Deep Dive

Coles and Woolworths are among a growing and diverse set of retailers injecting hundreds of millions into private-label range expansion – not just for revenue growth, but customer stickiness, trust and loyalty. They’re no longer just chasing price-conscious consumers: Today’s own brand strategies are leveraging every lesson from the brand playbook to win from value to premium tier, utilising quality product credentials, growing first-party data insights, category diversification and co-brand partnerships while also tapping into future-forward trends such as health and wellbeing, blurred work/home lifestyles, sustainable sourcing, changing consumer behaviours and preferences to innovate. It’s working. Circana figures show 4.8 per cent year-on-year growth across CPG/FMCG to $46bn in annual private-label sales last year. Complementary research shows 95 per cent of Aussie consumers are now open to buying private-label brands, and exclusive research supplied to Mi3 reveals broad familiarity and emerging motivators for own brand purchases. Even more significantly, Gen Z and Millennials are increasingly being swayed to consider private-label products. Here’s the lowdown on why and how retailers are making private-label the next big brand success story, and what name brands should attempt to fight back.

It’s less than a year since Salesforce launched autonomous AI agents into the wild. But the bots are already reshaping business functions. In the US, online accounting platform 1-800 Accountants, which handles payroll and book keeping for circa 100,000 firms, has slashed the time staff spend on customer service by 70 per cent. Open Table and Singapore Air are deploying the agents to similar effect. But what are they doing with all that freed human capital? And what are the broader implications for everyone as ‘agentics’ move rapidly through the digital supply chain?  Salesforce global CMO Ariel Kelman and colleagues say we will all soon have our own agentics buying – and negotiating prices – for us in online shopping and services. Which has significant implications for business structures and marketing functions and capability in particular. Kelman says we are now looking at a step change in marketing automation beyond content, where the agentic labour force will generate campaign briefs, launch campaigns off those briefs, and self-optimise the creative messaging and channels to deliver on the brief it crafted in the first place. Outside of agentics, Kelman says Salesforce’s new multi-touch attribution model is powering, telling the firm which marketing investments are driving sales and how cost-efficient they are. But not for brand – Kelman thinks it’s pointless trying to attach a dollar value to brand investments in B2B. “It’s just so disconnected from the purchase.” Those attempting to do so, he suggests, are “operating at a false level of precision.”

Guzman y Gomez's Lara Thom and Uber's Andy Morley don't exactly have the same role and remit, even if they both bear the title of CMO. They don’t own the same Ps, they work for brands and businesses at different stages of maturity in distinct categories, and they use different lenses when thinking about how marketing leadership should be delivered. But the duo, two of this year’s top 10 CMOs of the Year in the inaugural CMO Awards, were both recognised by judges for being stellar examples of marketing effectiveness. And Morley and Thom have surprisingly more in common than you’d first think. Whether it’s a belief in risk-taking and fostering learning cultures, or bold, attention-grabbing and progressive brand plays that strike the right cultural chords with consumers, this self-described “Bert and Ernie of marketing” also demonstrate adaptability and a willingness to innovate – critical attributes if you’re a marketing chief wanting to achieve effectiveness wherever you happen to work.