When it comes to strategic thinking, Rachelle McDermott has fostered a science-led approach that continues to deliver growth for Australia’s leading natural health company.
In her role as Blackmores Marketing Manager Integrated Communications, McDermott saw the opportunity to better leverage data to inform strategic choices. This led her to develop a new process, putting a stronger focus on data and analytics from both first and third party sources to understand consumer trends and identify problems. McDermott coupled this with the Blackmores Innovation “Game Changer” framework to ideate, experiment and build solutions to consumer problems. Together these guidelines for strategic thinking have driven proven results with ongoing growth across key brand metrics.
McDermott also capitalised on Blackmores’ rich data to lead the development of a new optimised and hyper-targeted paid media strategy known as “Communities of Interest” (COI). This focuses on enabling Blackmores to reach segments of people that are high-value, but too small for above-the-line campaigns.
While getting into the detail of specific metrics is fruitful for some areas, when it comes to reporting on the overall success of an integrated team it can often be challenging. McDermott saw the need to create an inclusive metric to capture collective results, so in 2019 she rolled out a new metric to Blackmores called Active Relationships. This captures alignment to strategy, cost of execution and creative quality in one number and provides Blackmores senior marketing leaders with the ability to make more effective decisions on future activity and budget allocations.
Always keen on embracing new technology, McDermott was also instrumental in the development of the Blackmores Voice Action (Alexa and Google) product. The voice action was first-to-market in Blackmores competitive set and puts the brand in a unique position to capitalise on further developments as voice technology evolves to incorporate commerce opportunities in the future.
McDermott is passionate about bringing innovation to the table, and outside of leading her team to success she champions the “Game-Changers” framework across the business by running ongoing workshops to educate and inspire all employees.
