It was a bold call: Employ a long-term creative agency colleague as in-house creative director and reshape his team to lead brand thinking and tone internally, including internalising a recent rebrand.

“A bold call and turns out, a very good one,” says Chapman of the recent rebranding work at Reflections. But never suggest marketing is about being brave to this former agency lead, now client-side CMO. The ability to make a call and defend it? Yes, that’s the job of the marketing chief. But being obsessed with bravery? No way, he says.

“Doing good work isn't brave, it's smart. And even so, as far as all the brave work going on in the world, marketing isn't near the top of the list,” Chapman comments, adding he’s about creative first, data second.

Effective marketing strategy

Promoted 18 months into his first client-side marketing stint with the holiday park operator to the c-suite, Chapman was tasked with repositioning the Reflections brand. What had been a series of smaller trusts operating the parks as separate entities has transformed into one of the largest players in the sector with a market value of about $500 million and $80 million in annual revenue. Under CEO, Nick Baker, Reflections has kick off a re-engineering of the business model to a social enterprise, profit-for-purpose business. As the executive team has unified and pulled together foundational, back-end and operation models to ensure a consistent approach to market and park management, the time was ripe for a holistic brand positioning all staff could rally behind.

Historically, Reflections’ marketing strategy saw 90 per cent of budget and efforts going on short-term demand drivers and performance media, and just 10 per cent on brand building activities and future demand drivers. As a result, awareness was low and preference was even lower. In early 2024 Chapman started making the drastic shift in strategy to flip this, reducing short-term tactics to 10 per cent and investing 90 per cent of budget into brand building, awareness, salience and future demand tactics. Central to this strategy was rebranding from Reflections Holiday Parks to Reflections Holidays, complete with a new brand look and positioning, ‘Life’s Better Outside’.

Achievements include a new brand campaign and revamped loyalty program, plus signing key sponsorships with NRL Newcastle Knights and AFL GWS Giants – two key geographic battlegrounds, says Chapman. “We also invested heavily in organic social, SEO and ecommerce, launching an award-winning new website. The work across all channels bucked category norms by turning ad breaks into mini holidays and reminding people, Life’s Better Outside.”

The tester was 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 in 2023, 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.

The new brand strategy made for some exceptional – and ironically, short-term – results including 10.1 year-on-year, topline revenue growth between February 24 and February 25, a +15.9 per cent lift in NPS, and a 20 per cent increase in loyalty club membership. Ecommerce has started increasing too, and there’s 14 per cent growth in the number of trips taken. All this while paid search is down by 77 per cent.

“In tourism, show don’t tell is key. Once someone sees us, they’re more likely to consider. We achieve this through traditional marketing tactics but while this can get us a lot of the way, it costs and is still Reflections talking about Reflections,” Chapman continues. “We needed an additional strategy that would tap into word of mouth. Cue the Reflections Ambassador Program; a team of 50 super fans with a unique creative talent.”

Reflections Ambassadors were recruited from its Loyalty Club and attracted a whopping 4500 applications. A diverse group of outdoor enthusiasts from every demographic are now in the Ambassador ranks, from illustrators, artists and photographers to writers, poets, videographers and podcasters.

“Missions are assigned matching need, demographic and creative talent, resulting in is a magically diverse range of authentic content,” says Chapman. “So far, Ambassadors have completed 134 missions, captured 1206 pieces of content and built an army of loyal fans. They also road test new product, join development planning workshops and review our procedures. This program has given us access to an army of passionate story tellers and product researchers which has not only aided our marketing efforts but our CX efforts too.”

Reflections will host its first Ambassador Meetup this August, a three-day campout at which Ambassadors and the Reflections team will spend the weekend learning, sharing and building relationships, further strengthening the program and its potential, adds Chapman.

Discerning decision making

Not everything has worked, however, and Chapman is the first to learn and adapt. For instance, as part of Reflections sponsorship program, the park operator is the naming rights sponsor of iconic surfing festival ‘Surfest’ in Newcastle NSW and has done a wealth of activation work around it.

“Although successful in providing a good experience for people at the event, it had a three-day shelf life, minimal amplification and limited overall impact on any metrics. We made the decision to redirect this budget towards funding our own junior surfing tournaments across NSW,” explains Chapman.

Partnering with the Surfest, Reflections has now created the Reflections Cadet Cup, spanning three events and filling what Chapman believes is an important gap in surf culture for ambitious young surfers. He believes it’s establishing Reflections as the leading player on the youth surfing scene.

“At a micro event level, each competition reaches 100+ families, all who stay with Reflections during the event period. Every Cadet Cup event books out the nearby Reflections park, generating more revenue than is spent on the event,” comments Chapman. “In addition, the waiting list to join each competition is double the length of the entrants’ list, indicating a huge demand for the events which we’re now looking to extend.

“By diverting funds from the Surfest finals activation to create a series of events in the communities we operate within, we have driven greater brand reach, revenue and community impact.”

Business influence

With staff spread nationally, it’s critical to be crystal clear about priorities at Reflections. “At an exec level, we know who we are: The outdoor hospitality company for people that love the outdoors. Seems obvious but it’s not. Our category, holiday parks, is obsessed with presenting as an amusement park to sleep at,” Chapman says.

“They’re missing the point. Aussies want to be outside amongst nature in well considered camping environments. The challenge was that our staff had trouble grasping this. They felt that following category norms was the path to success. The executive looked to marketing to change perceptions.”

To help, Chapman’s team aggregated diverse customer data to paint a clear picture, including macro trends from Tourism Australia, over 17,000 customer reviews, 180,000 NPS surveys and four waves of brand health surveys (consideration drivers) to demonstrate who Reflections is for target segments, and what they want. Identified macro drivers include nature, connection and experience, while key frustrations are over developed spaces, poor customer service and poorly maintained facilities. Highlighted drivers of consideration meanwhile, included access to nature and quality amenities.

Chapman’s team presented this to the entire business at the 2024 Reflections conference, announcing Reflections is ‘For The Camper’ and naming FY25 ‘The Year of The Camper’. “It’s had us ask and answer the question of every move: Is this for the camper?” says Chapman.

“From our ads to our new glamping precincts, designing and launching ‘The World’s Best Amenity Block’ and launching campfire acoustic sessions. Year of The Camper has been a glue in aligning our efforts as a company and has been a key driver in NPS rising 15.9 per cent year-on-year.”

Data-driven decision making

Such insight was made possible after the Reflections marketing team led a project to connect NPS points to revenue, discovering that a one-point increase in NPS was worth $307,000.

“Like most organisations, we have always gathered vast amounts of customer feedback and tracking metrics like Net Promoter Score [NPS], but we were faced with a critical challenge: Understanding how these scores translate into tangible business outcomes,” explains Chapman. “NPS was no different, and the team had struggled to quantify its financial impact. This, in turn, made it difficult to justify investments in customer experience (CX) initiatives.

Kapiche’s platform was brought in to help provide advanced feedback analytics and bridge the gap, connecting NPS changes to key financial metrics, such as revenue, customer retention and lifetime value.

“By building a data-driven understanding of how each point of NPS improvement influenced the bottom line, we were able to make informed decisions and clearly demonstrate to the business the financial value of enhancing customer experience,” says Chapman. “Additionally, this allowed us to prioritise CX improvements that offer the greatest financial return, maximising the ROI of our CX initiatives and align our efforts with broader business objectives for sustained growth.”

With a robust customer listening ecosystem, Reflections aggregates and orders reviews and NPS surveys of its 40 properties into one central intel bank via Kapiche. It also conducts brand health surveys twice a year, runs focus groups with ambassadors and uses social listening tools to understand what people are saying about us online.

One gap, however, was reading the online customer journey beyond analysing behaviour and site performance. To address this, Reflections has partnered with tech platform, Intercom, to enable web chat on its website.

“While the immediate benefit of deploying this capability was in guiding our 2.4m annual unique web users through their journey, the bigger opportunity came in way of the insights it provided on our customers while they were in the moment,” says Chapman. “We’ve found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that customers use chat when they can’t find what they want or they’re frustrated by the process. To ensure we provided a great customer experience, we appointed a team of reservations agents from our reservations team to man the chat rather than frustrate people further with bot responses.”

Another key benefit Chapman cites is using insights from chat to inform and prioritise web improvements. Again, it’s delivered a value back to the business in hard commercial terms, increasing online conversion from 3.16 per cent to 3.45 per cent in the first year.

Commercial delivery

Throughout it all, Chapman is all too aware loyalty among Reflections guests is key to financial success. Even with a lacklustre loyalty program when he started at Reflections, members accounted for 50 per cent of overall tourist revenue.

“The rewards club did not have a clear identity and incentivised guests for business that they would have given Reflections anyway, generated little added revenue as a result,” he says. “At the time, the actual cost of the program was also unclear due to a lack of financial reporting on usage of guest credits.

Reigniting the program, now known as the Outsiders Loyalty Club, meant restructuring the incentives on offer, promoting time spent at Reflections (volume) and exploring different Reflections locations (cross sale). As a result, the program was 21 per cent cheaper to run than previously, and resulted in guests taking more subsequent trips than before - 12.7 per cent up YOY. Notably, visits to different Reflections locations increased substantially (21.6% up YOY). The loyalty club now accounts for 70 per cent of all Reflections tourist revenue.

In complement, Chapman has developed an agile marketing automation program, which now automates hundreds of unique triggered customer campaigns, including reminding guests to book, prompting them to follow through with abandoned purchases, suggesting new stays and reminding guests to spend their credit. The program personalises communication to each guest, taking into consideration where they live, what activities they enjoy, and what accommodation they prefer.

As a result, the Reflections marketing automation program has already delivered $2.3m in marketing automation assisted revenue in the first eight months of the financial year, exceeding a target of $1.6m. The ROAS on this program currently sits at 16x when accounting for platform and employee costs.

People leadership

Tech aside, Chapman’s overarching priority as CMO is to make the time that his team spends at Reflections “the time that they talk about for the rest of their career”.

“Most teams consist of two types of people: Those who are good, and those who are good at it. We’re building a team of people who are both. Our plan: No dickheads and no passengers,” he says. “These good and good-at-it individuals deserve and demand a great environment to perform and grow so we have developed a set of rituals and behaviours that foster growth.”

Among these are a biannual Campout, where each member of the team presents on their discipline – what’s working, what’s not and what’s changing.

“At campout we leave titles at the door – everyone contributes. We eat together, exercise together and build plans together,” says Chapman. “Campout has been a great glue for the team. It’s brought us together, grown great ideas and called bullshit on bad ones.”

Ideas born from Campout are built out in 90 days plans. Each of Chapman’s four reports have their own, cascading into weekly team WIPs.

“We also hold monthly marketing masterclasses in which a fellow CMO shares their recipes for success. The team have loved this program, many sparking informal mentor relationships,” Chapman adds.