Since taking over the marketing reins at Salomon a year ago, head of marketing Briony Kent has helped the footwear brand leverage live music to connect with consumers. Originally known for hiking and outdoor performance gear, Salomon has become hugely popular with Gen Z. These days, it’s hard to walk through a music festival or rave without spotting multiple pairs of the brand’s signature shoes.
Kent puts much of that success down to Salomon’s focus on community. In fact, she told B&T that everything the brand builds commercially “needs to have a community heartbeat to it”.
Now into our second season of B&T’s CMOs To Watch, presented by Zenith, Kent 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.
We sat down with Kent to discuss why building community is the future of marketing, how she leverages TikTok to better herself and how Salomon is fighting the tough cost-of-living environment.
B&T: Let’s get to know you… What three things would you take to a desert island?
Briony Kent: My dog Coco, we’re genuinely co-dependent and she’d never forgive me if I left without her. A really good knife, because I’d absolutely still try to cook something delish. And honestly? Probably a good bottle of wine. Life’s too short, even on a desert island.
B&T: What is your passion outside of work? If you weren’t a CMO, what would you be doing?
BK: Food has been at the centre of my life since I can remember. I grew up on a farm and my parents owned a café, so cooking wasn’t a hobby, it was just life. These days that shows up as hosting dinner parties, testing new recipes and feeding the people I love. There’s something about gathering people around a table that I find genuinely restorative.
My closest friendships are built on long lunches and honest conversations, we eat, we laugh and we challenge each other. That dynamic keeps me sharp.
More recently, I’ve also been exploring content creation on TikTok, which has been a surprisingly fun creative outlet. It’s a space where you can experiment without taking yourself too seriously and as a marketer, watching how audiences respond to raw, unpolished content in real time is honestly one of the most useful things I do
B&T: What was your favourite campaign of all time?
BK: With 300 plus campaigns under my belt this is genuinely impossible. But, the one that came to mind first is our ‘G’d Up from the Feet Up’ campaign with G Flip at Platypus Shoes, which says something.
I pitched it from scratch and put my name on the line. We built it entirely in-house with the creative team, which made it feel like ours in a way that agency-led work rarely does. But what made it special wasn’t the campaign itself, it was the partnership.
G Flip performed at our Melbourne Central store opening, hosted our karaoke bar at Splendour in the Mud, wore our shoes on stage for 12 months and did a roadshow signing of their new album across 20 of our stores.
We signed them just before they blew up, which felt like great instinct at the time and looks even better in hindsight. It didn’t feel like a campaign. It felt like community, a genuine, authentic connection between a brand and an artist that audiences could actually feel.
B&T: Now let’s talk shop. What is your brand’s top priority for the next 12 months?
BK: We have a clear three-part focus: establish Gravel running, retain our leadership in trail running, and build genuine sportstyle credibility.
We’ll drive all three through what we call the four C’s with Community as the central force. Everything we build commercially needs to have a community heartbeat to it.
B&T: What channel is exciting you the most and how do you split your marketing budgets between long/short and channels mix?
BK: Community and world-building are the future of marketing—I genuinely believe that.
But that doesn’t mean the event is the only amplification vehicle. The smartest play is using live experiences to generate content that then comes to life across paid digital, owned digital and in store.
It’s an ecosystem, not a channel. When you get that loop right, every dollar works harder
B&T: What is the biggest challenge you currently face in the marketplace?
BK: We’re in a genuinely tough cost-of-living environment. Consumers are making real trade-offs. They can’t do everything, and they’re being selective. The temptation for Australian retail brands is to race to the bottom on price, to discount and chase short-term volume. We have to resist that.
Our job is to keep investing in marketing, to create experiences that earn the right to be chosen; so that when someone does have discretionary spend, they want to put it toward our product.
It’s also a moment that forces discipline. Every initiative needs to justify itself: is it actually driving impact? What value are we creating beyond price? And are we communicating that clearly
B&T: What are you most excited about in the marketplace?
BK: Brands are being genuinely challenged right now, and I think that’s healthy.
Consumers expect more—they’re not going to sit through irrelevant paid ads and pretend they’re interested.
The brands that will win are the ones willing to completely rethink their marketing funnel, lead with innovation, and show up in ways that feel earned rather than bought. That pressure is forcing creativity, and that excites me.
B&T: Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?
BK: Honestly? This answer changes depending on the day, I’ve got an ADHD brain and a long list of ideas.
But the thread that’s stayed consistent for years is that I’ve always wanted to build something of my own. A brand, a product, something I’ve built from the ground up. I’d hope that within five years I’d have had the courage to actually start that or better yet, be well into it.
B&T: Speaking hypothetically what’s one brand, product or category you’d like to sink your teeth into right now as a marketer?
BK: This is going to sound random, but Sportsgirl. It holds such a significant place in Australian fashion history, and with the ’00s and ’10s having such a major cultural moment right now, I think the opportunity for a full brand revival is real. Give me a $50 million budget and creative freedom and I’d be very excited about what that could become.
B&T: Zenith believe there is untapped media potential we need to uncover. What is your prediction for media this year?
BK: The brands that win will be the ones that stop treating media as a distribution problem and start treating it as a communication design problem.
We buy placements and roll out campaigns but we rarely step back and ask: what is the actual consumer journey here? What am I trying to achieve – recall, brand love, conversion? And then: have I built specific assets designed for each platform and each moment in that journey?
Everything should be driven by custom content and intended outcomes. Are we doing that perfectly yet? No. But that’s the direction, and the brands moving that way are already pulling ahead.
