Jason Piggott will be the first to tell you that “playing the long game isn’t always the popular path” to take.

In fact, this five-year marketing exec of Freedom Furniture Australia says it might not even be the “right path,” but for Freedom it’s the one path that has delivered the results and continues to provide the foundations for its next chapters.

Admittedly, he says it takes conviction, and the ability to make “deliberate” moves, even if it’s the slower, more frustrating pursuit, particularly for the “speed junkies” in the senior team.

“Marketers are hardwired to make bold calls – testing, learning, backing ideas, and shaking things up. But sometimes, the boldest move is the one you don’t make,” Piggott says.

“At Freedom, we’ve chosen not to chase every short-term spike or shiny tactic (when and where we can). Instead, we’ve stayed the course on a long-term vision: rebuilding our brand, rewiring our go-to-market, and reshaping how we show up for customers and team members.” 

Effective marketing strategy

It’s this bold behaviour that sees Piggott, the company’s general manager of marketing and franchisees, reinventing brand strategy, and claiming new and increasing market share.   

Market research revealed that Freedom was underserving the ‘quick and affordable’ sofa segment, so he set himself a mission.

“As a mid-market player in the furniture category, to be successful Freedom needs to drive its volume by ensuring that enough ‘value customers’ trade up from competitors like Fantastic and Amart, whilst gaining an unfair share of customers from the ‘mid-to-top’ end players like Nick Scali, King, Plush to drive higher margin sales. Whilst holding our own against the mid-to-top end competitors – the challenge over the past decade has been conquesting the value/volume customer [for us this is defined by our use of Roy Morgan Helix Personas].” 

Piggott says the ‘quick and affordable’ sofa segment was looking for a suitable product, within the right price bracket, and importantly with the right delivery timeframe.

“Seventy-five per cent of the sofa market is either immediately delivered, or within one month. Of this, 44 per cent of immediate deliveries and 49 per cent of under one-month deliveries are priced under $2k. The question therefore was does Freedom have the right products for the <$2k market that can be delivered quickly, and how can this be best communicated.?” 

The solution? Piggott says it was multi-faceted and driven across the business, including initiatives with the merchandise team to identify products within the price bracket that would appeal to ‘Younger Independents’ and ‘Family Home Improvement’ customers. As the business traditionally operated as a ‘made-to-order’ sofa provider, they also shifted to ensure that these products were warehoused as ‘made to sell’ so they could be delivered in under a month.

Additionally, the team worked with retail operations, visual merchandising, and online teams to ensure that these ‘Quick Ship’ products were clearly communicated to customers within this segment. From a marketing perspective, they rebalanced the brand and retail approach to focus on the ‘Home of Sofa’ and promoted ‘Sofas from $999’ to reinforce its mid-market positioning.

This approach directly addresses the challenge Piggott outlined: competing in both the value and mid-to-top-end segments, ensuring that Freedom doesn't just capture market share, but maximises revenue opportunities through strategic upselling.

“Freedom have unlocked the ability to service customers with an immediate need for a sofa on a shorter lead time, generate volume from the value customer segments that allow our highly trained sofa specialists upsell customers into higher price, higher margin, longer lead time products and delivered consolidated sofa [upholstery] revenue growth.” 

Customer-first thinking

To prepare for the future, Piggott says Freedom must rapidly elevate its customer experience and re-calibrate the business around a 'customer first' approach across all channels.

“It’s clear if we are to build for the future, as a legacy retailer we need to quickly go ‘next level’ on customer experience and re-calibrate the wider business to have a ‘customer first approach’ no matter what the channel or touchpoint,” he says.

Central to this is the marketing team's work in customer journey mapping and insights, creating a full view of Freedom's customer experience – from research and purchase to delivery and after-sale support.

The team launched an end-to-end 'Voice of the Customer' program via Qualtrics to track performance across key touchpoints including website, in-store and product delivery, and embed insights through education, dashboards, and hard baking the feedback into the stores incentive system.

“This data is now being used to identify opportunities for where improvement is needed in our customer journeys and deliver real and actionable insights of where we need to improve including driver analysis to identify positive and negative drivers of the results and which touchpoints and measures to place importance on and prioritise actions which can be used to drive improvements in Freedom’s NPS. Associated with this we communicate these via infographics on Workplace to spell out the impact of NPS, key drivers and employee behaviours on customer retention and acquisition in a real and tangible way linked to store and staff performance,” says Piggott.

Supplementing this, the team conducts biannual brand and category research via Qualtrics Bx across furniture, homewares, and mattresses to benchmark customer attitudes and track brand health, with live dashboards enabling more customer-centric decision making.

The leadership team has embedded this “customer-first approach” into Freedom’s three-year strategic plan. Next on its CX Horizons Roadmap: innovation initiatives like Outer Loop Process Design; the myFreedom Loyalty Program Survey; new integrations (Zendesk, Product Review, Google Review); utilising Qualtrics to assist with AI functionality; and initiatives to drive post-purchase advocacy. 

Piggott says early results are promising: Freedom’s NPS has hit a record 72, and its Product Review Score has climbed from 3.5 to 3.9 over the past 12 months. Additionally, in early 2024, acknowledging the need to align brand promise with customer expectations and business strategy, Piggott redirected brand advertising funds into a cross-functional CX initiative.

The goal: Conduct a business-wide audit of Freedom’s current customer experience and business strategies; create a future-state roadmap for improvements; and embed customer thinking at the heart of decision-making.

“Retail marketing is dominated by the challenge of building a brand for tomorrow while driving sales today, navigating these two priorities can be difficult - but it is crucially important that marketing leaders can take a long-term video and understand how they can influence stakeholders and drive business strategy beyond ‘bold and relevant’ creative executions or ‘engaging and innovative’ media plans.” 

All of this signals a powerful shift at Freedom: Customer experience is no longer a standalone function – it’s now a central, strategic pillar driving growth, loyalty, and long-term differentiation. It’s embedded in every decision, action, and initiative across the business.

That alignment is no surprise, given Piggott’s deep commitment to customers.

“I lead with a customer-obsessed mindset – putting the customer at the centre of everything, from how we define our brand promise to how we map journeys, measure experience, and make strategic trade-offs,” he says. “Whether it’s using data to refine our loyalty program or embedding feedback into every touchpoint, this approach ensures we’re building marketing that’s not only relevant, but genuinely valuable.”

Data-driven decision making

For Piggott, the most effective marketing doesn’t favour data over creativity – or vice versa. It thrives at the intersection of both.

“Data brings precision, helping us understand the who, what, where and when. But it’s creativity that drives emotional connection, builds brand distinctiveness, and ultimately shifts consumer behaviour.” 

“That balance, however, doesn’t happen by default. It starts with a strong brief – one that’s built on insight, not just information. A brief that frames the challenge clearly, but leaves space for ideas to breathe. And it continues with thoughtful, constructive feedback that sharpens thinking without prescribing outcomes.” 

This philosophy underpins how Freedom has evolved over the past five years. According to Piggott, the business has strategically embedded data and insights across every layer of its customer and loyalty strategy, culminating in substantial commercial impact in FY24 and the development of a rich, first-party, single-view data source.

Through deep analysis of customer behaviour, segmentation, and purchase trends, Freedom’s CRM and Loyalty programs – myFreedom and Freedom Trade – have collectively driven $30 million in gross profit contribution. This achievement demonstrates how data doesn’t just inform decision-making; it powers high-impact initiatives that materially affect the bottom line.

Piggott outlines the key drivers of this gross profit contribution: incremental gross profit when myFreedom vouchers are redeemed; gross profit from myFreedom members who redeem a voucher and then make an additional purchase within eight weeks; profit generated from CRM campaigns (email and SMS); and profit from new Freedom Trade members, with over 70% of these members being new to the brand. These gains, he notes, are offset by the costs of voucher redemptions, the Homewares Free Delivery benefits, and the operating expenses associated with running the CRM team.

The growth of Freedom’s loyalty base further highlights the power of its data-led strategy. “The loyalty base grew 21.3 per cent year-on-year to 1.34 million members, now contributing 87 per cent of total sales. myFreedom members spend significantly more than non-members, with new members spending 152 per cent more and visiting 50 per cent more frequently after joining. Marketing opt-in rates among new members reached 70 per cent, providing a rich, addressable audience for future targeted communications.”

Leveraging transactional and behavioural data, Freedom has also fine-tuned its voucher program.

“Freedom uses transactional and behavioural data to optimise its voucher program, identifying that members spend up to 6.7x the value of a voucher when redeemed, driving $14.3 million in incremental gross profit sales. Data also revealed that 42% of vouchers remain unredeemed, highlighting a valuable opportunity. Targeted re-engagement strategies are now in place to increase redemption rates and maximise ROI via automated campaigns and staff training to highlight with myFreedom customers.”

Looking ahead, Piggott says Freedom has a clear roadmap to build on this momentum. “A clear future roadmap driven by data includes consolidation of fragmented communication platforms into a unified, insight-driven system and further investment in personalisation and AI at scale. This will support our ambitious FY25 goals to double loyalty membership and triple sales contribution from direct communications whilst further elevating the myFreedom and Trade programs into the categories' most powerful loyalty programs, designed not just to reward, but to retain, engage and drive advocacy.”

Business influence

Certainly, over the past five years of Freedom’s turnaround journey, the team recognised a clear strategic truth: If they could "win in sofa," the team could drive sustained profitability to underpin its broader ambitions.

To capitalise on this, marketing focused on achieving a deeper understanding of the shopper journey – specifically, how to win in the critical sofa category.

To deliver on this goal, Piggott partnered with Cognition (qualitative) and Ipsos (quantitative) to build an insights program designed to identify what ‘best-in-class’ sofa retail looks like, and where Freedom could better meet evolving customer needs.

The research program involved mapping the key steps in the customer journey, developing a clear understanding of the basics of each step – such as the time taken, channels used, and retailers considered – and identifying shopper missions along with the motivations behind them. It also focused on uncovering key customer needs and pain points across the journey, for both Freedom and its competitors. Crucially, the program was designed to drive these insights through the business, ensuring they informed decision-making at every level.

The project was delivered in four phases: beginning with internal briefings and stakeholder interviews to build foundational knowledge, followed by deep qualitative research through in-home and in-store ethnography, competitor safaris, and staff interviews. A quantitative study then validated key issues across the broader category. Finally, insights were embedded across the business through infographics, customer videos, and stakeholder workshops.

“This comprehensive, end-to-end research has resulted in numerous cross-functional initiatives aimed at enhancing Freedom's customer experience and operational efficiency. These initiatives include collaborating with the merchandise team to identify appealing products for specific customer segments, recalibrating from a ‘made-to-order’ to a balanced ‘made-to-sell’ model to ensure quicker delivery times, and working with Retail Operations, Visual Merchandising, and Online teams to clearly communicate the availability of quick-ship products to customers through managing the customer journey post purchase by personalised customer communications in the wait and an enhanced delivery experience,” he says.

Piggott says he’s energised by the momentum behind these efforts, which are aimed at better meeting customer needs while driving stronger sales and profitability across the business. While the initiatives are still in the deployment phase, he’s confident they’ll deliver meaningful impact in the months ahead.

Commercial delivery

Under Piggott’s leadership, Freedom’s marketing team has proven its ability to deliver strong commercial results by identifying and capitalising on two key growth opportunities that are perfectly aligned with the company’s three-year strategic plan: the Freedom Trade Program and Freedom Property Styling.

These initiatives showcase Piggott’s knack for driving profitability, diversifying revenue streams, and expanding the brand’s footprint.

Launched in May 2023, the Freedom Trade Program was a masterstroke in targeted marketing. By analysing myFreedom membership data, Piggott and his team identified that a portion of members were trade customers who would benefit from a more tailored offering. The program was designed to cater specifically to business customers, offering them compelling benefits: 15% off regular prices, an additional 5 per cent off sale and clearance items, and exclusive access to trade-only events like VIP sporting experiences and surprise rewards.

He says program is now gearing up for an accelerated acquisition and growth phase, having already attracted a strong base – 69 per cent of members are entirely new to Freedom, with the remainder largely transitioning from the previous myFreedom program.

Piggott has also led the launch of Freedom Property Styling, a new business model that taps into adjacent markets and capitalises on Freedom’s brand strength. The service, which focuses on property staging and furniture hire, was launched in Sydney in January 2025 and is set to expand to Melbourne by mid-2025.

“The ambition is to cover all major capital cities and major regional centres in the medium term. From a Freedom perspective, this new-to-market channel further solidifies the Freedom brand as the ‘Home of Home’, demonstrates our brand stretch to unlock further business opportunities and delivers a quantifiable, ongoing revenue stream via product sales and ongoing licencing fees from both sub-licensing of areas and a license charge on every project.”

Piggott recognises the significance of this new venture, which expands the Freedom brand into the interior design and real estate space while opening up new revenue streams through product sales and recurring licensing fees.

This kind of innovation, he says, is exactly where marketing should be playing at the intersection of brand, customer experience, and commercial growth.

For Piggott, modern marketers are no longer just brand storytellers; they must be strategic growth partners, deeply embedded in business decision-making.

“The best marketers [right down to the most junior levels] can connect creativity with commercial outcomes. It means understanding how marketing activity directly impacts revenue, margin, market share, and customer value – and being able to articulate that impact at whatever table you are sitting at,” he says.

“In a retail environment where every dollar must drive performance, commercial acumen allows marketers to shift from being seen as cost centres to growth engines. It brings a stronger voice to the boardroom and ensures marketing strategies are aligned with broader business goals.

“Whether it's forecasting the ROI of a loyalty campaign, defending brand investment in a volatile economy, or balancing short-term conversion with long-term equity, commercially minded marketers will lead the charge in proving that brand and business growth are two sides of the same coin.”

People leadership

Indeed, Piggott’s leadership style revolves around creating a workplace where team members feel a deep sense of purpose and belonging, one that is closely aligned with the organisational values.

“In a world of automation and algorithms, people and capability are more important than ever and creating an environment where the team feels a sense of purpose and belonging aligned to the organisational values is at the centre of my approach.

“With the war for talent ongoing and very real, people, capability and connection are more important than ever – ensuring that they want to be here, they can see and feel their development taking them where they want to go and a sense of responsibility and accountability to their peers is anchored in my approach.”

At Freedom, this includes structured development through the Australian Marketing Institute, using its Core Marketing Competency Framework to guide individual growth. Team members take part in AMI courses, mentoring, and bootcamps, while also embracing AI as a tool for both efficiency and innovation.

“We are also collectively focused on empowering the team via AI. Our approach here is two-fold - it's about how we embed AI in every role in the team to increase efficiencies, improve outcomes and ensure alignment across all we do; as well as focusing on ensuring that individuals are building muscle on how to harness the technology for today and tomorrow.”

At the same time, innovation is encouraged through a disciplined yet creative approach.

“From a team perspective we encourage this via our ethos of being bold and taking risks. To empower the team, we use a structured approach of documenting our innovation (see below Marketing Innovation Brief), investing the resources to execute and then clearly measuring the results and communicating this across the team (and where applicable across the business). We have found that this approach not only focuses the thinking but provides a structured process to present ideas linked to commercial outcomes and take calculated risks.”

For Piggott, it's about linking creativity to commercial impact – and empowering the team to take smart risks.