What you need to know:

• First-time client-side CMO and former creative agency chief, Peter Chapman, has been promoted to the c-suite after 18 months as GM of marketing and sales for holiday park operator, Reflections.
• Reflections is social enterprise-led business headed up by former Tourism Australia CMO, Nick Baker, that’s making transformational changes in order to become a profit-for-purpose organisation.
• With a fundamental brand idea anchored in ‘home of the outsiders’ and a solid brand and creative platform under ‘life better outdoors’, Chapman believes the business has developed a long-term position that has already been seen to deliver double-digit, record growth and boost demand.
• But while purpose and sustainability underpin the business, don't expect to see these as the focal point in marketing campaigns. Chapman is looking to customer need first to drive his strategy and that need is nature and a recharging holiday, he says.
• And even with a cost-of-living crisis and anxiety-laden consumer sentiment to contend with, Chapman is confident the need for recharging in the outdoors is worth investing in for the short and long term.

Reflections’ newly promoted CMO and former creative agency MD, Peter Chapman, admits he underestimated what it takes to assume a role like client-side marketing chief.

“You have to be ready for a role like CMO,” he tells MI3. “I thought it would be really similar to either running an agency or working directly on one brand’s work. But there are a couple of things that really drive this role: Incredible accountability; and ability to influence.

“You’re ultimately in that seat where the business is looking to you to make the right decisions. There is pressure with that and accountability, which I’m really enjoying; there’s also the ability to influence the business in the most incredible way.”

Chapman spent 20 years making his way up the creative agency executive ladder from account management to director roles with JWT and Clemenger BBDO Melbourne. During this time, he worked across categories and notably with FMCG, automotive and retail brands such as Carlton & United Brewery, Kraft, Mitre 10, QUIT Victoria and Ford, before becoming managing director of Enigma Communications as the agency scaled from one office to three.

Eighteen months ago, Chapman then secured his first client-side gig at holiday park operator, Reflections, as GM of marketing and sales, reporting into CEO and former Tourism Australia CMO, Nick Baker. In November, Chapman was promoted to the c-suite as CMO. It’s a title he tells MI3 was finally confirmed after plenty of internal debate as to whether it’d best serve to call him CMO, chief customer officer or chief commercial officer.

According to Chapman, the final title came down to the fact Reflections is becoming a marketing-led, customer-led organisation, that his job is to drive short and long-term demand – and that he has a boss who rather likes the idea of CMOs being customer and growth leaders in the broadest sense.

“Chief marketing or chief customer officer made the most sense, but there were a few other things to consider,” Chapman says. “One is what the marketing is doing and contemporary legislature. But we also have 450 people and want them to understand clearly what our senior people are doing. We are in a relatively traditional end of the tourism market – while we are radically evolving, we want to do that at the right pace.”

The makings of a marketing chief

Reflections is a caravan and camping park operator that’s the organisational result of bringing together a portfolio of holiday parks and reserves on Crown land in some of the best locations in NSW. From a series of smaller trusts operating the parks as separate entities, it’s now one of the largest players in the sector with a market value of about $500 million and $80 million in annual revenue.

“In my lizard brain, I was looking for potential opportunities. Nick comes in the door to our agency – this ex-top 10 CMO from Tourism Australia now running a tourism business in a category I’m really interested in, which is the outdoors,” Chapman recalls. “We started to talk about his ambitions to double the amount of parks by 2030, as well as the plans to adopt a quadruple bottom line, which meant success would be measured not only against profit, but our environment, cultural and community impact. And in all of that, reshape what people think caravan and camping operators are.

“It’s a fairly traditional category that hasn’t had a lot of disruption. That was very exciting to me. I knew from Nick’s pedigree he has experience long-term in hotels, but then in marketing and in tech, which is an interesting mix.

“I saw a business that wanted to act like a startup but was significant in its scale. That’s always super exciting – you have the scale to do something with the attitude of moving quickly.”

Business re-engineering

To realise the ambition of becoming a social enterprise, profit-for-purpose business, Reflections has been re-engineering its business model. Steps so far including rebuilding the core management system that all properties operate on by integrating with a new partner, to shifting from a contractor to employee model. This huge change saw Reflections go from 120 to 450 staff over nine months.

For Chapman, this shift means Reflections can now run programs right across the business that are consistent, with holistic brand positioning its people can rally behind. In Reflections’ case, the fundamental organising idea of the brand is ‘home of the outsiders’.

“It’s a nice positioning for us – our role in the outside is to be home while you’re here. It’s also the idea of you belonging here – there’s a nice tension between belonging and outsider,” he says.

The brand idea is manifesting at a consumer level and through the business under the moniker, ‘life’s better outside’. It’s a creative expression Chapman is confident will stick for a long time and aligns to customer needs.

“We want to build assets that are enduring, and we believe ‘life’s better outside’ will be that for us,” he says. “We will wrap different creative executions around that, but there’s so much room to explore that further.”

The positioning was put in lights as part of Reflections’ first above-the-line campaign in 2022 centred around radio, peak TV and out-of-home billboards. The work contributed to 20 per cent growth last year, Reflections’ biggest-ever year. It also led to immediate demand growth of 20 per cent as well as significant gains in prompted brand awareness +30 per cent higher than original benchmarks.

“What’s been really good is to see our people wanting these changes, having really bought into this ‘life’s better outside’ idea. They’re the ones driving it,” Chapman says. “That’s a huge indicator of success for me – when your people are the ones signing off emails with ‘life’s better outside’ or talking about that in everyday conversations, that’s a win.”

Meanwhile, under the covers, a host of work is underway to improve the group’s sustainability credentials. Reflections has an employee whose sole job, for example, is to understand the environmental impact of guests when they stay at any of its parks, and how to reduce that footprint with and for them.

“We’re starting to understand literally down to what’s the carbon impact of a customer, and what things we can do and fix that don’t diminish customer experience at all but that will have huge impact,” Chapman says. “There is a heap of base work happening, plus some exciting modelling we’re doing around sustainability. The idea is we’ll invest in sustainable ideas and initiatives, then the money they save doesn’t go into the general book but into new ideas. It becomes a flywheel that grows and grows, delivering more for all.”

Unpacking and recognising the purpose of purpose

Yet overtly bringing the sustainability and purpose message into marketing and creative isn’t something Chapman is keen to do. His ultimate reason: It’s not the top thing driving customers to engage with Reflections.

“We don’t lead with purpose because people primarily don’t go on holidays for that reason – they’re not spending time with us for that reason. They want the best nature-based holiday they can get, and we can serve them that. The other stuff comes in through that journey,” Chapman says.

“Once they have a relationship with us, then they can explore the idea that when they stay with us, the money goes back into the parks and these parks are here for the people of the communities we’re in. So I think it does deepen the relationship we have with customers, but it’s not the lead message.”

As Reflections pursues its profit-for-purpose business ambitions, there’s no doubt it’s facing into shifting headwinds on brands orienting around purpose and broader societal causes. Just this month, Unilever CEO, Hein Schumacher, said force-fitting a purpose position on every brand in its portfolio is simply not relevant and isn’t necessarily leading to growth. At the same time, consumers are becoming increasingly wary of brands virtue signalling or businesses latching onto specific social causes just for the sake of it.

Chapman spies a fundamental difference between companies talking about purpose for their own purposes, and importance to the customer.  

“A lot of brands have driven very heavy, worthy purpose-led positioning and communication, and even activity, because either they think they should, or because it makes them and their shareholders feel good,” he comments. “Our approach has been let’s do it before we talk about it. Yes, it’s prominent in things like our strategic plan, our governance and constitution, but you won’t see creative work talking about that purpose. What we want to do is primarily talk about the customer need, which is to get outside and reconnect by disconnecting. That’s our position.

“The other thing is we’re by no means perfect. You have to be really careful as a brand going out there saying we’re worthier than anyone else. There’s still stuff we need to work hard to get right in our parks – we have a lot of ageing assets, which typically aren’t good for the planet. We’re rapidly fixing those. It’s a crawl before you walk on that stuff. As Nick puts it, let’s not get ahead of our skis on purpose.”

Chapman also positions ‘purpose’ in a similar way to ‘product’. “It’s the whole ‘I don’t want a quarter inch drill bit, I want a quarter inch hole’ – I tend to put sustainability and purpose with the drill bit piece,” he says.

That doesn’t mean marketing isn’t aligning with Reflections’ purpose-led business model. The parks operator has a very close relationship with surfing, for instance, and is a major sponsor of Surfest, the big WSL major surfing event. In coming months, Reflections will launch its own surfing competition for teenagers that will give the winner a wildcard into the main Surfest tournament.

“We have stunning architecturally built form – our villas and cabins are beautiful. But what the customer wants is a moment and nature-based holiday. So we talk about that,” Chapman says. “Sustainability is similar – the product gives you an ability to be really bold with the brand and say come and spend time with us it’s awesome; now it’s for two reasons. One, the experience you have will be great; but also because it will be doing great.”

Long and short of creative expression

Then there’s Chapman’s own creative mantra, cultivated through years of agency work.

“I use the analogy of Chanel saying get dressed and ‘before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off’. That’s a bit like how creative work should be,” he says. “You have to leave some stuff on the table for people to explore. Some things are much more impactful when people discover them versus us as marketers ramming them down their throats, regardless of the temptation to.”

Reflections’ current creative work explores the basic difference between the humdrum of the rat race and what happens when consumers come and spend time at one of Reflections’ parks.

“There are all sorts of other places we’re keen to take it. And to take it deeper than advertising and into experience as well,” Chapman says. “We’re starting to look at contemporary ways to build the brand through different ideas that will all bring at the very least, ‘home of the outsiders’, but also life’s better outside as well.”

Chapman is sticking to the song sheet even as the cost-of-living crisis deepens and consumer sentiment is increasingly driven by anxiety and concerns around the economy, household costs and inflation. Reflections remains in high growth and anticipates double-digit growth against last year’s record results.

“The proposition is really landing. We know that as a lot of our competitors actually aren’t seeing much growth, if at all. People need time out and the harder it gets, the more people need that time out,” Chapman says.

“Whether they can afford it or not is a different question. It’s our job to serve up things they can afford and to speak to people that are in the right market for us. For every camper taking less holidays, there are European and South Asian holidaymakers that aren’t doing that.

“We’re in the business of giving people time out or time to recharge. I don’t think that will ever go away. Our world only gets busier and faster and everything we see is leaning towards this idea of time spent really breathing away from the rat race is good for us. There’s real opportunity to stick with that.”

Chapman is nevertheless watching all sorts of levers closely, including what the domestic market is doing in relation to international travel, and the opportunities for Reflections in the inbound traveller market.

“For us, it’s still a fiercely domestic market. But yes, understanding what’s happening for different segments in our market is important,” he continues. “We know mainstream families are feeling the pinch more than anyone else in relation to economic pressures. The way we speak to that portion of our market needs to be sympathetic and we need to be cognisant of price, average length of stay, making sure there are inclusions in packages that make it a great value exchange. Then we have a portion of the market who are retired or semi-retired and want to spend more time on the road, so we lean into that as well.”

To help with targeting, Chapman’s team has turbo-charged its marketing automation platform to have more tailored conversations with members and past guests. “That’s useful to them and effective for us.”

But it’s worth noting Chapman is a big believer in the ‘long and short’ of marketing. Easier for a CMO in a company that’s not listed, he agrees, but there are still stakeholders to manage and budgets and accountability to adhere to.

“When things are tough, that’s the time to say let’s get into it, and drive as much demand as is possibly there. You have to use smart channels to do that and broadcast channels in smart ways,” he says.  

Outside of advertising, another priority for Reflections has been building an ambassador club of 50 of the most potent examples of its customer base. These individuals are creating content and providing a useful sounding board for testing products and even ideas before they’ve been fully formed. Ambassadors also go on paid assignments, such as spending a week in northern NSW, capturing content along the way.

“It’s about building a customer-first business that is an outdoors brand before it is a property company,” Chapman says. “Our industry has been guilty in the past of being property and asset managers in the business of camping and caravanning. We are a camping and caravanning outdoors company that happens to be an accommodation provider.”

Being – and becoming – a CMO

Meanwhile, what’s playing out for Chapman with his marketing and sales remit is strategic control and input.

“Although my remit as CMO largely stays the same, which is looking after customer, brand, revenue and marketing, is it does change the narrative, particularly upwards,” he says. “It’s the ability to speak to the board, our key commercial stakeholders as a c-suite, and for Nick as CEO, myself and our CFO to go into meetings or situations where we can command the floor from our disciplines.”  

As for what it takes to successfully fulfil the CMO role, Chapman brings it back to accountability as well as the agility with which he can act.

“The time between initial idea and execution, versus on the other side of the fence, where arguably your role is ideas, is so much shorter. And your ability to protect it and drive it through the business is just profound,” he says.  

“The other thing I’m learning fast is to separate wheat from the chaff and focus on the stuff that will move the needle. I have an amazing team doing most of the campaign work. As CMO, it really is about driving the business through the lens of the customer. That’s the actual job. You need to be focused, restrained and consistent.”

For any prospective aspiring fence jumpers, Chapman advises asking CEOs several pertinent questions to make sure the role is the right fit.

“Some of the key indicators are who am I reporting to, what’s my role in board reporting and board attendance – they’ll give you a real sense of where the business is at in relation to its support of marketing as a business driver,” he says.

“I just feel incredibly lucky that supports marketing, is a product I love and working in an executive team that really celebrates the power of marketing done properly.”