We can thank the Baby Boomers for taking up everything American so enthusiastically. Known as the Coca-Cola generation (Coke factories opened here in the late 30s) post war kids were obsessed with American culture that was brought here by the GIs. From Coke, Fanta, Tab, and Pepsi to Juicy Fruit and PK chewing gum; from McDonalds and Burger King hamburgers, to American TV shows like My Three Sons, I Love Lucy, and Leave it to Beaver we became converts to a type of sanitized US morality where idealised Mom-and-Dad-and-three kid-families ate fried chicken and mashed potatoes over red check clothed dinner tables and everyone drank Puritanical tumblers of milk instead of beer and wine.

And so it grew like a disease – Levi jeans, The Beach Boys, Elvis, fluoridated water, an obsession with painkillers – and somehow, before we could blink we became the unofficial 51st state. Our cars were American rip offs (yes the Holden was Australia’s first car but it was for all intents and purposes a General Motors Chevvy and our Falcon GTOs and Valiant Chargers were just Fords and Chryslers with different badges). We even started building Spanish style ranch houses and filled them with appliances such as dishwashers and microwaves that generations of Australians had been able to do quite happily without.

But our era of Americanization may be over. 

We have already seen that Labour’s campaign for re-election will seize on our slap in the face over steel and aluminum tariffs (even while we are paying our allies more than $500 million a year for submarines that may never be built) as a chance to give new air to their $22.7 Billion Future Made in Australia policy. 

Normally this sort of patriotic cum nationalistic behaviour would have been criticised internationally. Since World War II, the world economy and its trade relationships have been driven by a theme of free trade, collaboration and open borders. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. In fact Australia’s balance of payments with the US was in their favour – we buy more from them than they buy from us – which makes the punitive tariff regime even more bizarre and hurtful.

But thanks to the Trumpian typhoon, all free trade bets are now off. If Making America Great Again means returning to the nostalgic 1950s where the US was the supermarket of the world, every country now has the right to hunker down and think about themselves too. This is a profound shift. Since the Keating days of financial deregulation we have tried to be open traders on the world market. We don’t subsidise our farmers, even though the US and Europe do. We didn’t subsidise our car industry (see where that got us). We don’t subsidise our airlines (although Rex might be a new test case). We’ve tried to play a straight Aussie bat. But the gloves are off. 

The US purchase of our steel and aluminium represents less than 1% of our exports so there is every likelihood we will be able to swing that surplus to China or Europe. But for our many other manufacturing businesses this is the time to turn to new markets – our own people.

According to Trading Economics our Top 10 imports from the US in the last financial year were: machinery, vehicles, electrical equipment, medical technology, pharmaceuticals, aircraft/spacecraft, mineral oils and lubricants, precious stones and metals, chemical products and cosmetics. But there are also millions of dollars heading off shore for products we can produce ourselves – rubber and plastic goods, meat, fertiliser, beverages and spirits, soaps, dairy products and so on. 

So from a micro point of view, where are the opportunities? Albo fell just short of saying replace your Jim Beam with Bundy…but watch this space. Australian winemakers could certainly do with a hand and while we don’t drink a lot of US wines (our imports are mainly French champagne and NZ Sauvignon Blanc) every bottle that comes from the Barossa or the Yarra is another dollar that stays here. Sadly we no longer make vehicles but Chinese and Korean car manufacturers could easily suck up supply from disgruntled Tesla and Ford Ranger “truck” drivers. Or is this the catalyst to revisit our own sovereign vehicle industry? If we can make Bushmasters for Ukraine in a small regional city such as Bendigo, surely we can make simple, cost-effective electric cars in Australia’s Detroit – Adelaide? And if AUKUS goes pear shaped we might just have to!

More than 90% of our pharmaceuticals come from the US (and Europe), which became blatantly a sovereign risk during COVID. Our own smart but struggling pharma companies (not those owned by US multinationals) need a huge shot in the arm in the next Federal budget to make them more competitive and us more self-reliant. The Budget is also a time for the Albanese government to put its money where its mouth is and favour Australian owned businesses in federal supply tenders.

This is the time for Australia to grow up and out of its forelock tugging hangover from the 1960s and assert ourselves as a country in our own right. We happily gave up our blood ties with the UK for America, after the fall of Singapore and the bombing of Darwin. We realised that we couldn’t rely on our mother country anymore. Now is a similar realisation. We can’t rely on Uncle Sam anymore either. It’s time to be a true Pacific nation and start building close economic, political and defence ties with our neighbours – Indonesia, SE Asian countries such as Malaysia, Vietnam and Philippines and of course India and China. The best place for this to start is through the soft diplomacy of tourism. Is it time for Australian tourism to focus even more attention on our nearest neighbours, to  market our close proximity and relatively cheap flights?  And should we reciprocate by extending our travels beyond Bali to other parts of Indonesia; beyond Japan to China and South Korea?

And what can we, as marketers, do to support this new era?

Without being too jingoistic, Australian businesses could do worse than focus on their Australian-ness. After the Trump shock marketers could play an important role in encouraging   self belief and much-needed national unity – celebrating our cultural diversity, and what brings us together as a nation, rather than focusing on our haves and have nots? Appealing to the greater good of our community and highlighting the very Australian attributes of the way we do business – open, transparent, relaxed, friendly, collaborative – can be our new positioning. Our product manufacturers can also derive a point of difference from geographic proximity to market (remember carbon miles) and leverage benefits such as the freshness, cleanliness and traceability of our ingredients. Lets get back to proudly proclaiming we are Australian owned.

For years we have resisted this type of patriotic marketing as anti-free-trade, narrow minded and just a bit naff. But now all bets are off. Buy Australian. Buy better.

Listen to Australian music. Read Australian books. Watch Australian movies. Use Australian streaming services (Stan not Netflix). And maybe once and for all get off the US-owned (un)social media platforms that are stealing our focus and radicalising our communities. 

Finally my own jingoistic pitch. If you’re planning to use an agency this year or put your business out to tender, think about how you can support Australians and independents. There  are a plethora of small to medium independents who can deliver Australian creativity using Australian knowhow, and whose meagre profits keep the money rolling through the Australian economy. 

Just a thought.

The post Tell Trump to jump, buy Australian appeared first on Fuller.

While double digit growth in premiums on the back of rising inflation and a slew of natural disasters haven’t helped the industry’s reputation, much of this damage can be sheeted back to poor brand communication.

The customers that are battling insurance affordability and availability don’t understand that increased exposure to risk comes at an increased cost. 

The fact that the industry manages more than 4 million claims a year with positive claims experiences for 90% of customers is lost on government regulators and the media who focus on the other 10%.

This means the industry is failing to attract smart young talent – especially women – at a time when technology such as AI and predictive modelling will threaten current work practices.    

The good news is that clients of insurance brokers have much higher trust levels than large companies. The Vero Insurance 2023 SME Index (undertaken by BrandMatters which was acquired by Fuller last year) shows that small to medium business satisfaction with insurance brokers is at 78%, well above pre-COVID levels. This satisfaction is particularly strong amongst larger businesses who value the pivotal role they play in explaining risk management and being a specialist risk adviser, whilst simultaneously acting as a true customer advocate.

“This is a testament to the strong relationships that brokers have with their clients and serves as evidence of the value of the profession to Australian business,” the report says.

Macro issues

The conference – which was something of a crystal ball summit – highlighted  a number of global trends and issues that are affecting the future of the industry.

Changing technology

The industry suffers from ageing IT systems, which were frequently bolted together as acquisitions occurred over time. These businesses are losing their competitive edge against faster moving companies that are adopting AI and predictive modelling technology to manage risk.  In this changing technology context many large, legacy insurers often appear as “deer in the headlights” paralysed by the need to change and unsure where to prioritise. The industry has long had a reputation for being slow to act and cope with technology transformation and is struggling with the challenges of the sheer volume of information and data points, the need for automation of these data points to deliver cost savings and the increasing sophistication required to leverage both these elements. 

Climate change

As one of the presenters highlighted at the conference, the increasing severity and frequency of catastrophic events has pushed up premiums by as much as 28% in some areas. In this new climate reality, insurers are distracted as they build a view across risk ratios and what risk is acceptable or not. How to define vulnerabilities in a rapidly changing climate and how to manage what are seen as solutions is the big challenge. For example, how does the industry respond to the desire by 85% of Australians to live near the coast when it is more vulnerable to storms and floods? And how does it manage the boom in EV technology when unstable lithium batteries may have an increased fire risk?

Regulation

Government regulators (and politicians) are increasingly frustrated with claims speed after catastrophic events. However, the sheer size of the workload after these disasters is beyond the capacity of most companies. Another presenter highlighted for example the Northern Rivers floods which created 224,000 individual claims in less than one week which is an impossible task for existing teams. Technology and its ability to process claims more quickly has a huge role to play here. 

Cyber risk

The insurance sector is a large holder of customer data and therefore represents a target for the global web of ransom-wear criminals. After Medibank Private and Optus, how prepared is the insurance sector for a breach?

Geopolitics

The ongoing geopolitical instability of wars in Europe and the Middle East is a chaotic environment for all industries but with 40 countries globally undertaking elections in the coming 12 months, the geopolitical outlook will be particularly unclear.

Implications through our lens of brand communication

Regulators are looking for insurers that have a clearly communicated internal culture around compliance, regulation and governance.  This includes fairness and transparency around policy wordings, claims, timeliness…and where the matter is grey erring on the side of the client. This includes reducing the inherent insurance product complexity within the insurance transaction. 

With this in mind companies need to set a clear purpose for their brands, beyond risk ratios, GWP and shareholder growth.
This means accepting the challenge of re-inventing their businesses around their customers.

• They need to do a better, clearer job of explaining to their customers what they are actually buying.
• They need to proactively control their brand’s narrative.
• They need to reduce complexity right across the insurance transaction with plain language, simplified graphics and the use of more contemporary explainer technologies such as video and animation.
• They need to take a positive community education role, becoming a thought leader in the press, on radio and on social media.
• They also need to build a sharper Employee Value Proposition (EVP) that seeks to attract and retain the best and brightest young talent who will drive the insuretech revolution.

In tough and turbulent times, clients seek the security offered by a strong, clear brand. 

Now is the time to refresh yours.

The post Rebuilding brand reputation in the insurance industry appeared first on Fuller.

I’m going to come out and say it. 

It’s time we got to know each other better. 

Sure, we meet around the coffee machine every morning. I know you have an oat milk latte and you probably know I have a short black with a dollop of froth. I know you’re an Essendon supporter (why for the love of God?) and I’m a rusted on Crows fanatic. You wear a lot of black. I wear a lot of blue. I cycle to work. You walk.

But I don’t think you really understand me. I don’t think you value what I do.

You see Harriet, I’m in marketing. Just across the open space near the aspidistra. Hidden amongst all the black t-shirts and baseball caps. Yep, that’s me waving now. 

You probably think we sit around lighting farts all day. Yes, we do laugh a lot over here in marketing. We are naturally optimistic, positive people. 

But there is a serious side to what we do. When you see our advertisements on TV or our billboards at the airport or our digital ads popping up on Instagram it’s not just because we had a thought balloon in the shower. 

It is part of a well planned and consistent strategy to protect our greatest asset — our company brand. 

We make sure that every customer understands our point of difference.

If we do our job correctly then our sales team can convince our customers to keep buying our products over our competitor’s…and we all get paid.

As the company’s HR Manager, you seem to be having less fun than me. You sit amongst a lot of suits who look worried all the time. I presume your mission is to try to find the best people to fill the positions we have. And of course you try to make them stay with us for as long as possible. Unless of course they are unconscious incompetents…and then you try to ease them out the door as humanely as possible. Right?

What I have overheard in the morning coffee machine chats from all of you in HR is that it’s much harder to find good people than it used to be.

I read in the media only the other day that Australian businesses are crying out for more workers and we’re in the middle of one of our largest ever labour shortages. In fact, late last year, there were more than 400,000 job vacancies. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australia’s unemployment rate sits at 3.9 per cent, a 48-year low, and the proportion of the adult population holding a job or actively looking for work has hit a record high 66.7 per cent.

I’d understand if there was just a shortage of aged care workers. But there aren’t enough teachers, nurses and GPs. There are never enough web developers or computer programmers (although Google and Twitter just freed up some desk space). I can’t get my bathroom re-tiled because there aren’t enough tradies.  And the bar staff at the local pub are so inexperienced, they don’t even know how to pour a decent beer (which you might think is their key skill).  

Where did all the trained staff go? I can understand a lot of backpackers went home to Europe and a lot of students went back to China during COVID. But what about everyone else? Are they all sitting around in Byron Bay sipping iced chai lattes and doing Wordle?

This must be a big worry for you Harriet. You hold the future of our company in your hands. We can’t grow without good people.  

Tell me if I’m wrong, but are you stirring the same old pot of talent around and around again? Are you still fishing from the same wharf using the same bait? Still relying on the tried and tested recruitment agencies? Seek.com? 

Can I make a suggestion? Why not sidle over to my aspidistra one day and have a chat. Isn’t it time to work together to build another brand for our company…an employer brand of choice.

While our marketing brand is all about our competitive value proposition, I imagine your employer brand is about employee value…what we deliver in terms of culture. A statistic I found from an article prior to COVID was revealing: 46 per cent of potential employees cite company culture as very important when choosing to apply to a company. 

I imagine that is a lot higher now as employees are seeking greater flexibility (such as working from home) and greater purpose (such as a chance to make a difference in areas such as climate change and reconciliation). 

I’d love to show you how we develop a brand strategy and how we could apply that to an employer brand. As well as identifying our big picture goal and our objectives I’d like to spend time getting to the core of our company story. What is our purpose? What gets us out of bed in the morning? What are our values and beliefs? What do we fight for?

I’d like to undertake some market research to find out more about the behaviours of the employees you want to attract.

Then we can develop messages that aren’t just a list of perks and benefits…like free parking and an annual Christmas party!  Shouldn’t we be telling our prospective employees that by working for us they get to change the world – or at least our small part of it – by working with others who share their values? Storytelling is what we are really good at, over here in aspidistra land. 

I’d like to show you how we use our marketing toolbox to engage our customers.

A great way to get started is to explore the features available on our LinkedIn company page. Like the new Company Commitments feature that highlights employer of choice benefits, from diversity and inclusion to environmental responsibility and work life balance. I’d also recommend using great content. When was the last time HR asked marketing to develop a video that told our employer brand story? We could add photographs and animation, original music and great design. We could even develop a podcast series. 

But we wouldn’t stop there. Our web people are just dying to make your employer brand portal so that our future employees can hook into our vibe. Then we would use data, algorithms and lots of other dark arts to communicate more directly with the precise type of employee we want to hire. We could even use outdoor and BVOD if we felt it was targeted enough, although we wouldn’t be recommending newspapers because who reads them?

What this all adds up to is catching the perfect whiting…using a fish finder and a carefully baited and sharpened hook; not a splash of burley in a restless ocean.

Precision is what marketing is all about these days. Together, we just have to start treating our employer brand the same as our company brand.

Imagine how we could make our culture feel simply irresistible. 

Tell you what Harriet. Why don’t we do lunch? 

Yours, Harry

The post When Harry met Harriet appeared first on Fuller.

A self-fulfilling prophecy is the psychological phenomenon where if someone expects or believes something enough, their behaviour will change to the point where the belief or prediction will actually come true. Defined by psychologists and sociologists in the 1920s and 1930s, the theory was probably first used to explain the runs on banks in the Depression. Spooked by rumours that their local bank was running out of money, customers would rush to withdraw their cash and unwittingly achieve the very outcome they feared. 

Self-fulfilling prophecies explain inexplicable success and failure in sport; unexpected political wins and losses; and (some believe) illnesses that patients thought they had…and therefore did.

If it is true that beliefs influence actions, it seems an unusual tactic by the new Federal Treasurer to dwell so heavily on the R word. Nothing is more likely to cause a recession (there I said it) than saying we are about to have one. But it seems our political leaders — not just here but in the vainglorious US and masochistic UK — are falling over themselves to talk things down. 

Certainly there are undeniable headwinds facing us. The Russo-Ukrainian war has impacted the international economy, driving up inflation and our cost of living. Central banks have responded like Fred Flinstone using the bludgeon of higher interest rates to stop us spending. It seems that having survived the biggest pandemic in a century, governments are hell bent on bursting the balloon of pent up consumer optimism that could have repaired our economy. 

To politicians and economics commentators and media pundits, get a grip.

Through the economic challenges of the late 1980s and early 1990s (when inflation ran at 10 per cent and interest rates topped out at 18 per cent), through the Millenium drought from 2001 to 2009, the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2010 and the COVID pandemic, there’s been no evidence that negativity and pessimism improves outcomes.

Despite every challenge thrown at us (and I’m sure the current floods in the eastern states will be the same) people have demonstrated an incredible capacity to get on with living. During all the wars and disasters that have befallen humanity we refuse to give up. We find a partner, we get married or live together, we buy or build houses (often in areas we don’t initially want to live, but understand it’s a stepping stone), we start families, update our worn out cars and washing machines and fridges. We might tighten our belts by eating out less or taking fewer holidays but essentially we continue on…because what other choice do we have with our 80 or so allotted years. Most people do not want to live their lives in fear..they want to live with optimism and joy.

During these periods I draw positivity from perspective. Looking at what has come before is always a good roadmap for the future. So I was encouraged to read this blog from entrepreneur Kelly Bertog pointing out that some of the world’s longest lasting and most successful businesses started during recessions. 

General Electric for example was started in 1892 by Thomas Edison just as the US economy was tumbling into the greatest depression of the 19th century. It’s now a $100 billion company that has reinvented itself as a power, renewables, aviation and healthcare multinational. 

Determined in his belief that the automobile would be the way of the future, horse-drawn carriage manufacturer William Durant purchased the Buick Motor Company in 1904 and then in 1908, just as the world was tumbling into recession, he created General Motors as a holding company to acquire other automobile manufacturers and boost his market share. 

It’s a well-known story that in 1928, brothers Walt and Roy Disney introduced Mickey Mouse in their short-animated feature Steamboat Willie. A year later in 1929, the duo incorporated Walt Disney Productions just as the Great Depression was starting. The fact that the world needed a good laugh enabled them to grow their business during the toughest of times. In fact film producers and movie houses had their golden years during this economic downturn because people wanted to escape.

During the US recession of 1958, entrepreneur Jay Pritzker purchased the Hyatt House motel near Los Angeles International Airport. Even with business activity and travel slowing during the tough economic times, Pritzker bought two more hotels in that decade. Eventually, the Hyatt chain grew to nearly 900 properties, and annual revenues exceeding $5 billion dollars.

The 1973 Middle East oil crisis and resultant stock market crash didn’t stop Bill Gates and Paul Allen from developing their new computer software business Microsoft, which launched on April 4, 1975, days after the recession was considered officially over. 

It’s easy to dismiss these as phenomenons of the golden years of business during a long lost, nostalgic 20th century. 

But in more recent times we’ve seen similar success stories. 

Ryan Van, writing for Lawpath, points out that it was only in 2009, just as America was recovering from the GFC, that Uber revolutionised public transport and food delivery. Love it or hate it, Uber now has more than 100 million active monthly users worldwide.

Another post-GFC start-up was Airbnb, launched in 2008 by three college students who had an idea to rent out a mattress in their living room. Soon after, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk started Air Bed & Breakfast.

Closer to home, Van points out one of the most successful Australian survivors of multiple recessions (including COVID) has been JB Hi-Fi which launched in Australia in mid-1974. Australia was in an economic recession, recovering from the 1973 oil crisis when founder John Barbuto’s opened a store with a simple mission – deliver a unique range of music for the lowest price possible. 

In 1973, passionate surfer Gordon Merchant and his wife Rena started Billabong, again during the international recession caused by the oil crisis — again an international success.

The 1982-83 post Vietnam war recession did little to deter Gerry Harvey and Ian Norman from starting their home retail chain, Harvey Norman. Today, the pair have launched nearly 200 franchises across Australia and more than 100 stores in offshore locations…and employ 5,500 people.

There are of course thousands of other businesses who didn’t just start during a recession but ploughed through it, to be rewarded with success (and a lot of grey hair).

The real challenge during recessions is seeing opportunity and acting upon them. There are some common trends that emerge out of these business success stories.  

Convenience drives customers, and General Electric, Hyatt and MYOB recognised that making their customer’s lives easier was a strong selling point.

Being first to market with new technology was the story of General Motors’s success. It is also the reason Microsoft and MYOB have retained market leadership as they keep innovating and leading.

Price and affordability, while still delivering value and quality, are also threads common to Hyatt, Airbnb and Cotton On.

And then there’s the lure of escapism presented by widely divergent companies such as film-maker Disney and beach-wear manufacturer, Billabong.

Marketers have spent the last decade using data to connect them with customer needs, punting on giving consumers what they want before they even ask. Digital marketing is so precise that it can define the exact needs and location of a consumer and then show up on their virtual doorstep offering them products they never thought they needed. 

However, things may be changing. Professional services firm Accenture warns in one of its recent Insight reports that post-COVID, a new paradoxical behaviour is emerging amongst consumers that business is struggling to understand.

Banks have been told by Big Data that consumers want convenience but in fact what they really want from their financial institution is trust.

Trust in airlines is also the primary need of travellers. Yet Qantas spends too much of its marketing budget assuring us it is “The Spirit of Australia”,  without delivering on its promise of getting us from A to B without cancellations.

Companies that sell consumer goods are obsessed with the convenience of online shopping, yet increasingly consumers want to see more sustainability rather than range and choice.

 This lack of connection between companies and their consumers is creating unrest in the boardroom. Accenture says 88 per cent of executives think their customers are changing faster than their businesses can keep up.

The take home message is that to win the hearts and minds of consumers during a changing economic and political environment, businesses need to be less customer centric and more “life-centric” — understanding the micro differences between people that are not covered by boxes such a Gen Y and Z.

Evolving products such as Youi, the insurance company that personalises your motor policy based on usage, is one such businesses that recognised human difference. Credit approval and home loan apps are similar responses to the need to take control of your life when you want to. Accenture also references Blue Buffalo, a pet nutrition company that provides information on how to manage the family dog or cat via content shared on a digital app.  Scratch is a similar Australian company that delivers pet food to your door, offering convenience as well as quality and value.

Certainly there are challenges ahead but also opportunities. Businesses and organisations that understand the resilience of their customers and offer to partner with them, to make their lives easier and more affordable, more meaningful and purposeful, will triumph.

The only self fulfilling prophecy that we should live by is that we are brave and courageous. Positive persistence trumps pessimism every day. 

The post The age of opportunity appeared first on Fuller.

Evidently this “exploration, celebration and amplification of the growing momentum around ethical, regenerative and social impact business” has been running since 2015 — who knew? And it is no fringe event for transcendentalists — this year’s speakers include Simon Holmes á Court from Climate 200, the Chief Purpose Officer of KPMG, Richard Boele and Chief Impact Officer at Bank Australia, Dr Sasha Courville as well as a host of purpose driven start-ups. 

Where economist Milton Friedman once said the social responsibility of every business was to increase profits, in the last 15 years, purpose has become intertwined with profit as corporates “rethink value and how it is created”. 

Cynical CEOs and Boards take note — your employees and your customers are happy for your company to make money, but they also want you to address issues such as sustainability, inequality, diversity and digitisation, according to EY Global. 

For a contemporary case study, look no further than Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, who last week gave away his US $4.4 Billion company divesting 2% of all stock and decision-making authority to a trust, and the other 98% to a non-profit called the Holdfast Collective, which “will use every dollar received to fight the environmental crisis, protect nature and biodiversity, and support thriving communities, as quickly as possible”, according to the statement.

It would be easy to say that the rise and rise of business with purpose is a new post-COVID back-to-basics fad. But we have just been reminded that a large part of Queen Elizabeth II’s public appeal was her apparent lack of personal self-indulgence (other than a Dubonnet and gin before dinner and a bang-on funeral).

Former PM Paul Keating’s statement on her death summed it up well:

“In the 20th century, the self became privatised, while the public realm, the realm of the public good, was broadly neglected. Queen Elizabeth II understood this and instinctively attached herself to the public good against what she recognised as a tidal wave of private interest and private reward.”

The Queen stood as a conservative alternative to the acquisitive capitalism of the Post War 60s, the narcissism of the 1970s ‘Me’ generation, the vulgar overspending of the 1980s — and the obsession with self that has transpired ever since with the proliferation of social media such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

Now we are seeing a new generation of Zs (born 1997 to 2012) who are rebelling similarly against excess with their powerful commitment to purpose. These digital natives are the School Strike for Climate tribe, or as Forbes magazine says, “the sustainability generation”. 

“The pandemic didn’t start the sustainability revolution, but it has put it into hyperdrive, and Gen Z is in the driver’s seat.”

For the last eight months, Fuller has been working closely with the Department of Premier and Cabinet to develop a new immigration recruitment strategy for South Australia, and together we were proud to launch A New State of Mind several weeks ago. The creative was developed completely in SA with local producers, videographers, artists and musicians.

 The exciting difference about this campaign is that it is not just trying to make Adelaide look like Melbourne or Sydney — we will never be them. It is not trumpeting our ‘20 minutes from the beach’ lifestyle which doesn’t, at the end of the day, guarantee a fulfilling career. Nor is it trying to get just any bum on any Qantas seat — we are flush with over 55s.

It is a hyper-targeted campaign designed to address the important shortfall of 20-40 year olds in South Australia and attract those who will go on to build our state with their innovative thinking and technical skills — these are the socially aware Gen Zs.

Extensive research by the Department of Premier and Cabinet undertaken with young people who had already moved to SA in the last few years found that this is “the place you live if you want to live with purpose, where your actions can have lasting results.”

The essential premise of the campaign strategy is that if you want to attract global talent away from big, impersonalised cold cities you have to play to our advantages — small, connected….and purposeful. As the campaign says:

“A New State of Mind isn’t about status. It’s an identity of power to make change; make your mark. It’s for people like you, wanting to renew. It’s about rediscovering South Australia as a diverse, progressive, sustainable and innovative state world-changers choose to call home.

“Recalibrate, reset, rejuvenate, reignite … whatever way you look at it, a New State of Mind is calling you to make a move. To surround yourself with game changers, world leaders, innovators and eco warriors. The ripple effect is in motion. Are you ready to be part of it?”

This isn’t simple advertising hyperbole — it’s truth.

If you were born here it’s ingrained in your DNA that we were one of the first free settlements in the world. There were no convicts, there was no martial law. The pioneers that arrived from grey London, squinting at the southern sun, could practice religious and political freedom unheard of in the old country. 

It’s of course jarring that, to achieve this freedom, the indigenous landowners had to give up theirs. But at least we were the first Australian colony to ensure evidence from Aboriginals could be accepted in courts of law (1844), the first to offer the vote to Aboriginal men alongside white men (1856) and the first colony in Australia (and the fourth place in the world) to grant adult women the right to vote…and this included Aboriginal women (1894).

We are proud of many other social achievements: South Australia was the first part of the British Empire to legalise trade unions (1876); the first to prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, colour or country of origin (1966); the first to decriminalise homsexuality (1975) and the first to return freehold title to Aboriginal communities (The Pitjantjatjara Land Rights Act 1976).

Today we take these things for granted, but it took courage and a sense of destiny to achieve these reforms in the 19th and 20th century — all because we were settled with a purpose.

At the launch of A New State of Mind, Premier Peter Malinauskas said “this is South Australia’s time”.  

He spoke eloquently without notes but the gist of his speech was, that despite our ethical leadership, other states have been more materially successful than us. 

Victoria’s gold rush of the 1850s and 1860s pumped billions of pounds into the state’s economy and set it up as Australia’s economic capital. New South Wales and Queensland benefited from the coal boom of the last century, and they became economic powerhouses through steel, electricity generation and heavy industry. Western Australia captured much of the new wealth in Australia from the late 20th century through the fortunes of iron ore and other metals.

The Premier said our leadership in climate-friendly technology (we now rival Denmark as number one in wind and solar power generation in the world, and we expect to be the largest global generator of green hydrogen by 2025) and our optimistic outlook in defence, space, high value metals mining, health, medical and creative industries as well as wine, food and agribusiness positions us as an exciting 21st century global hub.

This is the place and this is the time.

It is up to us to take up the challenge, tell the story and drive a new purposeful generation of South Australians.

The US anti-slavery campaigner Ralph Waldo Emerson may well have written the mantra for our New State of Mind 150 years ago: 

“The purpose of life…is to be useful, to be honourable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

The post This is our time appeared first on Fuller.

Imagine sprawling on a picnic rug sipping champagne on a warm, balmy night, with the sun setting in broad brush strokes of orange and red and lapis lazuli over the nearby rolling waves of a pristine beach.

Meanwhile, you’re watching — shoulder to shoulder with around 3000 other spell-bound souls — a spectacular drama that tells a 60,000 year old story through dance, music and video.

This is not Sydney or Noosa or Byron Bay. It’s not Venice or Sicily.

It’s Australia’s most Australian city, Darwin.

I’m like many Australians who grew up with a vision of the Gateway to Asia as a place where beer gutted, navy-singletted blokes consumed outsized Darwin ‘stubbies’ in quantity. Where thongs and shorts were de rigueur. Where Crocodile Dundees entered town in battered 4WDs after a week of cattle droving, in scenes reminiscent of gun slinging Western movies. Where women waited at home in printed shifts cooking kilos of meat for their men, dragging on a cigarette and brushing away barefoot children. Where kangaroos thudded down Cavenagh street at midday. Where the Big Wet drove sane people crazy.

But the ‘new’ Darwin is a world away from that caricature. It is now a multicultural blend of Asian, Aboriginal, South American and European faces, voices and food that is rapidly developing a reputation as one of Australia’s most sophisticated and creative capitals.

The recent launch of this year’s Darwin Festival — and the weekend of creative events that followed it — was another chance to experience this reputational rebrand and wonder at how it has been achieved.

A brand is a heart story, not a logo or a concocted tagline. It must be authentic and it must be based on deep unassailable truth.

The sustained efforts of the Top End’s highly collaborative art community, to position Darwin as the country’s indigenous creativity centre, have provided the foundation for this “truth” brand.

Founded in 1984, the Telstra NATSIAA (National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards) are now the richest art awards in the country, thanks to the generosity of our big Aussie telco. The winner receives a career changing $100,000 and another $90,000 is split across categories embracing general painting, bark painting, works on paper, 3D, multimedia and emerging. The awards this year went to  internationally significant contemporary art pieces whose creators will be feted by gallerists and investors from New York to Paris to London.

Running alongside the awards is the DAAF (Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair) which showcases more than 2,000 works from 70 communities and has generated 11.6 million dollars in sales over the past five years. This is a chance for art lovers to experience authentic, certified paintings, sculpture and other works, a far cry from the mass produced souvenirs that masquerade as Aboriginal ‘art’ at airports and tourist spots. 

The NATSIAA and DAAF (one does grow weary of the enthusiasm for acronyms but that, unfortunately, is the arts) has also spawned a whole secondary industry of retail and wholesale art galleries and consultants who take indigenous art to the salons of the world’s rich and famous. 

Then there are the National Indigenous Music Awards. This year’s winners, revealed at a Saturday night outdoor concert, provided more proof of this Top End city’s indigenous creative leadership. For more than a decade the awards have launched careers such as Baker Boy, Dan Sultan, Jessica Mauboy and Thelma Plum and celebrated heroes such as Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu and Archie Roach. 

The Darwin Festival itself is an eclectic fortnight of “Hot August Nights” featuring everything from the Australian Ballet to Tim Minchin to Tom Gleeson to electro indie pop group Telenova. The opening night that I described above was a spectacular free outdoor event showcasing the spellbinding music of Gurrumul with the Darwin Symphony Orchestra.

While this artistic and indigenous community collaboration is the visible and experiential illustration of ‘Brand Darwin’, like all good brands, there is a very deliberate strategic plan that sits behind it. 

A City of Darwin community consultation process in 2018 led to a ten-year transformation plan, called ‘Darwin 2030: City for People, City of Colour’.

“City for People recognises Darwin as the most culturally diverse and inclusive city in Australia. City of Colour recognises our vibrant event season and significant landscape across the municipality,” is the plan’s mantra.

While I suspect that the plan battled during COVID, it seems to be firing now, evidenced by the warm embrace of the Festival by locals and tourists last weekend and a packed schedule of sporting, fishing, motoring and food events that will roll out during the rest of the year.

Of course not everything about this ambitious re-brand is perfect…yet. 

Delivering the promise is not always easy or straightforward for a population of just 85,000 people, where 31 per cent were born overseas and 27 per cent have English as their second language. But at places like the Parap Markets, diversity and multiculturalism is a living and breathing street theatre performed to the scent of laksa, pad thai and espresso. There is no artifice here, just happy humanity.

There is the usual battle to supply quality tourist accommodation in the high season (remembering that during the summer wet season tourism dries up). But there is an ongoing and substantial investment in recreational and hospitality facilities, especially in the Waterfront restaurant strip.

It is important too that there has been no attempt to sanitise or filter the day-to-day experience of living in a city where Aboriginal people make up 7.4 per cent of the population (more than double Australia’s average indigenous ratio of 3 per cent). For the majority of urban Australians who have never met an Aboriginal person, this is a privileged opportunity to start a reconciliation conversation with First Australians.

And while the heat and humidity are unavoidable, Darwin weather is strangely cathartic — and a lot more exciting than the plasticity of the Gold Coast — after a chilled southern winter. 

The takeaway for marketers is that in re-modeling itself over the last 10 or 20 years, Darwin has been true to itself and it is this very honesty that makes its brand so appealing and engaging.

Like its namesake, it has captured the essence of evolution rather than revolution, and in doing so challenged many other Australian city brands with its clarity and confidence.

Feature image credit: Darwin Festival

The post The city of hot August nights appeared first on Fuller.

For most Australians, the Statement from the Heart will be about as familiar as Appendix 23 in the Budget papers. You’re more likely to know the lyrics of Waltzing Matilda, even though it was released five years ago.

That a majority of Australians would not be able to recall even a few words of this gracious document or understand what it means, is an indictment on a political era that has functioned on fear. 

Changing that ignorance and achieving a positive referendum result will be a monumental communications exercise for the new Government. 

The most recent polling conducted by the Guardian suggests that more than half the sample — 52 per cent  — now support a treaty with Indigenous Australians. This is a five-point increase from 2017, when the question was last asked.

53 per cent of respondents also supported a constitutionally enshrined voice to parliament in line with the Uluru statement, an eight-point increase since 2017. 

Even though half of us support the idea of constitutional recognition, many of us still feel helpless about how to achieve it.

As we reach the end of National Reconciliation Week 2022, a first step might be to familiarise ourselves with the text.

ULURU STATEMENT FROM THE HEART 

We, gathered at the 2017 National Constitutional Convention, coming from all points of the southern sky, make this statement from the heart: 

Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs. This our ancestors did, according to the reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, according to the common law from ‘time immemorial’, and according to science more than 60,000 years ago. 

This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown. 

How could it be otherwise? That peoples possessed a land for sixty millennia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the last two hundred years? 

With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood. 

Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are alienated from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future. 

These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness. 

We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country. 

We call for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution. 

Makarrata is the culmination of our agenda: the coming together after a struggle. It captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination. 

We seek a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history. 

In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard. We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.

The new Labor government has essentially adopted a staged approach to change.

Firstly a First Nations voice to parliament, a forum through which First Nations can advocate to the parliament and government. This voice will be enshrined in the constitution, so it cannot be removed by any current or future government. 

The Government hopes that the referendum will be held in 2024.

Secondly, the statement calls for a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making. “Makarrata” is a Yolngu word that means to make peace. 

Built into the Makarrata Commision will be the third stage: truth telling. 

The details of this final stage remain unclear, but it is expected that the commission would be unbiased and open in uncovering injustices experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, much as the inquiry into the stolen generation in the late 1990s did.

The communication challenges

While the Statement is not exactly a call to revolution, Australia has been incredibly slow to deliver constitutional rights to Indigenous people.

It’s more than a century since South Australia became the first electorate in the world to give equal political rights to both women and men, including Indigenous men and women. 

However, it took until 1962 for the The Commonwealth Electoral Act to grant all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people the option to enrol and vote in federal elections — but enrollment was not compulsory. It was not until 1984 (almost a century after the SA law change) that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people gained full equality with other electors under the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment Act 1983. This Act made enrolling to vote at federal elections compulsory for Indigenous Australians.

The last indigenous-issue referendum was in 1967 when Australians voted overwhelmingly to amend the Constitution to allow the Commonwealth to make laws for Aboriginal people and include them in the census. That was so unanimous (91 per cent) that a ‘No’ case was not even developed.

But that history of success is not typical of referendums in Australia. 

As constitutional lawyer Greg Craven wrote in The Weekend Australian: “The Australian people are by disposition constitutionally cautious. They know they have a pretty good Constitution, so they will not change if they perceive the least danger.”

Craven argues that this referendum will “not be about good media and attractive packaging.”

“As many opinion leaders as possible – plus some more – need to be in favour of the voice.”

He is nevertheless optimistic based on the move by the nation’s religious leaders — from Catholics and Anglicans to Hindus and Moslems — to support the Statement immediately after the election.

“This unprecedented alliance shows….the voice is not a fringe issue promoted by Indigenous activists and their leftie allies. It has the considered support of a vast array of serious people concerned with serious issues,” he says.

Fuller Brand Communication is an apolitical agency that has never abused the trust of our staff or clients by taking party political sides in elections. We, like most other small businesses and corporations, don’t want this reflection on several hundred years of neglect, to be another unseemly political shouting match. 

We want this to be a positive contribution to the healing of our country.

How the business community can be an example of leadership

Back in 2019, fourteen Australian organisations united for National Reconciliation Week to support the Uluru Statement from the Heart. 

The ‘Response to the Uluru Statement’ was developed by BHP, Curtin University, Herbert Smith Freehills, IAG, KPMG, Lendlease, National Rugby League, PwC Australia, PwC’s Indigenous Consulting, Qantas, Richmond Football Club, Rio Tinto, Swinburne University of Technology and Woodside.

The response supported the call for a referendum to enable constitutional reform and encourage others to join in the national dialogue.

Sadly, it is not clear from my research if that Response is still valid or indeed if there have been other signatories. 

However, one thing the organisations did have in common was a Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP).

Since 2006, Reconciliation Action Plans (RAPs)  have enabled organisations to strategically take action to advance reconciliation.

RAPs are based on the core pillars of relationships, respect and opportunities, and they provide tangible and substantive benefits for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. This includes employment opportunities, economic equity and support for self-determination. 

RAPs assist businesses to embed the principles and purpose of reconciliation. The RAP network is a diverse group of more than 1,100 organisations that directly impact over three million Australians at work every day.

As a small business that is currently working our way through our own Reconciliation Action Plan, I can say that while the process is necessarily confronting and challenging it is also culturally unifying and enormously rewarding.

We have all learnt more about our unconscious biases and reflected on how our communications industry (and the media we often work in partnership with) have been part of the problem, but should now be part of the solution.  

There are only a few times in our lives when we can make a real contribution to history that will be remembered by our grandchildren. This is one of those times. 

The post A heart statement for all Australians appeared first on Fuller.

I also love it because it is one of the best independent book sellers in Australia. It punches above its meagre weight in its depth and breadth of titles, it has a talented and well-read staff and the coffee is sustaining on a freezing Tassie day, as the grey rain slates the windows. 

Since it was founded 102 years ago by bookseller Bill Fuller, it has also played a quite unique community leadership role. It has published local history books enabling Tasmanians to tell their stories, it supports Tasmanian authors with readings and book signings and it gets involved in local cultural activities.

Its most recent campaign that caught my eye was Connect 42, a bid to improve literacy in Tasmania. 

Now, for a moment, just consider this long lunch conversation starter:

One in two working age Tasmanians are functionally illiterate.

That’s 50 per cent of all men and women between the ages of 16 and 65. 

Half the patrons on the Spirit of Tasmania ferry. Half of the locals who visit MONA. And half the crowd in the New Sydney Hotel on a Saturday night (a minimum, I’d say), who don’t possess the reading and writing skills required to manage daily living and employment tasks.

Staggering isn’t it. 

Levelling-up literacy

Connect 42 (part of the Tasmanian 100 per cent Literacy Alliance) is doing something about it. It aims to double literacy by 2030 so that Tassie kids can catch up with the progress other states are making (for example, South Australian Year 1 literacy scores have improved from a 43 per cent achievement rate in 2018 to 63 per cent in 2021).

But lest we all gravely tug at our chins and take cheap shots at the Taswegians, there is another equally disarming fact. 

According to the OECD, 40 to 50 per cent of adults in Australia have literacy levels below the international standard required for participation in work, education and society. If there is any good news, the OECD numbers show our literacy rates are similar to New Zealand and actually better than in the United Kingdom and US.

In a survey of adult skills conducted by the OECD in Australia, Australian adults scored fifth out of participating countries for literacy — after Japan, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden. The United Kingdom and the US scored at 15th and 17th respectively. 

So this inability to grapple with basic words and numbers is not just a Tasmanian or Australian thing. It’s global…and I imagine it only got a lot worse over the last two years of education interruptus.

I don’t know why I’m surprised. Back when I worked in newspapers, crusty sub editors told us to take out words with more than six letters. The view was that the general population reading level was about that of a second year high school student. 

Last week I decided to go back and check the Government Style Manual (the once mandatory Bible that sat on every editor’s desk) to see if the level of language used in general communication has changed. 

Apparently not.  

According to the Manual, in Australia about 44 per cent of adults read at literacy level 1 to 2 (a primary school equivalent level where they understand short sentences). Only 15 per cent read at level 4 to 5 (the highest level).

This illiteracy pandemic can’t be easily explained away by Australia’s rise in migration. 

According to the 2016 census, 73 per cent of Australians speak English as the only language at home which leaves about 27 per cent who are multilingual. But of the 25.3 million people in Australia, only about one million do not speak English at all.

According to Adult Learning Australia, 68 per cent of callers to their Reading Writing Hotline in 2020 were not from Aleppo or Damascus or Beirut. Most were from English speaking backgrounds and went through school in Australia. 

Adult Learning Australia says: “another mistaken belief is that it is young people who don’t have the literacy skills for work and study.”

The ABS’ Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies revealed that it is older Australians, aged 60+, with the lowest literacy rates.

And 60 per cent of callers to the Reading Writing Hotline are men, mostly in the 44 to 65 age group. The boys who were teasing the girls in the back row during the 60s, 70s and 80s are the long term victims of their own inattention.

The communications challenge

I assume most of you who are reading this essay are interested in the business of communication — how to convey a message to an audience to engage them, create behaviour change, sell a product or a service.  

We as a group of creative people go to extraordinary lengths to develop communication campaigns. 

We undertake research to determine the behaviours of our target audiences — what they read, drink, eat, what entertains them, where they travel, whether they have children and/or dogs and/or cats, whether they own their own homes or are renting, what they drive or don’t drive. 

We never check if they can read.  

Our writers craft conceptual messages, leading to a few, pared back inspiring emotional one liners that will elicit a response. Pure poetry.

Then our artists craft visuals to add a heightened level of connection; the videographers take these cues and make movies; animators make the unreal, real.

We then test the idea with a panel of representative consumers who give it their thumbs up or down.

Then it hits the streets and we stand back and watch and measure whether our campaign has stopped people crashing into themselves on the roads, or checking Facebook while driving. 

We might be trying to encourage them to give their hard-earned cash to a charity. Choose a new car. Buy some tight jeans from The Iconic. 

And if the campaign doesn’t work, we blame the concept, the channel or the media spend.

In fact, what we now know is that half of our target audiences may not have the capacity to read or understand what we are talking about. 

So what do we do as communicators? Keep firing the shotgun into the fog hoping to hit something? Or start thinking about our messaging and channels in a more sophisticated way?

Language localisation  

Language localisation is a field of study that addresses this issue.

“The main goal of localisation is to give your product, offering, service, or even just simply your content, the look and feel of one created specifically for your new target market, irrespective of their native language, local culture, or religion.”

Localisation is a product of the increasing globalisation of society…but it is not the same thing.

Globalisation is the interconnection of the world through trade, communications, and travel. Localisation is the strategy of adapting products and services for specific locales and cultures. 

Wikipedia says: The localisation process is most generally related to the cultural adaptation and translation of software, video games, websites, and technical communication, as well as audio/voiceover, video, or other multimedia content, and less frequently to any written translation (which may also involve cultural adaptation processes). 

So, fellow brand communication trendsetters, how do we fine tune our campaigns so they hit the mark amongst people with different cultural and literacy skills?

Language localisation specialist Lee Densmer says that while we can make sentences simpler, really it is pictures that are worth a thousand words.

“The advantages of using visual storytelling over text go well beyond making it comprehensible for low literacy populations: images are easier for anyone to comprehend quickly, and the information is absorbed faster and resonates longer,” she says.

“Show your audience the story and they’ll become much more invested in it as they start to see life through the eyes of the characters and, most importantly, work things out for themselves. Images trigger the emotional brain.”

The brand brains at Branding Strategy Insider reinforce this message. 

“The emotional brain processes sensory information in one fifth of the time our cognitive brain takes to assimilate the same input,” they say.

“In a world where the trend is for consumers, regardless of their literacy level, to spend less time engaging with your marketing, having someone process your message in two seconds instead of ten makes a massive difference. 

“90% of the information transmitted to your brain is visual, and it processes images 60,000 times faster than text.

“Literacy considerations aside, visuals are faster to process, easier to remember and cheaper to localise.”

As a professional writer I can feel fearful…or freed up by this information. I choose the latter. 

We know in our own agency that the requirements for video and animation is growing exponentially as clients seek greater connection with every age group and demographic. 

One of the best examples is a recent pro-bono campaign that we developed for an indigenous fresh food supply business in Alice Springs. 

Kere to Country is a good strategic case study of how storytelling graphics were used to communicate with isolated communities in the Northern Territory. 

The people in these communities might speak three or four different languages — English being the least widespread — so it was essential to adopt the lessons of localisation to achieve cut-through.  

Through our Fellowship program we have also developed a diversity language guide that makes communication more targeted and inclusive.

The take home message is that the illiteracy suffered by around half of adult workers in Australia (and the world), is a far more serious pandemic than the one we have just learnt to manage with vaccines and masks.

This is now a serious equity issue, a threat to a harmonious, amicable and balanced society. Radical political and terrorist organisations feed on those who haven’t learnt to read, absorb information objectively and make considered judgements. Family violence often stems from male frustration and feelings of inadequacy.

It’s time to campaign not just for more funding and better teachers, but a new approach to educating those who consistently slip through the cracks of our system — boys and young men, Australia’s First Nations people and those from marginalised families. 

As communicators we have to do more than talk. We have to own this challenge.

If you would like to donate to Connect 42, you can visit their website.

The post Read it and weep appeared first on Fuller.

In business, brand loyalty ⁠is the holy grail. Maintaining the loyalty of your current customers is a lot easier than finding new ones, and rebuilding loyalty is a long hard road back. 

It’s the same in politics. Too often our elected members believe loyalty is something that can be purchased for a few shekels. But as the South Australian Liberal Government learnt last weekend, loyalty is a commodity that has to be won, not taken for granted.

Therefore, it’s fair to ask, is loyalty the “heart of all virtues” it once was? 

Since the corner shop closed, we’ve been well trained by the likes of Woolies and Coles and Aldi to shift our loyalties from one supermarket to another just to save 49 cents on toilet paper. They have created a self-fulfilling prophecy of disloyalty where “lowest price” is apparently the only determinant of customer satisfaction.

We’ve let our electronics retailers and high street clothing stores wither and die to grab an online bargain that we hope will work…or fit. We move houses, cities and countries. We swap partners like iPhones. We change jobs almost as often as our underwear. 

Until a few weeks ago I would have thought that we were a universe away from that era where explorers used to set off to the edge of the world in flimsy boats, based on a thought bubble from their king or queen; when astronauts were rocketed into space with only a vague promise of a return flight; or the time when people used to work in the same job for fifty years with their only reward, a gold watch, often followed by a heart attack. 

Would 38% of the male population of Australia voluntarily enlist to leap out of trenches with the certain expectation of machine gun death? That is what happened between 1914 and 1918, when 400,000 soldiers sailed off to WWI. In today’s terms that is the equivalent of more than 4.5 million Australian men prepared to give up their hair product and Diesel jeans and craft beer for a chance to get shot. Not likely, bro!

But as we’re seeing on our 24 hour news feeds, loyalty to country is a visceral instinct that cannot and should not be underestimated in any generation.

Here we are in March 2022 and Ukrainian men and women from all over the world are falling over themselves to return and fight for the motherland. Every male — even 60 year olds — must enlist regardless of their ability to recognise one end of a tank from another. Teenage girls, housewives and old men are learning how to fire AK-74 submachine guns, while Molotov cocktails are being manufactured in cellars alongside home brew vodka and pickled borsch. 

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is not in Hawaii, he’s dressed in Army greens and fronting his main military asset ⁠— people.   

Impressive as this nationalism seems, not much thought has been given to the capacity of a Russian enemy which is highly trained and well equipped to deliver death. 26 million Russians (including Ukranians) lost their lives in WWII because Stalin’s approach was a numbers game of cannon fodder attrition, and Putin is shaping up to be his protege.

But then body counts always come after the smoke clears.

For those of us who grew up in the Cold War 1960s, it seems unthinkable that East and West are again tumbling towards nuclear brinkmanship. Yet that is how perennially fragile peace is. Love of country runs deep and history shows that world wars have started with a lot less provocation than this…and that the dry firewood of nationalistic loyalty is always waiting for a match. 

As Mark Twain said soon after the US Civil War, “Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.”

The SA Liberal Government may have presumed that after shepherding its voters through a 24-month COVID “valley of death” it could expect some gratitude in the polling booths. Clearly it was badly wrong.

As a nation we are not noted for our love of big government. Yet when the pandemic started in Australia in February 2020, the freedom-loving Australian public bowed uncharacteristically to authority. 

There was a willingness to make sacrifices for the greater good unlike anything we had seen for decades. We stopped travelling. Businesses sent their workers home. Retailers closed their doors and reluctantly subsisted on government breadcrumbs. Sporting competitions were held on spectator-less grounds. We waved at our ageing parents through double glazing and learnt how to enjoy Friday night drinks on Zoom.

No-one liked it, but other than a sprinkling of lunatic anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, we all tolerated it. Remarkably there was bipartisan backing for the decisive leadership of our Federal and State governments (and their celebrity health advisers) to lock us down.

But two years on, a weariness has set in.

For many South Australians who vaxxed once, then twice then boosted; who stayed home over Christmas instead of seeing the in-laws; who lost their hospitality businesses; had to find RATs that were more expensive than a six pack of beer; and were then buffeted by disruptive rounds of close contact isolation and quarantine, the shine of patient loyalty finally wore off at the weekend.

Voters want consistency and predictability. They also want to be listened to, rather than talked at. 

It is more than likely that this same frustration could boil over at the Federal ballot box in May. After 700 or so sleepless COVID nights, and baggy-eyed months of campaigning, the Prime Minister’s reward could well be a return to Opposition.

But history shows that we are no more fickle in our loyalty to governments, than our grandparents. 

Conservative Robert Menzies seemed to personify dignified trustworthiness when he was sworn in on 26 April 1939 as Australia’s 12th Prime Minister. A few months later the country was right behind him when he shared his  “melancholy duty” to commit us to World War II. But he stepped down in 1941 to make way for a united war cabinet, and we changed governments and leaders five times during the decade of greatest threat to our national security since Federation.

In the UK, Winston Churchill pulled off an “against all odds” British victory in World War II. He served as Conservative Prime Minister twice — from 1940 to 1945 — but just as the Nazis surrendered and the guns were silenced he was defeated in the 1945 general election by the Labour leader Clement Attlee. 

Despite an 83% approval rating and hero status as the PM who saved the Commonwealth, the election was a landslide to Labour. The public who trusted Churchill as a war leader didn’t believe he had the ticker to manage a reconstruction economy, and told him so.

Only one self-evident truth persists: since Brutus shafted Caesar, politics continues to be the very profession where disloyalty is almost a prerequisite.

So to brand loyalty. Boards, CEOs and marketing managers constantly strive for this intangible long-term feeling of trust, “a dedication by customers to purchasing the brand’s products and/or services repeatedly, regardless of deficiencies, a competitor’s actions, or changes in the environment,” according to Wikipedia.

After the tumult of the last two years, how is your brand shaping up? 

Is it time to invest in market research to determine your customer’s attitudes towards your products and services? Is it time to listen as well as talk? Have you undertaken an audit of the performance of your digital marketing, to gather valuable data about customer engagement? Have you reviewed your website and made a plan to upgrade? 

While most companies and organisations continued to invest in their marketing during COVID to ensure their brands were not forgotten, now is the time to commence a new marketing strategy based on what we’ve learned from the pandemic…because the only certainty is that there will be another wave sooner or later.

A McKinsey and Co report published last month, ‘Three keys to a resilient postpandemic recovery’ said “to build a better future, the emphasis must now shift from defensive measures and short-term goals to a sustainable, inclusive growth agenda.”

“At the moment, labour shortages, the rise of the digital economy, supply chain disruptions, inflation, and inequality are all addressed in isolation,” it says, calling for a less siloed, more holistic approach. 

“Strategies and structures have to be designed for flexibility and speed. We can assume disruption and accelerated change lie ahead. Nations and organisations must therefore approach issues with built-in adaptability and agility. Speed is important.”

Now those of us running small to medium enterprises can’t influence the macro business or political environment. But we can choose to put in place our learnings from the last 24 months.

EY’s Janet Balis penned a Harvard Business Review article, ‘10 Truths About Marketing After the Pandemic’ 12 months ago, when we all thought the pandemic was over. Her comments about the customer experience have never been more relevant. 

She points out businesses must get a better handle on their customer segmentation than they would have pre-pandemic. Research is showing that affordability, health and environmental sustainability are now the key drivers of customer choice. 

Given the extraordinary shift to digital communication during the pandemic “you are no longer competing with your competitors, you are competing with your customer’s best [digital] experience,” she warns.

It is also no longer good enough for customers to hope you have what they want. 

“Customers expect you to have exactly what they want,” she says. 

In a world where supply chains are constrained that might mean developing new local manufacturing relationships, which are better for the planet and the local economy anyway.

In all of this the customer experience must sit at the heart of every transaction and transparent and open relationships are essential.

Finally, the article points out “the old truth that your brand should stand behind great products must give way to the new truth: your brand should stand behind great values.”

“The pandemic truly challenged brand loyalty,” Balis writes. 

“The EY Future Consumer Index found that up to 61% of consumers, depending on the category, became willing to consider a white label product…or switch name brands. That dynamic coupled with growing consumer awareness and activism precipitated during the social unrest of 2020 should make brands very focused on the values they express.”

Marketing should no longer be the poor cousin of the finance, production and operations departments, wheeled in when sales need a boost. 

Marketing managers and the agencies they employ should be advising Boards and CEOs about how the world their customers inhabit is rapidly changing, and how, using a predominantly values based digital strategy, they can build loyalty and trust.

This might be more urgent than we think, as we move from what now looks like the comfort of post-pandemic to the chill of cold war.

Image: Crossing of the Dnieper Monument at the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War, Kiev, Ukraine.

The post The price of loyalty appeared first on Fuller.

While I remain a little misty-eyed for those mornings in the WFH office last March – the sun pouring through the window, the autumnal leaves tumbling from the Manchurian pear trees, the homemade morning tea, a bit of Neil Young on the old Technics turntable – there is no doubt that Australia (and particularly South Australia) has been an international resilience success story.

Now, while Europe, the UK and USA are facing up to a third COVID wave, Adelaide has just completed its festival season – something few of us dared to dream about even six months ago.

Of course COVID-19 is not over yet, evidenced by the current Brisbane outbreak.

But by pivoting, swivelling, pirouetting – call it what you will – a lot of businesses and organisations who moved fast to create new products and services and then embraced the latest marketing technologies – including digital content development and distribution and video – that succeeded.

South Australian Tourism Commission (SATC)

Hospitality was among the hardest hit sectors and we were particularly excited to help launch the SATC Great State Voucher campaign late last year. Working with Executive Director of Marketing Brent Hill and his team to get the hotel turnstiles rolling, we helped create a captivating city hotel accommodation offer, and have now launched a third campaign promoting regional experiences.

As Brent posted recently:

With COVID restrictions easing and in response to South Australia’s falling wine sales to the China market, we also worked with SATC to deliver the ‘Adelaide Street Stomp’ last Friday, 26 March. As the launch event for the 2021 Year of South Australian Wine, this activation engaged South Australian opinion influencers who will in turn, encourage the public to get out and visit our state’s award-winning wine regions.

WOMADelaide

Our team also helped WOMADelaide pull-off an outstandingly successful event, with almost 19,000 people attending the four sunset concerts in Ityamai-itpina (King Rodney Park).

We proudly offered our content production and social, video, native, display and search advertising services, focusing our marketing efforts on digital, as well as differentiating each night’s line-up to specific audiences – from Tash Sultana to Oils fans.

Our results reflected the growth we’ve been seeing across many digital clients in the post-pandemic, on-screen world. Digital ad engagement increased significantly compared to previous years, along with the website click-through and e-commerce conversion rates.

UniSA

COVID also accelerated the shift to online in the tertiary education market. Our client, UniSA Online, saw an opportunity to strengthen its position in the market and further promote its flexible, high-quality online study experience.

Ellen Martin, UniSA’s Online Marketing Manager said:

Amy Tran, UniSA’s Content Communications Coordinator added:

“How you learn online can make or break your study experience – but for many, the way online study works is not widely understood. We saw a unique opportunity in the market to demystify what it means to learn 100% online and to shine a spotlight on the things that make UniSA Online the best in business – our exceptional study experience, purpose-built learning platform, and dedicated student support.

“Through a suite of short and punchy animated videos, we set out to highlight the vast array of media-rich course content, interactive learning activities, as well as our online academics who are at the very heart of our students’ success.”

Department for Education

During the height of COVID-19, the South Australian Government Department for Education – faced with the challenge of educating students remotely – needed to quickly equip parents and caregivers with tools to support their child’s education from home.

Fuller’s content and video production teams worked with the Department to develop a suite of three educational videos for parents – ‘How to set up home schooling workspace’, ‘How to talk to children about the transition’ and ‘Reading with your child at home’ – to provide this information in an engaging, and informative manner.

Carers SA

As the pandemic hit last March, another Fuller client, Carers SA, was about to embark on a statewide roadshow. This series of workshops had been planned to educate communities on Federal Government changes to the way the State’s 250,000 unpaid carers are supported.

Overnight, those plans were thrown into disarray. But with quick thinking and savvy advice we were able to help Carers SA transition the face-to-face workshops into a digital environment.

Creating a series of animations and engaging content to replace the workshop presentations and using digital marketing to connect them with the unpaid carer community, Carers SA were able to salvage an activity that was vitally important to so many.

Regardless of type, size or industry, COVID has – and continues – to impact the incomes of many organisations and the livelihoods of its employees.

But it has also been an inspirational time, observing how managers and staff dedicate themselves not just to survival, but dare to imagine the promise of growth.

The post Pirouette to success appeared first on Fuller.

I know where I was – sitting amongst several thousand T-shirts and shorts and straw hats enjoying the vibes of WOMADelaide. In fact the vibe I was most enjoying was not only a driving Nigerian Afrobeat or syncopated Cuban reggae, it was the earnest words of a Costa Rican climate change campaigner Christiana Figueres. The former UN Secretary for Climate Change and co-author of the 2015 Paris Agreement, she had jetted into sweltering Adelaide the day before. I never heard how or when she got out, but a few days later people started buying toilet paper by the truckload…and the rest is history.

Figueres was promoting her new book “The Future We Choose” and had a singular message: that 2020 – 2030 is the last decade when we might just be able to turn global warming around.

“We are facing the most consequential fork in the road,” she said in a subsequent interview.

“If we continue as now, we are going to be irreparably going down a course of constant destruction, with much human pain and biodiversity loss. Or we can choose to go in the other direction, a path of reconstruction and regeneration, and at least diminish the negative impacts of climate change to something that is manageable.”

What I liked most about her address was the lack of climate change hysterics. This wasn’t a political diatribe, it was a simple and undeniable environmental and social call to action based on fact.

The message was practical – the world needs to halve its emissions by 2030 and all of us can play a role: by measuring how much carbon we use, and then reducing it.

“Before you make a purchase, or an investment, or any kind of decision that impacts on the planet and on other people, the question should be: “Do I really need this and is this actually conducive to furthering the quality of life on this planet?” she said.

Why was I interested in this passionate but rational campaigner? As a father and grandfather I’m deeply aware that things will have to change if my family are to enjoy even a modicum of the environmental predictability I enjoyed in my childhood.

And as a marketing communications specialist I’m fascinated about the economic challenges ahead to businesses and organisations from a rapidly changing climate. How will they pivot – as they did last year – to maintain relevance, to sustain profitability and keep employing people?

Once the COVID pandemic settled into our daily lexicon during 2020, I guess I expected carbon reduction might have seemed like an academic luxury, especially to businesses who were flat out trying to keep food on the table.

But that couldn’t have been further from the truth. Proving that global corporations can walk and chew gum, Woolworths announced in early November that it has committed to power all of its operations – more than two terawatt-hours worth of demand – with 100 percent renewable electricity within just five years.

On the same day (fittingly November 11 Remembrance Day) mining billionaire Andrew Forrest announced his strategy to turn Fortescue Metals Group into one of the biggest energy companies in the world, with plans to produce 235 gigawatts of renewable energy, or five times the current capacity of Australia’s National Energy Market. His goal is to challenge global energy majors such as Chevron as an energy producer, stitching up deals across the globe. Fortescue will in fact be the largest single Australian energy user to join the global RE100 initiative, a club of the world’s most influential businesses who have all made a pact to move to renewable energy.

If that wasn’t enough, Boris Johnson (who admittedly needed some positive press after his annus horribilis) announced on 18 November 2020 a 10 point carbon reduction plan for the UK, seeing wind, hydrogen and nuclear energy as the employer of the future. Controversially, part of the plan will be an end to the sale of new petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2030, ten years earlier than planned (hybrids will be permitted until 2035).

Then General Motors, the home of the original Chevvy gas guzzlers, started 2020 with the news that it is committed to carbon neutrality by changing its entire fleet to electric cars by 2035.

These are big strategies, big ideas. And they are by no means isolated examples of real action: the almost daily announcements about real climate action from Joe Biden to Bill Gates, are a long way from the cynical greenwashing we saw a decade ago.

These businesses and governments know what their customers, shareholders and voters are concerned about. In a 2020 survey Nielsen found that 73% of global consumers would change their consumption habits to reduce their environmental impact, and 81% feel strongly that companies have a role to play in improving the environment.

This grassroots movement is happening despite the lethargy of many politicians. Just as the industrial revolution and the digital revolution favoured the early adopters and marginalised the naysayers, this new revolution will move much faster than dithering legislators.

There is only one marketing mantra that businesses and not for profit organisations should adopt – to hear and deliver to our customers what they want.

So if these customers want us to make a difference – in an apolitical, practical way – then we have to ask ourselves what should we be doing?

Here’s our experience so far.

Five years ago we at Fuller made a decision to start treating sustainability seriously as a social, economic and business risk. Management and staff took a collaborative view that Fuller is a family company – not just family owned and managed but also an employer of more than 20 families. We all agreed that this gives us a heightened sense of responsibility to contribute to a society that we are proud to hand on to our children and grandchildren.

We also acknowledged that as we are in the business of communication, we need to be part of global change. We develop marketing and communications strategies and implement them using digital marketing, video, public relations and advertising. Our clients will need to engage with their customers in new ways as they grapple with this new economic and social order, so we need to be authentic and ‘walk the talk’.

Our first steps were small – we initiated a waste reduction scheme by introducing recycling sorting bins which cut our plastic and paper waste by at least 50%. We started composting kitchen scraps and coffee grounds and cut our water consumption by using more efficient taps and timers. Then we moved a step further by banning plastic drink bottles. We gave staff refillable bottles and also encouraged the purchase of ‘keep cups’ for takeaway coffee.

We soon found that the majority of our team were not only keen to adhere to these waste reduction efforts at work, but were also implementing similar strategies at home.

While these were important steps, we felt as a team that we could do more.

We became a partner of Carbon Neutral Adelaide to share our ideas with other businesses. Then we set out on the path to actually become carbon neutral.

We contracted a sustainability consultant, we measured our emissions and developed a strategy to reduce them.

We found that despite our sustainability actions, we had emitted 180 tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2019-20.

Putting this in perspective, a tonne of CO2 is the equivalent of the average emission of one passenger on a return-flight from Paris to New York. So we had just created the same emissions as 180 trans-Atlantic flights.

We’re a fairly small mainly digital business – we don’t manufacture things – so this came as quite a shock. We discovered that our main source of emissions is diesel and petrol cars and electricity. So we changed over to a 100% renewable electricity supplier in mid 2020 and in late 2020 ordered our first electric vehicle as part of a gradual fleet transition.

In the meantime, we will contribute to an offset scheme – in our case tree planting on the Coorong, a project that we can all get involved in.

After this 12 month process of self examination we achieved Carbon Neutral certification in December – the first marketing agency in Australia to do so.

Fuller was also awarded BCorp certification in December through the global BLab program.

BCorps are ethical businesses that balance purpose with profit. There are 3500 global BCorps and 257 in Australia, including brands such as Patagonia, Aesop and Beyond Bank.

We have had a long history of working with not for profits and social organisations to improve their outcomes so this was a way to formalise our commitment. Through 2020 we undertook a rigorous audit of our financial accounts, management policies around staff, customers and suppliers, and our contributions to the community and the environment. This was independently assessed and scored against a global benchmark of businesses that balance profit with purpose.

The BCorp journey is ongoing and in 2021 we will commit to a staff wellness program, a local volunteering initiative and a supplier audit to ensure the people we buy from are doing the right thing by the community.

I’m sure CEOs and business owners reading this will say, “well that’s all fine and dandy but what about the bottom line?”

As the extraordinary social impact of COVID starts to wane, we know that 2021 and 2022 are likely to be challenging economically.

To remain competitive there has never been a more important time to create a clear choice for your customers. As we move from Gen X and Gen Y to Gen Z, research shows that having a strong advocacy and impact position on sustainability and ethical business behaviour, will be the key differentiator in the 21st century.

But our mission is bigger than that.

COVID has been a great teacher. It has reminded us about the importance of community, the need to slow down and to act locally. It has also shown us that life is fragile.

A business revolution where purpose and profit are balanced and the health of our planet becomes foremost in our minds, might just be the greatest legacy of this extraordinary period in human history.

As Christiana Figueres says, it is our future that we choose.

The post The future we choose appeared first on Fuller.

Faced with cuts in incomes of 50 per cent to 100 per cent, it’s a miracle any of them are still here.

Yet news reports this week suggested bankruptcies totalled 8,000 last year, not a lot more than the 6,000 in 2018-19.

It’s fair to say that many of these remarkable survivals have been due to the enormously helpful JobKeeper supplement. This not only enabled businesses to keep their valued staff employed, but had the effect of turning those wages into everything from home renovations and garden makeovers, to home-delivered hamburgers…and onesies to enjoy them in.

There are expectations that the scaling down of JobKeeper from this week onwards will see a rapid increase in insolvencies.

But I wouldn’t be so sure.

During the Ides of March I optimistically predicted that Australian small business would rise above the challenge of COVID-19 and show the world our true colours of grit and determination – the tough stuff that Australian enterprise is built on.

Necessity: the mother of invention

Every day of the last 200 or so since lockdown, we have seen thousands of cases of innovation overcoming adversity, of creativity triumphing over crisis.

The SA Government’s COVIDSafe Awards announced last month, make particularly optimistic reading and provide all of us with encouragement as we enter the next phase.

Take the Cummins Agricultural and Horticultural Society, one of the first country shows across Australia to be cancelled in March, and the first to come up with a novel “online show”. This 109-year-old event ran for six weeks and received well over 200 entries thanks to the sponsorship support of local business, Olsson’s Sea Salt.

It reminds me of the recent Barossa Wine Show trophy presentation night. Normally a gala dinner for 300 or more, this year, small groups were hosted in local restaurants spread right across the valley, where they shared the awards by live streaming, still able to raise their glasses of Shiraz to each winner and make lots of unseemly noise….while supporting the local hospitality industry.

Earlier this year, two-year-old gym, Studio360 Cycle decided it wasn’t about to give away all of the hard work and money it had invested in its brand. So it maintained its community by delivering 40 “very, very, very” clean 70kg bikes all around Adelaide so their customers could log into a live-streamed class and experience the same atmosphere and competition in the safety of their own homes.

Salon Superstore used social platforms to communicate with customers and provide free home deliveries while undertaking a full renovation of their salon at HarbourTown, so that they were ready to trade when restrictions eased.

Like so many Australian wineries, Barrister’s Block Premium Wines grew their online store by building an ‘online relationship’ with their consumers through their ‘Care Package’ hampers, with products sourced only from local businesses forced to close due to COVID-19 and the December bushfires.

This has been a common wine industry story, with many of my friends in the industry reporting a record surge of online orders from their loyal customers, who have been genuinely concerned about their welfare and survival (while also assuaging a fierce lockdown thirst).

The General Wine Bar Kitchen in McLaren Vale adapted its business with Dine around the World private group “charters” to Thailand, Italy and Vietnam. The venue was booked by a single group, limited to people who know each other and all attendees were given a “flight briefing” before being individually served their exotic meals.

Food provider Abbots and Kinney adapted by delivering raw, frozen pastries, which customers could bake themselves, while watching the instructional videos, posted daily on their social media platform. They also teamed up with Lansdowne Wine to offer a wine, sourdough, coffee and milk delivery service to families.

The City of West Torrens ‘Get With The Program’ school holiday initiative could not go ahead due to COVID-19 restrictions. Temporarily rebadged as ‘Happy at Home’, the program was changed to feature a large variety of fun and educational individual and family activities via video and web links.

Crackle and Pop Records created a Youtube channel so customers could enjoy a series of ‘virtual digs’ through record crates, via a GoPro strapped to the owner’s head.

There are other inventive case studies beyond the government awards. A business concept that was already happening – ‘dark’ or ‘cloud kitchens’ – managed to leverage their model during COVID-19. These restaurants don’t have tables, chairs, waiters, or live customers, just a busy kitchen that prepares and delivers meals through the range of online food apps such as UberEats or Deliveroo.

One of our clients that we are particularly proud to work with is Detmold, a long-established family business that is a global leader in packaging.

The company pivoted to create a whole new product range – surgical and respirator face masks – under a new division, Detmold Medical, and have since employed 200 new people, some from hard-hit industries such as aviation.

Our own response to COVID-19 was to pull out all stops to maintain a connection with our clients through online conferencing and workshopping.

It was our ever-effervescent Business Development Manager Paul Kitching’s idea to strengthen this with an online networking platform, Coffee with PK.

Extraordinarily successful, it just clicked over its 100th session and is now an established part of the Adelaide (and interstate) business networking scene, providing serious discussion, humour (and sometimes teary group counselling) without the burden of small talk, unappetising appetisers and cheap bubbles.

The importance of brand

What businesses have learned from the last six months is that brand is everything…and by brand I mean a strong, authentic story, deeply embedded values and beliefs, a transparent and open staff culture as well as a sharp look and feel.

Strong and authentic brands have actually improved customer loyalty and retention during this tough time, while those with vague points of difference and shallow messaging have lost the game.

The businesses that used contemporary content during this period such as short, well produced video clips and podcasts stood out from their competitors, engaged their customers and provided value in the form of new information, advice or even good old fashioned fun.

A well established online presence has also been a key differentiator.

An up-to-date, contemporary, mobile-friendly website that is human-centred and customer-focused has become the only billboard that matters.

If that has been supported and amplified by a digital marketing strategy that uses a smart mix of paid and organic search and boosted social media posts, it has gained more cut through and custom than any amount of TV or radio advertising.

Planning for uncertainty

And that’s the future. There will be more consumers working from home so there will be less commuting, less radio consumption. There will be more Netflix, Apple and Stan streaming and less free to air TV watching – especially as one of the key viewer drawcards of summer sport seems likely to be reduced. There will also be less print media consumption as consumers move to digital news.

If there is any certainty from this year, it will be that the consumption behaviours learned this year will not only continue, but grow.

As businesses, organisations and not-for-profits plan for the uncertainty of a post-JobKeeper world, they will indeed need to keep being inventive and creative and resilient – so there has never been a better time to slap a coat of paint on your online shop front, invest in some snappy new content and sparkle up your brand.

The post JobKeeper: the training wheels are off appeared first on Fuller.