Think Your Marketing Team Is Hot Stuff? Compare Yourself To Our B&T Awards Finalists!

We’re recovering from a hangover after Melbourne Cup, so it seems only fitting that we do a dodgy a copy/paste job with our participating entry showcases from Marketing Team of the Year awards.

Today we’re canvassing the suave marketing teams from Taylors Wine, HCF and Toyota, who are in the running along with Meat & Livestock Australia, UBANK and LEGO to win the prestigious award at our night of nights.

And if you’re keen already for next year, this is the kind of competition you’ll be up against. Hot stuff yeah?

HCF

We are a 25+ strong team of talented, driven people, brought together by a visionary CMO, who in the last 12 months, has guided us and our business through a major digital and marketing transformation.

We are an eclectic group of marketers with a mixture of agency and in-house experience across different industries, inspired to do our best for leading not-for-profit health fund HCF, focused on making health care affordable, understandable, high quality and customer-centric. This is our story from the last 12 months…

We love a challenge in our team and in the last year we have put our minds and our talents to:

• rolling out an entire new technology stack including analytics platform and campaign management to deliver agility and transparency
• launching our ‘rebrand’ including new visual and verbal identity to bring the new proposition to life across multiple touch points
• segmenting our customers, identifying key psychographic attributes for bespoke communications
• launching our new website and suite of digital assets with personalisation capabilities to offer up tailored content
• adding a new sponsorship partner, National Breast Cancer Foundation and consolidating our sponsorship of the Sydney Swans
• launching our new Health Comes First creative platform with a major multichannel marketing campaign
• overhauling and relaunching our member magazine, called Health Agenda, delivering high quality health content

We’re a tight knit team, passionate about the brand we’re building. We’ve grown from 8 people to 26, focused on building the skills and capabilities needed for transformation. With such a fast growing team, we’ve been mindful of team culture and are committed to fostering a supportive environment, in which everyone gets to flourish.

We have a strong commitment to participation in conferences, forums and training. We are also a team that loves cake and we never let a birthday go by without proper celebration.

Taylors Wines

Australian family wineries face a challenging competitive environment. Overall category sales growth is flat, while international imports (up by 3.9 per cent in 2015) are stealing share from domestic suppliers. At the same time, a long term wine glut has fuelled price discounting and impacted winery profits.

Add to this more than 2,400 Australian wineries, 10,000 brands and large multi-national corporate competitors with significant marketing budgets. For smaller, family wineries, differentiation is key to survival.

Against this competitive backdrop, Taylors Wines’ small, specialised marketing team with its strong family culture, use of innovation and highly effective marketing strategies have grown awareness and share for the Taylors brand by educating and engaging consumers.

This effectiveness is highly evident in Taylors 2015 summer campaign ‘Live Better By Degrees’, where, through innovative packaging using an on-bottle temperature sensor (a world first in wine packaging), Taylors aimed to change the way consumers think about temperature and wine during the key summer selling period for beverages.

It is widely believed that red wine is served at room temperature while white wine is served chilled from the fridge. Taylors’ campaign sought to debunk this wine myth to educate consumers that actually our reds deserve a bit of chilling prior to serving, particularly during summer. Red wines served too warm are flabby, appearing overly alcoholic with the delicate flavours burned off.

Wines served too cold appear sharp and overly acidic. Serving a wine at its optimum drinking temperature reveals the wine’s true balance of flavours and aromas – just the way the winemaker intended.

By working collaboratively with their trusted agency partners, Taylors were able to communicate the benefits of wine and temperature across a multitude of platforms, growing share from 2.1 per cent to 2.9 per cent, and grew their revenue by 17.9 per cent compared to previous year’s sales. We’ll drink to that!

Toyota

The car industry is experiencing one of the biggest periods of change in its history. Local manufacturing is closing down, innovation is changing people’s perceptions of what a car should be, and the car market has never been more competitive or offered more choice.

This was never more prevalent than in January 2016, where Toyota experienced historically low sales.  We knew something needed to change.

So the Toyota marketing team set a vision: to transition from a product led organisation to one that puts the customer first.

To do this the marketing team rolled out a program called Toyota X Innovation: aimed at fostering collaboration to come up with innovative ideas, challenge the status quo and work at a blistering pace.

We devised an innovative mobile & social program: a significant change to our normal approach that included using Facebook’s lead generation ads and both Toyota’s and Facebook’s segmentation to create pre-populated forms sitting natively in Facebook.

And we created the Toyota LandCruiser Emergency Network: a roaming network that used Toyota LandCruisers to bring mobile communications to no-signal areas, winning a number of prestigious awards including; Creative Innovation Cannes Lion, Creative Innovation Gold Spike and three D&AD Graphite Pencils.

In doing this, the Toyota marketing team has created consistent monthly sales growth – including our biggest ever total sales month in June (and a pretty good July too) – leading to a huge 56 per cent lead in overall sales, almost double where we started the year.