Optimistic, curious, everywhere: Those are the three words Catherine Anderson, CMO of Origin chooses to describe her approach to marketing leadership.

And they all manifest in knowing the power of saying no as a marketing leader to an excellent or what might be construed as a ‘bold’ idea. Why? Because she believes it “allows for something just so slightly more excellent to exist”. 

The experienced marketing leader, who spent more than seven years with green energy company, Powershop, including nearly four years as its chief customer officer, joined Origin in 2022 as GM of strategic initiatives. She was then appointed GM of marketing in late 2022, followed by CMO in November last year.

Effective marketing strategy

Over the last year, the energy provider’s marketing function under Anderson’s stewardship has been overhauling three key components of its media approach: Media strategy and buying, data platforms and ways of working.

“Our intent was to optimise our marketing acquisition programs with highly personalised offers and stronger customer experiences, ultimately to deliver better cost to acquire outcomes,” explains Anderson.

Success was bolstered by the introduction of AI utilisation, marketing mix modelling and intelligent real-time bidding strategies, while also in-housing digital advertising capabilities.

In the first phase, media mix modelling was adopted to analyse and learn from channel performance. Secondly, by adding in an AI-driven scenario builder, product marketing teams are able to leverage baseline insights gained by the model and now perform ‘what-if’ analysis to optimise channel mix and investment that maximise marketing outcomes.

“In a year where we were rewriting our brand strategy and creative, this work was important to complement that and support our product teams with commercial gains,” Anderson says. It has paid off, with channel contribution increasing, and growing returns on product marketing funnel investments.

All this while completing a large structural change project within marketing focused on cultural transformation. Knowing how important it is for marketing to be able to work in the face of ambiguity, Anderson is keen to ensure as much adaptability in her Origin energy marketing team as possible, and has brought in more adaptive ways of working to help.

“With marketing offering a more centralised service, we have rolled out simple, adaptive work styles that take some guidance from Agile, but are quite fluid and responsive – that’s important in an organisation with multiple working styles,” she says. “We have worked through many all-team workshops, met hurdles and points of friction by addressing them using a Feature – Advantage – Benefit [FAB] model to onboard teams.”

From utilising fortnightly sprints as a common language, to rolling out new technologies such as Asana and Confluence, marketing has spent considerable time designing workflows, quarterly planning adherence, accountability constructs and training so it’s able to have tough prioritisation conversations and deliver commercially.

As she stepped into the first month trialling all new tools and processes at the time of CMO Awards submission, Anderson is quietly optimistic about how it’s come together.

“Through our changes, we have been able to reduce our costs by a double-digit percentage, with no negative impact to our stakeholders or business targets and an increase in team engagement,” she says.

Discerning decision making

Achieving marketing excellence undeniably means knowing what you’re about – then connecting it to what value you can bring to your unique organisation. In this vein, part of Anderon’s transition of marketing has been about introducing the ‘70-20-10 Budget Challenge’. This initiative asked teams to firstly focus 70 per cent of budget on standard work to meet business targets, then put 20 per cent to initiatives that enhanced the core, such as exploring new channels or investing in research to make the BAU work harder. The last 10 per cent was pooled into an ‘initiatives’ fund any marketing staff member could pitch for – whether it was for things they thought might fail, or had just never been tried before.

“As a new starter in marketing at Origin, I was using this 70-20-10 challenge to show I was comfortable with certain risk levels, trialling new things and team autonomy,” explains Anderson.

Efficiency and cultural benefits came with it. With a renewed focus on core budgets, marketing achieved its sales targets. But this was balanced with energy for innovation and learning. Having that pure innovation fund allowed the marketing team to fund a new customer segmentation tool and attempt its first ever all-in product and brand presence at a large electric energy event.

“However, it was smaller initiatives directly benefiting customers that stood-out, such as creating our own Origin door-snakes to send to customers to help stop drafts at home – 40 per cent of heating can be lost through drafts – and supporting community initiatives in natural disaster-impacted areas,” says Anderson.

Business influence

All of this has been achieved even as Origin made public market commitments to reduce cost from the business in FY25 including a $200 - $250 million cash cost reduction from its FY18 baseline by FY24, according to strategy documents. Personalisation and segmentation, along with targeting additional customer value, were also part of the plan.

Marketing was a contributor to this effort, helping expand utilisation and functionality of marketing communications platform to find journeys and opportunities that reduced administrative load and activity and delivered productivity gains.

“By continuously testing and refining our processes, we’ve built an experimental culture that challenges assumptions and validates hypotheses before implementation and have helped to share broader business agendas,” Anderson says. “This approach has not only improved our marketing outcomes but has also informed decision-making across tech, UX, and commercial teams, ensuring our initiatives deliver measurable business impact.”

Customer-first thinking

Representing customers and leading customer-centric programs at Origin is critical for Anderson and her team. Among the core programs are the AI trial to undertake customer sentiment analysis. The second component of customer centricity is running retail business all-ins for call listening sessions. Teams from all across the retail business are able to work in real time to solve pain points they hear from customers.

Strong connectivity into the Origin Exchange Customer Insight community is the third pillar. Origin taps into its strong community for feedback and insights at any time, from product features to feedback on advertising or energy efficiency tips people are using each day.

Data-driven decision making

Another area of improvement for Anderson’s team has been around leveraging this wealth of customer data insights. In FY24, seeing a gap in actionable customer insights, the marketing team built and introduced the business to a values-based (attitudinal and behaviours) segmentation tool using a mix of first-party and useful external data sources such as energy usage and location.

As part of the rollout, it was important to have a case study ready to prove the value of the new segmentation tool, so Anderson and the team focus on Origin’s Electric Vehicle products.

“The opportunity Origin had was to create simple, tailor-made energy products that help to shift energy usage to cheaper times of the day for our customers,” Anderson explains. Drilling down to find additional insights, personas for specific segments were further developed. These were mapped to media buying to allow stronger targeting.

As a result of the deeper customer analysis, stronger media targeting and customised CVPs, Anderson’s team achieved its sales targets a week ahead of schedule, then overachieved against the baseline of previous launches, all while trimming marketing and sales OPEX.

People leadership

Alongside the changes to marketing’s ways of working, Anderson believes in ongoing development for teams and aims to balance training on emerging skills alongside key marketing outcomes and needed innovations.

“The World Economic Forum reports that skills such as resilience, creative thinking, influence and AI are rising in importance over the next five years and as such, our training program will follow this for our marketers,” she comments. For example, teams were trained by psychologists on resilience frameworks and their implementation last year. The year prior, Origin ran communication improvement programs to lift influential storytelling, big ideas development and improve ability to give feedback – all with the aim of helping teams be more influential.

“In 2025, our focus will be on AI and Big Data, personalisation and creativity. Running concurrently to our yearly themes, our curated ‘marketing academy’ runs all year with hand-picked sessions focusing on marketing training needs from partners,” says Anderson.  

But it’s not all hardcore marketing skills that are in Anderson’s sights. She quotes the Chinese proverb: ‘Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere’. “I look to maintain flexibility in our training agenda, preferring not to choose one supplier or fixed program for marketers. Marketers are also encouraged to take on external training and experiences un-related to marketing, such as Finance for Non-Finance Managers, new leader training or cultural immersion programs with the Origin Foundation,” adds Anderson.

“To foster learning-orientation, teams are asked to present back to the group following any events, conferences or training they undertake. Additionally, we believe career growth can be gained inside our organisation, with some marketers undertaking week-long secondments to other teams.”