IKEA ANZ’s head of integrated media and marketing communications, Peter Moore, is backing social media to play an increasingly important role in the retailer’s brand and commercial growth, with a focus on turning channel investment into measurable results.
Moore is responsible for maximising marketing returns and ensuring media acts as a profitable driver of both brand and business growth. A keen advocate for measurement, he is focused on making every media dollar count.
Now into our third season of B&T’s CMOs To Watch, presented by Zenith, Moore joins the ranks of visionary marketing leaders redefining the playbook. This series celebrates those who balance bold ideas with business impact and have a whole lot of fun along the way.
Moore sat down with B&T to discuss social as a channel, the importance of investing in brand building and distinctiveness and how brands are finding themselves playing catch-up to persuade and crack the code within LLMs.
B&T: Let’s get to know you… What three things would you take to a desert island?
Peter Moore: A survivalist handbook. I won’t be going full-on Bear Grylls, however, challenge accepted. I’ll detox from my mobile, though will take a satellite phone for once the survivalist route has run its very short course. And sunscreen, I’ll need plenty.
B&T: What is your passion outside of work? If you weren’t a CMO, what would you be doing?
PM: Combining two of my passions, the dream would be to become a travel photographer. I love the full process – researching, experiencing, capturing, and editing.
B&T: What was your favourite campaign of all time?
PM: It’s over 20 years old now, the Sony Bravia campaign where they released a quarter of a million multicoloured bouncy balls in San Francisco. Creativity, bravery in execution, and a clear consumer benefit: Colour like no other.
B&T: Now let’s talk shop. What is your brand’s top priority for the next 12 months?
PM: During a time of low consumer confidence and high cost of living, it’s even more important that IKEA continues to invest in brand building and distinctiveness. Of course, there will be times for activations and offers, however we need to proudly lead with meaningful affordability, showcase our range, and champion our brand identity.
B&T: What channel is exciting you the most and how do you split your marketing budgets between long/short and channels mix?
PM: The prevalence and importance of social media channels excite me. We see only growing contribution from these channels towards our commercial and brand health performance, and now newer dynamics, like social search, becoming more critical.
At IKEA, we are guided by a global framework anchored in Binet and Field’s brand building to sales activation split. We further calibrate based on our physical and mental availability, specific to our market, and have the rigour of local econometric modelling – giving us confidence in return from this approach across commercial and brand contribution outcomes.
B&T: What is the biggest challenge you currently face in the marketplace?
PM: The impact of AI – brands are finding themselves playing catch-up to persuade and crack the code within LLMs. We are also being swamped with new, often offsite, metrics. It’s a challenge to identify and focus on meaningful metrics when site traffic may be impacted and there is the ongoing pressure on marketers to deliver measurable results.
B&T: What are you most excited about in the marketplace?
PM: On average, Australians are spending over two hours on social channels. The movement towards ‘resonance over reach’ in social media excites me, as challenges us as marketers to up our value-exchange approach to content – earn attention, story tell, acknowledge communities, and shift towards more audience-centric metrics.
B&T: Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?
PM: I certainly won’t be living self-sufficiently on a desert island. At a broad level, my aim is to keep leading and meaningfully contributing to a purpose-driven, creative, and values-driven brand – like IKEA. AI and capability continue to revolutionise our industry, and I am determined to embrace this journey, and champion this for the teams and partners around me.
B&T: Speaking hypothetically what’s one brand, product or category you’d like to sink your teeth into right now as a marketer?
PM: I’ve worn Nike my whole life. There’s been plenty of commentary around their brand voice recently – from encouraging everyday enthusiasts, through to a level of assertiveness and competitiveness. It would be an energising challenge to get under the hood of the category dynamics, the opportunity for Nike, and their strategic roadmap.
B&T: Zenith have an unapologetic ambition to be brand marketers’ Most Valuable Partner, delivering optimal ROI in the most meaningful way for every brand. If you could improve just one of these outcomes this year: growth, efficiency, customer experience, or brand strength, which would you choose and why?
PM: Whilst in these pressured cost of living times, tactically saying growth is very tempting, however, to achieve long term sustainable growth, I will have to say customer experience.
IKEA is fortunate to come from a place of brand strength, and scale – welcoming many visitors to our stores, website, and App. Visiting an IKEA store, getting a little lost, re-imagining your life in our roomsets, collecting a flatpack and eating the meatballs is the heart of our customer experience and our focus is amplifying that unique point of difference, while at the same time making that flow seamlessly through our digital channels too.
Through continuing to strengthen customer experience in our channel meeting points, the experience of our affordable prices and quality of our offer, this will in-turn build further brand loyalty, advocacy, and in-turn growth.
