Building Data-Driven Marketing Organizations: Insights from AANA Masterclass

Marketing leaders from Southern Cross Austereo, Standard Chartered, SunRice, and Tourism Australia shared their approaches to data-driven decision-making and marketing effectiveness at an AANA Masterclass in partnership with Gain Theory.

The April event, ‘From data to decisions: Driving profitable growth with marketing effectiveness’, saw clear themes emerge around the importance of measurement frameworks, stakeholder engagement, and building data-driven cultures.

In service of future growth

Jyane Quek, Standard Chartered’s Global Head of Planning & Effectiveness for Corporate Affairs, Brand & Marketing, spoke with Gain Theory’s Arvind Sethumadhavan about getting alignment between marketing and the c-suite of the 170-year-old bank.

Quek shared how she uses the visual analogy of an ‘iceberg’ to demonstrate marketing’s contribution to business objectives. The visible portion of the iceberg represents key impact metrics, such as assets under management, while below the surface lie key drivers such as inflation. This ‘hierarchy of metrics’ helps to create alignment and consistency across multiple geographies and customer segments, she said.

Stakeholder buy-in is achieved in part through “creating a ritual” of providing updates to senior leaders based around this hierarchy. Being part of the bank’s corporate planning committee is also crucial, with Quek noting it positioned marketing as being “in service of future growth and the evolving needs of our clients.”

To embed this approach across the organization, Quek emphasized the importance of change management. Her “immersion sessions” with local marketing teams helped them understand the data and its implications. “This is when I realized marketers were most engaged,” she said, citing examples where teams discovered opportunities to optimize channel investments, such as reducing TV spend in certain markets.

Quek concluded by sharing three key takeaways: the importance of articulating marketing’s impact, contribution, and incrementality; the need to identify what’s proven effective; and the value of bringing key stakeholders together – from product and finance to data and marketing – to create ongoing feedback loops.

Data, insights, and finding a common language

A panel of Australian CMOs, moderated by Gain Theory’s Justin Nel, then discussed their approaches to building data-driven marketing organizations. Tourism Australia’s Susan Coghill explained how she wanted to add strategic rigor and marketing effectiveness to her organization’s creative excellence. To help, she developed a playbook called ‘The 10 Principles of Great Destination Marketing’ that included a full funnel analysis of each market, including competitive positioning and destination choice drivers.

Coghill also described how Tourism Australia uses multiple data sources to make strategic choices. By analyzing consumer spend, competitive spend, and airline capacity data, for example, they identified underserved markets. This approach highlighted an opportunity in Korea, leading to increased brand activity investment in that market. “It’s really about how you make best use of a range of data sources to understand what’s happening,” she explained.

At SunRice, where “the consumer is the boss,” CMO Tamara Howe noted how marketing mix modeling revealed valuable insights about channel effectiveness – showing that while TV had a lower ROI than social, it was driving the most volume. Rather implementing these findings directly, Howe noted they informed conversations about channel choice and investment.

SCA’s Head of Marketing, Naomi Gorringe, outlined their four-year journey to improve data literacy across the business. “We’ve been trying to understand all of the different parts of the business, what their data literacy is… and then really leaning in and meeting people where they are,” she explained. Speaking a common language to demonstrate how data helps people make decisions and reach their goals has been crucial to this journey.

Unsurprisingly, using data to navigate the current macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty also generated plenty of discussion. Gorringe outlined how SCA leaned on partners to better understand short-term behavioral changes that enabled them to create more relevant content for near-time events, such as the upcoming federal election.

By way of contrast, Tourism Australia’s Coghill discussed how data could be used for a longer-term view. “Don’t confuse fast change with deep change,” Coghill advised, explaining how data helped distinguish between short-term trends and meaningful changes in travel behavior.

To this end, she emphasized the importance of using scenario planning – a data-led foresight technique that can be used to analyze what would happen to your KPIs if you were, for example, to increase your prices by 5%, decrease your TV spend by 10%, or change creative. Coghill said she used this approach to inform decision-making around how the ongoing cost-of-living crisis will impact people’s desire to travel in the future.

Summing up, Nel said: “This conversation highlighted that to do marketing effectiveness well you need to think holistically, starting with a clear understanding of the role that marketing plays in achieving the goals of the business. Then you need to use advanced measurement and foresight techniques to transform data into actionable insights that drive growth. Building a culture of data-driven decision-making can accelerate your ability to achieve this goal.”

Learn more about how to build a data-driven marketing organization by downloading this Gain Theory report: Unlocking Revenue Growth with Marketing Effectiveness: Insights for Australian Marketers