a little bit about that before, and the one bit we didn't talk about as part of that was the voice search. Obviously, all of us are getting much more used to, and back to your Google search point a second ago, we're getting much more used to talking about, Hey, Google, Hey, Siri.
Andrew Baxter:
Certainly, in Australia, it's well over 40% of search now is done by voice. In some of the countries like China and India, it's been well over 50% for a couple of years.
Andrew Baxter:
But in this country, we're seeing our younger audience using majority of voice search now. That brings up a whole lot of challenges that we go back to that Amazon example, people are asking on the Amazon site they might, hey, Alexa, and it says I want to buy some batteries. Now, you would think that you've got Duracell and Eveready. But no, I think the number one selling battery on Amazon is the Amazon Battery.
Andrew Baxter:
Just how do we influence what the voice... And some of our basic items, bread, milk, beer, whatever it might be. If we're thinking about, from a shopping point of view, "Hey, Google, add milk to my shopping basket." What milk is it going to put into the basket? There's so many, it's one litre, is it a two litre? Is it light milk? Is it A2 milk? Is it whatever it might be? There's a lot of complication going...it's an exciting space that this is all being AI driven and it's learning from you every time you're asking. But at the same time as marketers, we really need to be thinking through how do we influence that?
Andrew Baxter:
Because at the moment, when we do a voice search, it still pushes us back to our phone or our desktop with 10 options, the classic first page. As marketers, we've been trying to get on that first page in a search point of view for the last, however many years. Potentially down the track, it's just going to give you one answer, it's not going to give you 10 options.
Mark Jones:
That's my takeaway. I think it's no longer about first page, it's actually first. How can I be first?
Andrew Baxter:
Yeah. That's a big shift, and how do you influence that as a marketer? I think that's something that marketers in 2022 really need to be starting to think about.
Mark Jones:
Number six on your list is voice, and you're talking about voice search. But I think there's probably another aspect of this, which is maybe more broadly the marketing equation, how we're going to be marketed to by AI.
Andrew Baxter:
I went to a great session with Sydney Uni, they were showcasing some of their virtual, people. They literally can scan you in the room. They can scan Mark Jones with an iPhone. They can get you to talk for 10 seconds, and then up on the screen is what looks 99% like you, and then they can talk and, and you, on the screen are talking in your voice, your intonation.
Andrew Baxter:
Now, that can be used for good or for bad and we've seen things with ex-presidents in the United States, other people are pretending to be them when in fact it is all being done via this deep fake technology. I think when you think about there's those opportunities, but there's also the machine learning really helping to drive and the AI really helping to drive that personalisation.
Andrew Baxter:
I think it's also, one of the other topics we've got on here is about marketing mix. What's the optimal mix of my marketing? Well, AI, in terms of a marketing point of view is much more likely now to be able to tell you, what is that mix? In the past, we might have done some econometric modelling at some point, we might have figured out at a point in time, what the last three years of marketing's done and what combination of marketing was driving the best ROI.
Andrew Baxter:
Well, going forward, from a marketing point of view, that can be telling a marketer in real time what that combination should be. The AI effectively starts taking over and driving your marketing in real time.
Mark Jones:
Really, I think automating a lot more of that marketing mixed decision making. That's the blend of AI and thinking about your marketing mix in different ways. But that's short term versus long-term thinking as well. How do we get the balance right? How much am I spending on brand, versus short term revenue growth, lead gen and so forth.
Andrew Baxter:
This is a really hard one. Now, thankfully, the IPA, which is the UK advertising industry body have done a huge number of studies off the back of effective case studies over the last 20 years, and they've identified that it's about a 60-40 split. 60% is the brand and 40% is those short-term sales. Now, again, intuitively we know that if we throw a whole lot of marketing effort at say a digital campaign, it's going to drive. You can see the reaction straight away. You can see what sort of ROI you're delivering.
Andrew Baxter:
But what it doesn't do, it's a bit like a saw tooth. If you look at a classic saw, the tooth goes up and it goes back down, you end up back at the same spot. You never increase your baseline sales. Whereas, when you add brand in, when that saw tooth goes up, it lands at a just higher point than it did before. Then you start doing a little bit more short-term sales and a little bit more brand, and it lands at a slightly higher point again. You saw ends up going on an angle that increases over time, rather than just dropping back to your baseline.
Mark Jones:
Number seven is influencer marketing. I wrote down, when you were speaking about this, this is growing and not going away. I want to make a quick comment here again, about TikTok. What's astounding to me is the number of trades people around the world who are filming themselves, cleaning swimming pools, restoring cars, fixing up old bikes, or what was another great one I saw? Some blokes actually filling swimming pools with water that he transported, that was ready to go, had chlorine in it already. It showed him laying out pipes.
Mark Jones:
The punchline is always, this person has X million followers on TikTok. Just doing their normal job and filming it, and suddenly we're just excited about somebody laying pipes down on the ground and pumping water into swimming pool. What's happening here?
Andrew Baxter:
There was one today that I saw where someone who was doing train spotting, and he has now become the face of Gucci for their last campaign.
Mark Jones:
I've seen that guy. Yeah.
Andrew Baxter:
Next on the menu, my food podcast, we interviewed Australia's top butcher. He's the number one butcher. There's an Olympics for butchery, would you believe, globally, and there's an Australian team of butchers and Australia won the world championships a couple of years ago. This young guy called L y, he's very modern looking young butcher.
Andrew Baxter:
Well, he gets usually about a million views per TikTok around showing people how he's cutting meat. Now, he does it in a very engaging way, but you're right, some of these niches are quite incredible in terms of what they're doing. It isn't going away. We're still seeing the growth of various platforms. Interestingly, some of the top platforms globally are coming out of Australia.
Andrew Baxter:
There are companies like Tribe, there's companies like Hypetap, Scrunch, Vamp. There's quite a few, the right fit. All Australian owned platforms in the influencer space. They all do... Some of them enable almost DIY influencer campaigns and others will help you do things, depending on what you need. It's an amazing space.
Andrew Baxter:
The question I most get asked by CEOs is, does it work? My answer is twofold. One is, as I said before, on average 10 channels per campaign. Possibly nowadays should be in there as a channel that you are looking at as an option. But we're actually seeing some standalone campaigns also work quite strongly. It felt like it was something that was going to be here and gone. But as we all see from our social feeds, it's going strong.
Mark Jones:
I think we should bookmark that; does it work question for another one too. But my quick answer to that would be yes, if you know what you're doing, and it's contextually relevant. If you take an idea that works well in TV, it's probably not going to work in TikTok, even though it's a video channel, right? There's a style and a context that's really important.
Mark Jones:
Number eight, data transparency.
Andrew Baxter:
Well, this also comes back to trust. Again, we saw, I think it was Wesfarmers more recently in Australia, one of their third-party suppliers that had a data breach, and it was something like 3 million Australians' data was breached. We saw the Marriott hotel group a few years ago, have 386 million people's data compromised, including 5 million passport numbers.
Andrew Baxter:
Now, this is of years ago having one passport number breached to have been a huge issue for a brand. I think people have got to be really careful. It is people's private information. There's a lot of banking information that's sitting within the data that companies are collecting. Many are now trusting this two third parties, because they've got stronger cyber security and things like that in place.
Andrew Baxter:
I think there's a line that marketers need to look at, when you go back to personalization, we're obviously collecting a lot of data on our customers, again, B2B or B2C, how much of that do we use and how do we use it? I often say, it's a bit like... I use the analogy of the back fence with a neighbour. If the data, you have is that one of the parents is away working and the other parent's looking after two kids and one of the kids has got a bit of a cold. Then, as a good neighbour with that data and information, you might go knock on the door and you've made some soup for them, or here's a casserole dish. If you are drilling a hole through the back fence and spying on the neighbours to get the data, that's not a good thing.
Mark Jones:
No.
Andrew Baxter:
I think we've got to be sensible about what sort of data are we capturing? What are we capturing it for? Is it helping? I think there was a survey a few years ago that EY did on the banking sector that said 73% of customer were very happy for their data to be used, if it was for relevant and personalised offers and information. Well, yeah, great. Of course, that would be the case. There's also going to be a whole lot of people that don't want any of their data collected and that's fine as well. We've just got to be careful about that.
Mark Jones:
It begs the question, just how transparent we'll see brands this year as they perhaps gain more confidence in being transparent, knowing that's actually valued as opposed to being so scared.
Mark Jones:
Number nine is MarTech. You've touched on this. There is a huge issue here around, I think just the investment, the amount of money that's gone into MarTech.
Mark Jones:
If I could just quickly set this up, because I've just been fascinated by the MarTech chart that gets published every year, if you're aware of it. I think it was the MarTech... What are we up to? MarTech 7,000 or something? This is a chart that if you look it up, it's how many thousands of MarTech vendors there are in the world, and it seems to grow incredibly, exponentially every year.
Andrew Baxter:
I think when it started in 2010 or 2011, it was like 130 companies. Now, it's, as you say, 7,000, 8,000. I think the other point I want to make on MarTech is, I come back to that accountant looking for efficiencies through technology, whereas marketers are looking for personalisation and engagement through technology and they're two different things.
Andrew Baxter:
I think that, with the marketing lens on, we really should be looking at the marketing technology to help drive those great, personalised, seamless experience that we talked about earlier, as opposed to putting marketing technology into save money. That's that to me now. If you got the great experience and save money at the same time, terrific. But it shouldn't be first and foremost to try and save money. I think a lot of companies do that. They think by automating a whole lot of stuff, putting some technology in, it's going to make it cheaper. They then tend to lose that great customer experience and sales start going backwards.
Mark Jones:
I'm going to skip down. Number 10 on your list was marketing mix, which we've done. Now, up to 11, power of creativity. What is the power of creativity beyond the obvious?
Andrew Baxter:
This is obviously one, given my original background was from an advertising point of view, this is about big ideas and big campaigns can still drive huge success. There are all sorts of research, again, through the IPA and the UK and other parts of the world, that says that if you can create famous, memorable, emotional advertising, you've got a far higher likelihood of return on investment of those campaigns.
Andrew Baxter:
I was lucky enough to be the CEO of Ogilvy, and we did campaigns like Rhonda and Ketut and the Share a Coke campaign. They were the name on the cans, which started here in Australia and went to over 100 countries around the world.
Andrew Baxter:
When you're creating great ideas like that, that really engage consumers, that then drive sales, that's what you're looking for. I think, as we try and unlock growth, particularly off the back of this pandemic, we've all cut costs. We've spent the last 2, 3, 4 years trying to find efficiencies in our business, cutting costs because we've needed to. Now, we need to grow the top line. Standing out, doing some quite powerful campaigns can really help businesses do that.
Mark Jones:
Advertising agencies would say, it never went away as a strategy, but from a CEO perspective, or a CMO perspective, do you think where the pendulum is swinging back around this idea of the big creative idea?
Andrew Baxter:
I think so. In this market, there was the Uber Eats, because we were in the Australian Open and the Uber Eats, last year, did those great campaigns involving the players. They're very memorable campaigns. Certainly, I think now the proof is there. Again, the science is there that gives, I suppose some comfort that if we're about to go and spend some money on a fairly major campaign.
Mark Jones:
Number 12, the last one, just to touch on briefly, consumer behaviour change, because we have talked about this a little bit, and you mentioned forming new habits. I think will new habits and behaviour changes be good for your business or not, touching on that. I wonder at a deeper level, actually, whether... This is touching on my own book, which is Beliefonomics, looking at the belief systems, the world views that are being shaping our society and our businesses so radically in the last few years.
Mark Jones:
I wonder, as part of that, how we might see this kind of polarisation playing out in marketing campaigns? Not only the behaviours change, but we seem to be left or right, where pro or anti, insert any cause, right? This idea of nuance and grey seems to be getting stamped out of the consciousness.
Andrew Baxter:
It has been, but I do wonder if it all come back, because I'm wondering whether people are sick of the conflict. Interestingly, if you look at what happens in tough times globally, there's a number of trends that normally come out, and one is that people become less polarised, they normally need to get together. Interestingly, in tough times, fashion, for example uses a lot more colours, and you see a lot more colourful outfits that come out.
Andrew Baxter:
In really good times, it goes back to more black and whites. Then, I think, that polarisation happens. Interestingly comedy tends to come back in tougher times. We look for shows that provide that light-hearted, when times are good, we're trying to, again, there's some of those more powerful, emotional type of shows that come out.
Andrew Baxter:
There are all these trends that go over time that play into this.
Mark Jones:
I think as always marketers need to be really great students of the zeitgeist of, if you like, our community and where people are at. I think that's probably one of the things I took away from your point there about really understanding what people are buying, where they're going, how they're feeling. It's probably a good reminder for where you're at with your research, just how well you've understood what's been going on. Because we used to take a long-range view of research. I don't think we can afford to do that anymore. It's got to be much more real time.
Andrew Baxter:
It does. Understanding has that customer journey changed and has any of the decision-making points or pain points or gain points changed through that time? I think there's no better time right now to redo some of that type of research, to find out, particularly in the B2B space, what's gone on and whether we can shift our marketing efforts into other areas to get a better result.
Mark Jones:
Any parting thoughts for us, Andrew?
Andrew Baxter:
Look, on that, I try and update this every year. I've actually been, over the last couple of weeks, I've been collecting a whole lot of articles. Everyone does the, here's what's going to happen in 2022, as we do. But obviously, I updated this one toward the end of last year, anyway. Look, I think there's still things like, from a marketing point of view, there's opportunities coming like connected TV, which has been talked about again for the last eight years.
Andrew Baxter:
I think 50% of the TV sitting on the walls in Australian households are smart TVs. They're connected to the internet, but we haven't been serving ads up to them specifically for that household, like we would on your computer screen. That technology, again, is there. It's moving quite rapidly. There's some big companies in the US that have become unicorn companies already that are helping enable that sort of thing. I think there's a few watch outs.
Andrew Baxter:
I think shopping through social and through that influencer, that's becoming a lot more normal now where addressable shopping is If I'm thinking forward 12 months, it'll probably be closer to jumping on my list than where we're at now. But yeah, look, this list has evolved over time. I think there's only probably three or four on that list. I've done this now for four years in a row and there's only probably three or four that are still there from the original list. As I said, trust, the personalisation, the AI was always coming. The piece around marketing technologies dropped in and out.
Andrew Baxter:
think the best marketers have always been the curious marketers. They're always looking for what's coming, and what other opportunities there might be to really make their marketing as efficient as it can be.
Mark Jones:
Yeah, that's great. Look, and a really good reminder again, about out the importance of, as you say, staying curious and making sure that you really do understand how customers are thinking, feeling and behaving right now, which of course is probably going to change next week.
Andrew Baxter:
Yes.
Mark Jones:
All the best with all of your consulting work and the podcasts and the board activities. You got to a full dance card and it's great to hear your reflections on where we've gone and where we're going, as we try and figure out what 2022 is all about. Andrew Baxter, it's been a pleasure having you on The CMO Show.
Andrew Baxter:
Thanks for having me. It was great fun.
Mark Jones:
So that was Andrew Baxter. What a great insight into the most important things to consider as we begin the year.
Andrew is consistently revising his values and opinions to adapt to the ever-changing landscape that we live in, and I always enjoy speaking with people who study the zeitgeist.
He’s given us plenty to reflect on in this show, and I hope you enjoyed our conversation as much as I did.
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That’s it from me this time, thank you for joining us on The CMO Show. As always, it’s been great to have you with us. Until next time.