What you need to know:

• In our latest CMO Awards podcast episode, Arnott’s CMO, Jenni Dill, Flintfox International’s CMO, Cath Brands, and Growth Generators founder and former Curtin Uni CMO, Ty Hayes, have revealed their winning and highly commended formulas for realising growth initiatives as marketing leaders.
• Arnott’s Gluten Free was the winner of our inaugural Best Growth Initiative of the Year award at the CMO Awards, while Flintfox’s expansion into the DACH markets with its pricing and rebate software was highly commended.
• While these B2C and B2C examples are very different, what both demonstrate is the importance of being choiceful, going all-in on a growth initiative with organisation-wide support, embracing short and longer-term milestone gates for tackling growth properly, and being ready and willing to pivot and change based on market response and challenges that will inevitably come your way.
• Hayes sums up both up showcasing the three key ingredients necessary to unlocking growth: “foresight, insight and experimentation”.
• In Arnott’s case, gluten free is the FMCG’s most incremental launch to date, and it’s been responsible for 82 per cent of overall growth in the GF biscuit market in its own right.
• For Flintfox, doing a DACH launch properly has resulted in 13x ROI and two multimillion dollar contract wins thus far.
• Listen to the podcast episode here.

Being choiceful, slashing red tape, carving out time to work outside BAU, embracing short and longer-term milestone gates, then having the bravery to pivot when things change, are all critical to unlocking a new growth initiative with business-grade impact.

So say three Australian marketing leaders who’ve been at the coalface of tackling growth initiatives in the last few years: The Arnott’s Group CMO, Jenni Dill, Flintfox International’s CMO, Cath Brands, and former Curtin University CMO and now chief of Growth Generators, Ty Hayes. The trio joined Mi3 for the latest CMO Awards podcast to reveal what they’ve learned about realising growth from the position of CMO – from first identifying the opportunity, to gaining cross-functional buy-in to make it happen. These executives from very different B2C and B2B worlds also shed light on the surprisingly common steps that ladder to success – and importantly, where they had to rethink and pivot.

This year’s inaugural CMO Awards weren’t just a showcase of Australian marketing leaders doing an excellent job of marketing stewardship and effectiveness. We also introduced the Best Growth Initiative of the Year award, supported by Publicis Groupe, to single out and recognise strategic growth initiatives led by marketing teams.

This year’s award was won by The Arnott’s Group for ‘Gluten Free’ – the most incremental launch the FMCG has had to date.

There were also four highly commended finalists: Flintfox for expanding its niche price management software into the Austrian, Swiss and German (DACH) countries. Also highly commended were Blackmores’ ‘Transformation of the Innovation Programme for significant commercial outcomes and improvement in marketing effectiveness’; plus Intrepid Travel’s ‘From performance-driven to brand-led marketing: Only Intrepid’.  

You can find the full list of CMO Awards finalists and winners here.

Arnott’s: Going gluten free

Today, gluten-free biscuits make up approximately 10 per cent of Australia’s total biscuit market, with annual growth rate nudging 40 per cent. Arnott’s has driven 82 per cent of this growth in the past year alone, equating to $42 million in sales.

Dill calls Arnott’s Gluten Free range an overnight success – albeit three years in the making. Having first delivered an initial MVP in 2021, and subsequent range expansion in 2022, it was the launch of the Arnott’s Gluten Free Icon Range of Tim Tams, Shapes, Jatz and now Cookies & Cream in the last 12 months that has been the gamechanger and ultimate growth unlock.

At a macro level, Arnott’s had spotted the growing trend not just of rising coeliac disease diagnosis, which requires people to follow a strict gluten-free diet, but also swelling numbers of consumers choosing to eat less gluten. “We were watching that trend emerging, and then went hang on a second, we're in the gluten business. That's what we do. If all these people are now starting to choose not to eat gluten, what are we going to do for them?” Dill recalls.

The formula behind Arnott’s plan for GF then took its cues from four strategic growth pillars: Grow the core; build and scale a BFY [better for you] biscuits business; grow premium indulgence; and drive step-changed consumer impact through PR, social and digital. Measurement and stretch targets were another critical part of the puzzle. For Arnott’s, these included achieving $50m in retail scan sales within five years, delivering incrementality of sales over 50 per cent, and achieving share leadership in the gluten-free biscuits category.

“When we got into it, what people really wanted was our biggest, known, loved icons, but gluten-free versions with no taste trade off. So that pretty quickly set our true north,” says Dill. “That meant a multi-year journey to invest in new bakeries, establish new ways of working, new methods of baking, new ways of going to market, new locations on shelf. It really was a concerted effort, but we also wanted to make sure we weren't waiting two or three years to do something.”

Which meant getting an MVP in market first. “We had to start with our simpler products that were easier to get taste equivalent matches to in a gluten-free version. And then everything we did from a marketing perspective, had to make sure that everything was as incremental as it could possibly be,” continues Dill.

This was a critical part of a three-stage achievement process and set of short, medium and longer-term goals, critical given the amount of capital investment and enhanced risk profile from a business perspective.

“In the early days, we were setting weekly and monthly goals, making sure we were delivering on those. We had a couple of key milestones of baking prototypes out of the kitchen, then baking prototypes out of the scale-up plan, then baking prototypes out of the full-scale bakery,” says Dill. “We also then had some key milestones with consumers on acceptance. That was about making sure consumers who were medically diagnosed as gluten free, or who were choosing to avoid gluten, could really appreciate the taste of the product and the effort that we were putting in.”

Dill knew Arnott’s had hit the winning formula when staff in the office started eating the GF Tim Tams like normal gluten varieties and wouldn’t believe it was a GF product. “We put it in consumer testing and the response was people literally crying saying I haven’t had a Tim Tam for 12 years, you can’t believe how life-changing this is.”

But challenges were frequent, such as in the early days of scaling up, when Arnott’s couldn’t keep the retail shelves full.

“With any of these innovation journeys, if anyone ever tells you everything goes right the first time, or the whole way through a two or three-year project, they're probably lying. There are a million things you have to work through – daily barriers, obstacles or something that comes up. You've just got to find a way around it, through it, over it or under it that keeps the project intent whole and the mission whole, but allows you to deliver what you need to deliver,” says Dill.

Flintfox: Two tries to find success

At Flintfox, the growth opportunity was to take its Australian-made pricing and rebates solutions platform into the German, Austrian and Swiss markets where its major partner, SAP, dominated the ERP landscape.

“The team and I had two goes at this,” CMO, Cath Brands admits. “In the first attempt, we did it the lazy way – we put a translate button on the website, did some contextual translation of what we did and decided to buy some LinkedIn media. Turns out that that's not how you go to business in Germany. That's not how the Germans play the game.”

Take two required an all-encompassing approach: Native product extension and out-of-the-box compatibility, translation and new integrations with SAP, identifying nuanced user and macro conditions, building a market presence from scratch and a go-to-market approach including investing in a presence in the DACH region’s stronger than LinkedIn B2B social platform, Xing.

“Unlike every other market in the world, our friends in Germany follow a very strict awareness, consideration and conversion marketing funnel, and you literally market three different messages, and you watch the engagement convert,” comments Brands. “We invested and it took time – I’m not one to like things to take a long time – but we had to take the time to invest in awareness, consideration and conversion. But the incredible thing is when a German gives you their data, when they fill in that request a demo form, they actually mean it. And the conversion rate from an MQL to an SQL is 100 per cent because when they want to be contacted.”

The first 12 months saw Flintfox win multi-million-dollar customers in Germany, generating 13x ROI on its initial investment.

Given the 242-day average sales cycle, Brands also points to the importance of an MVP in this growth initiative “that wasn't going to be fully baked out, but would be enough for the customer to be engaged in a conversation”.

“We had to be able to fly the plane and land at the same time. So that meant having an MVP we felt proud of, to take to market, to show off our capabilities at the same time, it meant moving through that funnel of awareness, consideration and conversion as quickly as we could, but without taking shortcuts,” says Brands. That also required Flintfox to have the right content to support a customer on that journey.

“We did a lot of market research in Germany, trying to articulate clearly the dollar value around what is the impact that pricing technology can have on your business, because you are losing X amount every single day,” she says. “Long term, it has been building a team locally in market. One of the things we learned very quickly is it's one thing for a brand to put up a facade that you are a German company, and have a website to tell the story, and maybe the right go to market strategy, but if there's not somebody picking up the phone on the other end, speaking German, all of a sudden you've completely busted their trust.”

Insight, foresight and experimentation

For Ty Hayes, one of the judges of the Best Growth Initiative of the Year Award, each example shows how marketers have identified strategic, innovative approaches to drive significant net new revenue. “That was either attacking a new category or creating a new category, or entering a new market,” he says.

And what all of our winners and highly commended brands demonstrated is what Hayes sums up as three key steps behind every growth initiative of substance: “Insight, foresight and experimentation”.

“Clearly the two examples we've just heard looked at foresight and horizon scanning – what’s coming up, what are the big opportunities we can take advantage of,” Hayes notes. “With Arnott’s, it was the growth of gluten free as a category and the opportunities lying within that. With Flintfox, it was the new market, SAP’s presence – and they had the statistics and validation there.”

In addition, both growth initiatives closely aligned to the business strategy. “Marketing was a key driver of growth for the business, and there was a clear link between what they're doing in marketing and what they're doing to drive business growth,” Hayes continues.

Insight, meanwhile, is about clearly understanding current state. “This is made easier if you've got a clearly aligned marketing strategy to your business strategy, and you've got objectives and key results (OKRs) as a dashboard where you're tracking how you're performing as your brand, performing [across] your product portfolio, meets your average order value, and whatever the metrics are that matter to your business and your category,” Hayes says.

“But a gauge isn't enough: It's the insight comes from interrogating that and going, 'what's the opportunity here?' ... Say the business has shrunk 20 per cent: What is underpinning that, and is this a challenge in our product? Perhaps the cash cow is decreasing, or we've got a new growth product that's earned us so much in revenue, or we've got a conversion problem or retention problem. That's the insight and looking at current state across the business.”

For Hayes, the magic then comes where combine these elements and choose a strategic initiative that's based clearly on foresight and has a deep understanding of your current state and your capabilities. He also believes incremental growth is all-too-often hiding in plain sight, “but we’re all too busy to see it”.

“Taking the time to deep dive into that current performance across your funnel, or across your segments, your lifetime value, AOV, whatever ... it is often just the starting point and the low hanging fruit we don't have time to do because we're too busy,” Hayes says. One recent example he’s worked on with a member-based organisation was just to look at the firmographics (i.e. segmentation) of the current client base and service revenue from each segment, and then adapt the strategy to focus on higher value segments and services. This drove 79 per cent service growth over two years.

“Another thing is some teams lack the actual capabilities and strategic focus to identify the opportunities,” Hayes says.

Team unlock

But to drive explosive growth, you need to engineer for it, says Hayes. “That's been my other observation: You can't just throw a growth initiative on top of BAU to your team and say, go do that without creating capacity to do that. Again, that comes back to having a clear strategy, remit and positioning of the marketing team as growth drivers – we’re not a creative department.

“You've got to unlock capacity in the team, and that's either through agile or prioritisation, or other methods to give them the capacity to drive the growth.”

Arnott's Dill agrees every organisation will have legacy way of doing things, and a legacy list of projects being worked on.

“Being really choiceful about how to use your time as a leader,” is one part of unlocking growth, she says. “But also helping your team make decisions on what's truly important and where to spend the value-add time versus what needs to get done and can be done in a more compressed timeframe.

“We tried to make a lot of things easier to do. Our gate process was notoriously long and took thousands of hours of Powerpoint, Excel and meetings to get things to happen. We brought the gate documents down to one page, so everything that's important is on that one page. And as a leader, you can make a decision on that very quickly.”

And as soon as you start simplifying some work, you free up amount of “brain space and energy to chase after some of the other things”, Dill says. “You have to be relentless on that. Because some of the work just creeps back into the old ways over time.

“Without that, it [the growth initiative] becomes another thing on a long list of things for people to do. People will then choose where they're passionate about. Say individual A is more passionate about following the bouncing ball and doing the safe, comfortable stuff, while individual B is more passionate about doing something completely different. I think finding the right individuals to chase the right problems is part of any leader's job, just like coaching a sporting team.”

The other thing all three panellists agree on is intellectual curiosity. Having previously worked at Amazon, Brands reflects how important the organisation has made it to coach and train everybody, from product to marketing to sales, on what true innovation looks like. The other cornerstone is having the customer at the heart of everything you do.

“It really changes your mindset in terms of breaking down barriers and just this act fast, fail fast, act fast, fail fast and learn, learn, learn,” she says. “Flintfox is small, which means we should be able to be nimble. And because we are small, and have the nimbleness that comes from tech, there is a ‘you snooze, you lose’ mentality. It means that anytime we try to do something new, we try to do something different, or we try to expand into new markets and new ecosystems, it has to be end-to-end, and the entire organisation that's on this journey.”

Dill adds how important it is be able to look at problems from multiple different ways. “The final thing I'd say for innovation and growth is we always look for people with hustle and drive. You have to invest a lot of personal energy to make these things happen. It's never going to be handed to you on a platter.”