Innovation is a critical growth driver in healthcare and requires advanced consumer-centric strategy if you’re to attain category leadership, according to Blackmores chief brand, innovation and communications officer, Joanne Smith. Yet coming into the vitamins giant five years ago, she could see innovation wasn’t delivering anywhere near enough.

“Brand health and market share performance was declining, marketing investment behind innovation was ineffective,” Smith admits.

Working with her team and the broader business, Smith has led a three-year transformation of innovation at Blackmores Group. She labels it the boldest program she’s ever delivered in her career. Her ambition? “Creating an engine of profitable growth that centres on bringing superior health solutions to our consumers across our 12 markets – informed with rich scientific data and consumer insight and commercialised with excellence.

“We have incredible capability in Australia and harnessing this to bring innovation to market is a true advantage,” says Smith. “It’s rewarding to work in a creative organisation that is developing innovation and creative executions from scratch. This has created a true competitive advantage for our business.”

Effective marketing strategy

Transforming Blackmores’ innovation program for significant commercial gain – while simultaneously improving marketing’s effectiveness – has had many parts.

Smith’s transformation playbook included reinventing the ability to access consumer/customer insight across Australia, Indonesia, Thailand and China. Such quantitative data validated a three-year plan of innovation ideas launching across 12 markets and has become a highly valued asset and key growth tool for the future.

Another innovation is a bespoke AI tool that accesses over 600,000 scientific journals for insights from clinical research, strengthening the evidence base. “It’s a first for our industry, enabling us to leapfrog competition,” claims Smith.

Idea discovery processes, meanwhile, have involved colleagues from all functions of the business, breaking down silos and ensuring organisational buy-in and stronger ideas. To help, Blackmores has trained over 200 employees, embedding new capability to ensure this wasn’t a one-off change event but an ongoing way of working. Smith also highlights a world-class gate process to ensure quality, safety and efficacy of new products that meet the highest standards and reinforce brand trust in Blackmores.

Among headline results is a return of brand performance to growth, with market share leadership in Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. Notably, innovation sales increased from less than 4 per cent of total sales to 20 per cent.

Alongside tentpole innovation transformation, Smith hasn’t forgotten about reinvigorating brand planning and advertising and promotion investment strategy. Historically, Blackmores’ marketing planning was ad hoc, lacking consistency in approach, KPIs or guidelines on spend allocation. Implementing integrated commercial brand planning across 12 markets, beginning with a coordinated and consistent brand planning process, has been critical.

A key first step was enrolling the organisation on the case for change. From there, Blackmores could better identify desired outcomes for a new way of working. Introducing a new level of transparency and accountability across the marketing function was another must.

From there, Smith worked on training the marketing community specifically on best-in-class brand planning, starting with data and insight, into performance, then identifying key jobs to be done and linking those to initiatives and campaigns along with KPIs. Only then does marketing allocate advertising and promotional budgets, she says.

In addition, reviewing performance against plans and reassessing spend accordingly, identifying waste and reallocating spend across the consumer decision journey, and moving spend ratios from overspend in production to best-in-class splits prioritising media reach over duplicative production costs, have followed suit.

“The results have delivered significant gains back to the business which were reallocated into media, driving stronger brand performance,” says Smith.

For example, brand health metrics, which had been declining in Australia, all returned to growth and leadership. Blackmores as ‘a brand I trust’ has increased +3 pts to 54 per cent, while agreement with the statement Blackmores ‘is a brand that works for my health and wellbeing needs’ has lifted 5pts to 51 per cent, according to brand tracking data.

Discerning decision making

Blackmores has also pared back agency relationships, replacing 13 media agencies with one strategic partnership with Mindshare and a group-wide ad server, plus cut back 70 production agencies across 12 locations to one partnership with Prodigious for content. It’s worth noting Blackmores doesn’t rely on global or regional offices for content to execute – the creation of new products and marketing content is all done in Australia, and has to compete on the global stage.

Again, the objective was to address inefficiencies in marketing budgets, brand risk, and inconsistent brand presentation globally, while improving impact from marketing budgets and teams.

“In a complex web of markets and cultural needs, we identified opportunities to improve effectiveness,  optimise investments, standardise brand presentation, and enhancing transparency,” explains Smith. “Clear evidence-based goals were set to increase brand investment, achieve greater consistency, and improve quality… Continuous improvement methods were implemented to monitor and grow commercial benefits.

“This transformative project has positioned Blackmores Group as a leader in marketing effectiveness, delivering significant financial benefits and improved impact.”

Business influence

More recently, Smith has led the three-year corporate strategy for Blackmores Group. Her first step involved engaging the top 20 leaders of the organisation to collaborate.

“By involving a broader leadership team, we ensured ownership and commitment at all levels,” she says. “We prioritised data immersion, developing comprehensive data sets to inform our process and ensuring all team members were well-versed in this information from the outset.”

The executive team acts as a steering committee, working alongside the leadership team to shape the strategy. A useful guide has been the ‘Playing to Win’ framework by A.G. Lafley.

“I asked our CEO to hold training sessions on this framework, which were highly popular and helped build capability within the team,” Smith comments.

Collaboration with the finance team was also crucial. “We developed a commercial assessment model to rank strategic ideas based on key financial metrics, removing emotion and bias from decision-making,” says Smith.

“The result was a robust three-year strategy that delivers our growth ambitions and has high levels of buy-in across all employees. The strategy was approved by the Kirin Board in November 2024 and has been recognised by Kirin executives as an example of excellence in strategy development.”

Data-driven decision making

Getting Blackmores’ data capabilities on track to enhance consumer-centric strategy and drive growth across the 12 markets it operates in meant reinventing the approach to accessing rich consumer and customer insights.

Through cultural forecasting, Social, Technological, Environmental, Economic and Political (STEEP) assessment, and direct engagement with over 9000 consumers, the team built a deep understanding of health needs across diverse markets. This was further strengthened by the bespoke AI tool, which analysed over 600,000 scientific journals and clinical trials, providing a robust scientific evidence base for product innovations.

“We implemented a creative ideation process, involving marketing, R&D, sales, supply chain, and finance, fostering cross-functional collaboration and breaking down silos,” continues Smith. “Leveraging quantitative data, we built a three-year innovation plan, launching new products across our 12 markets at scale.”

As mentioned, innovation net sales have now grown from less than 4 per cent to 20 per cent of total sales, with profit margins 9 points higher than the company average.

“This initiative has demonstrated the power of consumer, customer and scientific data and insight in driving quantifiable brand and business impact. Innovation is now a key pillar of sales and profit delivery in the Blackmores P&L,” says Smith.

Commercial delivery

Transforming marketing investment model has happened in complement, driven by an ambition to direct spend to drive long and short-term growth and brand health. Smith cites significant savings thus far, enabling her team to reinvest in higher quality creative and more effective media investment, plus a more coordinated and consistent brand planning approach.

“This involved enrolling leaders to support a new way of working, training the marketing community on best-in-class brand planning, and reallocating spend to prioritise media reach over duplicative production costs,” she says.

Media reach increased by 44 per cent to 64 per cent, brand health metrics returned to growth and Blackmores has regained market share leadership in key markets: Australia, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.

Meanwhile, leveraging data-driven innovation as a sales and profit driver makes innovation a substantive pillar of the P&L. In 2024 it delivered over $100m in sales – the highest year for innovation sales in the company’s 92-year history.

“Innovation is now a profit engine for the company driving sustainable growth,” she adds.

People leadership

For Smith, curiosity is the ultimate attribute modern marketers must possess. “Marketers who are curious and also open minded and have a desire for continuous learning start by asking the right questions and seek broad perspectives before jumping to conclusions and solutions,” she comments.

“Curious marketers often uncover deeper insights into consumer behaviour, are future focussed, and strategic but also understand how to execute with excellence. I love this attribute in marketers because it fuels creativity and more informed and effective decision-making.”

To help her own marketing teams on the pathway to a learning mindset, Smith has spearheaded development and sustained investment in a Marketing Capability program, known as the ‘Vitality Brand Masters Program’. It’s become so robust, the program has achieved accreditation from the Australian Marketing Institute. The program includes an externally reviewed Marketing Competency model, eight formal learning modules, a bespoke selection of courses, mentoring, and partnerships with industry associations such as AMI, ADMA, The Ehrenberg Bass Institute, Mark Ritson, Circus Street and RMIT.

In 2025, the Vitality Bespoke Learning Program, now in its fourth year, delivered eight master classes, over 180 learners and more than 2450 hours of digital e-learning.