Taking the pulse of CMOs

Ryan Gracie thinks himself fortunate he doesn’t live too far from the office.

“I spent almost every day that I could within the office last year, except when the government mandated we all stay at home,” the now former CMO of Catch says. “Some days it was myself and the cleaners, and on other days there may have been five or 10 people.

“I prefer to come into the office. I just like to get up, get to my desk and slide into my work. I just feel far more productive than I do when I’m at home. So I’ve been coming in the whole time.”

But that’s not the case with the majority of his team. “There are plenty of my marketing team who I did not see for months
on end,” he says.

Just as COVID-19 was starting to creep into Australia, Catch was employing. “During the real lockdown period of COVID-19, we onboarded more than 100 people into head office,” says Gracie.

“That was a very strange period where we were bringing new people into the business without actually physically meeting them. Trying to assimilate them into teams who had a history in the business.”

At the same time, it felt like the whole of Australia had jumped online, buying groceries, looking for goods normally picked up in person on Saturdays.

“There was certainly an increasing demand for online and it looks like there’s been an increase across retail in general,” he says. “From about late March, April last year, we saw a big increase in people jumping online and purchasing, and they hadn’t purchased online before.

“It has really picked up from about here on in.

“Catch was one of those bigger brands that people were more aware of. So when people were searching around for those essential items, we were very readily discovered.

“Increased demand from our consumers across a whole bunch of products that we had not generally sold en masse or in volume before. Then the second part was that Australia Post really felt the strain.

“The strain of all of these sales going through their delivery network with them reaching their capacity they’d never reached before — very, very quickly.

“I think consumers were understanding of the fact the whole of Australia had jumped online and were trying to purchase goods.”

Since then, Catch has changed its marketing.

“Previously we’ve been spending 95% of our marketing budget on performance channels, which have a lower funnel activity, mostly across Google affiliates, retargeting, programmatic, etc,” says Gracie.

“What we’ve done from August 2020 onwards is we’ve really spun that mix around to be 70% performance and 30% spent on our brand campaign.”

With Catch’s brand campaign, unprompted brand awareness has increased by just over 50%.

“A significant increase, and what we’ve seen is we’re driving far more people from that top of funnel through our free channels, coming to the site either directly or through organic search,” he says.

“We’ve got a higher repeat customer number. So as we’re building up that loyalty as people are becoming more aware of Catch, they just come back to us more often.

“I think we’ve been able to capitalise on the opportunity of that increase in online spending, to have a formation around people who are coming through online, just natively now.”

Did somebody say Menulog?

Menulog took a big bet and, at first glance, a counter cyclical move at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic by launching a massive recruitment drive.

The delivery business is built on technology but still needs people to sign up restaurants and to make sure they can be serviced.

Growing fast before the pandemic, Menulog took off on a steeper climb when everyone was ordered to stay at home to help stop the spread of COVID-19. The business became a lifeline for many.

“We were actually doing quite well going into the pandemic, delivering a full quarter of double-digit growth,” says Simon Cheng, Menulog’s marketing director.

Then the world changed. Restaurants weren’t allowed to open. Overnight, Menulog became an essential service.

“And so we had to madly recruit about 2000 independent couriers within the first few weeks of the pandemic just to keep up with demand because the only way restaurants could trade was through delivery services,” says Cheng.

Growing the restaurant range is one of the biggest drivers for stickiness for customers using the Menulog app. “We want to be able to provide the full ecosystem of restaurants and dining options, then there’s no reason for people to go anywhere else,” says Cheng.

Amsterdam-based Just Eat Takeaway.com, the parent company for Menulog, singled out the Australian operation when releasing its results for the year to December 2020 for its soaring sales and expanded market share. Menulog was Just Eat Takeaway.com’s fastest growing market, with 104% order growth in 2020.

“Our investment in the sales force and in signing up restaurants to get on our platform, and growing that range, was one of the linchpins of our success last year,” says Cheng.

“Obviously, we had a lot of that at the start of the pandemic in March, April and May.”

Cheng has been at Menulog since April 2019. Before that he was with retailer Healthy Life, Carnival Australia, Qantas and agencies including McCann Erickson and Ogilvy.

The Survey

AdNews Marketing Pulse, a comprehensive survey and analysis conducted jointly with Hearts & Science.

Marketing Pulse looks at how brands, large and small, are responding to not only COVID-19, but to an increasingly complex, yet fragile and constantly changing, environment.

It is designed to create reference points, a benchmark on what organisations are doing post-COVID-19, what they plan and where they sit against other marketers in the Australian context.

Jeremy Bolt, CEO of Hearts & Science: “The survey confirmed what we already knew — that marketers are operating in an increasingly complex environment requiring new skill sets. In addition, more technology-driven solutions alongside fragmented publishers and platforms.”

The survey of more than 100 found:

• 92% of marketers believe they will grow in the next 12 months.
• Nearly 40% see that growth in excess of 10%.
• Primary driver of growth being to increase market share.
• 47% believe media budgets will increase to drive this growth.

“What I found interesting was what marketers felt was critical to enable this growth, and where they believe these capabilities are now and where they see themselves with respect to these capabilities in 24 months’ time,” says Bolt.

From the survey, the most significant gaps now, where there was either no or basic capability, included:

• ROI & attribution analytics.
• Martech and Automation.
• 1P data

Looking forward 24 months, the areas where 100% of those surveyed wanted a solution included:

• Reporting.
• Collaboration between business units.
• Mapping of the Customer Journey.
• But the biggest shifts in capabilities over the next 24 months were:
• ROI and attribution analytics.
• Martech and Automation
• Single Customer View.

“However, none of these issues were expected to be fully solved by then,” says Bolt. “Mapping the customer journey followed closely behind, in that many organisations are not there yet, but all participants wanted this solved in the next 24 months as priority.”

Bolt finds these insights both fascinating and valuable, but not surprising.

“Knowing how much to spend — and in what channels — is a discussion we have regularly, which our ‘brain’ solution solves,” he says. “First-party data and martech to manage audiences is the next discussion and is largely driven by global privacy changes and how these are manifesting in the larger platforms, as well as how the collection, management and use of customer first-party data is navigated.

“What was surprising to me was the focus on automation. This can make some clients anxious but it does tie closely to owned and earned assets (identified as one of the highest drivers in a high ROI), as well as understanding
and mapping the customer journey. This we know is no longer linear and intersects across both brand and performance.

“So marketers have a busy but interesting time ahead, full of opportunities. Some of these capabilities and requirements may not sit naturally in the marketing function, but need to be managed and led by marketing; hence the need for new skill sets, high levels of collaboration and the de-siloing of functions within organisations.

“The time is now for marketing to take the lead. Starting with the customer journey and prioritising the capabilities and who will deliver these to support it.”

 (This article was published in the AdNews magazine. Subscribe here to make sure you get your copy.)