News Analysis

Qantas is investing heavily in customer experience and digital transformation as it looks to rebuild its brand cachet, savaged during the early years of the decade by Covid, and smashed by the airline's poor performance after the economy reopened. The fact that the former CEO, Alan Joyce, blamed customers for poor customer experiences didn't help. New boss and former Group CFO, and chief customer officer, Vanessa Hudson, seems to be off to a better start at least on the service front, with NPS rising in late 2023, and customer satisfaction scores rebounding after Xmas. However, the airline still reported falling profits for H1, despite a very strong performance by the Loyalty Group, which helped the Flying Kangaroo generate marketing revenues of $533 million, up $140 million on the corresponding half last year. Unhappy customers pose a big risk for the airline, as does the threat of cybercrime, and the emergence of new business models, according to the company's financial filings. And there is one big short-term risk: The ACCC's legal action accusing Qantas of the kind of slippery misconduct that reinforces consumer prejudice against brands already on the nose — selling tickets on flights it had already cancelled. 

CMOs struggle endlessly with martech integration, pouring vast sums of money (and an increasing share of their scarce budgets) into trying to get all the elements of a complex tech stack to integrate. Large language models offer a great leap forward, with Boomi out of the box with a new patent. The company has been issued a US patent for technology that leverages 10 years' worth of software integration patterns through LLMs in a way that vastly accelerates out-of-the-box integrations. Boomi's CEO, Steve Lucas will be well known to Australia's CMO community as the former CEO of Marketo – bought by Adobe in 2018. In this Australian exclusive interview, he outlines how innovation based on Boomi's new patent helps solve one of the longest-standing challenges in martech. And with the ball is now rolling, it's likely other innovations, based on those millions of integration patterns mapped by Boomi and its rivals, will emerge in coming years.

Sam Altman — the former and potentially future — CEO of OpenAI says AI will reduce the cost of intelligence by a factor of one million. For brands, that ushers in a world where every customer, even if there are millions of them, could be serviced by their own discrete employer. But that employee will be code.

The world may have just experienced its biggest single shopping day ever. Well over a billion consumers are believed to have participated in this year's Singles Day event in China (and increasingly APAC), but it will be months before we can guesstimate the actual figures although some analysts are already suggesting Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) was 2 per cent up on 2022). E-commerce giants like Alibaba and JD.com are reticent to crow too loudly after the Chinese government started cracking down on tech giants in 2021 for forgetting the golden rule of Socialism with Chinese characteristics — no matter how gilded and rapacious the consumer party, no one outshines the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and no one puts Xi in the corner, as Alibaba founder Jack Ma discovered the hard way. More than a decade has passed since China's Singles Day overtook America's Thanksgiving long weekend as the world's biggest shopping event and while it continues to grow in influence across the region, beyond APAC most of the world's consumers haven't really heard of it.

Emarsys CEO Joanna Milliken has worked in martech for 20 years, including stints at Exact Target and Salesforce. Now three years into her role running Emarsys, a job she landed one month before SAP bought the company, she has successfully integrated the business into the giant global software vendor – no mean feat in an industry where cultural clashes can derail acquisitions. Having a long-term perspective on the promise of martech to improve business outcomes helps. Milliken tells Mi3 about the most predictable outcomes in martech during her time in the industry and the most unexpected. She calls out two Australian businesses – Adore Beauty and City Beach – as standout examples of how to get customer and employee engagement right.

After riding the Covid e-commerce swell to peak at $200m in revenues, Adore Beauty found itself dumped heavily when the economy reopened and everyone raced back into shops. The first half of 2022 brought choppy waters for the growth, profitability and even survival for plenty of other big-name Australian e-commerce brands. Booktopia, Kogan, and Temple and Webster faced heavy headwinds, while online furniture brand Brosa went under. But Adore doubled down on driving customer engagement, built a new app and tightened its grip on marketing costs, returning to growth in the past year. CMO Dan Ferguson says the P&L tells a story of resilience. But he says marketers thinking naively about loyalty may be in for a rude awakening. Plus, why Ferguson thinks the tide going out has opened the floodgates to a lot more martech reviews.

Accenture Song chief David Droga runs the creative and digital powerhouse at the heart of a professional services giant employing 700,000 people in 120 countries. The founder of Droga5 and brains behind some of the world's most iconic advertising campaigns, including the Tourism Australia Dundee spoof, admits he is still learning about the power of tech, data and creative. He thinks the nation's creative brilliance is not being sold as well as Tourism Australia campaigns – such as the current Say G'Day and Droga5's iconic Dundee work. He also reckons there is too much short-termism and a relentless focus on "fireworks" and the creative industry needs to balance this out with more "lighthouse" campaigns that CEOs and CMOs require. There are few people better positioned to run the rule over the advertising industry, and Droga doesn't pull any punches. He wants quality and evolution, and maybe one day, to become Australia's next PM.

CustomerX: Customer-focused leaders are increasingly involved in product development and company-wide process change as they look to drive innovation that grows revenues and improves margins. That means managing organisational challenges from early stage start-up through to global scale. We reveal lessons learned at the front lines of innovation from companies including Blackmores, Compass Group, Country Road Group, Uber, Iconic, Village Roadshow, Kmart and Kennards Hire. And we identify the qualities boards are seeking from transformation leaders.

CustomerX: It’s never a great feeling, adding that ‘Deal Lost’ flag against a previously hopeful prospect in the CRM. But B2B marketer Michael Fan, the marketing operations lead at low code/no code technology vendor Workato – and an engineer by trade – built a reactivation campaign on Open AI’s large language model, breathing life back into $6 million worth of sales pipeline. Just as importantly, it released account executives from their desks – and drove home just how critical effective marketing is to sales.