What you need to know:

• CMO Joanna Robinson took the reins at The Iconic amid falling sales and a bloated cost base. Now she’s leading a retail marketing revival
• The firm reversed brand erosion by shifting from performance-heavy media to full-funnel storytelling, launching the emotionally charged “Got You Looking” platform with strong gains in brand awareness and consideration.
• Campaigns featured authentic disability representation and culture-driving stunts like “The Shop That Stops the Nation,” reconnecting The Iconic with mainstream relevance.
• But these strong results were built on some tough decisions. Robinson halved her team early on, reallocating bottom-funnel budgets to fuel brand investment, driving three straight quarters of growth, including a 9.4 per cent lift in Q4.
• AI has long been a part of The Iconic toolkit, but now it's becoming foundational across customer experience, from multimodal search to priority support for VIPs and agentic AI-driven chatbots.
• The ecommerce leader is also redefining customer service as end-to-end brand experience, launching exec-level immersion programs and transforming search into a personalised, AI-powered brand moment.
• So what's next? Robinson is soft-launching a loyalty program for two million customers, building a retail media network, and investing in marketing mix modelling to anchor ongoing investment with accountability.

Timing is everything. The Iconic's CMO Joanna Robinson probably could not have picked a worse moment to land at a new gig. April 2023 was smack in the middle of the worst reporting season for Australia's two decades-old ecommerce industry.

When pandemic lockdowns lifted, so did the stakes for ecommerce vendors who had just experienced a huge surge in sales while they were the only shopping game in town. But then consumers flooded back to brick-and-mortar stores, and worse, for the pureplays, traditional retailers like David Jones and Myer emerged from the Covid fog armed with tooled-up digital operations.

The Iconic, once considered a poster child of retail disruption down under, suddenly found itself in a much more competitive environment, including the rise of marketplaces like Amazon and Temu. "Stronger for longer" turned out to be an aberration.

For Robinson, who stepped in as CMO amid stagnant sales, brand erosion, and a bloated cost base, the brief was clear: transform or tank. What followed was a two-year reset and rebuild that was anchored in a renewed commitment to brand, additional investments in AI-powered capabilities such as a much improved search experience, and a new way of thinking about customer service and experience.

Misery loves company

The early 2023 Australian ecommerce reporting season was a bloodbath. Singapore-based investment banker North Ridge Partners noted in the March edition of its monthly client newsletter, "The reversal in eCommerce fortunes (both figuratively and literally) was broad and deep. Everyone got smashed everywhere, all at once, but the extent of the revenue reversals – and how they translated at the bottom line – varied by category."

Consider the trading landscape at the time. The country's two giant grocers, Woolworths and Coles had just reported 7 per cent ecommerce revenue declines, Booktopia experienced a 15 per cent reversal, Adore Beauty was down 17 per cent, and when Temple and Webster reported that its 12 per cent revenue fall converted directly into a 46.7 crash in profits, investors were acutely reminded just how leveraged many online businesses are.

The best anyone could say was that at least The Iconic was not alone in reaping the whirlwind.

But it was not only the financial picture that was bleak. By the time Robinson had her feet under the desk, brand awareness was sliding, and trust had eroded – which meant future revenue stability, let alone growth, was also massively at risk.

“I talk about the fact that we lost our secret sauce,” she recalls. “Declining brand awareness all the way through the funnel. We’d lost relevance.”

Freefall

Robinson stepped into a business facing myriad operational challenges.

“We had this massive cost base and we re-emerged after Covid into a far more competitive market. It was tough,” she says. “Declining profit, declining sales. It was freefall,” she told MI3.

Within six weeks of taking the role, initially as interim CMO, Robinson made the hard call to halve her team. “I was introducing myself to people the day I was making them redundant,” she recalls. “But it had to be done. We had to strategically carve out the cost base.”

That brutal clarity paved the way for a disciplined reset. “Last year was our year of reset. This year is about supercharging,” she says. The shift in momentum has been significant. “We’re now in our third consecutive quarter of growth. Q4 last year was up 9.4 per cent.”

To help engineer this turnaround and set the brand up for a new wave of growth, Robinson drew on her FMCG muscle memory developed while working for brands such as Unilever and Estée Lauder.

“We just went back to basics. Four Ps, full funnel." Which is exactly the advice this year coming out of Cannes from both FMCG giants and academics alike.

Robinson acknowledges that The Iconic succumbed to a common ecommerce affliction: “We got addicted to the bottom of funnel. It was all paid performance.”

That addiction came at a cost. “We'd forgotten about the art of storytelling. We'd forgotten that we're here to inspire and entertain customers as much as we are to sell.”

Enter “Got You Looking,” The Iconic’s master brand platform developed with Dentsu Creative. “It was truly and simply about re-establishing ourselves back in the market,” she says.

And it worked. “We managed to reverse the decline of unprompted brand awareness and achieved a 34 per cent year-on-year increase,” says Robinson. There were also shifts in brand consideration, preference, and a 10 per cent bump in purchase intent.

“We're now moving into our third year of it,” she adds, underlining the campaign’s durability. “It really is that kind of consistency of the brand across all of the customer touch points.”

Stakeholder alignment

Another critical element of the rebound was stakeholder alignment. CEO Jere Calmes and CFO Chris Thompson, both recently appointed, backed the brand strategy from day one. “Chris came from Coke. We spoke the same language,” Robinson says.

Her mantra: full funnel investment drives efficiency at the bottom. But with no budget increase, Robinson had to reallocate from performance to brand. “We had to carve it from the bottom. If you get the full funnel pumping, the bottom of the funnel is more efficient.”

Agency partnerships were reset with strategic intent. “My brief was: blow shit up. But strategically. We rewrote the brief with Dentsu, and everything had to tie back to brand health.”

The company is also upping its game in terms of technology-fuelled customer experiences.

AI Search is a case in point. Search used to be a pain point. “Null search was a huge issue. If someone typed Lululemon and we didn’t stock it, we’d return zero results,” says Robinson. “We literally said ‘no search’. Imagine the experience.”

That wasn’t just a missed sale, it was a brand moment lost.

With 200,000 products and 2,000 brands, and 300 new arrivals every day, The Iconic’s product range is a competitive weapon. But it also risks alienating shoppers drowning in options. Robinson’s answer is agentic AI.

Search and discovery has become the frontline of innovation. “We’ve been using multimodal search for a while,” she told delegates to the recent Zendesk customer event in Sydney. “You can type into the search bar that you’ve got a '70s disco party, and the machine will use an algorithm that interprets not only what a '70s disco party' means, but also how you’ve shopped with us before. It uses your personal data to showcase a curated product list that’s relevant to that theme.”

Behind the scenes, a data-rich layer of meta-tagging enables hyper-specific queries, scalloped necklines, cherry prints, and beyond. “Using AI, you can now actually search for about 30 different attributes that we've attached to the visuals within our PDPs,” Robinson explains.

The capstone is Tilly, Its AI-powered chatbot, about to get an upgrade. “We’re launching the next iteration… the agentic AI version,” she reveals. The move shifts the chatbot from reactive support to proactive problem-solving.

In Robinson’s words, it’s all part of embedding a “product mindset”, not tech for tech’s sake, but in service of “solving real customer problems.”

Multimodal input is also on the roadmap. “We’re looking at how customers might use visual prompts or mixed media to search beyond just text. That’s where it’s going,” she says.

Discovery

And The Iconic is also exploring how generative AI will change the fundamentals of discovery. “Who are we actually going to be marketing to in the future? Is it going to be agents? Is it humans? I mean, humans still make the ultimate decisions, for now, but this changes the landscape of marketing forever?”

While full autonomy may be years away, Robinson is laying the groundwork now. “These shifts will redefine visibility, SEO, and even attribution. It’s early, but we need to be ready.”

Across the wider issue of AI, Robinson emphasises that the company has years of capability and expertise under its belt already.

She sees it as table stakes in an e-commerce battleground defined by immediacy, intelligence, and personalisation.

“AI has been available for a long time. It’s just now become, you know, kind of more of a hygiene level,” Robinson says. The business has embedded AI across its customer experience pipeline: in programmatic media, personalisation, intelligent search, and service automation. She adds, “We’ve been using AI in many aspects of our business… not just because we’re an e-comm.”

The Iconic's AI Guild, which is an internal champion network, ensures each department has a dedicated AI lead to stay abreast of tool evolution and cross-functional deployments.

“There is so much AI you can choose. Which one do you go with?” Robinson says. Zendesk remains a long-standing partner due to its ability to evolve quickly and deliver consistent CX outcomes.

Rebranding service as experience

Behind the scenes, Robinson and her team are also driving an important cultural change.

“We rebranded the whole team from customer service to customer experience. New core values, new tone of voice. It starts with the department that talks to a million customers a year,” says Robinson.

The team now ensures brand tone is embedded in every FAQ, bot, and human interaction. Their bot, Tilly, is being rebranded to reflect enhanced capabilities and brand alignment.

The company has also introduced Customer Connect Days, where executives shadow CX teams to see real pain points in action. “We’ve had so much upside already. Commercial changed processes. Assortment teams adapted listings. Our CTO apologised for missing hygiene basics. It’s been a revolution,” she says.

Free returns, long considered a defining promise of the brand remain non-negotiable. “Yes, it affects cost base. But it differentiates us. We’re monitoring for abuse. But we’re keeping it.”

Coming soon: Loyalty, retail media, and MMM

Robinson is now steering the brand into its next chapter, with three major initiatives on deck.

First, loyalty. “We’ve soft-launched the program. Two million customers are being gradually onboarded,” she says. A full, hard launch is planned for Q1 next year, with tier-based benefits and personalised communication layered throughout. “We’ll make a lot more noise then. But we want to get it right first.”

“We’re about to launch a loyalty program,” Robinson reveals, “and ahead of that, we piloted tiered service through Zendesk. VIPs get priority routing. That pilot alone has driven a 15 per cent uplift in CSAT for those VIPs.”

On the retail media front, while it already offers partnership activations and marketing solutions, a formal retail media network will go live next year. “We want to ensure we can deliver on that proposition for our brands, both endemic and non-endemic,” Robinson says. “It’s about creating customer value on both sides of the platform.”

And third, measurement. The Iconic is on the cusp of implementing marketing mix modelling (MMM). “I’m one of the few CMOs who doesn’t yet have an MMM,” Robinson jokes. “We’ve done the pitch. Fingers crossed we’ll be in soon," she said, telling Mi3 the plan had just been signed off the previous day,

With AI maturing, data pipelines evolving, and new commercial levers coming online, Robinson’s playbook is expanding. But the principles such as clarity, CX, and commercial accountability, remain exactly the same.