There is a particular kind of irony that the industry built on telling other people’s stories often struggles to tell its own. Marketing agencies spend their days crafting positioning, building campaigns, and advising clients on how to show up with consistency and conviction. Then they go back to their own website, which hasn’t been updated in two years, and wonder why the pipeline has dried up.

This is the world Kathleen Gunther lives in. She runs Gunther Consulting, and her entire practice is built on one premise: agencies are bad at marketing themselves, and they need someone external to hold the mirror up. In Episode 34 of Canned the Marketing Podcast, Kathleen joins Ben and Steph to talk through why this problem exists, what strong positioning actually looks like in 2026, and what any agency owner, indie or otherwise, can do about it right now.

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The Cobbler’s Children Problem

Ask any agency founder why they don’t invest in their own marketing and you’ll hear a familiar rotation of answers. There’s no time. The budget always goes to client work first. We know what we should be doing, we just never prioritise it. Someone internally could probably handle it.

Kathleen’s diagnosis goes deeper than busyness. The real issue, she argues, is a kind of analysis paralysis that sets in the moment an agency turns the lens on itself. Suddenly, a team that spends its whole working life making strategic decisions for clients finds itself unable to land on a direction for their own brand. The expertise doesn’t disappear. The objectivity does.

“I hold the mirror up and I interrogate,” she explains. That’s the core of what she does. And when Ben and Steph push her on whether agencies genuinely don’t see the gap, or whether they’re just not prioritising it, her answer is both. They often can’t see it. And even when they can, time and resource pressures mean it gets buried.

There’s also a third reason, and Steph raises it early: a lot of agencies quietly believe that winning awards is their marketing strategy. It’s not entirely wrong. Awards carry credibility, create conversation, and signal quality to prospective clients. But they’re a single channel, and a passive one at that. They don’t build a pipeline. They don’t nurture cold audiences into warm ones. And they certainly don’t substitute for a consistent, deliberate presence in market.

Ben adds another layer from his own experience at Human Digital. The instinct for growing indie agencies is to try to do everything in-house, including their own marketing. The logic is understandable: you’re a marketing agency, surely you can manage. But the skills required to deliver strong B2B campaigns, earned media, content strategy, and CRM nurture for your own business are the same skills that are fully deployed on client work. Bringing in someone external isn’t a sign that you can’t handle it. It’s the exact same logic you pitch to your own clients every day.

What Good Positioning Looks Like in 2026

Kathleen’s definition of strong agency positioning is refreshingly simple: one that can back up its claim.

Not one with the most sophisticated manifesto. Not one with the most beautifully written mission statement. One that says what it does, delivers what it promises, and can point to evidence. In a market where every agency website reads like it was generated from the same set of adjectives (strategic, results-driven, innovative, passionate), the agencies that stand out are the ones that can show the receipts.

She’s direct about the opposite tendency, the “wankonomics” approach, where positioning becomes so laden with jargon and abstraction that it stops communicating anything at all. The test is simple: can you say what you do in a sentence that both a bot and a human can process clearly? If the answer is no, you’ve overcomplicated it.

The process she uses with agencies isn’t a heavy-duty brand strategy exercise. It’s two focused workshops designed to land on three to four content pillars, each tied to what the agency genuinely stands for and can consistently show up around. Those pillars are usually some combination of the work itself, the culture of the team, and how the agency shows up in the broader community, whether that’s the industry, a cause, or a particular market. Keep it simple. Keep it consistent. Show up the same way, repeatedly, until people recognise you before they even read the copy.

Understanding who you’re talking to is a critical part of this. Kathleen is candid that many agencies haven’t done the foundational work on their customer data. Pre-COVID, most agencies ran largely on referrals. Someone vouched for you, you got the meeting, you won the work. That environment allowed a lot of agencies to build successful businesses without ever building a proper audience. That environment is gone. The fragmentation of channels, the rise of the creator economy, and the shift in how buyers research agencies before they ever make contact means that referrals alone aren’t enough. You need to be discoverable. You need to be recognisable. And that requires data, at minimum an email list that you’re actually nurturing, even if only quarterly.

The Earned Media Gap

One of the more pointed conversations in the episode is around earned media, and why so many agencies under-invest in it.

Kathleen’s view is that most agencies simply don’t understand what it is. If you haven’t worked inside a PR agency, it’s easy to assume that any media coverage must involve buying ad space somehow. The idea that you could place a story, build a journalist relationship, or write a reactive opinion piece that gets picked up by industry trade press, without paying for placement, feels abstract. So it gets deprioritised in favour of paid channels that feel more controllable.

What good earned media actually looks like, Kathleen explains, is multiple placements over time across a mix of reactive and proactive content. A new staff hire announcement keeps the wheels turning. An opinion piece responding to the week’s industry news builds credibility. A commentary on a campaign that’s getting attention positions your agency’s voice in the conversation. None of this happens without investment in the craft: good writing, genuine journalist relationships, and the editorial judgment to know when to pitch and what angle will land.

The agencies that do this well, she notes, tend to be PR agencies. PR agencies understand the mechanics because it’s their core service. Other types of agencies, digital, creative, media, often haven’t built those muscles. The answer isn’t necessarily to hire a full PR function. It’s to partner with people who have those relationships, or to bring in a specialist who does.

People Are the Differentiator

By the midpoint of the conversation, a theme has emerged clearly: in agency new business, people buy people. The work matters. The case studies matter. But what makes an agency genuinely distinctive, especially an indie, is the humans behind it.

Kathleen is direct about the importance of the founder's personal brand in 2026. The agency leader who is out in the industry, attending events, joining conversations, making themselves available, and contributing ideas back to the community is not just doing good PR. They’re doing the most important business development work available to them. Not in a sales-heavy, card-swapping sense. In the sense of being a recognisable, trusted presence that people want to do business with.

She praises Ben for doing this well, which he accepts with appropriate humility and probably excellent hair. But the point is serious: as an indie, your name and your reputation are the brand. When your personal brand disappears because you’ve retreated into operational or financial tasks, the agency’s pipeline tends to follow it.

She also raises diversity with real force, and it’s worth engaging with properly. She describes what she calls the “big dick swinging strategist” dynamic in agency settings: the senior person who arrives, deploys impressive-sounding language, and leaves the room feeling smaller than it was when they walked in. She’s not here for it, and she argues that clients shouldn’t be either. The question she’d ask any agency she was evaluating is not just “who will I be working with day to day?” but whether the most junior person in the room is encouraged to have a voice.

Diversity, Kathleen and Steph both note, remains uneven across the industry. Gender representation at senior levels is improving, with names like Nikki Grafton at Omnicom NZ cited as examples. But multicultural representation, and specifically indigenous voices in Australia and New Zealand, remains a genuine gap. Steph raises Aotearoa, a New Zealand cultural design and advertising agency specialising in indigenous marketing, as a powerful example of what clear, purposeful positioning anchored in cultural expertise looks like in practice.

The Partnership Advantage

One of the more practical threads in the episode is about how indie agencies can offer genuine breadth without the overhead of a full-service model: partnerships.

No indie agency in 2026 can credibly claim expertise in every area a client might need. If one tells you they can, Ben and Steph both suggest that’s a red flag worth taking seriously. The agencies that thrive as independents tend to be the ones who know their lane precisely, and who have built trusted relationships with complementary specialists to fill the gaps. PR, design, analytics, indigenous marketing, AI implementation: all of these are areas where a smart indie can provide genuine value through curation and coordination rather than trying to own every competency.

Kathleen makes the point neatly: it takes a village. Campaigns take a village. Client relationships take a village. The 2026 marketing ecosystem is too fragmented for any single agency to credibly own all of it.

When You’re Doing Everything Right and Still Not Growing

The most grounded question in the episode comes from Ben. You’ve got your strategy. You’ve niched down. You’ve got PR support. You’re showing up consistently. You’re still not growing. What then?

Kathleen’s answer is deceptively simple: you have to back up your marketing with sales.

This is the part that many agency founders would rather not think about. Marketing creates visibility and credibility. It builds the conditions for a conversation. But it doesn’t close deals. At some point, someone has to pick up the phone, send the email, and have the actual human conversation: how are you going, what’s coming up, where’s the gap, how can we help? If the thing you’ve been doing for 12 months isn’t working, pivot. Don’t wait another 12 months hoping the strategy eventually lands. Change what isn’t working.

Steph adds an important note here about patience alongside proactivity. B2B agency sales cycles are long. Trust-building takes time. A well-executed content strategy might not generate an inbound brief for 12 months, but in that time it’s doing the quiet work of making your name familiar, your thinking credible, and your agency a natural part of any shortlist consideration. The pipeline you’re building now is a slow burn. The phone call you make this week is what moves things today.

AI: Use It or Get Left Behind

The conversation ends, as most marketing conversations do in 2026, with AI. Kathleen’s take is refreshingly undramatic.

Use it. If you’re not using it, you’re behind. Use it for ideation, for pressure-testing frameworks, for checking direction. But don’t confuse using AI tools with having a strategy. The thinking still has to come from you. The frameworks, the positioning, the content pillars: those are built from experience and human judgment. AI accelerates execution. It doesn’t replace the strategic foundation underneath it.

She does name one real concern with genuine candour: the impact on junior roles. The tasks that used to be entry-level work, the research, the first drafts, the scheduling, are increasingly being absorbed by AI. She doesn’t think it’s all bad. She points to the historical pattern: print to digital, photography to digital, every major technological shift has eventually created new roles and new demand. But she’s honest that the transition is disruptive, and that the junior pipeline into the industry deserves serious attention from agency leaders right now.

Her practical approach: use AI to build out frameworks and test ideas, treat it as a collaborator rather than an oracle, and build your own system from your own thinking rather than trying to wrestle a generic tool into producing something that feels like you.

What In-House Marketers Should Look for in an Agency

The episode closes with a flip Ben introduces deliberately. Most of the conversation has been directed at agency owners. But plenty of the Canned listeners are in-house marketers evaluating agencies. So what should they actually be looking for?

Kathleen’s checklist is worth running through properly.

Start with research. How is the agency showing up in public? How does the founder present themselves? Do the case studies reflect the kind of work you need? Have they worked with your competitors, and if so, what can you learn from that?

Look for value alignment. Not in a vague, corporate mission statement way. In a practical sense: do they show up in the same spaces you do? Do they care about the same things?

When you get to the pitch, run chemistry hard. Creative agencies call their pitches “chemistry sessions” for a reason. The quality of the ideas matters, but the quality of the relationship matters just as much. You’re going to be in rooms together when things aren’t going well. Do you want these people in those rooms with you?

Ask who you’ll be working with every day. Not just who’s presenting. Who’s actually doing the work, and what’s the expectation of founder or senior involvement once the honeymoon period is over?

And watch how people treat each other in the room. Kathleen has a specific heuristic she returns to: she judges people by how they treat the wait staff. The agency that makes everyone in the room feel heard is the one worth working with. The one where the senior strategist talks over the junior account manager is telling you exactly how your relationship will go.

The Part Nobody Wants to Do Is the Part That Works

The marketing industry spends a lot of time talking about authenticity and a surprisingly small amount of time applying it to itself. Agencies that are willing to do the same work for their own brand that they do for their clients, the strategic thinking, the consistent positioning, the long-term community building, are the ones that compound over time.

Kathleen’s work is a direct response to the gap between what agencies know and what they actually do. And the conversation in Episode 34 is a useful challenge to any agency leader who has been quietly telling themselves that the awards shelf, the referral network, or the someday-we’ll-get-around-to-it content plan is enough.

It isn’t. But the fix isn’t complicated. Start with strategy. Know your pillars. Back it up with the work. Show up consistently. And when the marketing is doing its job, pick up the phone.

Watch or listen to the full episode with Kathleen Gunther at cannedmarketing.com. New episodes drop weekly.

Connect with Ben van Rooy at linkedin.com/in/benvanrooy/

Connect with Steph Quantrill at linkedin.com/in/stephanie-quantrill/

Subscribe to Canned the Marketing Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

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Loyalty is one of those words that gets thrown around in marketing strategy documents with enormous confidence and surprisingly little precision. Everyone says they want loyal customers. Almost nobody agrees on what that actually means, and even fewer have a clear view on how to build it.

Loyalty is when a customer chooses you again and again, even when they have other options. It is not a program. It is not a tier structure. It is not a points balance. It is a behaviour, and it is the result of an emotional relationship between a customer and a brand.

There are two kinds of loyalty operating in the market, and most brands are only building one of them.

The first is true loyalty. This is emotional, identity-driven loyalty where the customer sees themselves in your brand. They trust it. They advocate for it. They would feel a genuine sense of loss if it disappeared. Think Apple. Think Patagonia. Think your local coffee shop that you travel twenty minutes out of your way to visit. This kind of loyalty is relational, not transactional. It is earned.

The second is manufactured loyalty. This is built through incentives, switching costs, points programs, status tiers, and locked-in subscriptions. The customer keeps coming back, but the critical question is: if you removed the program tomorrow, would they still show up? Would they still choose you? More often than not, the honest answer is no.

As Ben puts it: “Loyalty isn’t marketing. You can market to achieve it, but loyalty is actually a customer behaviour.”

This distinction matters enormously for how you invest in your customer retention strategy. Because if you are spending big on a points program that is essentially paying people to return rather than inspiring them to return, you are building a liability, not a brand asset.

The Forces Making Loyalty Harder to Earn (and More Important Than Ever)

Several things happening in the market right now have converged to make loyalty both more valuable and more elusive.

Customer acquisition costs are climbing. The cost to bring in a new customer has roughly doubled across most categories in the last five years. Digital advertising is more expensive. Attention is fragmented. Retention is no longer a nice-to-have metric sitting quietly in a CRM dashboard. It is a commercial necessity.

At the same time, customers have more choice than ever. In most categories, there is minimal friction left in the purchase journey. You can switch banks, telcos, insurance providers, and grocery stores with relatively little pain. The only things holding customers in place are genuine preference or a well-designed incentive structure. And the problem with relying on incentive structures alone is that competitors can replicate them.

The subscription economy has also changed consumer expectations. It has trained people to think about ongoing relationships with brands rather than one-off transactions. But that cuts both ways: customers in subscription relationships are constantly re-evaluating whether you are worth the monthly fee. Convenience is not a moat anymore. It is just the minimum.

A Taxonomy of Loyalty Marketing Programs

Let’s go through the main mechanics brands use to market towards loyalty, and where each one works and where it falls apart.

Points-Based Programs

The most common form. Spend money, earn points, redeem for rewards. Airlines, supermarkets, coffee chains, and beauty retailers have all built substantial businesses on top of this mechanic.

The core appeal is straightforward: customers feel rewarded for spending, and the accumulation dynamic drives frequency. The clever ones layer in tier mechanics as well, creating a spend-to-progress structure that changes customer behaviour.

The problems are equally straightforward. Points are confusing. The value of a point is opaque, and brands devalue them constantly. Qantas reportedly carries billions of dollars of unredeemed points on its balance sheet, which is a liability in every sense. Customers who have held on to points for years can become genuinely resentful when they expire or are suddenly worth less than expected.

Points programs are also easy to copy. If every competitor in your category offers them, they stop being a differentiator and become table stakes. You are spending money just to stay in the game.

Tiered Programs

Tier programs tap into something deeply human: status and recognition. Bronze, silver, gold, platinum. The more you spend, the higher you climb. The higher you climb, the more you feel like a valued member rather than a customer.

Mecca is a strong local example. Their Beauty Loop program has been running since 2010 and is genuinely effective at driving aspiration and changing purchase behaviour. Steph notes how the program shows you not just what you need to reach the next tier, but what it would take to reach the tier above that. It is clever psychology: they are always pulling you toward a goal slightly beyond reach.

Airlines have mastered the dual approach, combining points with tier status. Lounge access, priority boarding, status recognition: all of it taps into a desire to feel elevated. As Steph puts it, there is something powerful about the idea that everyone is equal until you board the plane.

American Express runs perhaps the most sophisticated tier program in the market. The card structure moves through green, gold, platinum, and centurion. Centurion is invite-only, reserved for platinum cardholders who clear around $100,000 USD in annual spend. The platinum card is made from metal, which makes an audible sound when you set it down on a restaurant table. None of that is accidental. The fee itself is a filter, creating a self-selecting community of cardholders who have already committed financially. “Member since” is printed on the card, making tenure visible and meaningful.

Ben worked for American Express in London and New York and offers a clear reading: “Amex proves that loyalty doesn’t have to be free to be effective. You can run a program that makes money for the business and gets customers to pay for the privilege.”

Cashback and Discount Programs

Simpler, cleaner, and often more effective for high-frequency, low-consideration purchases. You spend money, you get money back. There is no mental maths involved. No calculating the redemption value of a point or trying to remember which retailer gives you double rewards on Tuesdays.

Everyday Rewards from Woolworths fits broadly into this category. It sits quietly in the background, accumulating vouchers that surface every few weeks. The real product is your data, and most customers know it. The program works because the value is tangible and the friction is low.

The risk with cashback programs is that you are training customers to expect a discount. Once you start, it is very hard to stop. Customers conditioned to receiving cashback will punish you if you remove it. You have essentially created a permanent price reduction dressed up as a reward.

Coalition Programs

Flybuys is the canonical example in Australia and New Zealand. Multiple brands, one loyalty currency. Customers earn across a network of retailers and service providers, and brands pay to participate in exchange for access to a highly valuable shared data asset.

The data angle is underappreciated. Steph is currently spending $35,000 with Flybuys for a promotional campaign, because the access to that coalition data is genuinely valuable. Redemption rates on points offers are low, but the targeting and reach are compelling. Both sides of the marketplace get something: brands get data and distribution, customers get a reason to consolidate their spending within the network.

Where coalition programs struggle is complexity and consumer fatigue. When Flybuys wound down its New Zealand operations, there was not exactly a national day of mourning.

Experience and Access-Based Loyalty

Instead of discounts or points, the reward here is an experience or exclusive access. VIP events, early product drops, members-only content, priority access, concierge services.

This is harder to commoditise than a points program. A competitor might be able to match your double-points offer, but they cannot replicate the feeling of being escorted into a lounge while everyone else queues. They cannot give your customer front row at a concert. Experiences create memories, and memories create emotional bonds.

Westpac’s music presale access is a recent example doing the rounds. There is genuine power in giving a cardholder the ability to get their friends into a sold-out gig. It converts a functional financial product into a social currency.

The challenge is cost and scale. Experiences are expensive to deliver, and they work best for premium brands with smaller, high-value customer bases. Scaling them to millions of customers is genuinely difficult, though brands like Spark have made it work by carving out front-row sections at major concerts for status customers.

Subscription Models

Amazon Prime is the defining case study. Customers pay for membership and receive benefits, primarily speed and convenience. Once inside, every interaction reinforces the next. The Kindle, the Prime Video, the delivery are all part of a flywheel that makes leaving feel like a downgrade rather than a rational financial decision.

The interesting psychological mechanic here is sunk cost. Customers who have paid for membership feel compelled to use it. The Costco and Sam’s Club model operates on the same principle. Jetstar Club does something similar in the aviation space, which is genuinely a category stretch for a budget carrier.

When Loyalty Programs Go Wrong

The failure modes are predictable, but brands keep hitting them.

The most common is launching a program without asking customers what they actually want. Rolling out a points mechanic because competitors have one, or because the Shopify plugin makes it easy, or because someone in leadership got excited about it, without testing whether the target customer gives any weight to it. Some customers want cash back. Some want status. Some want access. Some want nothing except a better product. Research first.

The second is using a loyalty program to solve a P&L problem. It is not a quick fix. If your product or customer experience is broken, no points program will paper over it. A loyalty program is icing. You need a cake first.

Mecca ran into this directly. After years of building genuine equity in their Beauty Loop program, they sent members a tote bag in place of the usual free product reward. The backlash was significant. There were also reports of expired product in gift boxes. When you have built customer expectations around a program, you have created an obligation. Failing to deliver on it is not just a logistics problem. It is a brand trust problem.

The third failure mode is building loyalty entirely through lock-in without building genuine brand equity underneath. If the only reason customers stay is that leaving is painful, you are one competitive disruption away from a very bad quarter.

As Steph puts it: “You want to avoid building a company that only builds loyalty through trapping people. You need to build brand equity and deliver value so customers want to stay with you.”

What Genuine Loyalty Actually Looks Like

Steph nominates Les Mills as her example of true, unprompted loyalty. No points program. No status tiers. No anniversary email. Just a product that delivers enough value, at a price that is genuinely competitive with alternatives, that she has never seriously considered leaving. The experience is the retention mechanism.

Ben’s is Apple, which he acknowledges sits in complicated territory. Apple has genuine product love at its core, but it is also a walled garden of intentional design. iMessage and the green text shame. The Apple Watch that only pairs with an iPhone. The interoperability that makes switching feel like a project. True loyalty and designed switching costs exist simultaneously, and it is not always easy to tell where one ends and the other begins.

That ambiguity is part of what makes Apple interesting as a case study. Their customer experience is genuinely excellent in many areas. Their ecosystem is genuinely useful. But the walls are also real, and they know it.

The honest question any brand should ask is: if we made it as easy as possible for customers to leave, would they still stay?

What Is Coming Next for Loyalty Marketing

A few directions worth paying attention to.

Personalisation at scale is accelerating. AI is enabling brands to move from segment-level loyalty mechanics to genuinely individual treatment. The concerning application is dynamic pricing: charging customers the maximum they are likely to pay based on behavioural signals. The compelling application is the inverse: offering customers the maximum value you can based on what you know about them. The technology is the same. The choice of how to use it is not.

Community is increasingly a loyalty mechanism in its own right. Red Bull does not run a traditional loyalty program, but it has built communities around extreme sports, music, and gaming that create genuine brand identification. When customers see themselves in a brand’s community, they are not doing the calculation about points value. They have already decided.

The death of the physical loyalty card is accelerating, and everything is moving into the phone. The practical implication is that the tactile wallet reminder disappears with it. That small physical cue, the card in your wallet that surfaces every time you open it, was doing more work than we gave it credit for. Apple Wallet is the obvious replacement, and it is already becoming an advertising surface in its own right.

Loyalty is earned, not bought.

You can build programs that manufacture the appearance of it, and some of them are genuinely effective at changing behaviour. But if you strip away the points and the tiers and the free boxes, and customers would not choose you without them, you have not built loyalty. You have built a subscription to retention.

The brands that get it right use programs as amplifiers for genuine brand value, not substitutes for it. They understand which customers they are actually trying to retain and why. They do the research. They treat the program as a long-term commitment rather than a quarterly activation. And they never mistake a scan at the checkout for customer love.

Do not do loyalty just because you can. Bake it into your strategy. Ask your customers what they want and what they value. Do the work. Because a badly designed loyalty program does not just fail quietly. It trains customers to expect discounts you cannot sustain, creates liabilities on your balance sheet, and erodes the brand equity you spent years building.

If you want the full conversation, including the Amex deep dive, the Mecca post-mortem, and a genuinely candid argument about whether Flybuys ever really worked, this episode is worth your time.

Listen to Episode 33 wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the full episode on YouTube. And if someone in your organisation is about to launch a loyalty program without reading this first, forward it to them. Consider it a public service.

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New episodes of Canned; the Marketing Podcast drop every week at cannedmarketing.com

Connect with Ben van Rooy on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/benvanrooy/

Connect with Steph Quantrill on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/stephanie-quantrill/

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We asked a room of over 200 marketing leaders to raise their hand if they had all the resources they needed to do an awesome job.

Nobody moved.

Not a twitch. Not a tentative half-raise. Just silence and knowing smiles.

That moment set the tone for the entire episode. Canned; the Marketing Podcast went live at the B2B Marketing Conference in Auckland, hosted by the Marketing Association, and the conversation we had on stage is one that almost every marketer in the country is having behind closed doors. How do you deliver meaningful results when your budget doesn’t match your brief?

We were joined by two marketing leaders who know this tension intimately. Fiona Taimana is the GM of Marketing at Noel Leeming, part of The Warehouse Group, where she leads marketing, digital, and creative across both retail and commercial. Her commercial division turns over roughly $200 million in revenue. She has one marketing manager. And her share of the total Noel Leeming marketing budget? Two percent. Fiona has built her career across retail, B2B, and international markets, including a stint with Emirates in the Middle East. She knows what it looks like to make a lot out of very little.

Anna Henwood is the CEO of Stickybeak, a global insights platform that helps brands test products and creative in market. Before founding Stickybeak, Anna was CMO at Les Mills, where she led a 100-person marketing function across global offices. Now she runs a 12-person startup selling SaaS into markets including New Zealand, Australia, and the UK. She’s gone from a world where the founder would casually double your content budget to one where every dollar has to earn its place.

Together, we explored three principles that every marketer working with constrained resources should have tattooed on the inside of their eyelids. Or at least pinned to their desk.

You’re Sitting on More Than You Think

Here’s the thing that gets overlooked when the budget conversation starts: money is only one kind of resource. And it’s often not the most valuable one you have access to.

Fiona’s commercial team at Noel Leeming was reformed only 18 months ago. When she looked at what she had to work with, the answer wasn’t “not enough.” It was “what’s already here that we’re not using?”

Noel Leeming has 66 stores nationwide. The commercial sales team was already aligned to stores in their regions. Suppliers like Smeg, Fisher & Paykel, and Bosch were already funding in-store events like built-in cooking centre experiences. The infrastructure was there. The audiences were there. The supplier money was there. What was missing was the connection between those assets and the commercial team’s pipeline.

So they made the connection. The commercial team started leveraging those in-store events, extending them with additional hours focused on knowledge sharing. They invited their personal networks, local chambers of commerce, and sector contacts. No new budget. No new platforms. Just smarter activation of what already existed.

Anna’s version of this was slightly different but built on the same principle. When Stickybeak launched, the founding team’s most valuable asset was their collective network. Everyone involved had built careers before deciding that startup life was for them, and those careers came with serious contact lists.

“One door opens five and then five opens ten more and away you go,” Anna said. “And it is a hard graft. That’s time you’re pouring in there, not money.”

This is worth sitting with for a moment. When we talk about doing more with less, the instinct is to find cheaper ways to execute the same activities. But the bigger opportunity is often about activating entirely different assets: your people’s networks, your existing customer base, your supplier relationships, your physical footprint, your data. The budget you need might already exist in a form you haven’t recognised yet.

Hire for Skill, Not Just for Rolodex

One of the more interesting tangents in the conversation was about hiring. In PR and sales, there’s a long tradition of hiring people for who they know. You’re essentially buying someone’s network when you bring them on board.

Anna pushed back on this. While she acknowledged that Stickybeak’s UK expansion will involve hiring people who understand that market, her priority is functional expertise first.

“I hired a couple of salespeople last year and the one who was amazing had no marketing background, didn’t have any LinkedIn followers in that space, and has crushed it.”

Her reasoning is straightforward. Great salespeople run process. They execute a playbook consistently. They close. Those are skills, not connections. And in a small team where everyone has to wear multiple hats, the ability to actually do the work well matters more than the ability to open a few doors.

Her CMO at Stickybeak is a case in point. One person running events, HubSpot campaigns, paid media, creative, and more. That’s the reality of marketing in a 12-person startup. You don’t need someone who can delegate beautifully. You need someone who can do the work.

The Case for the Lazy Marketer

Ben threw a deliberately provocative question at the panel: do some marketers choose to stay under-resourced to avoid accountability? Do they avoid fighting for budget because they’re already overworked and more budget means more expectations?

Anna’s answer was unexpected. “I actually quite like a lazy marketer,” she said. And then she explained why.

A lazy marketer, in Anna’s framing, is someone who finds the efficient path. They don’t overcomplicate things. They don’t add seventeen workstreams to a campaign that only needs one. They identify the thing that matters, they do it well, and they resist the temptation to keep layering on complexity.

“It’s hard to do marketing simply,” she said. “It’s easy to get carried away with the complexity of all the integration and the connections you can do.”

There’s a Venn diagram somewhere between too basic and too complex, and the sweet spot is closer to simple than most teams think. Especially in B2B, where the temptation to build elaborate multi-touch attribution models and integrated nurture sequences can consume more energy than the actual marketing.

Fiona added another angle. When you genuinely don’t have the resources to overcomplicate things, the constraint itself becomes a feature. You don’t have a million options. You make a decision, lean into it, and make it happen. Sometimes the absence of choice is what creates speed.

The Paid Search Kill Switch

Anna told a story from her time as marketing manager at STA Travel (RIP to anyone who booked a gap year through them) that deserves its own section because it’s one of the best “prove your value” plays we’ve heard.

Her GM, who had no marketing background but plenty of opinions (sound familiar?), didn’t believe paid search was working. STA Travel was only 5% e-commerce at the time, and in his view, the paid search investment wasn’t justifying itself.

Anna tried showing him the data. The leads. The contact-us page traffic that was driving people to stores. He wasn’t convinced.

So she turned it off.

Eight days later, the GM was at her desk. Every store in the country had called him. Call enquiries were down. Emails were down. The only thing he could think of that had changed was paid search.

“Turn it back on,” he said. And Anna never had to fight for paid search budget again.

It’s a risky play and she acknowledged that. But the lesson is important. If you believe a channel is driving value, you should be able to prove it. And sometimes the most convincing proof isn’t a dashboard. It’s the absence of results when you pull the lever.

AI Interns and 40-Minute Email Redesigns

Both guests are using AI tools in their teams, and neither is precious about it. But both were clear on the same point: AI is an intern, not a senior marketer.

Fiona’s biggest challenge is creative output at scale. Her commercial team spans education, trade, and other sectors, and you can’t send the same creative to a teacher that you send to a tradie. With one marketing manager serving multiple segments, the volume of manually created assets is a bottleneck. She’s investigating AI tools that can combine product and human imagery to unlock faster creative production for remarketing, social content, and sales enablement.

The challenge, as she put it, is quality control. One of her sales team recently sent her a Canva slide for brand approval, and keeping everything on-brand when you’re distributing creative capability across a team is genuinely hard. Her approach is tight brand guidelines, locked-down templates, and AI-powered tone of voice agents that can adapt messaging for different audiences within guardrails.

Anna went further. She told a story about discovering that Stickybeak’s password reset email was, in her words, “disgusting.” So she opened Lovable (an AI development tool), dropped in a template, gave it copy she’d borrowed from another platform she admired, asked it to optimise for SendGrid and make it responsive, and pushed it to production 40 minutes later.

Forty minutes. From “this is terrible” to “this is live.” That’s the kind of speed that changes how small teams operate.

Anna also shared something worth stealing: quarterly AI hackathons. She encourages her entire team to spend dedicated time experimenting with AI tools, many of which offer free trials of 7, 14, or 30 days. Solve a real problem. If it doesn’t work, you’ve learned something. If it does, you might save three hours a week. The downside risk is low and the upside is significant.

Of course, not every organisation is there yet. As Steph pointed out, some businesses still have the door firmly locked on AI adoption. The gap between the companies experimenting and the companies resisting is going to become very visible very quickly.

Big Rocks, Focus Fives, and Fit for Future

The second principle we explored was about prioritisation, and specifically about having the discipline to focus on the initiatives that will have the greatest impact rather than spreading effort across dozens of smaller activities.

Anna’s approach is structured and deliberate. At Les Mills, her team ran what they called a “Focus Five” process, a quarterly planning exercise where the team came together every 13 weeks to define the key priorities. Each priority needed a clear definition of what good looks like, a way to measure success, and a named owner.

That last point matters more than it sounds. Without a named owner, priorities become shared responsibilities, which is another way of saying nobody’s responsibility. And the person who owns it needs to scope it, because otherwise you end up with big rocks that are actually boulders and nobody has the capacity to move them.

At Stickybeak, Anna runs the same rhythm with her small team. She’s honest that the volume of big rocks still tends to exceed what the jar can hold. But the discipline of the process, even imperfectly executed, keeps the team aligned and creates a shared reference point. It’s especially valuable when you’re hiring constantly and new team members need context on what matters and why.

One concept from Anna’s Les Mills days that stood out was the idea of a “Fit for Future” pillar. Across their quarterly priorities, they always reserved roughly 20% of capacity for forward-looking work. Not the biggest project, not the most urgent. But if they weren’t intentional about making space for innovation and strategic investment, they’d end up treading water indefinitely.

This is where a lot of B2B teams fall down. The BAU is so relentless and the commercial pressure so immediate that there’s never time for the work that compounds over the long term. Having a named pillar for it forces the conversation.

Fiona’s reality is slightly different. Noel Leeming operates in a heavily trading-led environment where the Monday morning review of commercial performance can reshape the entire week’s priorities. Her big rock isn’t a specific initiative. It’s maintaining a flexible structure of templated activities that can be turned on and off depending on which part of the business needs support.

“When I say crisis, it’s never really a crisis,” she said. “It’s more about the opportunity that has arisen. Building and trade is suddenly picking up. What can we turn on for that?”

Her marketing team needs to be able to move within a week. That’s the reality of B2B marketing inside a retail group, and it requires a different kind of planning discipline. Less about locking in a quarterly roadmap and more about having the components ready to assemble quickly when the moment calls for it.

Introduce, Enhance, Perfect

Anna shared a framework that started in Stickybeak’s product team but has broader application for any marketing team trying to ship work faster.

The problem it solves is the instinct to skip straight to perfect. Teams want to deliver a polished, fully featured solution on the first pass. But perfect takes time, and in a resource-constrained environment, the pursuit of perfect often means nothing ships at all.

The framework is simple. First, you introduce. Put something to market that’s good enough to learn from. Does the audience even want this? Does it solve the problem you think it solves? You’re not committing to a final version. You’re testing an idea.

If the introduction works, you enhance. That might mean deeper integration, better design, more sophisticated functionality, or expanded reach. You’re building on validated demand, not assumptions.

Perfect is the final tier, and Anna was candid that Stickybeak probably won’t have many perfect things in the next 12 months. And that’s fine. The point is to create a shared language that gives people permission to ship work that’s good but not finished, and to build iteratively based on what you learn.

This is essentially a reframe of the MVP concept, but the language matters. Calling something an “introduction” feels different from calling it a “minimum viable product.” It implies a deliberate first step rather than a compromised output. And for marketers who take pride in the quality of their work, that distinction can be the thing that unlocks faster execution.

Showing Results to Unlock More

The third principle is the one that makes everything else possible. You can activate hidden resources and prioritise ruthlessly, but if leadership doesn’t see the impact, the budget stays where it is. Or shrinks.

Anna’s philosophy here is simple: little and often.

“Don’t save up a big quarterly 50-slide presentation that’s beautiful to bore your C-suite peers to tears,” she said. “Just be constant with the impact that marketing is making.”

At Stickybeak, her CMO runs a Slack channel that surfaces customer activity in real time. Event registrations, whitepaper downloads, webinar sign-ups. Anna doesn’t need this data for her own marketing decisions. Her CMO has HubSpot for that. The Slack channel exists specifically so that Anna, as CEO, is constantly aware of what marketing is generating.

Every one-on-one, every meeting, every casual conversation becomes an opportunity to drop in a data point. “That packaging masterclass is up to a hundred registrations already.” No fanfare. No formal report. Just a steady drumbeat of evidence that marketing is working.

The contrast with the traditional approach is stark. Most marketing teams batch their reporting into monthly or quarterly reviews, which means leadership only thinks about marketing’s impact when a deck lands in their inbox. Anna’s approach means marketing’s value is ambient. It’s always in the room.

Fiona took a different but equally effective approach with the “Class of the Future” campaign. Noel Leeming invited schools across New Zealand to win a future-proofed classroom, eventually awarding it to a school in Mangakino. The team documented the entire experience and created a compelling human story around it.

Here’s the smart part. They didn’t play it to the CEO first. They played it to the internal teams. The stores. The sales staff. The broader business. The emotional response rippled upward until the group CEO saw it and understood, viscerally, why brand storytelling matters.

“It reminded everybody of the human piece,” Fiona said. “Why we do brands, why we connect with people.”

The result? “What other things can you do like that, Fiona?” Which is the best question a CEO can ask a marketer. And the answer, of course, is “plenty, with the right investment.”

That storytelling approach then got applied to sector-specific content for LinkedIn campaigns, creating an ongoing content engine from what started as a single brand play. One well-told story became the proof point for an entire content strategy.

What Happens When They Cut Your Budget in Half?

We asked both guests what they’d do if someone walked in tomorrow and halved their budget. The answers were instructive.

Anna went straight to market focus, a discipline she learned at Tourism New Zealand. The principle is tiering: rank your markets by priority and allocate resources accordingly. A tier one market gets TV, PR, and the full toolkit. A tier three market gets trade media and targeted activity. The decisions about what to cut become almost automatic once the tier structure is in place.

For Stickybeak, the UK is currently the highest-growth market, the cost base is roughly the same regardless of geography, and the pound converts very favourably against the New Zealand dollar. A customer who pays $8,000 NZD locally would pay about four and a half thousand pounds, which converts back to significantly more NZD. If Anna had to be ruthless, she’d consolidate all investment into the UK.

“If you don’t understand the priority order of your markets, push your SLT to make that decision this week,” she told the room. “Because it just unlocks you in terms of what you do with your budget and who does what.”

Fiona’s approach was similar in structure but applied to customer segments rather than geographies. Which sectors are in growth? Which have the most margin? Which are worth protecting? She lines up the activities against each segment, draws a cut-off line, and then lets the business leaders debate where that line should sit.

She also shared a specific budget defence tactic. When asked to cut $20,000 from a category, she showed the leadership team the sales impact data. “You’re cutting $20,000 but you’re going to lose $200,000 in sales. What would you prefer?” She got some of the money back.

The key to making that work is having the numbers ready before you need them. If you’re scrambling to pull together an ROI case after the cut has been proposed, you’ve already lost ground. Fiona measures constantly so that when the conversation comes, and it always comes, she’s ready.

Anna put it more bluntly: “Just have a few numbers. Say it with confidence. If you don’t know, there’s no way they’re going to know.”

The Great Debate: More Budget or More People?

We posed a question to both guests: if you could only have one, would you take a larger budget with a smaller team, or more team members with a smaller budget?

Fiona chose people. Her reasoning is that the tools available now, from Canva to smart digital planning platforms, mean a skilled team can stretch a modest budget remarkably far. Building a customer database, creating events, running ongoing communications, sharing expertise, telling stories. All of that can be done affordably if you have capable people doing it. And once you start spending heavily on media, you’re also spending on agencies, and the cost to get to market climbs fast.

Anna chose budget. Her reasoning is equally logical but starts from a different place. With AI tools expanding what a small team can produce, the constraint isn’t capability. It’s access to the platforms and tools that cost money. More budget means more AI subscriptions, more paid media, more technology. And those tools multiply what a lean team can achieve.

There’s no right answer here. Both perspectives reflect the reality of the environments these leaders operate in. Fiona comes from a world of large retail teams and in-store infrastructure where people are the engine. Anna comes from a fully in-house marketing function at Les Mills where a 100-person team included social, insights, design, and video editing. She’s now in a world where technology can replace some of that headcount, but only if you invest in it.

The real takeaway is that the question itself is worth asking in your own context. What’s actually the binding constraint in your team right now? Is it hands on keyboards or dollars in the account? The answer should shape your next budget conversation.

In-House vs Agency: When to Hold and When to Fold

The final audience question we got to was about the perennial tension between building capability in-house and partnering with agencies.

Fiona’s model is a core in-house team covering creative, digital, and marketing, supplemented by specialist agencies brought in for specific skills as needed. If you’re short on social, bring in a social agency. If media is the gap, find a media partner. The agencies rotate based on what the team needs at any given time, and a key benefit is that the agency relationship brings exposure to emerging trends and approaches that an internal team can miss when they’re heads-down in execution.

“You can’t be fully internal or you just become a closed loop,” Fiona said. “And then that’s the fate.”

Anna added a financial lens. If you don’t have a big paid media budget, hiring a full-time salary to manage it might not deliver a good return. People create work. A team member who doesn’t have enough to do will fill their time, and that can lead to busy work rather than impactful work. An agency stays in scope. They do what you’ve briefed them to do and they’re generally disciplined about not wandering.

Both perspectives point to the same principle: the in-house vs agency decision isn’t a philosophical one. It’s a practical one based on volume, skill gaps, and where you’ll get the best return on the money you have.

What It All Comes Down To

The conversation in Auckland reinforced something we keep coming back to on this podcast. The marketers who deliver the most impact aren’t always the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones who think clearly about what they have, focus ruthlessly on what matters, and communicate their value relentlessly.

Fiona is doing remarkable work with a fraction of the resources most marketers would consider the minimum. Anna is scaling a global SaaS business with a team of twelve and a framework that prioritises learning over perfection. Both are proof that constraint, when combined with clarity and discipline, can produce better marketing than abundance ever could.

If you’re a marketer who feels under-resourced (and based on that room in Auckland, you probably are), the playbook from this episode is worth pinning up. Know what you’ve got. Decide what matters most. Ship the introduction, not the perfect version. Measure everything. Tell your CEO about it constantly. And when the budget conversation comes, have your numbers ready and say them with confidence.

Watch or listen to Episode 32 on your favourite podcast platform and hit subscribe so you don’t miss a week.

Read all past episodes and show notes on the Canned Marketing Substack: cannedmarketing.com

Connect with your hosts: Ben van Rooy (Human Digital) linkedin.com/in/benvanrooy/ Steph Quantrill (Cue Marketing) linkedin.com/in/stephanie-quantrill/

If you enjoyed this one, share it with a marketer who’s fighting the good fight with a budget that doesn’t match their ambition. And subscribe to Canned on Substack for weekly episodes, show notes, and the occasional opinion that might get us in trouble.

Your marketing technology stack is probably working against you.

Not because the tools are bad. Not because you chose the wrong platform. But because somewhere between the optimistic onboarding call and the reality of Tuesday morning, things got messy.

Data went stale. Integrations broke. Someone built an entire customer knowledge base inside ChatGPT on their personal laptop. And now three departments are claiming attribution on the same sale while nobody can actually prove what drove it.

Welcome to the modern MarTech stack.

On this week’s episode of Canned; the Marketing Podcast, Ben van Rooy of Human Digital and Steph Quantrill of Cue Marketing explore one of the most talked about and least understood topics in our industry: what actually belongs in your marketing technology stack, how B2B and B2C stacks differ, and why AI is not the magic fix everyone wants it to be.

This episode is dense. It is practical. And it will probably make you want to audit every tool your team is paying for.

What Is a MarTech Stack

There is a distinction worth drawing early.

“Working in MarTech” means you are employed by a marketing technology company. Your MarTech stack is the collection of platforms, tools, and systems your organisation uses to attract, convert, engage, and retain customers. They are different things, and conflating them leads to confused conversations in boardrooms.

As Ben puts it: “When someone says, what is your MarTech stack, they mean, what are the technologies that you’re using to execute your marketing?”

Some businesses try to do everything inside one platform. Some startups will attempt to run their entire operation out of HubSpot, and fair enough, HubSpot does pack a lot into one place. But for most organisations, the stack is a constellation of tools that need to talk to each other.

That “talking to each other” part is where things tend to fall apart.

The episode walks through the core layers of the modern MarTech stack. What follows is a breakdown of each, with the B2B and B2C nuances that make this topic far more interesting than any vendor whitepaper will admit.

Customer and Audience Data

This is the foundation. The epicentre. If your business claims to be customer centric, this is where that claim either holds up or crumbles.

In B2B, the centre of gravity is your CRM. This is where your contacts, accounts, pipeline stages, and buying committees live. It supports everything from lead nurturing to account based marketing, and it gives sales and marketing a shared view of what is happening with a prospect. When it works, it is effective. When the data is incomplete or out of date, it is a liability.

In B2C, the picture is more fragmented.

If you are running ecommerce, you are in a strong position. You have first party data flowing in from your Shopify store, enriched by tools like Klaviyo, and supported by Google Analytics. You are close to your customer.

But if you are in FMCG and you are not selling direct, you may have almost no customer data at all.

As Steph points out: “If you’re working in FMCG, you likely will not have a CRM system at all.”

Your retail partners hold the data. The Woolworths and Coles of the world know what your customers are buying, which aisle they are walking down, and what other brands they are picking up. You are relying on Nielsen, IRI, and whatever insights you can piece together from social listening and media performance data.

B2B data is geared towards relationship management and deal progression. B2C data is focused on behaviour, transactions, and real time engagement. Both matter enormously. Neither is simple.

CRM and Lifecycle Marketing

This layer is about managing communication over time. It is the engine that keeps prospects and customers moving.

In B2B, this means marketing automation. Lead nurturing sequences. Scoring models that determine whether a prospect is cold, warm, or ready to buy. Email workflows that push people through a buying journey. The goal is alignment between marketing and sales, and the tool of choice is almost always the CRM with automation bolted on.

Steph offers a reality check from the trenches: “If the data that you’ve input right at the beginning of your CRM system is incorrect or half complete, then it just becomes so much harder to see where you are.”

The tool is only as good as what you put into it. The best CRMs now use AI to pull data from emails, phone calls, and other touchpoints automatically. But that only works if the foundation is solid.

In B2C, lifecycle platforms lean more towards engagement than lead management. Email, SMS, push notifications, retention journeys, discount vouchers, cross sell recommendations. The question is less “where is this prospect in the pipeline” and more “how do we get them to buy again, and soon.”

This is also where the subscription economy enters the conversation.

As Ben observes: “Everyone is trying to subscriptionise their service. It started with Netflix, and now all of the onlines are doing it. But now also all of your physical products are being subscriptionised.”

It is the dominant model for driving recurring revenue and lifetime value, and it is reshaping how B2C stacks are built.

An interesting geographic nuance emerged in the episode. Steph, who is currently working in the US market, notes that American consumers are deeply accustomed to subscription purchasing through Amazon and similar platforms, while New Zealand and Australian consumers are not quite there yet. The platforms and logistics infrastructure are not ready for it at the same scale. Something for any APAC marketer to keep in mind when benchmarking against US case studies.

Your Website and Digital Experience

Your website is one of your most important owned assets. Or at least, it should be.

“How many rooms have you sat in where the question has been asked, will we even need websites in the future?”

The answer, for now, is yes. Websites are here for at least the medium term. AI may eventually change how content is discovered and consumed, but you still need a place to put your story, your credibility, and your conversion points.

In B2B, the website is a research and credibility tool. Buyers come to check you out before they engage. Content hubs, landing pages, case studies, and clear conversion points matter across the full funnel.

Ben identifies credibility as the first pillar: “In B2B, it’s all about, can I as a buyer trust you with my business?”

That means consistent branding, real faces rather than faceless corporate anonymity, fast loading pages, and SEO optimised content that gets picked up by both traditional search and AI powered search.

For a deeper dive into how B2B brands can build effective digital experiences, Human Digital’s insights hub covers B2B marketing extensively.

In B2C, the website’s role depends on your business model.

If you are direct to consumer, your site is the point of transaction. Product discovery, user experience, merchandising, checkout flow, payment options, and shipping all matter because someone visiting your site is usually ready to buy.

If you are FMCG, your “website presence” may actually live on other people’s sites. Your investment goes into making sure your product is front and centre on the digital shelf of your retail partners.

Then there is the app question.

The episode offers a useful rule of thumb. If customers use your product or service daily or weekly, an app makes sense. If they interact with you every six months, do not build an app. Invest in a mobile optimised website instead. This is advice that could save a lot of businesses a lot of money, especially when you factor in ongoing maintenance, development resources, and the reality that consumers do not want another app on their home screen.

In the QSR space, Steph highlights an added complexity. Brands like McDonald’s and Hell Pizza need to manage their presence across their own app, their website, and third party aggregators like Uber Eats. Each channel has different UX requirements and different implications for your tech stack. Choosing where to invest requires understanding where your customers actually buy, not where you wish they would.

Content and Campaign Execution

Every stack needs a way to create, manage, and distribute content. This is where marketing gets made.

In B2B, content tends to be educational. White papers, webinars, case studies, long form articles, sales enablement assets. Campaigns involve multiple touchpoints across longer timeframes, and keeping everything consistent across sales and marketing teams requires solid asset management and brand governance.

In B2C, the tempo is faster. Product storytelling, seasonal campaigns, retention content, paid media assets, dynamic creative. Production volume is higher and turnaround is quicker.

As Steph frames it: “You’re spending less time in your storytelling phase and more in your product and retail. You’re literally trying to sell things and get it out the door faster.”

The difference is not just tone or format. It is cadence.

B2B content goes deeper and longer. B2C content moves faster and scales wider. Your stack needs to support whichever rhythm your business demands. And ideally, your digital asset management system should serve as a single centralised location for the latest logos, product photography, and brand assets. Version control is not glamorous, but it is essential.

Commerce, Conversion, and Revenue

This is where the stack supports commercial outcomes.

In B2B, conversion is tied to your pipeline. Opportunity tracking, proposal activity, account engagement, sales enablement, ABM platforms, intent data. Conversion is rarely a clean online transaction. It often turns into a contract, a legal review, a negotiation. But it still needs to be recorded back in your CRM.

As Ben notes: “Most good sales teams want to get that bonus, so they will record that sale.”

In B2C, ecommerce platforms play a much bigger role. Product catalogues, checkout systems, payment processing, shipping logistics. The transaction is the moment that matters, and everything in your stack should be optimised to reduce friction at that point.

Analytics, Attribution, and Optimisation

This is the data layer.

In B2B, measurement focuses on lead quality, pipeline contribution, influenced revenue, and account engagement. Attribution is complex because buying cycles are long, touchpoints are many, and multiple people within an account are involved.

In B2C, the metrics shift to acquisition cost, conversion rate, basket size, repeat purchase, retention, and lifetime value. For ecommerce, tools like Google Analytics provide good visibility. For brick and mortar retail, it includes foot traffic, dwell time, and in store conversion rates. Retargeting and abandoned cart recovery are standard plays.

Matching real time sales data with traffic data and media performance is harder than any dashboard makes it look. There are time lags, data quality issues, and platform discrepancies that mean your reporting is often more like a best available approximation than a definitive picture.

Integration and Orchestration

This is the glue. It is the layer that most businesses underinvest in.

No stack works if the systems are disconnected.

In B2B, integration typically centres on the CRM as the hub, with marketing automation, sales tools, and reporting platforms feeding into it.

In B2C, integration needs to connect ecommerce, customer data, media platforms, service channels, and retention systems.

The priority for both is a seamless experience. For the customer and for the internal teams trying to make sense of it all. Tools like Looker Studio or Power BI can pull disparate data sources into unified views, but the quality of those views depends entirely on the quality of the underlying data and the integrity of the integrations.

Who Actually Owns the MarTech Stack

Marketing needs the stack to do their jobs, but they rarely own it outright. Technology teams often manage the infrastructure. Finance controls the budget. In B2B organisations using HubSpot or similar platforms, customer success, sales, and marketing all have an equal stake because they are all touching the customer at different points.

Ben argues that there should always be one clear owner. In mature organisations, that is typically a marketing operations or revenue operations team. This team sits at the intersection of marketing, technology, and finance, and they ensure that the stack is not just functional but strategically aligned.

If you do not have this function, you are likely experiencing the symptoms. Duplicated tools, conflicting data, attribution arguments, and a general sense that nobody quite knows what is going on.

The AI Layer

AI is entering every layer of the stack. Predictive lead scoring in B2B. Churn prediction in B2C. Faster campaign analysis. Better personalisation. Pattern recognition that would take a human team weeks. The potential is real.

Every platform now has an AI overlay, and they are all expanding beyond their core function, trying to do everything. Steph’s advice is sharp: “Think about what’s the core function of this piece of technology. Do you need another piece of software for the other things? How are those two things going to speak to each other?”

And here is the line that should be on every marketer’s monitor.

AI does not fix poor strategy.

Messy data plus AI equals messy outputs at scale. Garbage in, garbage out.

There is also a genuine risk around employees using external AI tools to build knowledge bases and learning models outside the company’s sanctioned systems. This fragments the knowledge base, creates data security risks, and can breach compliance regulations. Larger organisations need a leadership led AI strategy, not a free for all.

What Should Marketers Do Now

1. Audit your stack against your business needs. Do not find a shiny tool and then look for a problem. Start with the problem.

2. Focus on the core layers first. Get your CRM and customer data foundation right before adding extras.

3. Improve data quality and integration before anything else. The stack will not save you if the data is broken.

4. Identify a small number of useful AI use cases. Do not try to automate everything at once.

5. Build systems your team can actually use. Invest in training. A tool nobody understands is a tool nobody uses.

6. Do not buy tools just because they have AI features. That is not a strategy.

7. Right size your tech for your business. If you have ambitious growth plans, make sure your tools can scale. If you are staying where you are, do not pay for enterprise solutions you will never need.

8. Think about ongoing costs. Seat licences, development resources, maintenance. A MarTech stack is not a one time purchase. It is an ongoing commitment.

The fundamentals of marketing technology have not changed, even with AI reshaping the landscape. Businesses still need to know their audience, create relevant experiences, drive conversion, and measure impact.

What is changing is the speed, intelligence, and adaptability of the tools available.

The future of MarTech is not B2B versus B2C. It is about understanding that the same core building blocks work across both when used properly. The winners will be the marketers who get the basics right, integrate thoughtfully, adopt AI where it genuinely adds value, and resist the temptation to bolt on every new feature that lands in their inbox.

Dust off your CRM. Untangle your integrations. Clean your data.

Then worry about the AI.

Watch the Episode

If you want the full conversation, watch the episode of Canned featuring Ben van Rooy and Steph Quantrill.

You can also subscribe to the Canned Marketing Substack for weekly insights into marketing strategy, brand building, and industry trends.

Ben van Rooy (Human Digital)

Steph Quantrill (Cue Marketing)

New episodes of Canned drop every week exploring the ideas shaping modern marketing. Subscribe, share with your team, and join the conversation.

Luxury did not begin with logos or influencer campaigns.

Historically, luxury was about power.

For centuries, luxury goods were reserved for royalty and aristocracy. In parts of Europe there were even laws that regulated who could wear certain fabrics, colours, or materials. Silk, fur, and gold embroidery were not simply fashion statements. They were symbols of social hierarchy.

Modern luxury brands began to emerge in the nineteenth century, particularly in France and Italy. These brands were built on craftsmanship and exclusivity rather than mass production.

Louis Vuitton originally produced handcrafted trunks for Parisian elites. Hermès began as a saddlery serving European nobility. The value of these brands was not only the product itself but the story behind it.

Luxury has always been about distinction. Not just something expensive but something symbolic.

Three core elements defined the early luxury model.

1. Craft mastery and exceptional materials

2. Scarcity and limited availability

3. Heritage and cultural prestige

Those principles still shape luxury marketing today.

Why Luxury Breaks the Rules of Economics

Most products follow a simple economic rule.

As prices rise, demand falls.

Luxury does not follow that rule.

In luxury markets, higher prices can increase demand because price itself signals status and exclusivity. Economists call these Veblen goods.

The logic is psychological rather than practical.

If a product is expensive and difficult to obtain, owning it signals wealth, taste, and belonging to a particular social group.

Luxury brands therefore operate under a different set of priorities.

• Margins can exceed 70 percent
• Demand is intentionally restricted through limited supply
• Desire must consistently exceed availability

One of the most famous examples is the Hermès Birkin bag.

You cannot walk into a store and buy one. Customers typically need an established purchase history and sometimes a waiting list before they are offered the opportunity to purchase a Birkin.

In luxury, the product is not the bag.

The product is the status associated with being chosen.

The Four Ps of Luxury Marketing

The traditional marketing framework of Product, Price, Place, and Promotion still applies to luxury brands. The difference is how those levers are used.

Product: Story and Craftsmanship

Luxury products are designed to communicate quality without explanation.

The product carries a story. Often rooted in heritage, craftsmanship, or cultural relevance.

Examples include:

• Artisan leatherwork from family workshops in Italy
• Watches assembled by master craftsmen in Switzerland
• Fashion houses referencing decades of design heritage

Luxury products tend to be timeless rather than trend driven. They are meticulously finished and often backed by narratives about origin and authenticity.

However, many luxury brands have diluted this principle by expanding into entry level products such as perfumes, accessories, and branded merchandise. While these products increase revenue, they risk weakening the aura of exclusivity.

Price: Strategic Theatre

Luxury pricing is rarely about production cost.

It is about positioning.

High prices reinforce status and exclusivity. Discounting undermines the perception of prestige.

This is why some luxury brands destroy unsold inventory rather than selling it at reduced prices. Maintaining brand perception is more valuable than clearing stock.

Premium brands such as RM Williams maintain pricing discipline for this reason. By avoiding discount cycles they protect long term brand equity.

However, in recent years many luxury brands have pushed prices aggressively higher. Post pandemic price increases have sometimes outpaced improvements in quality, leading consumers to question whether the value still justifies the cost.

Place: Controlled Distribution

Luxury distribution is tightly controlled.

Historically this meant flagship boutiques in prestigious retail districts such as Fifth Avenue, the Champs Élysées, or Collins Street.

The physical environment reinforces brand positioning. Luxury stores are designed as immersive experiences rather than simple retail spaces.

However, the digital era has disrupted this model.

Ecommerce platforms, resale marketplaces, and social media have made luxury more accessible than ever before. While this increases reach, it can also erode exclusivity.

The growth of luxury resale platforms such as The RealReal has added a new layer of transparency. When resale values drop, the perceived value of the brand can drop as well.

Promotion: Myth Building

Luxury marketing focuses less on direct selling and more on cultural storytelling.

Rather than buy now messaging, luxury brands use:

• Celebrity endorsements
• Cultural associations
• High fashion editorial imagery
• Long term brand narratives

Historically, royalty and aristocrats were the ultimate influencers. Later, film stars and athletes filled that role.

Today social media has democratized influence, but luxury brands still rely heavily on aspirational figures to signal status.

Promotion in luxury is less about product features and more about myth building.

The Tensions Facing Luxury Brands Today

Luxury brands are currently facing a number of structural challenges.

Overexpansion

Many brands expanded aggressively during the rapid growth of the Chinese luxury market. As economic growth has slowed, that expansion has become harder to sustain.

Overexposure

Logos and branded products became increasingly common during the 2000s and 2010s. When luxury items become ubiquitous, they lose their signaling power.

Aspirational consumer slowdown

The middle tier luxury buyer has pulled back as global cost of living pressures increase. This group previously drove much of the category growth.

Generational shifts

Younger consumers often prioritise experiences, sustainability, and individuality over visible status symbols.

For many luxury houses the challenge now is maintaining exclusivity while still achieving growth targets demanded by shareholders.

The Rise of Quiet Luxury

One of the most interesting shifts in luxury marketing is the rise of quiet luxury.

Quiet luxury rejects overt logos and conspicuous branding in favour of subtlety and insider knowledge.

A notable example is The Row, the fashion label founded by Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen. The brand avoids obvious branding, influencer campaigns, or mass marketing. Instead it relies on exceptional materials and restrained design.

The effect is that only people familiar with the brand recognise it.

Quiet luxury signals wealth without needing to shout about it.

This shift reflects broader cultural changes. Increasingly, status is communicated through taste and insider knowledge rather than visible logos.

Luxury Is Becoming Experiential

Another major shift is the move from ownership to experiences.

Luxury brands are increasingly investing in immersive environments and events.

Examples include:

• Formula 1 hospitality and brand activations
• Fashion week events and runway shows
• Luxury travel and dining collaborations
• Pop up experiences and private client events

These experiences are designed to be shared socially, amplifying the brand’s cultural relevance.

The goal is not just to sell a product but to create a moment that reinforces the brand’s prestige.

Luxury Brands in Australia and New Zealand

While Europe dominates the luxury landscape, Australia and New Zealand have produced a number of strong premium and luxury brands.

Examples include:

• RM Williams, known for its heritage craftsmanship and iconic boots

• Aesop, famous for minimalist design and highly curated retail environments

• Karen Walker, recognised globally for distinctive fashion and eyewear

• Zambesi, celebrated for avant garde New Zealand design

• Deadly Ponies, known for high quality leather craftsmanship

These brands often lean heavily on authenticity, craftsmanship, and a strong connection to place.

In many ways that understated confidence aligns well with the emerging quiet luxury movement.

What It Is Actually Like to Work in Luxury Marketing

For many marketers, working for a luxury brand appears glamorous.

The reality can be quite different.

The industry is highly competitive and often underpaid relative to the prestige of the brand. The brand itself is part of the compensation.

Success in luxury marketing often requires:

• Exceptional client service skills
• Deep understanding of customer psychology
• Long term brand thinking rather than short term campaign performance
• A strong personal sense of style and cultural awareness

Many professionals begin in customer facing retail roles before moving into brand or marketing positions.

Those front line roles provide invaluable insight into the luxury customer experience.

What Marketers Can Learn from Luxury

Even if you do not work in luxury, the category offers powerful lessons for marketers.

Luxury brands remind us that:

• Scarcity can increase demand

• Storytelling can create emotional value

• Price can reinforce positioning

• Distribution control can protect brand equity

• Experience can strengthen brand loyalty

Perhaps the most important lesson is discipline.

Luxury only works when brands resist the temptation to chase short term growth at the expense of long term prestige.

Once exclusivity is lost, it is extremely difficult to recover.

The Future of Luxury

Luxury marketing is entering a new phase.

The next generation of luxury brands will likely be defined by:

• Quiet design and subtle status signals
• Sustainable production and traceable materials
• Hyper personalised client relationships
• Experience driven brand engagement

The brands that succeed will be those that protect their mystique while remaining culturally relevant.

Balancing those forces will define the future of luxury.

Watch the Episode

If you want to dive deeper into how luxury marketing works and why it matters, watch the full episode of Canned featuring Ben van Rooy and Steph Quantrill.

You can also subscribe to the Canned Marketing Substack for weekly insights into marketing strategy, brand building, and industry trends.

Canned Marketing Substack
www.cannedmarketing.com

Ben van Rooy (Human Digital)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/benvanrooy/

Steph Quantrill (Cue Marketing)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanie-quantrill/

New episodes of Canned drop every week exploring the ideas shaping modern marketing. Subscribe, share with your team, and join the conversation.

There is a reason nostalgia marketing keeps showing up in the world’s biggest campaigns. It is not because marketers have run out of ideas. It is because memory is emotional, familiarity feels safe, and in uncertain times, people are drawn to brands, products and stories that remind them of who they were.

That is the thread Ben van Rooy and Steph Quantrill pull on in this episode of Canned. They use everything from McDonald’s Friends figurines to Viennetta, Grimace, Coca-Cola, Stranger Things and Barbie to explore why nostalgia remains such a potent commercial force, and where it goes wrong.

What makes this conversation especially interesting is that nostalgia marketing is not a gimmick. At its best, it is the strategic use of shared cultural memory to create recognition, spark emotion and build community. At its worst, it is superficial retro styling, trend hopping, or a brand trying to insert itself into a cultural moment it has no right to claim. That distinction matters because audiences are far too savvy to fall for empty references to the past.

And right now, the past is unusually powerful. Across food, fashion, entertainment and branding, there is a visible return to older ideas, older icons and older aesthetics. Protein bars borrow flavours from Chupa Chups and Violet Crumble. Corn chips revive old brand memories with odd flavour collaborations. Fashion circles back every few decades. Music resurfaces through film and television. Iconic products are reintroduced to new generations with a wink to those who remember them the first time around. Memory has become media. The past has become commercial inventory.

What nostalgia marketing actually is

Ben defines nostalgia marketing as the act of looking back to better times, or at least to times that feel better in memory. More specifically, it is about using shared cultural memory to trigger emotional connection, usually with an older part of your audience. That could be a product, a TV show, a toy, a sound, a design style, a character or even an entire era. The point is not merely to reference the past. The point is to reconnect people with what that past meant to them.

That is why it can be so powerful. People do not just remember products. They remember contexts. Family dinners. Childhood rituals. Teenage obsessions. After-school TV. Festive occasions. Supermarket aisles. Toys they desperately wanted. Songs they overplayed. Desserts reserved for special events. The feeling of belonging to a moment in culture. When a brand successfully taps into those associations, it does not just sell a product. It activates identity.

Steph’s example of Cabbage Patch Kids captures this beautifully. For her, they are not just dolls. They represent a childhood phenomenon, a cultural moment when everyone wanted the same thing and ownership meant social significance. Ben’s example of Viennetta works the same way. It was not simply a frozen dessert. It was a marker of occasion, a symbol of affordable luxury, wrapped in distinctive visual and sensory cues. The log shape. The layered texture. The crack of the chocolate. The ceremonial serving. All of it contributed to a memory structure that stayed intact for decades.

That is the real engine of nostalgia marketing. It builds on memory structures that already exist. It does not need to invent emotion from scratch. It borrows emotional equity from the past and reactivates it in the present.

Nostalgia in uncertain times

One of the most important points raised in the episode is that nostalgia becomes even more effective when the wider environment feels unstable. When times are uncertain, people gravitate towards the familiar and the safe. That is not just a political or economic observation. It is a behavioural one. Familiar brands, familiar rituals and familiar references reduce friction. They offer comfort. They create a sense of continuity.

That helps explain why nostalgia has become so visible in recent years. In a fragmented media landscape where trends arrive and disappear at absurd speed, nostalgia offers something stable. It is legible. It cuts through. It makes people feel like they are in on something. For older audiences, it triggers warm recognition. For younger audiences, it signals coolness, authenticity or rediscovery. In both cases, it provides emotional depth in a world that often feels overly optimised and transactional.

Ben even points out that nostalgia has been used powerfully in politics. “Make America Great Again” is a textbook example of how emotionally charged the longing for a supposedly better past can be. It is a reminder that nostalgia is not inherently good or benign. It is simply powerful. Brands need to understand that power before they use it, because when memory is involved, audiences react with unusual intensity.

McDonald’s, Friends and the millennial wallet

The conversation starts with a question that many marketers might have shrugged off too quickly. Why is McDonald’s offering Friends character figurines with meals? Who exactly is buying a Rachel or Joey toy with their order?

The answer is millennials.

Millennials are now in their peak earning years. They have substantial purchasing power, deep memory banks and strong associations with the cultural products of the 1990s and early 2000s. They tend to respond better to brands that respect their lived experience rather than chasing whatever is newest. For a generation raised on Friends, this campaign is not about plastic figurines. It is about recognition, reward and emotional familiarity.

Steph makes a useful distinction here between functional and emotional marketing. McDonald’s could sell meals through price, convenience or promotional bundles. Instead, this kind of campaign plays a different game. It uses cultural memory to deepen attachment and make the purchase feel more meaningful than the food itself. That matters in categories as competitive as quick service restaurants, where differentiation on product alone is increasingly difficult.

The Friends example also illustrates something broader. Nostalgia marketing is not always about reviving your own past. Sometimes it is about collaborating with the past of your audience. McDonald’s is not a nostalgic Friends brand. It is a mass brand borrowing from a shared cultural property to create emotional relevance. That is a subtle but important distinction.

McDonald’s as a masterclass in modern nostalgia

The Friends tie-in is not an isolated stunt. Steph notes that McDonald’s has form in this area. The Grimace campaign is one of the clearest recent examples of a legacy brand using nostalgia with energy and relevance. Rather than simply reintroducing an old character, McDonald’s turned Grimace into a contemporary cultural event, complete with products, visual identity and a sense of playful discovery. It took an old memory and gave it new social currency.

The Tamagotchi reference follows a similar logic. That campaign tapped into layered nostalgia by reviving not only a product but an entire mode of relating to products: collectability, emotional attachment and low-stakes obsession. When Ben describes this as “layered nostalgia”, he puts his finger on something important. The most effective nostalgia marketing works on more than one level. It can recall a brand, a behaviour, a medium, an aesthetic and a social feeling all at once.

McDonald’s understands this because it treats nostalgia not as costume, but as experience design. The value is not merely in the object. It is in what the object represents. The past is being used as a device to get people back into the ecosystem, deepen brand affection and create moments people want to talk about.

Coca-Cola and the long game of brand consistency

If McDonald’s shows how to reactivate nostalgic symbols, Coca-Cola demonstrates another truth altogether: sometimes a brand becomes nostalgic simply by staying consistent for long enough.

Coca-Cola is one of the great nostalgia brands, not necessarily because it is constantly doing nostalgia campaigns, but because it has maintained such a stable brand world over time. The curves of the bottle. The calligraphic logo. The visual language of Americana. The seasonal references. The enduring Santa iconography. All of it contributes to a sense of continuity.

This is a valuable reminder for marketers. Nostalgia is not always something you switch on. In some cases, it is something you earn through repetition, memory and restraint. Coca-Cola’s brand consistency means it can lean into the past without looking contrived, because the past is already built into the shape of the brand. Audiences trust it because the cues have remained familiar across decades.

That is why nostalgia marketing and brand building are closely related. A brand that constantly reinvents itself may struggle to create the kind of enduring memory structures nostalgia depends on. A brand that knows what it stands for, and expresses that consistently over time, creates a bank of recognisable assets that can later be drawn upon for emotional effect.

Barbie, Stranger Things and the power of cultural reactivation

Some of the most effective nostalgia marketing right now is happening through entertainment.

The Barbie movie is the standout example. It did not merely revive an old toy. It reactivated an entire cultural framework. It invited audiences to revisit Barbie through the lens of memory, identity, irony and reinvention. It appealed simultaneously to those who grew up with the brand and to younger consumers encountering it in a newly elevated cultural form.

What made Barbie so effective was that it had scale, confidence and a point of view. It did not treat nostalgia as sacred. It treated it as material to be reworked. That is one of the reasons it travelled so well across generations and categories, even if many brands then overreached by trying to attach themselves to the pink wave without any real relevance. Steph is clear on this. Some brands absolutely should not have forced themselves into the Barbie conversation just because it was dominating culture. That is trend chasing, not strategy.

The Stranger Things and New Coke example is another standout. Coca-Cola took one of the most notorious failures in its own history and cleverly reintroduced it through a series set in 1985. This was not just product placement. It was narrative placement. The show’s setting made the brand’s historical misstep feel contextually authentic, and the campaign built around that reference turned embarrassment into cultural currency.

Steph also notes the wider effect of Stranger Things. It did not only activate nostalgia for those old enough to remember the 1980s. It brought younger audiences into that world as well. Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” became a modern hit because the show translated an older cultural artefact into a contemporary emotional moment. That is the intergenerational power of nostalgia when used well. It bridges people through shared discovery, even when their original points of reference are different.

Nostalgia is not just for older audiences

One of the most useful insights from the discussion is that nostalgia marketing does not only pull older audiences back in. It can also pull younger audiences forward.

Younger generations often rediscover previous decades and recode them as cool. Fashion is cyclical. Music is sampled and remixed. Older design languages become fresh again. In that environment, nostalgia becomes both memory for some and discovery for others.

That helps explain why 1990s aesthetics have become so visible again, and why references that might seem niche or dated can suddenly feel culturally hot. A younger consumer does not need to have lived through the era to respond to its symbols. What they need is an accessible entry point: a campaign, a film, a social trend or a product collaboration. When it works, the past becomes not only relevant but desirable.

This is why nostalgia marketing can be such an efficient bridge between brand heritage and audience growth. Done properly, it allows a brand to honour its past without becoming trapped by it. It gives long-time customers a reason to reconnect and gives new customers a reason to care.

The challenge: authenticity versus opportunism

For all its upside, nostalgia marketing is full of traps. Both Ben and Steph keep coming back to the same warning: if it feels fake, forced or self-serving, it will not work. People are emotionally protective of the memories and cultural moments that matter to them. Brands are not dealing with neutral assets. They are dealing with identity, affection and lived experience.

Older audiences do not want to be patronised. They want to be recognised. That is a subtle but vital point. A campaign that lazily references the past without understanding what the past meant risks insulting the very people it is trying to attract. A brand that radically changes a beloved property may create backlash rather than excitement, because it has interfered with memory rather than enriched it.

Steph adds another layer. Relevance matters. If your audience is largely millennial, choose a nostalgic cue that means something to millennials. Do not reach for a reference that belongs to an entirely different generation and expect it to land. The nostalgic moment needs to match both the customer base and the brand. Otherwise the campaign feels arbitrary.

This is also why corporate anniversaries can be mishandled. Steph raises the example of brands celebrating their own birthdays, and whether consumers truly care about how long a company has existed. Ben’s response is blunt. Nostalgia should be about shared reflection, not a selfish one. If the campaign is just a brand congratulating itself for being old, that is not nostalgia marketing. That is self-importance. The emotional centre has to sit with the audience, not the organisation.

Nostalgia works best when it builds community

Perhaps the most compelling conclusion from the episode is that nostalgia marketing is really about community. Ben describes it as a way to build around shared understanding. That framing matters because it moves the discussion beyond tactics and into meaning.

A nostalgic campaign is not just a familiar picture or a recycled character. It is an invitation to participate in collective memory. That explains why the strongest examples often create conversation, collectability or rediscovery. They give people something to recognise together. They prompt stories. They make audiences feel seen in a way that pure performance marketing often does not.

At the same time, nostalgia is not soft. It can be commercially hard-edged. It can drive foot traffic, sales, engagement, earned media and cultural relevance. But those outcomes come from emotional truth, not from retro styling alone.

Practical advice for brands

For marketers considering whether nostalgia has a place in their strategy, this episode offers some clear practical guidance.

Start with your audience, not your own preferences. Ask what cultural references, products, periods or properties genuinely matter to the people you are trying to reach. Nostalgia only works when there is something meaningful already sitting in the audience’s memory.

Make sure the reference fits your brand. Just because a cultural moment is big does not mean you need to participate. The wrong partnership or aesthetic looks like desperate trend jumping. The right one feels inevitable.

Build on memory structures rather than overwriting them. The job is not to vandalise what people loved. The job is to honour it, refresh it and give it new relevance.

Think beyond direct sales activation. Nostalgia is especially useful when you want to build emotional distinction, rekindle affection or bring lapsed audiences back into the brand. It can support acquisition, but it is often strongest when used to deepen meaning.

Remember that younger audiences can still be part of the equation. A well-executed nostalgic campaign does not exclude people who were not there the first time. It gives them a way in. That is often where the cultural magic happens.

Do not confuse heritage with entitlement. A long history is only useful if it means something to customers. Shared memory beats self-celebration every time.

Why this matters right now

There is a temptation to view nostalgia marketing as a light topic, especially when the examples involve toys, old desserts, TV sitcoms and childhood collectibles. But beneath the surface is something much more serious about how brands create relevance.

In a crowded market, emotional connection remains one of the few durable advantages. Nostalgia gives brands a way to access that connection through symbols people already understand. It also forces a discipline that many modern campaigns lack. To use nostalgia effectively, a brand has to know its audience, know its cultural territory and know the difference between resonance and noise. Memory is not decoration. It is meaning.

The best nostalgia marketing feels both familiar and fresh. It honours the past without becoming trapped in it. It offers recognition without laziness. It creates emotional shorthand without oversimplifying the audience. And when it works, it reminds us that the most powerful brand stories are often the ones people already carry with them.

Watch or listen to the full episode, and if you enjoy smart conversations about branding, marketing and culture, subscribe to stay in the loop with future releases.

Ben van Rooy (Human Digital): LinkedIn Steph Quantrill (Cue Marketing): LinkedIn

Marketing is not just campaigns.
It is not just social media.
And it is definitely not just promotion.

Yet in boardrooms and budget conversations everywhere, marketing is still treated as if it begins and ends with advertising.

In this episode of Canned the Marketing Podcast, Ben and Steph went back to the foundations: Product, Price, Place and Promotion, not for nostalgia, but because those four variables still underpin every successful brand strategy being built today.

Despite AI.
Despite social platforms.
Despite e-commerce acceleration.

The fundamentals have not changed.

What has changed is how often they are misunderstood.

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The 4Ps: A Framework That Refuses to Die

The 4Ps were formalised in 1967 by Philip Kotler in Marketing Management. At the time, marketing was often conflated with selling or advertising. Kotler introduced structure. He grounded marketing in economics and strategic thinking.

His argument was simple: marketing is a system.

You cannot isolate communication from what you are selling. You cannot separate pricing from positioning. You cannot ignore distribution and expect brand perception to remain intact.

Decades later, the model still holds because it forces coherence.

Product: You Are Selling More Than You Think

Everything begins with product.

And product is rarely just the physical thing.

It is the experience. The design. The performance. The packaging. The emotional response. The service layer. The brand story.

Take Aesop. On paper, it sells hand soap. In reality, it sells ritual. Scent. Design. Status. The store experience. The packaging aesthetic. The feeling of considered luxury.

The product is not just the formulation. It is the total offer.

Allbirds provides another example. Its early global growth was built on embedding sustainability into the product itself. The materials were the marketing. The proposition lived in the shoe, not just in the campaign.

But product advantages are fragile. Competitors replicate. Large brands integrate similar features. Innovation becomes baseline.

Which is why the next P matters so much.

Price: Positioning in Numerical Form

Price is never just about revenue. It is a signal.

It tells the market who you are for and who you are not for. It communicates confidence. It shapes perception before a word of copy is written.

Aesop’s pricing reinforces its premium positioning. RM Williams protects its brand equity by rarely discounting core products. Apple enforces pricing discipline across all its distribution channels.

Contrast that with brands that live in permanent sale mode. In those cases, discounting becomes the identity.

Price also has a less glamorous but essential role: it must sustain profit. If your pricing structure does not account for discounting, channel margins or cost increases, growth can look impressive while profitability quietly erodes.

Marketing does not sit separate from financial reality. Margin is strategy.

Place: Context Changes Value

Where you sell shapes what you are worth.

Consider a bottle of wine. The same product might cost $15 in a supermarket, $25 in a specialist wine store, and $60 in a restaurant. The difference is not the liquid. It is the context.

Place influences both cost structure and perceived value.

In recent years, direct-to-consumer channels have complicated this further. Brands that once relied entirely on retailers now sell directly online. That creates tension. If pricing undercuts retail partners, relationships strain. If it remains aligned, margins tighten.

Apple’s approach is instructive. It maintains strict pricing consistency whether you buy directly or through a reseller. That discipline protects brand integrity and channel relationships simultaneously.

Place is not logistics. It is positioning.

Promotion: The Visible Lever

Promotion is the part everyone sees.

Advertising. PR. Social content. Influencers. Media buying. Email. Events.

It is the visible expression of marketing. But it is only one lever.

Promotion amplifies what already exists. It does not fix structural misalignment.

A premium brand that constantly discounts confuses its audience. A value brand attempting to signal exclusivity creates tension. A brilliant campaign cannot compensate for weak product experience or inconsistent distribution.

When the four Ps align, promotion becomes powerful. When they do not, it becomes noise.

The Extended Ps: People, Process and Proof

As service businesses grew, the framework expanded to include People, Process and Physical Evidence.

People recognises that in service environments, staff are part of the product. A knowledgeable team member at Bunnings shapes the customer experience. So does an agency account lead or consultant.

Process refers to how things happen. Onboarding, checkout, implementation, support. Friction reduces trust. Seamless processes increase confidence.

Physical evidence speaks to proof. Case studies, packaging quality, store design, website polish. In intangible services especially, tangible cues reassure buyers that the offering is credible.

These additions reinforce one thing: marketing is systemic. It touches operations, finance, experience and culture.

The Human Reality: Agency and Client Tension

Theory aside, there is another variable that shapes marketing outcomes: relationships.

Agencies often feel clients provide unclear briefs, delay approvals or shift scope mid-project. Clients often feel agencies overcharge, underdeliver or fail to bring strong strategic thinking.

Both perspectives can be true at the same time.

What is rarely measured is the health of the relationship itself.

When structured, anonymous feedback is introduced, something interesting happens. Agencies often rate clients generously at first. Clients rate agencies more critically. Over time, as feedback becomes normalised, scores converge.

Alignment improves.

Not because anyone becomes perfect, but because issues are surfaced early and addressed directly.

In a profession built on communication, internal communication is often the weakest link.

Revisiting the 4Ps is not academic. It is practical.

If your marketing feels fragmented or inconsistent, the issue may not be a lack of creativity. It may be misalignment across product, price, place and promotion.

Are you charging in a way that reflects your intended positioning?
Are you distributing through channels that reinforce your brand?
Does your promotion accurately represent the experience you deliver?
Are your internal and external partners aligned in executing that system?

Marketing excellence is rarely about a single clever idea. It is about coherence.

AI will evolve. Platforms will rise and fall. Consumer behaviour will shift.

But the core questions remain constant:

What are we selling?
At what price?
Through which channels?
And how are we communicating that value?

The 4Ps endure because they force discipline.

If someone in your organisation still believes marketing is “just advertising,” send them this.

And if you want the full conversation, including our debate on the extended Ps and the realities of agency–client dynamics, listen to the latest episode of Canned the Marketing Podcast.

Subscribe for next week’s discussion on nostalgia marketing and why brands keep reaching back to move forward.

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Marketing is having a moment. Not the shiny, campaign-launch, applause-and-awards kind. The other kind. The one where the ground shifts under your feet: budgets tighten, expectations climb, channels multiply, and suddenly everyone has access to the same AI tools that can generate a “strategy” in seconds.

So what actually separates great marketers from the rest now?

According to John Miles, CEO of the New Zealand Marketing Association, it’s not the tools. It’s the thinking. It’s the fundamentals. It’s community. And it’s leadership development that turns marketers into people who can drive real commercial outcomes, not just ship activity.

In Episode 27 of Can The Marketing Podcast, Ben from Human Digital and Steph from Cue Marketing sit down with John to talk about how the MA is evolving, what it has learned through disruption, and what it takes to prepare today’s marketers for the demands of 2026 and beyond.

From Direct Mail to Modern Marketing Leadership

Many assume the MA has always looked the way it does today. It hasn’t.

The organisation began more than five decades ago as the New Zealand Direct Mail Association. It was practical and functional, built around issues like postal costs and coordination. It later became the Direct Marketing Association of New Zealand before eventually transforming into the New Zealand Marketing Association in 2007.

That evolution mirrors the profession itself. Marketing moved from direct mail and tactical execution into a complex discipline spanning data, creativity, technology and leadership. The association had to evolve alongside it.

John stepped into the CEO role just over six years ago, bringing a background that spans FMCG, agencies and education. His career has included working in breweries, academia, polytechnics and leading a private business school with global campuses. That blend of commercial and educational experience shaped his view of what the MA needed to become.

In his words, the mission became clear: help marketers be brilliant.

It’s a deceptively simple line. But it reframes the organisation from an event host into a capability builder.

What the Marketing Association Actually Does

The MA is the professional association for marketers in New Zealand. Unlike lawyers or accountants, marketers are not required by law to join a professional body or maintain formal development credits. That means the MA has to prove its value every year.

Today, the association supports hundreds of companies and thousands of individual marketers, including a fast-growing base of student members. Corporate members range from major banks and FMCG players to smaller businesses investing in capability. In large organisations, entire teams can be covered under one membership tier.

The core offering spans education, networking, events and access to industry leaders. But what stands out in this conversation is that the MA is not positioning itself as a club. It’s positioning itself as a career accelerator.

When COVID Forced Reinvention

Three months after John joined the MA, COVID hit.

The organisation’s main income streams were events and learning and development programs. Both disappeared almost overnight.

The logical response would have been to cut costs and wait it out. Instead, John asked a different question: what can we do for our members right now that adds real value?

That question led to a rapid pivot into online education. It included reaching out to international experts and launching work-from-home programs that connected New Zealand marketers to global thinking during a time when isolation could have stalled growth.

What could have been a contraction became an innovation moment. Education went from being one pillar to becoming central to the organisation’s identity.

Bridging the Gap Between University and Industry

One of the most practical challenges discussed in the episode is the “graduate gap”. Many marketing graduates leave university without real exposure to the workplace. Employers often find that while graduates understand theory, they lack context, confidence and industry access.

The Top Talent Marketing School was designed to address exactly that.

Originally focused on supporting Māori and Pasifika students through professional certification, the initiative evolved into a structured program that identifies top-performing marketing students and gives them concentrated, practical preparation for the workforce.

It is deliberately intense. It connects students with businesses. It creates exposure that most university programs cannot provide on their own.

What makes the program powerful is not just the workshops, but the connection to real companies. Students gain insight into expectations, commercial realities and professional standards before they graduate. For many, it changes the trajectory of their early careers.

A Leadership Ladder for Every Stage

A key theme in the conversation is that marketers need development at different career stages. The MA has built a two-lane pathway to support that progression.

The Emerging Marketer Accelerator is designed for professionals with roughly two to five years of experience. At this stage, marketers are competent but still forming their judgement. They often don’t know what they don’t know. The program provides structure, exposure and leadership foundations that accelerate growth.

At the other end is the Advanced Marketing Leadership program. This flagship initiative is reserved for experienced marketers, typically with more than ten years in the field and leadership responsibility. It includes a rigorous selection process and focuses heavily on emotional intelligence, influence and strategic thinking.

One of the most powerful elements of the senior program is speed mentoring, where dozens of CMOs and senior executives gather to give direct feedback and guidance. It’s a rare opportunity for aspiring leaders to access the top of the profession in one room.

What emerges from this structure is not just education. It’s a pipeline. Students move into emerging roles. Emerging marketers move into leadership tracks. Leaders give back into the system.

80 Events a Year and a National Footprint

Beyond formal education, the MA runs an extraordinary number of events each year. The organisation has expanded well beyond Auckland, with active communities across Queenstown, Dunedin, Christchurch, Wellington, Tauranga and Hamilton.

This geographic spread matters. Marketing talent does not live in one city. Regional professionals need access to peers, insights and industry conversation just as much as those in large corporate headquarters.

Events are not simply social. They are touchpoints for capability, idea-sharing and visibility. For non-members, they often serve as an entry point. For members, they reinforce the sense of belonging to something larger than their own organisation.

ROI Pressure, AI and Channel Overload

Perhaps the most valuable part of the episode is the future-facing conversation.

Marketing has never had more delivery mechanisms. Channels are fragmented. Measurement is scrutinised. Budgets are tight. AI tools are ubiquitous.

John’s perspective is grounded rather than alarmist.

First, he argues that the fundamentals still matter. Understanding product, price, place and promotion is not optional. If anything, in a world of automation, foundational thinking becomes more important.

Second, AI changes efficiency but not responsibility. It can generate content quickly, but it cannot replace judgement. The marketers who will win are those who iterate, question and refine rather than accept the first output. Critical thinking becomes the differentiator.

Third, creativity is not dead. In fact, there are signs of a creative renaissance in markets like Europe. The principle remains timeless: if you can put a smile on someone’s face or make them feel something, you have a better chance of cutting through.

Finally, data and ROI accountability are only going to intensify. Marketers must be able to demonstrate impact. The idea that smaller businesses cannot afford advanced measurement is outdated. The real risk is not investing in capability and being left behind.

Lessons for Marketers at Every Stage

Several clear lessons emerge from this conversation.

Marketing is a craft, not a collection of tools. Platforms will change. The underlying thinking does not.

Capability beats hype. Long-term success depends on structured development, not trend-chasing.

Community is a competitive advantage. Access to peers, mentors and leaders accelerates growth in ways individual effort cannot replicate.

Education is continuous. The pace of change means marketers cannot rely on past experience alone.

The best marketers will be the best thinkers. In a world where AI can produce outputs for everyone, depth of insight becomes the real differentiator.

A Profession Built by Those Who Give Back

One of the most striking themes in the episode is generosity. Senior leaders show up to mentor. Companies invest in student pathways. Members support regional growth. The ecosystem strengthens because people contribute beyond their own job descriptions.

A strong marketing profession does not happen by accident. It is built intentionally through education, shared standards and a willingness to raise the bar together.

If you want to understand where marketing in New Zealand is heading, and how capability and leadership will shape the next decade, this episode is essential viewing.

Watch the full conversation with John Miles on Can The Marketing Podcast, and if you believe marketing deserves to be treated like a profession, not just a function, subscribe and share it with someone ready to level up.

If you’ve worked in marketing for more than five minutes, you’ve probably heard this sentence: “We need a new strategy.”

Sometimes it’s said with excitement. Sometimes with panic. Often after a campaign hasn’t worked.

But most businesses that say they have a strategy… don’t.

They have plans. They have activity. They have a calendar full of campaigns, posts, emails, launches, and “urgent” requests. What they don’t have is a clear set of choices that guide all of that activity.

In this episode of Canned the Marketing Podcast, hosts Ben van Rooy and Steph Quantrill dig into what strategy actually is, what it absolutely is not, and why so many marketers end up stuck in tactical chaos instead of strategic clarity.

This is not a theoretical conversation. It’s grounded in lived experience, hard earned lessons, and real examples of brands getting strategy right (and very wrong).

The core misunderstanding: strategy is not a document

One of the biggest traps marketers fall into is treating strategy as a thing you produce rather than a set of decisions you make.

Strategy is not:

• A 60 page PowerPoint deck

• A media plan

• A list of campaigns

• A social content calendar

• A vision statement

• A set of KPIs or targets

Those are all outputs. Strategy comes before them.

At its simplest, strategy is a set of choices made in advance that determine:

• Where you will play

• How you will win

• And, just as importantly, where you will not play

That last part is the one most organisations struggle with.

Because strategy creates focus, but focus requires trade offs.
And trade offs mean saying no.

Why “doing more” feels good but achieves less

There’s a false sense of achievement that comes with activity.

Sending the email.
Launching the campaign.
Posting the content.
Turning on another channel.

It feels productive. It looks busy. And in many businesses, busyness is rewarded more than clarity.

But as Ben points out in the episode, if you don’t decide your direction deliberately, it will be decided for you by your inbox.

Without strategy, marketers end up reacting to:

• The loudest stakeholder

• The newest channel

• The latest trend

• The most recent failure

This is how brands end up jumping from Meta to TikTok to search to influencers with no unifying idea, no consistency, and no compounding effect.

Strategy creates simplicity, not complexity

A good strategy does one thing exceptionally well.
It makes everything else easier.

If your strategy is clear, it should simplify:

• Decision making

• Prioritisation

• Channel choices

• Messaging

• Campaign planning

If your “strategy” makes marketing feel more complicated, more chaotic, or more fragmented, it’s probably not a strategy at all.

As Steph puts it, strategy should act as a north star. The destination doesn’t change every year. The tactics might, but the direction stays consistent.

Marketing strategy cannot exist without business strategy

One of the most common mistakes marketers make is building a marketing strategy in isolation.

Marketing strategy is not separate from business strategy. It sits inside it.

Before you can answer marketing questions like:

• Who are we targeting

• What are we saying

• Where are we showing up

You need clarity on business fundamentals:

• Who does the business serve

• How does it make money

• Where does it compete

• Where does it choose not to compete

• What does winning actually look like

When marketers are excluded from business strategy conversations, they’re forced to guess. That’s when you see random campaigns, constant repositioning, and reactive channel hopping.

Being “at the table” matters, but so does asking better questions when you’re not.

The cascade of choices: strategy on a page

One of the most practical frameworks discussed in the episode is the cascade of choices.

At its core, it answers five questions:

1. What is our ambition?
   Why do we exist and what does winning mean?

2. Where will we play?
   Which markets, categories, customers, and geographies?

3. How will we win?
   What makes us different? Why should customers choose us?

4. What capabilities do we need?
   Skills, systems, and resources required to deliver.

5. What management systems support this?
   Measurement, incentives, and processes.

Marketing plays most heavily in the middle of the cascade, shaping:

• Customer insight

• Target segments

• Positioning

• Value propositions

The entire strategy should be explainable on a single page. The detail can live elsewhere, but clarity has to come first.

Diagnosis before action: the step most teams skip

Both Ben and Steph stress the importance of spending more time diagnosing before acting.

Good strategy starts with deep understanding:

• The customer

• The category

• The competitive landscape

• Your own product

If you’re marketing a consumer product, you should have used it. Tasted it. Bought it. Seen where it sits on the shelf. Understood why someone chooses it over alternatives.

Too many marketers know less about their product than their customers do.

Consistency beats cleverness every time

Great brands are not built by constant reinvention. They’re built by consistency over time.

The episode highlights brands like:

• Bunnings, with a decade plus commitment to DIY, value, and helpfulness

• Chemist Warehouse, unapologetically chaotic but ruthlessly clear on price and range

• American Express, positioned as a membership brand focused on high value customers, benefits, and experiences rather than discounts

These brands evolve tactically but remain strategically consistent.

Strategy is not about being clever.
It’s about being clear, then staying the course long enough for it to work.

When strategy is missing, everything feels urgent

One of the most telling signs a business lacks strategy is constant urgency.

• “We need to reach a million people”

• “Let’s just try TikTok”

• “Meta didn’t work, pull it”

Without a clear strategy, every idea feels equally important. Every channel feels like a silver bullet. Every campaign is judged in isolation.

Strategy gives you the confidence to ask better questions instead of reacting to noise.

Practical takeaways for marketers at any level

If you’re early in your career:

• Read good strategy

• Study brands with long term consistency

• Ask “why” more often than “how”

If you’re mid career:

• Push for clarity on business objectives

• Understand how your role ladders into business strategy

• Spend more time on diagnosis, less on output

If you’re senior:

• Fewer campaigns, better executed

• Protect consistency

• Say no more often than yes

And at every level, remember this litmus test:

If your strategy doesn’t make marketing simpler, it probably isn’t a strategy.

Strategy is for everyone

Strategy isn’t reserved for CEOs, CMOs, or people with MBAs.

Anyone can engage with strategy. Anyone can question it. Anyone can use it to do their job better.

And when strategy is done well, it doesn’t feel flashy.
It feels calm.
Clear.
Focused.

Which is exactly how good marketing should feel.

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Customer experience has quietly become one of the most overused and least understood phrases in modern marketing.

Everyone claims to be customer-centric. Every strategy deck says “put the customer first”. Yet customers are more frustrated than ever, loyalty feels increasingly fragile, and brands are still surprised when churn creeps up or reputation takes a hit.

In this episode of Canned, Ben van Rooy and Steph Quantrill are joined by customer experience specialist Sarah Clearwater, founder and CEO of Reframer, to explore customer experience.

Customer experience isn’t a layer on top of your brand. It is the delivery of your brand promise.

And more importantly, the moments that define brands aren’t when everything works perfectly. They’re the moments when things go sideways.

What customer experience actually is (and what it isn’t)

One of the first myths the conversation tackles is the idea that customer experience is just another department, or a glossy artefact like a journey map that lives on a wall.

Sarah puts it simply:

Customer experience is the practice of making visible how customers actually experience your organisation, end to end.

That means:

• From first awareness and marketing messages

• Through sales, onboarding, product usage and service

• Including cancellations, complaints and edge cases

What it is not:

• A replacement for marketing

• A single tool or metric like NPS

• A one-off workshop or research project

Instead, customer experience acts as the connective tissue. The “glue” that keeps marketing, sales, product, service and technology aligned around the same human reality.

Marketing makes the promise. Experience keeps (or breaks) it.

A recurring theme in the episode is the tension between what brands say and what customers feel.

Marketing’s job is to make promises:

• This product will save you time

• This service will be easy

• This brand will look after you

But those promises are kept or broken elsewhere in the organisation.

When the experience doesn’t match the message, customers don’t blame the process. They blame the brand.

And crucially, people remember broken promises far longer than clever campaigns.

This is why customer experience isn’t a threat to marketing. It’s one of marketing’s most powerful allies.

Why customer experience matters most in commoditised categories

In categories like banking, insurance, telco and B2B services, products are often hard to differentiate. Features converge. Pricing tightens. Switching becomes easier.

What remains?

The experience.

Sarah notes that organisations tend to invest seriously in customer experience when business as usual stops delivering growth. Often this happens when:

• They’re trying to reach a new segment or generation

• They’re entering a new market or business model

• Retention or acquisition metrics start to stall

In these moments, understanding customers deeply isn’t a nice to have. It becomes a resilience strategy.

The reality inside most organisations: silos and blind spots

One of the most relatable parts of the conversation is the honest acknowledgement of how organisations really work.

Marketing attracts the lead.
Sales converts it.
Product delivers it.
Service fixes it when it breaks.

Each team is doing their best. Each team has KPIs. But no one owns the whole journey.

The result?

• Handoffs become failure points

• Promises get diluted

• Customers experience inconsistency

As Ben points out, this is especially painful in B2B, where:

• Sales cycles are long

• Multiple stakeholders are involved

• Buyers are often not the end users

Problems can take months to surface, by which point trust has already eroded.

Why journey mapping still matters (when done properly)

Customer journey mapping gets a bad reputation when it’s treated as a tick-box exercise.

But when done well, it becomes one of the few tools that forces organisations to see themselves from the outside in.

Sarah explains that journey maps help teams:

• Step out of org charts and into customer reality

• See invisible moments, especially in B2B decision making

• Understand where value is created or destroyed

Importantly, journeys are often the only place where conflicting KPIs become visible.

Marketing might be optimising for lead volume.
Sales for readiness to buy.
Customer success for speed to value.

Without a shared view, everyone is “right” and the customer still loses.

Personas over segments: a smarter tool for marketers

One of the most practical takeaways for marketers is the shift from demographic segmentation to behavioural understanding.

Traditional segments often focus on:

• Age

• Gender

• Income

But these factors don’t always explain why people choose, hesitate or leave.

Personas and customer archetypes focus instead on:

• Decision making patterns

• Motivations and anxieties

• Context and constraints

Two customers may look nothing alike demographically, yet behave identically when buying from you.

For marketers, this unlocks:

• More relevant messaging

• Better alignment with sales

• Fewer assumptions disguised as insights

For small teams: start with real conversations

You don’t need a six figure CX platform to improve experience.

For smaller teams or solo marketers, Sarah’s advice is refreshingly grounded:

Don’t ask customers “how was your experience?”
Ask them about specific moments that matter.

Better still, talk to customers who recently cancelled.

Those conversations reveal more than dashboards ever will, if you’re willing to listen and act.

Lip service vs real customer centricity

Many organisations claim to be customer-centric. Fewer can prove it.

A simple test Sarah offers:

Are your biggest decisions informed by customer insight or by internal opinion?

Real customer centricity shows up when:

• Strategy is shaped by customer evidence

• Investment decisions link back to customer impact

• Insights lead to action, not just reports

If insight doesn’t change behaviour, it isn’t insight. It’s decoration.

The ROI question every CFO asks

Customer experience often struggles to justify itself because it feels intangible.

Sarah’s analogy lands hard:

You don’t notice the nails in a house until the storm hits.

The ROI of customer experience shows up in:

• Acquisition

• Retention

• Churn

• Conversion

• Cost to serve

The work isn’t about measuring everything. It’s about linking experience improvements to the metrics that already matter.

Where great brands really shine: when things go wrong

The most human moment in the episode comes when the hosts share personal brand experiences.

A stolen phone abroad, resolved with calm, empathetic support.
A broken shoe, handled personally and consistently.
A hardware store employee who doesn’t just sell products, but gives confidence.

The common thread?

None of these moments were planned. All of them were stress tests.

Great brands aren’t defined by perfect journeys. They’re defined by how they respond when reality intervenes.

Experience is how strategy becomes real

Customer experience isn’t separate from brand, marketing or strategy.

It’s where all three meet.

When organisations invest in understanding and improving experience, they’re not just fixing friction. They’re building resilience, trust and long term relevance.

And in a world where customers have more choice than ever, that might be the most defensible advantage of all.

Watch, listen, and go deeper

If you want to hear the full conversation, including practical examples and real world stories, watch or listen to this episode of Canned.

If you found this useful:

• Subscribe to Canned for weekly conversations on marketing, strategy and brand

• Share this episode with someone who still thinks customer experience is just a department

• And start mapping the moments where your brand promise is truly tested

Because that’s where your brand is really built.

Every January, marketers collectively dust off their crystal balls.

Budgets are being reset, strategies are being rewritten, and everyone is quietly wondering the same thing: what actually matters now?

In this episode of Canned, Ben van Rooy (Human Digital) and Steph Quantrill (Cue Marketing) kick off 2026 by doing exactly that.

2025 was, for many, a year of survival. Budgets tightened. Teams shrank. AI exploded faster than most organisations could sensibly absorb. By early 2026, the mood is cautiously different. Not euphoric. Not boom-time. But more optimistic, more pragmatic, and far less tolerant of waste.

This conversation is about navigating that reality.

Theme 1: Brand is back (and performance-only thinking is hitting a ceiling)

One of the strongest predictions from the episode is simple but significant: brand investment is no longer optional, especially in B2B.

For years, performance marketing dominated the conversation. Lead volume, cost per acquisition, short-term returns. Many organisations doubled down on lower-funnel activity at the expense of long-term brand building.

That strategy is starting to crack.

Ben’s view is clear:

• Overreliance on lead gen is producing flattening returns

• Short-term optimisation without brand is making growth harder, not easier

• The brands seeing momentum are those rebalancing top, middle and bottom funnel activity

In markets like Australia and New Zealand, where brand investment has historically lagged, this creates a real opportunity. The brands willing to stay the course and educate boards and CEOs on why brand matters will pull ahead.

Steph adds an important qualifier: this only works if leadership can hold their nerve.

Brand investment doesn’t pay back in weeks. It requires belief, evidence, and marketers who can sell the value of metrics beyond immediate revenue.

Theme 2: AI is everywhere – and audiences are already pushing back

AI is no longer emerging. It’s embedded.

But the tone around it has shifted.

Both Ben and Steph describe a growing sense of fatigue – not with AI itself, but with how lazily it’s being used.

Key realities discussed:

• AI makes it easy to produce huge volumes of content

• Much of that content is interchangeable, generic, and forgettable

• Audiences can feel when brand personality has been flattened

Steph frames this as a craving for “realness”.

As AI adoption increases, people are placing more value on:

• Human presence

• Physical experiences

• Distinct points of view

• Brands that feel intentional rather than automated

There’s also a generational insight worth noting. Younger audiences are often better at spotting bad AI than older ones. What looks “good enough” to some demographics is instantly rejected by others.

The takeaway isn’t anti-AI. It’s about where AI belongs.

Bottom-of-funnel, transactional content? Perfect. Brand storytelling, positioning, cultural relevance? Still a human job.

Theme 3: The agency model is fragmenting – and that’s not a bad thing

Another major prediction for 2026 is the continued rise of specialist agencies.

After years of consolidation, large agency groups are under pressure to justify their margins and complexity. At the same time, brands are becoming more sophisticated buyers of marketing services.

The result:

• More niche, specialist agencies with deep expertise

• More in-house teams owning strategy and core execution

• More use of fractional, project-based and specialist talent

Steph highlights the human impact of this shift.

Junior roles are changing. Traditional agency career paths are less clear. Some work is disappearing due to automation, while new forms of value are emerging.

The opportunity sits with people and teams who:

• Double down on a clear craft

• Understand where AI genuinely saves time

• Can translate strategy into execution

This isn’t an industry imploding. It’s an industry rebalancing.

Theme 4: Content volume will explode – quality will decide who wins

If 2026 has a defining tension, it’s this one.

Content has never been easier to produce. And that’s the problem.

AI has removed friction from creation, which means feeds, inboxes and platforms are filling faster than ever. In that environment, average content doesn’t just underperform – it disappears.

Ben frames it clearly:

• Quantity has a role, especially at the bottom of the funnel

• Quality is what builds brands, trust and long-term advantage

• The gap between mediocre and excellent content will widen

Steph adds an interesting counter-trend: the rise of long-form.

As short-form accelerates, there’s renewed appetite for:

• Thoughtful writing

• Long videos

• Podcasts

• Substack-style commentary

Not because everyone consumes it, but because the right people do.

Depth becomes a filter.

Theme 5: B2B buyers now expect consumer-grade experiences

One of the quieter but more important predictions is around B2B experience.

B2B buyers are not comparing your website to other B2B sites. They’re comparing it to:

• Consumer brands

• Streaming platforms

• E-commerce experiences

• Well-designed digital products

Tolerance for:

• Generic messaging

• Clunky UX

• Faceless brands

is dropping fast.

This creates a genuine opportunity for B2B brands willing to:

• Invest in design

• Show their people

• Develop a clear point of view

• Build confidence through brand, not just credentials

You don’t need a Super Bowl ad. But you do need to look like you care.

Challenges and realities marketers need to face

Throughout the episode, a few hard truths surface:

• Budgets are unlikely to explode in 2026

• Cost of living pressures are still real

• Many teams are being asked to do more with less

• AI will continue to remove some types of work

But there’s also cautious optimism.

Projects that were paused are restarting. Businesses are planning again. Growth may be steady rather than spectacular, but it’s moving.

The marketers who succeed will be the ones who:

• Make deliberate choices

• Resist chasing every new tool

• Invest where it actually compounds

Practical takeaways from the episode

If you strip the conversation down to action, a few clear principles emerge:

• Balance brand and performance rather than swinging between extremes

• Use AI to remove friction, not personality

• Invest in content quality where it matters most

• Be clear about what you specialise in

• Design experiences for humans, not funnels

Or, as Steph jokingly predicts, maybe what we really need is a new role altogether.

The vibe translator.

Someone who can read the room, navigate competing agendas, and sense when something feels right or deeply off.

AI can analyse sentiment. People still understand nuance.

2026 is about intent, not noise

Marketing in 2026 rewards intention.

Being clear about who you are. Where you play. What you automate. What you protect. And what you invest real human effort into.

The tools will keep changing. The platforms will keep shifting. The fundamentals – trust, clarity, relevance and confidence – haven’t moved at all.

If you want to go deeper into this conversation, watch or listen to the full episode of Canned.

And if you’re navigating these questions inside your own team or business, subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming next.

Next episode: customer experience, journey mapping, and why understanding the path to purchase is becoming a core human skill again.

See you there.

By the time December rolls around, marketers are tired. Budgets are blown, campaigns are wrapped, and everyone is pretending the year went exactly to plan.

That’s why year-end conversations matter.

In this Christmas special episode of Canned: The Marketing Podcast, Ben van Rooy from Human Digital and Steph Quantrill from Cue Marketing look back at the brands that defined 2025. Not through awards decks or LinkedIn hype, but through outcomes, impact, and cultural reality.

Joined by brand strategist Eugene Healey, this episode becomes less about who won and lost, and more about what brand actually means right now.

Marketing didn’t get simpler in 2025. It got noisier.

More platforms. More content. More cultural tension. More pressure to perform instantly and explain everything to a CFO who wants certainty in an uncertain world.

Against that backdrop, this episode tackles the uncomfortable gap between:

• Talkability and sales

• Creativity and effectiveness

• Cultural relevance and brand permission

And it asks a harder question many brands avoid:

Just because you can participate in a cultural moment, does that mean you should?

The Big Themes That Kept Coming Up

Brand Is Bigger Than Campaigns

One of the clearest threads through the episode is that brand is not what you launch. It’s what you live with.

Optus didn’t land on the naughty list because of a bad ad. They landed there because brand is built through systems, service failures, and how you communicate when things go wrong. In highly regulated industries, marketing teams often inherit messes they didn’t create, but still carry the reputational cost.

The takeaway: Brand lives everywhere, especially where marketing has no control.

Talkability Is Not the Same as Growth

American Eagle’s Sydney Sweeney campaign became unavoidable in 2025. Hot takes everywhere. Headlines everywhere. Cultural debate everywhere.

Sales growth? Not so much.

As Eugene Healey points out, brand consideration and preference actually declined. The people celebrating the campaign online were not the people buying the product.

This is the danger zone modern marketing keeps walking into:

• Confusing cultural visibility with commercial effectiveness

• Assuming controversy equals success

• Reporting impressions when the business needed preference

Attention without alignment is just noise.

When Purpose Actually Works

Not all bold work fails. Herpes New Zealand proves that.

Their multi-year campaign reframed sexual health through humour, humanity, and honesty. It didn’t talk down to audiences or hide behind service-announcement tropes. It treated people like adults.

What made it work was not just creativity, but commitment:

• Multi-channel execution

• Real healthcare integration

• Clear behavioural outcomes

This wasn’t purpose as positioning. It was purpose as practice.

And it’s why the campaign deserved its Cannes Lions and its place firmly on the nice list.

The Realities Brands Are Struggling With

Oligopolies Kill Bravery

Supermarkets and telcos dominate their categories. And paradoxically, that dominance makes them boring.

When the incentive is “don’t mess it up”, creativity dies. As Eugene puts it, many Australian and New Zealand industries operate in a Mexican standoff where everyone is profitable enough to stay safe and terrified enough to stay dull.

Yet challenger behaviour still exists. Up Bank proves regulation is not an excuse. IKEA proves scale doesn’t kill imagination.

The issue isn’t constraints. It’s courage.

AI Isn’t the Problem. Cynicism Is.

Coca-Cola’s AI Christmas campaign isn’t offensive because it uses AI. It’s offensive because it assumes viewers don’t care.

Same assets. Same tropes. Same emotional shorthand. Just cheaper and faster.

The reaction wasn’t outrage. It was indifference.

And indifference is lethal.

As the episode makes clear, the problem isn’t technology replacing creativity. It’s brands choosing efficiency over respect for craft.

Where Brands Got It Right

IKEA’s New Zealand Launch

Few brands understand cultural entry like IKEA.

Instead of shouting “we’re here”, they studied how New Zealanders actually live. Then they showed up in ways that felt local, inclusive, and human.

Pop-ups outside Auckland. Regional media investment. Physical brand assets that felt playful, not imported.

The lesson is simple:
Global brands win locally when they listen first.

Cadbury Made to Share

This campaign worked because it integrated product, packaging, and behaviour.

By mapping real consumption moments and reflecting shared effort and appreciation, Cadbury didn’t just tell a story. They created more reasons to open the chocolate.

It’s a reminder that the best brand ideas:

• Increase consumption occasions

• Reinforce purpose

• Live beyond one channel

John Lewis and the Power of Emotion

Every year, people say emotional advertising is dead. Every year, John Lewis proves otherwise.

This year’s campaign resonated because it didn’t chase trends. It respected audience intelligence and emotional complexity. It trusted storytelling.

Craft still works when it’s honest.

Crisis, Culture, and the Art of Recovery

The Astronomer and Coldplay saga wasn’t planned. But the response was.

By leaning into discourse instead of hiding from it, the brand reframed a viral disaster into cultural commentary. The choice of Gwyneth Paltrow was absurd in exactly the right way.

The lesson:
When culture explodes around you, denial makes it worse. Reframing can save you.

Practical Takeaways for 2026

If there’s one piece of advice that runs through the episode, it’s this:

Build from the bottom up, not the top down.

That means:

• Start with real moments, not big slogans

• Design ideas that can fragment and travel

• Create frameworks people can participate in, remix, and own

• Respect audiences enough to do the work properly

Brands that win now are not louder. They’re clearer.

Naughty or Nice Is a Moving Target

Every brand is one decision away from the naughty list.

Every crisis is one response away from redemption.

What separates the winners from the cautionary tales isn’t budget, scale, or even talent. It’s judgement.

This episode doesn’t hand out easy answers. But it does offer something better: perspective.

And as we head into 2026, that might be the most valuable thing marketers can have.

🎧 Watch or Listen to the Full Episode

If you want the full conversation, including Cannes side quests, fashion tangents, and unfiltered industry honesty, watch the episode or listen on your podcast platform of choice.

Subscribe to Canned: The Marketing Podcast for more conversations that cut through the noise and get real about what works.

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B2B marketing often sits in the shadow of its louder, flashier sibling. While B2C gets the big budgets, bold creative, and cultural moments, B2B is expected to quietly generate leads, support sales, and somehow do more with less.

But as buying journeys become longer, trust becomes harder to earn, and buying decisions involve more people than ever, B2B marketing is no longer just a support function. It is a growth lever.

In this episode of Canned, we dedicated the entire conversation to the power of B2B marketing. From buying committees and account-based marketing to brand, trust, and long game thinking, this was a deep dive into what actually works in modern B2B.

This article unpacks the key themes, realities, and practical lessons from the episode.

What makes B2B marketing fundamentally different

At a surface level, the goal of B2B marketing seems simple. Create demand. Generate leads. Support sales.

But the reality is far more complex.

Longer buying cycles

Unlike most consumer purchases, B2B decisions are rarely impulsive. They are considered, researched, debated, and delayed. Buyers may take months, sometimes years, to move from problem recognition to purchase.

Higher stakes

B2B purchases are expensive and risky. The people involved are not just spending money. They are risking credibility, reputation, and sometimes their jobs. Choosing the wrong vendor can have real consequences.

Multiple decision makers

In B2B, you are almost never selling to one person.

You are selling to a buying committee.

The buying committee is where deals are won or lost

One of the most important realities discussed in the episode is the concept of the buying committee.

In even moderately sized organisations, purchasing decisions involve multiple stakeholders, each with different motivations, fears, and success metrics.

Common roles include

• The economic buyer focused on cost and ROI

• The technical buyer focused on functionality and risk

• The user buyer focused on usability and day to day impact

• Procurement focused on fairness, process, and compliance

• Legal and IT focused on risk, security, and integration

Each of these people needs different information to say yes.

A single sales deck or generic website page cannot serve them all.

This is where many B2B brands struggle. They speak to one audience and assume everyone else will follow.

They rarely do.

Trust is the real currency of B2B marketing

If there is one word that defines effective B2B marketing, it is trust.

Trust that

• Your product will work

• Your company will deliver

• Your team will still be there in three years

• Choosing you will not backfire internally

Price-based positioning is fragile in this environment. If your value proposition is simply being cheaper, you are easy to replace.

Instead, B2B buyers look for signals of competence and credibility.

This is where brand becomes essential.

Not brand as logos or colours, but brand as

• Visibility

• Consistency

• Authority

• Proof

Why brand matters more than performance alone

One of the recurring themes in the episode is the danger of relying solely on performance marketing in B2B.

Search ads and lead forms cannot do all the work.

Buyers want to recognise your name before they speak to you. They want to feel confident that others like them have already chosen you.

This is why B2B brands that invest in brand building consistently outperform those that only optimise for short term leads.

Effective brand signals include

• Thought leadership and opinion

• Speaking at conferences

• Publishing content that educates, not just sells

• Being visible where your buyers already are

• Showing up consistently over time

Brand shortens sales cycles because it reduces perceived risk.

The underrated power of testimonials and case studies

Few assets are more powerful in B2B than a well-chosen testimonial.

Not generic praise, but specific stories from customers who look like your future buyers.

Why testimonials work

• People trust people more than brands

• They validate real world outcomes

• They help buyers justify decisions internally

• They speak in language marketing often cannot

The most effective testimonials

• Match your ideal customer profile

• Speak to a specific problem

• Describe life before and after your solution

• Feel credible, not polished

In many cases, testimonials and case studies do more to close deals than any campaign ever will.

Buying journeys are messy and non linear

Another key insight from the episode is that B2B buying journeys are rarely neat.

Different stakeholders realise the problem at different times. Some are proactive, others are dragged into the process reluctantly. People loop backwards, revisit old information, and change priorities mid process.

A typical high level journey looks like

• Problem realisation

• Education and research

• Requirement definition

• Shortlisting

• Risk mitigation and validation

• Procurement and approval

But in reality, each person in the buying committee follows their own version of this journey.

This is why content matters so much.

If your brand is present early during research and education, you shape the conversation before requirements are locked in.

That is an enormous advantage.

Account based marketing as a strategic unlock

Account based marketing, or ABM, was a major focus of the discussion.

At its core, ABM flips traditional marketing on its head.

Instead of marketing to individuals and hoping the right companies appear, ABM focuses on a defined list of high value target accounts and deliberately engages the people within them.

What makes ABM powerful

• It aligns marketing and sales

• It prioritises quality over volume

• It speaks directly to known needs

• It respects the reality of buying committees

A strong ABM approach includes

• Clear definition of ideal accounts

• Deep understanding of stakeholder roles

• Tailored messaging by role and industry

• Content designed to support internal selling

• Consistent engagement over time

ABM is particularly effective for complex, high value B2B products and services.

Practical lessons for B2B marketers

From the episode, several practical takeaways stand out.

Build assets that sell when you are not in the room

Your champion needs tools to sell internally. Case studies, videos, explainers, and content that answers objections matter more than perfectly polished pitch decks.

Invest in brand even with small budgets

Brand building is not about big spend. It is about clarity, consistency, and showing up with substance.

Speak to humans, not job titles

Even in B2B, decisions are emotional. Fear, ambition, and personal risk drive behaviour as much as logic.

Accept complexity rather than fighting it

B2B is complex. Trying to oversimplify buying journeys often backfires. Design your marketing to support complexity, not ignore it.

Why this matters now

We are operating in a low trust, cautious buying environment. Budgets are scrutinised. Decisions take longer. Buyers want proof, reassurance, and confidence.

In this context, B2B marketing that relies purely on tactics will struggle.

B2B marketing that builds trust, authority, and long term brand equity will win.

Final thoughts and what is next

This episode only scratched the surface of B2B marketing, but the message is clear.

B2B marketers are not just lead generators. They are growth architects.

As buying journeys become more complex and competitive advantage becomes harder to sustain, the brands that win will be those that understand people, not just pipelines.

If this conversation resonated, we are taking it further.

Ben and Steph will be speaking live at the Marketing Association B2B Conference, exploring how ambitious B2B teams can grow with small budgets and smart strategy.

👉 Watch the full episode
👉 Listen to Canned on your favourite podcast platform
👉 Subscribe to this Substack for future deep dives into modern marketing

Because B2B deserves better marketing.

If you’ve spent more than five minutes on LinkedIn lately, you’ve seen the explosion of “personal branding experts,” thought leadership hot takes, and professionals of all levels suddenly appearing online with polished content and strong points of view.

But beneath the buzz lies a deeper shift. Consumers trust companies less and people more. And this is reshaping how brands are built, how influence works, and how marketers need to operate.

In this episode of Canned, Ben and Steph dive into the realities, risks, and opportunities of personal branding today, from celebrity endorsements and internal influencers to corporate guardrails and career strategy.

The Context: A Distrustful Consumer and a Changing Influence Landscape

Marketers have always borrowed influence from big personalities. Celebrity endorsements are as old as advertising itself. But something fundamental has changed.

As Ben explains, 75 percent of consumers trust companies less than they did a year ago, while trust in individuals is rising. That means the “market” for influence has shifted from corporate channels to people: creators, CEOs, employees, and even everyday professionals building an online presence.

TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and now LinkedIn are where authority is being built, often by individuals with no corporate badge and no traditional credentials.

The result
People are influencing buying decisions, category thinking, and brand momentum at a scale once reserved for major advertisers.

Inside the Episode: Key Themes and Arguments

1. The Creator Economy Isn’t a Trend, It’s a Restructuring of Influence

The Cannes Lions conversations on creators opened something for both Steph and Ben: Creators aren’t just supporting brands. Sometimes they are the brand’s growth engine.

The pair discuss the example of UK drinks brand Poppi and the outsized impact of creator Alex Earl on its valuation. When the audience at Cannes ran to meet her instead of the brand’s CMO, a truth crystallised.

People don’t aspire to follow corporations. They follow people they feel connected to.

2. Why Personal Brands Outperform Corporate Messaging

Consumers can smell corporate polish from a mile away. They want personality, consistency, and authenticity. That’s why Ben’s example of Eugene Healy a marketer with half a million followers and a cultlike industry following hit home.

Eugene built trust by showing up consistently and delivering value. And that trust extends to the brands he partners with.

3. Consistency Builds Trust. Whether You’re a Person or a Company

Steph draws the parallel:
What makes a strong brand also makes a strong personal brand.

A consistent tone of voice
Clear values
Recognisable behaviours
Showing up the same way every time

That’s what makes people trust you.

4. The Corporate vs Personal Brand Balancing Act

This is one of the biggest tensions today. Employees worry that posting on LinkedIn makes them look like they’re job-hunting.
Others fear saying something that their employer wouldn’t approve.

Steph shares examples of people who privately agree with her posts but are afraid to comment publicly for that reason.

Ben’s view
You can always talk about topics, even if you can’t talk about your company. And your personal brand doesn’t need to match your job title. It should reflect your expertise, interests, and ambition.

By the time the job is posted, he argues, it’s too late. The people with strong personal brands are already in the pipeline.

Challenges and Realities Discussed

1. Companies Fear Losing Control

When creators build content on behalf of a brand, corporate marketers feel exposed.
Will the creator go off-brand
Will the tone fit
Is the risk worth it

But as the hosts point out, creators often improve brand resonance because they aren’t weighed down by corporate guardrails.

2. Internal Influencers Are Rising, And That’s Messy

Brands are beginning to use junior staff as “faces of the company”.
Steph feels for them.
They’re suddenly performers. They’re unsure if they’re representing themselves or the brand.

This raises questions
What happens when they leave
Can their face be endlessly reused
Does it help or hinder their career

No one has fully worked this out yet.

3. Authenticity Is Harder Than It Sounds

Trying too hard breaks trust.
Changing your voice breaks trust.
Pretending to be someone you’re not breaks trust.

Both hosts note that the audience can feel the difference when someone is forcing a persona rather than inhabiting their true voice.

Lessons, Insights, and Takeaways

1. A Personal Brand Is Not Optional Anymore

If you sell services, lead a team, run a business, or want a career that grows faster than your job description, your personal brand matters.
People buy from people especially in B2B.

2. You Don’t Need to Be a CEO to Build Influence

LinkedIn democratised thought leadership.
Marketers, junior staff, freelancers, and operators can build authority simply by showing up.

3. Your Brand Can Be Aspirational

Your LinkedIn headline doesn’t need to match your current job title.
It should reflect who you want to be known as.

4. Role Models Help You Shape Your Voice

Ben cites the hosts of Hard Fork and Eugene Healy as influences. Steph references leaders like Jason Paris and Rob Fyfe people who blend personality with leadership.

Study others, but don’t copy them. You’re building something uniquely yours.

5. Corporate Leaders Can Become Brand Assets

Jason Paris’s casual office tour video is a masterclass in authentic leadership.
Joely Hodson’s presence at Spark Accelerate reinforces her credibility.
Her investment in tech events signals strategic confidence.

These CEOs amplify their brands by being visible and real.

Practical Tips for Building a Personal Brand (Without Being Cringe)

1. Start with consistency, not perfection.

Pick one topic and show up with it regularly.

2. Speak like yourself, not like a press release.

Your energy should match your natural voice.

3. Commenting is content.

You don’t need to post. Start by sharing smart, thoughtful viewpoints on others’ posts.

4. Avoid the trap of “corporate neutral”.

Ben’s tip
Have a point of view. Even a light disagreement builds clarity and trust.

5. Don’t overshare, especially if you’re consulting or agency-side.

Steph highlights the need to balance authenticity with confidentiality and professionalism.

6. If you’re early-career, volunteer to make content.

It’s portfolio gold. It shows initiative.
It gives you on-camera confidence.
And it can fast-track your career.

7. Remember: your personal brand is simply how people experience you.

No theatrics required.
Just clarity, consistency, and character.

Personal Brands That Nailed It (According to the Episode)

Jason Paris – One NZ

Charismatic, visible, playful, and authentic.
He embodies the brand while still being unquestionably himself.

Joely Hodson – Spark

Strategic, credible, forward-thinking.
A CFO-turned-CEO bringing transparency and confidence to a major NZ brand.

Dan Carter – Athlete to Commercial Force

A masterclass in monetised personal branding.
He partners only with brands aligned to his values and image.

Mark Moore – Stolen Girlfriends Club

Founder and walking brand embodiment.
He never appears out of aesthetic alignment with his own label.

Personal branding isn’t about being loud or flashy or reinventing yourself as a “thought leader”.
It’s about showing up consistently, sharing what you know, and offering your audience something of value.

It helps you
Attract better opportunities
Build trust faster
Enhance your employer’s brand
Grow your influence
Become discoverable in your field

And as Ben and Steph prove every week on Canned, it can also be fun.

We’re in a new era of influence where people, not corporations, shape how markets move. Whether you’re a marketer, a leader, a creator, or simply someone building a career, your personal brand is already speaking for you.

The only question is: Are you shaping it intentionally

🎧 Watch or listen to the full episode for deeper insights and real-world examples.
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Brand collaborations have become the marketing world’s favourite cheat code. When done well, they deliver reach, credibility, cultural heat and sales that neither partner could create alone. When poorly done, they become expensive distractions, brand misfires or, in truly catastrophic moments, a warehouse full of unused black plastic “abstinence rings”.

In this episode of Canned the Marketing Podcast, Ben and Steph dive deep into the world of colabs across FMCG, fashion, movies, aviation, retail and even B2B. They explore what works, what fails, and what every marketer needs to know before signing on the dotted line.

Let’s break it down.

Setting the Scene: Why Collaborations Matter Now

From TikTok-driven snack colabs to unexpected fashion mashups, brands are increasingly tapping into each other’s audiences, codes and cultural resonance.

Why? Because a good collaboration does three things at once:

• Expands reach into new or hard-to-access audiences

• Reinforces or elevates brand equity

• Creates cultural relevance faster than traditional campaigns ever could

And in a market flooded with sameness, colabs offer something every marketer wants: talkability.

What Makes a Good Brand Collaboration? A Marketer’s Checklist

1. Audience alignment

Steph sets the foundation early: collaboration only works when both audiences stand to gain.

“You want to either get access to another audience… or expand reach. Ideally your audiences are really closely aligned or incremental.”
— Steph

If the Venn diagram has no overlap, run.

2. Authentic brand fit

Ben puts it simply: you shouldn’t combine polar opposite brands just for hype.

“You want some overlap… you don’t want really polar opposite brands coming together.”
— Ben

Great colabs feel inevitable, not forced.

3. A real value exchange

Each partner must get something meaningful. A high-end fashion house may gain mass reach. A mass retailer may gain credibility. A food brand can capitalise on a cultural moment.

If one partner is doing all the heavy lifting, the partnership is likely to fail.

4. Operational feasibility

Especially in FMCG, colabs are not whimsical ideas; they’re expensive, time-consuming, and resource-intensive.

Packaging. Formulation. Supply chain. Manufacturing. Compliance. Retail buy-in.
Steph emphasises:

“The length of time it takes… there’s a whole lot of resource that goes into a colab that you want to make sure is worth doing.”

5. Consumer benefit

A simple rule: if it’s not a win for the buyer, it’s not a win. Novelty is one thing; a gimmick is another.

The Best Brand Collaborations: Local, Global and Legendary

Whittaker’s: The gold standard in NZ FMCG

Whittaker’s has turned limited-edition collaborations into a recurring cultural moment.

Why it works:

• Strong flavour heritage to build on

• Smart partner selection (Tip Top, Jelly Tip, L&P…)

• Beautiful packaging

• High anticipation

• Consistent quality

• Mass earned media

Consumers trust Whittaker’s not to mess with a good thing, and they reward it with hype and sellouts.

Target x High-End Designers (like Missoni)

One of Steph’s favourite examples: entry-level retail meets luxury design.

The Missoni x Target collaboration sold out instantly.

Why? The value felt extraordinary. Customers accessed premium style at an accessible price, while the designer gained massive mainstream visibility without damaging brand prestige.

Barbie: The ultimate world takeover

Ben says it best:

“Which brand did Barbie not collaborate with?”

Skates, doughnuts, cosmetics, food, fashion; every category turned pink. Barbie’s licensing strategy created the biggest multimedia cultural event of the year. A masterclass in omnipresent branding.

Air New Zealand x ParrotDog Beer

A New Zealand example with real craft:

• A beer formulated specifically for taste at 30,000 feet

• A clever reveal video mimicking Air New Zealand’s iconic style

• Beautiful alignment of brand stories; local, premium, innovative

• Exclusivity that creates demand

Steph loved how each brand told the story differently while staying true to its own tone.

Four Square x Sawmill Summer IPA

A perfect demonstration of seasonal relevance and local charm.

Why it hits:

• Both are beloved NZ brands

• Strong summer + beach culture connection

• Great packaging

• Perfect timing for the holiday season

• Creates local love and social buzz

Hospitality collaborations

Ben shares an example: Paris Butter x 63 Clinton, a two-night caviar-heavy tasting menu collaboration.

That’s the magic of colabs in hospo: creativity, exclusivity, and memorability.

The Worst (or Weirdest) Brand Collaborations

Sometimes collaborations break the internet for the wrong reasons.

Balenciaga x Scholl: The “Frankenshoe”

A high-fashion brand and an orthopedic shoe company. Enough said.

It got attention, but not all attention is good attention.

Steinlager x All Blacks: The Abstain-for-the-Game Ring

One of the all-time great “did anyone think this through?” moments.

The idea: wear a black ring to show you’re abstaining (yes, that kind of abstaining) to support the All Blacks.

The result: a warehouse full of unsellable rings and a collective marketing facepalm.

When the product just doesn’t taste good

Even Whittaker’s has had misses, Steph notes.

The lesson?
Don’t rush. Test properly. Not every flavour works, no matter how big the brand.

Important Nuances: Not Every Partnership Is a Collaboration

Steph draws a critical distinction: something like Barbie wasn’t just “collaborating”—it was licensing.

Licensing = a brand allows others to use its intellectual property.
Collaboration = both brands contribute strategically, creatively and commercially.

It’s important for marketers to know the difference before deciding how to structure agreements.

The Role of Exclusivity, Limited Editions and Scarcity

Many successful collaborations are built on exclusivity: only available once, for a short time, in limited numbers.

This taps into:

• FOMO

• Collectability

• Social sharing

• Premium pricing

• Seasonal hype

As Steph notes, this is especially powerful in luxury and fashion.

When Collaborations Fail: What Can Marketers Learn?

1. Rushing leads to bad product

If the product isn’t good, the collaboration won’t save it.

2. Misalignment damages credibility

A premium brand pairing with a mass brand can work; but only if done thoughtfully.

3. Cultural misreads are expensive

The Steinlager example is the ultimate reminder.

4. Trend-chasing has a short shelf life

Biscoff. Labubu. Sour Patch Oreos.

Great for a moment, but risky long-term.

5. Controversial partners carry reputational risk

Yeezy is the clearest example. When the collaborator becomes problematic, the brand pays the price.

What About B2B? Yes, Collaborations Exist Here Too

Ben shares two recent B2B partnerships from Human Digital:

Human Digital x Ether

An AI platform that helps marketers create better presentations using their own data.

Human Digital x Firmable

A tool for improving customer and sales data quality for better outbound marketing.

In B2B, colabs are less about culture and more about:

• Capability expansion

• Joint value propositions

• Shared customers

• Co-marketing opportunities

The same principles apply: alignment, shared audience, mutual benefit.

Practical Advice for Marketers Considering a Collab

1. Start with your brand DNA

If the partnership doesn’t reinforce who you are, skip it.

2. Build the Venn diagram

If there’s no meaningful audience overlap, it’s a no.

3. Test the product early

Especially for FMCG; taste, quality, supply chain.

4. Plan for dual marketing streams

Each partner must promote in their own tone and channels.

5. Clarify the value exchange

Who brings what? Who pays for what? Who benefits?

6. Think about the exit strategy

What if:

• the partner is cancelled

• the product flops

• the response is negative

• supply chain collapses

• timing is off

7. Use scarcity strategically

Limited editions can generate urgency and premium perception.

8. Be culturally sensitive

Avoid the “abstain for the game” trap.

A Few Dream Collaborations (Because Why Not)

Steph loves fashion colabs, especially accessible luxury via brands like Target.
Ben dreams in flavours; anything with spicy mayo wins his heart.
Together, they imagine:

• Balenciaga x Tesla (limited-edition interiors?)

• Chef x restaurant guest menus

• Les Mills x Adidas (already real and thriving)

Sometimes imagination is half the fun.

Final Thoughts: Collaboration Is a Strategy, Not a Stunt

Brand collaborations aren’t about noise. They’re about value alignment, strategic expansion, product magic and cultural resonance.

When done well, they make the brand bigger than the sum of its parts.
When done badly, they erode trust or make you the punchline of Marketing Twitter.

The good news? With the right research, testing and partner selection, most brands can find a collaboration that’s meaningful, memorable and commercially powerful.

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If you asked most marketers where creativity goes to die, many would jokingly say financial services. Layers of compliance. Endless risk reviews. The invisible hand of “We can’t say that”.

Yet in this episode, Hamish Russell, Social and Content Lead at ASB, shares a story that flips that stereotype on its head.

This is a conversation about navigating risk while making genuinely creative work. It’s about carving out space in an unlikely environment. And it’s the story of how ASB created The Big Little GetWise Show: a handcrafted, Kiwi-made kids series teaching financial skills to primary-aged students.

Spoiler: it was made in under two months, filmed at TVNZ, written in-house, scored with 10 original songs, and stitched together on a shoestring budget.

This is what’s possible when marketers stop waiting for permission and start creating.

The Context: Creativity, Compliance, and a Bank That Wants to Stand Apart

Hamish didn’t join ASB expecting a creative renaissance. Worried (as many agency creatives are) that moving to a bank would dull his edge.

But once he began working with ASB from agency-side, he saw something different:

• A brand with a clear purpose

• Leaders pushing for more creativity

• A space where brand differentiation mattered more than ever

Because, as Hamish points out, banking is a category where products are essentially the same. The colour palette changes (green vs red vs yellow), but the offering rarely does.

So if the products are similar, the story becomes the differentiator.

This mindset created the space for something unexpected to flourish.

Key Themes from the Conversation

1. Creativity Thrives When You Find the Cracks

Hamish talks openly about the reality of risk in banking. You can’t ignore it. But you can find the spaces where creativity can live safely.

Instead of pushing the boundaries of product messaging, he focused on community, education, and social storytelling, places where creativity can stretch without risking compliance chaos.

2. When Everyone Zigs, Find Your Own Territory

ASB has a 150-year history in youth financial literacy. Deposit books. Money boxes. Classroom visits.

Rather than manufacturing a new story, Hamish amplified an existing one:

• GetWise, ASB’s in-school programme, reaches thousands of students

• Facilitators teach money basics without selling product

• The content is genuinely helpful, not a thinly disguised ad

This heritage made GetWise the perfect candidate for digital reinvention.

3. When You Can’t Find the Right Partner, Become the Partner

Hamish initially explored partnering with YouTubers or influencers. But all the content resonating with Kiwi kids was overseas: Bluey, Miss Rachel, American creators with bright colours and hyperactive editing.

No local equivalent existed.
So he made one.

The Spark: Turning a Classroom Programme Into a Digital World

The insight was simple but powerful:
If kids are spending hours watching YouTube, why not put structured, Kiwi-made financial literacy content right where they already are?

Hamish and his team:

• Interviewed teachers and facilitators

• Mapped out what engages primary-aged kids

• Identified the most beloved characters from the in-school programme

• Scoped how to translate them to digital video

The result:
A nine-episode series, broken into 36 small modules of 3 to 6 minutes each — perfect for classroom or home viewing.

Designed to be:

• Bite-sized

• Fun

• Handmade

• Bright, musical, and puppet-filled

• True to ASB’s purpose without selling to kids

The Reality: Budget Constraints Forced Creative Ingenuity

This was not a big-budget production. In fact, it wasn’t in anyone’s budget at all.

Hamish went “cap in hand” across the organisation to fund it:

• Two episodes were funded by the fraud and scams team

• Some by marketing

• Some from the GetWise unit

• Some from scraps and goodwill

He jokes he became a “master of manipulation”, but really it was a masterclass in cross-business collaboration.

And constraints unlocked creativity:

• Hand-painted sets

• DIY puppets

• Songs written in-house

• Set pulled together with TVNZ friends

• Production by small, agile partner Good Viking

• Filmed under ridiculous time pressure to align with Cyber Awareness Week

This is the kind of creativity most marketers forget they’re capable of.

Why This Worked: The ASB Culture + Leadership Factor

Hamish credits ASB’s leadership, especially CMO Helen, with providing trust and space.

When he pitched the idea, her immediate reaction was:
“Why haven’t we done this already?”

That trust meant fewer layers of approvals and more creative control.
He still checked with legal, fraud ops, financial wellbeing, and GetWise.
But he kept the process lean.

In his words, once the project was moving:

“I just grabbed the ball and ran for the try line.”

A rare sentence in a bank. And a rare move that paid off.

Lessons and Takeaways for Marketers

1. Creativity doesn’t die in regulated industries — but it must be channelled wisely

You can’t make the riskiest work. But you can make the most meaningful work.

2. Solve real problems, not marketing problems

Teachers wanted short, modular content.
Kids wanted locally made shows.
Facilitators are needed to reach more classrooms.
ASB solved all three.

3. Use the skills you already have before outsourcing

The team leveraged:

• In-house copywriters

• TVNZ experience

• A content creator who writes music

• Facilitators who already know what kids respond to

Many brands forget how much talent already sits inside the building.

4. Democratise content when the purpose is bigger than the brand

By placing it on YouTube Kids and keeping it free, ASB ensured that anyone can access it.

5. Don’t drown your main channels with niche content

ASB is tactically promoting it to teachers and parents, not filling its primary social feeds with kids’ content. Smart segmentation.

Practical Insights from the Episode

For teams wanting to build content in-house:

• Start with passion projects, they ignite the best work

• Build cross-functional mini-squads

• Use constraints as creative fuel

• Make approvals fast by tightly scoping what needs sign-off

• Showcase early builds to stakeholders to build confidence

For brands in regulated industries:

• Use educational content to separate from product compliance

• Find heritage stories you can modernise

• Keep the brand presence subtle when teaching kids

• Partner with business units who share aligned objectives

For anyone producing video for young audiences:

• Keep episodes modular

• Follow primary school timing rhythms

• Keep visuals bright and tactile

• Don’t underestimate the power of music or puppets

• Validate everything with real teachers

What’s Next: Season Two? More Characters? More Funding?

Though only a couple of weeks old, the series is already gaining:

• Hundreds of views per episode

• Photos from classrooms using it

• Positive internal feedback

• Interest from external funding bodies

Hamish’s dream?
A Season Two that expands into new topics, especially with financial literacy becoming part of NZ’s national curriculum.

The characters are ready. The need is real. And the appetite inside ASB seems strong.

This episode isn’t just about a content series. It’s a case study in modern marketing inside large organisations:

• Creativity built within constraints

• A marketer championing an idea others hadn’t imagined

• Purpose-led storytelling that actually serves an audience

• Internal collaboration done right

• A bank behaving like a kids’ TV studio to create real impact

If you want to see what this looks like in practice — and why teachers and parents are already engaging — Hamish wants you to go watch it.

Search “The Big Little GetWise Show” on YouTube or YouTube Kids.
And then come back and tell us your favourite puppet.

Call to Action

If you enjoyed this behind-the-scenes deep dive, make sure to:

• Watch the episode video

• Subscribe to the podcast for more inside stories from marketers shaping the future of brand and content

• Share this article with anyone who thinks creativity “dies in corporate”

If you’ve ever been the only marketer in the room, you’ll know the mix of autonomy and isolation it creates. That tension sits at the heart of this week’s episode of Canned the Marketing Podcast, where hosts Ben van Rooy (Human Digital) and Steph Quantrill (Cue Marketing) go inside The Marketing Club (TMC) with founder Chanel Clark; fresh off launching the first-ever Marketers Day. They set the tone early: creativity, purpose, and human connection are the point, not the by-products.

Ben calls the event “top notch” on every dimension; speakers, venue, catering, sponsors, signalling this wasn’t just another badge-and-lanyard conference; it felt like a marketing festival.

What follows is a build-in-public masterclass: where the idea came from, the messy middle (timelines, budgets, committees), the reality of community growth, and how TMC is evolving with mentorships, paid memberships, and a new podcast. Consider this your long-form companion to the episode with key quotes and timestamps so you can jump straight to the moments that matter.

The spark: from “first marketing hire” to first-time festival

Chanel traces the idea for TMC to a run of roles where she was repeatedly the first marketing hire; empowering at first, isolating later. That’s when she decided to build the thing she needed: a space where marketers could learn, vent, and get unstuck together.

When the flood of “you should cover this” feedback outgrew the cadence of TMC’s educational and networking events, Chanel made the call: go big. She doesn’t even like the word “conference”; the aim was a festival feel built from the community’s own data and desires.

Behind the curtain was a volunteer committee, rebuilt at the start of the year. Once in place, Chanel famously “briefed” the team as if Marketers Day was already in motion, a clever momentum hack when a bold idea needs collective belief.

Key themes and arguments

1) Design from real demand (not your assumptions)

Programming started with two years of feedback forms and DMs, clustered into themes, then shaped into panels; the MVP for launch approach. The goal: keep energy high, avoid afternoon slump, and ensure every voice adds something new. , ,

2) Curate chemistry, not just CVs

Panels were cast to disagree productively and bring varied vantage points (agency, venture studio, creative, founder). The result: fresh, scrappy ideas instead of corporate sameness.

3) Community growth is a flywheel (and yes, LinkedIn still works)

TMC grew word-of-mouth through candid LinkedIn posts and IRL meetups; each event generated dozens of next-day shares, compounding discovery. Slack was chosen because it met people where they already were.

4) Price for inclusion, plan for sustainability

Chanel’s north star: people over money but not at the expense of survival. That meant affordable tickets, relentless sponsor outreach, and eventually a paid membership to cover real costs (goodbye, self-funded spring rolls).

5) Do the brave thing first, then scale

TMC’s next horizon includes mentorships, paid tiers, and a new podcast (“The Marketing Clubhouse”) launched audio-only to validate before adding video/studios. It’s the MVP mindset, again.

Challenges & realities (the unvarnished version)

Budgets and sponsors in Q4

Running a first-time event in October meant most partner budgets were already committed. Many loved the concept but needed to see v1 before backing v2, classic cold-start friction. Chanel’s workaround: hustle DMs, be transparent, and accept that year two = easier.

Committee capacity

TMC is volunteer-run; rebuilding the committee took time, and that pushed timelines. Chanel overcame inertia with a “this is already happening” brief that converted uncertainty into execution.

Programming trade-offs

Workshop + panel would be ideal, but for the first year, the team prioritised tight, panel-driven flow to reduce operational risk and maintain energy.

Merch, logistics, and the bell curve of T-shirt sizes

From oversized goody bags to T-shirt size chaos at registration (pro tip: people switch sizes on the day), the human details mattered, and produced learnings for next time.

Lessons, insights, and takeaways

1) Start with a community-first hypothesis

If the real problem you’re solving isn’t “together is better,” don’t fake it. Modern audiences sniff out performative “community” instantly. Chanel’s transparency created trust, and trust created growth.

2) Use an MVP for launch mindset

Panels over complex formats. Audio over video. Slack over a new platform. Reduce friction everywhere, for your team and your audience.

3) Curate for contrast

Aim for panels where smart people can disagree well. It’s the antidote to “six people saying the same thing”.

4) Engineer your flywheel

Every IRL event should earn dozens of organic posts the next day. Photograph, tag, and make sharing effortless; that visibility fuels the next RSVP wave.

5) Price accessibly, then add value layers

TMC’s move to paid memberships came after a clear tipping point: the community outgrew what one person could subsidise. Paid tiers are a promise to serve better, not a paywall for its own sake.

6) Choose the right start city for the story

Auckland first, Sydney next: sometimes community logic beats commercial logic because it sets the cultural DNA you’ll scale later.

Practical tips & playbook

• Harvest feedback like a product manager.
  DM attendees personally; ask “what should we do next?”; cluster responses; program from patterns.

• Write the “already happening” brief.
  When momentum is fragile, present a concrete plan with dates and roles. People commit to clarity.

• Cast for perspective, not just prestige.
  Build panels across roles (agency, founder, creative, venture studio) to prevent echo chambers.

• Pick platforms your audience already uses.
  Slack > new tools; IRL meetups > abstract “community.” Remove adoption friction.

• Own the boring stuff early.
  Budget cycles (avoid late-year launches), merch sizes, and registration logistics can make or break perceived quality.

• Design for shareability.
  Plan a group photo, sponsor moments, and micro-stories (e.g., legendary goody bag) that attendees will proudly post.

• Stage-gate your expansions.
  Launch your podcast audio-only, validate cadence and audience fit, then add video and studio polish later.

The texture of the day

Marketers Day wasn’t just smart; it was sensory. From the heavy (in a good way) goody bag stocked with hydration, supplements, skincare, and PB, to the purple TMC totes and tees, the event felt personal and over-delivered on delight, the kind of detail attendees brag about online.

Chanel is clear: commercially, Australia might have been easier. But TMC began in New Zealand, and launching Marketers Day in Auckland encoded values the team wants to scale, grassroots, warm, proudly local, before going bigger (Sydney next). That sequencing is strategic brand building, not sentimentality.

What’s next: mentorships, memberships, and the mic

TMC has moved beyond meetups:

• Mentorships: peer-to-peer across “all ages and stages,” often matching people at similar levels who want a thought partner, not a boss.

• Paid memberships: a necessary evolution to keep the community inclusive and sustainable, the precise definition of valued value.

• Podcast (“The Marketing Clubhouse”): audio-first interviews from students to C-suite, mirroring the breadth of the community itself.

Marketers Day proves that movements beat moments. When you design from demand, curate for contrast, and build with radical transparency, a “first-time event” can feel like a long-running tradition on day one. That’s the lesson from Chanel and TMC: do the brave version now, then scale what works.

Watch / listen to the full episode for the candid, tactical details straight from the source, and if you took value from this deep dive, subscribe right here on Substack so you don’t miss the follow-ups (including our upcoming episodes on brand co-labs and personal branding).

Banking Gets Brave: How Westpac Turned Finance into Fun (and Fear)

When was the last time a bank ad made you feel something?
That’s the question that kicks off Episode 14 of Canned: The Marketing Podcast, hosted by Ben van Rooy from Human Digital and Steph Quantrill from Cue Marketing.

This episode dives deep into the world of Westpac New Zealand, where marketers Allie Buczkowski and Georgia Livingstone are proving that banking doesn’t have to be boring. Together, they unpack two award-worthy campaigns, Avoid a Black Friday Hangover and The House of Credit Card Horrors, that flipped financial marketing on its head.

The result? Campaigns that didn’t just sell, but taught, entertained, and redefined what people expect from a bank.

Why This Episode Matters

Marketing in finance is notoriously tricky.
The products are serious, the regulations are tight, and the audience’s trust... well, shaky. Most campaigns stick to safe ground, focusing on topics such as interest rates, responsible lending, and predictable taglines.

But Westpac’s team decided to do something different: use creativity to change how people feel about money.

By blending financial education with cultural trends (hello TikTok, horror movies, and Gen Z humour), they turned “boring but important” topics, like credit cards and budgeting, into conversations that actually resonated.

This episode explores how they did it, the battles fought behind the scenes, and what every marketer can learn from their fearless approach.

The Campaign That Started It All: Avoid a Black Friday Hangover

Every marketer knows Black Friday as a sales bonanza. Westpac saw it differently, as a teachable moment.

Allie and Georgia identified a growing issue: young Kiwis were spending impulsively but learning little about financial wellness, despite the flood of #FinTok advice online.

“There’s so much financial content out there,” says Allie, “but it hasn’t necessarily made people better off. If anything, it’s made money management more confusing.”

So Westpac decided to join the conversation, not to sell, but to educate.

The Big Idea

Instead of promoting products, they launched Avoid a Black Friday Hangover, a tongue-in-cheek campaign warning against overspending.

• Message: Be mindful, not mindless.

• Medium: TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and TVNZ OnDemand.

• Format: A series of short, relatable videos highlighting “truisms” about spending — like bringing a friend to keep you honest on a shopping spree.

• Partnership: Kiwi brain-drink brand Ārepa, which produced a limited-run “spending clarity” can as a real-world extension of the idea.

The campaign struck a chord, earning serious engagement and, more importantly, reappraisal among younger audiences who didn’t see banks as relevant to their lives.

From Hangovers to Haunted Houses: The House of Credit Card Horrors 👻

With momentum from Black Friday, Westpac’s team doubled down on creativity, this time tackling another misunderstood topic: credit cards.

For many, “credit” equals “danger.” Westpac’s goal was to flip that fear on its head and help people understand how credit can work for you, not against you.

The Insight

As Georgia puts it,

“People aren’t avoiding credit cards because they don’t want them, they just don’t understand how they work.”

Enter The House of Credit Card Horrors, a Spookers-inspired haunted experience that made the dangers of debt tangible (and entertaining).

The Experience

Working with Saatchi & Saatchi, Spur, and the legendary scare pros at Spookers, the team built a haunted house where each room represented a different “credit fear.”

• Fear of Debt Traps

• Fear of Fees

• Fear of Fine Print

• Fear of Losing Control

Over 1,200 people braved the experience, filmed via CCTV for safety (and social sharing). It wasn’t just theatre, it was education disguised as adrenaline.

The Amplification

The activation went far beyond the walls of the house:

• Visitors shared photos and videos across social media.

• The campaign linked to Westpac’s online “Fair Free Credit Hub,” a resource hub that simplified financial jargon.

• Earned media amplified the stunt, cementing Westpac’s position as a creatively bold, and socially responsible, brand.

Inside the Reality: Selling Creative Courage in a Risk-Averse Industry

Let’s be honest, getting these ideas approved inside a major bank wasn’t easy.

Every creative marketer knows the balancing act: innovation vs. compliance, bravery vs. brand safety.

As Allie shared,

“You have to respect that people are doing their jobs — ensuring the work stays within the bank’s risk appetite. But at the same time, we wanted to show up as a brand that cares about people beyond money.”

The key to getting sign-off? Evidence.

• Campaign testing showed strong audience resonance, especially around the relatable language of “hangovers” and “fears.”

• Clear success metrics (impressions, engagement, time on educational pages) tied creative ideas to business goals.

• A collaborative agency model, where creative, media, and experiential partners worked seamlessly, reduced internal tension and increased trust.

In short: bravery, backed by data.

Key Lessons for Marketers

1. Start with the Audience, Not the Product

Westpac’s success came from empathy, understanding what Gen Z actually cares about and meeting them where they are.

2. Use Culture to Cut Through

Horror films, TikTok humour, even hangover metaphors, these are cultural touchpoints that make abstract topics feel human.

3. Make Education Experiential

Learning is more effective when it’s felt. Whether through a drink, an activation, or an interactive landing page, Westpac made finance tangible.

4. Partnerships Build Credibility

Collaborating with local brands (Ārepa), agencies (Saatchi & Saatchi, Spur), and even Spookers made the campaigns more authentic, and newsworthy.

5. Bravery Inspires the Business

Creative risk-taking isn’t just about marketing, it shifts internal culture. After the success of these campaigns, Westpac’s new CMO has doubled down on bold, customer-first storytelling.

Practical Takeaways

For marketers, especially in highly regulated or conservative industries, this episode offers a roadmap for creative transformation:

• Prototype bold ideas through small activations before scaling.

• Educate with empathy, people don’t want lectures, they want relevance.

• Show proof, not hype. Use metrics that link creativity to measurable outcomes.

• Champion collaboration, the best work happens when agencies share the spotlight.

• Own your narrative. Financial well-being and social responsibility can coexist with business goals.

The Big Picture

Westpac’s story is about more than marketing. It’s about changing how people think and feel about money, and proving that creativity can live in even the most risk-averse categories.

As Georgia put it best:

“If you start where the customer is, and you can back your idea with real insights, no one in the business can argue with that.”

This episode is a reminder that brave ideas don’t just sell, they stick. They educate, inspire, and build brands people actually care about.

Watch or Listen

Canned Podcast Ep. 14 – Banking Gets Brave: How Westpac Made Finance Fun
Hosted by Ben van Rooy (Human Digital) and Steph Quantrill (Cue Marketing).
Featuring Allie Buczkowski and Georgia Livingstone from Westpac New Zealand.

👉 Watch the full episode on YouTube
👉 Subscribe to Canned on Substack for more stories from marketers pushing boundaries

The Setting: A Live Debate at SXSW Sydney

Under the warm Sydney sun and surrounded by gyoza and beer, Canned went live at SXSW Sydney to tackle the biggest marketing question: is the future of marketing human or artificial?

Hosts Ben van Rooy and Steph Quantrill welcomed two guests from opposite ends of the marketing spectrum:

• Alex Holden, Group GM of Brand & Customer at EVT, the company behind QT Hotels, Rydges, and Moonlight Cinemas.

• Matt Meffan, from Aether, a new AI startup tackling what he calls “institutional amnesia” in marketing.

The crowd expected another AI hype session. What they got instead was a grounded, lively conversation about what really matters: creativity, connection, and the irreplaceable human touch.

The Big Claim: The Future of Marketing Is Human

After days of AI-heavy panels at SXSW, Ben and Steph wanted to flip the narrative.

“If you’re not talking about AI this week, do you even have a future in marketing?” Steph joked. “But we wanted to push against that.”

Their live episode, “The Future of Marketing Is Human,” invited both scepticism and curiosity. How can marketers embrace AI without losing their humanity or their jobs?

Inside EVT: AI as a Helper, Not a Replacement

Alex Holden offered a corporate yet personal perspective from EVT, an experiential powerhouse spanning hotels, cinemas, and ski resorts.

EVT has used AI for chatbots, customer service automations, and data-driven insights, but Holden emphasised one thing: the customer always comes first.

“We’ve been using AI for the better part of five to seven years,” Alex said. “But what’s really changed is who we’re using it for. It’s not just about optimizing workflows anymore, it’s about understanding how our customers use AI in their lives.”

She shared a story about using ChatGPT to plan a multi-generational family holiday, from a six-month-old to a 92-year-old grandmother, and how the tool’s convenience still didn’t replace her need for real-world research and human intuition.

“AI gave me a head start,” she said, “but I still needed to check reviews and do my own digging. It’s a starting point, not a substitute.”

The Other Side: AI as the Pragmatic Partner

Matt Meffan, representing the AI side, was quick to clarify: he’s no evangelist.

Aether, the startup he recently joined, was built to help marketers combat “institutional amnesia”, the endless cycle of creating and recreating PowerPoint decks and reports.

“Raise your hand if you love building PowerPoints,” Matt teased.
(Only one person did.)

Aether’s solution? AI that learns from your company’s own data, not the open web, and generates accurate, cited, and reusable content.

“We’re not replacing people,” he said. “We’re replacing repetitive tasks so people can focus on storytelling, strategy, and stakeholder management — the things humans do best.”

Key Themes and Realities from the Conversation

1. AI’s Hype vs. Its Reality

AI has become the buzzword du jour. But both guests agreed: it’s not magic. It’s a tool; powerful but flawed.

“Junk in, junk out,” said Matt. “That’s as true now as it was in the big data era.”

AI still relies on clean data, human oversight, and thoughtful application. EVT’s use of AI in customer service, for example, has dramatically reduced response times, but every message still gets human review before hitting “send.”

2. The Ethics of Synthetic Data

When asked whether synthetic (AI-generated) data has a place in research, Alex was cautiously open.

“If your budget is tight, maybe,” she said. “But nothing beats actually talking to your customers. A survey costs very little compared to the value of real human feedback.”

3. Transparency vs. Authenticity

Do marketers need to disclose when they’ve used AI? Matt’s view: probably not.

“AI touches everything we do now,” he said. “But the best work will always rise to the top because of its craft, not because of the tools behind it.”

Alex agreed, especially for a hospitality brand.

“You can’t use AI to generate a photo of a QT Hotel room,” she said. “It’s not real. Authenticity matters.”

When AI Meets Emotion: Why Feeling Still Wins

Perhaps the most resonant theme of the discussion was emotion, something AI struggles to replicate.

Steph noted that ChatGPT’s own recent ad campaign features real people telling real stories about how AI helps in their daily lives.

“That’s human-centered marketing,” she said. “Even AI companies are using emotion to sell AI.”

Matt agreed.

“I’ve never seen an AI-generated creative that truly made me feel something,” he said. “AI is brilliant at summarising, synthesising, and pattern recognition. But marketers? We do the what next. We give it meaning.”

Lessons and Takeaways

1. Human Skills Still Rule

AI might handle 80% of the grunt work, but that last 20%, the strategic, emotional, creative layer, is all human.
As Matt put it, “AI will remove tasks, not skills.”

2. Brands Must Rethink Discovery

Search isn’t the same anymore. With consumers turning to chatbots and LLMs for recommendations, brands must rethink how they show up.

“It’s SEO 2.0,” Alex said. “Optimising not just for Google, but for AI models without losing your brand voice.”

3. Real Experiences Are a Rebellion

In an age of automation, people crave real connection.

“Post-COVID, customers want experiences that feel tangible and personal,” said Alex. “It’s a pushback against the automated everything.”

4. AI Won’t Replace Creativity, It Will Amplify It

Steph summed it up beautifully:

“AI won’t make creatives obsolete. It’ll make them infinite.”

The panel compared it to Photoshop’s arrival decades ago; once feared, now essential.

Challenges on the Horizon

The discussion wasn’t all optimism. The panel also warned about emerging tensions:

• Ethical dilemmas: AI models trained on artists’ work without consent are sparking lawsuits.

• Data ownership: Brands risk losing control if they don’t understand what data powers their tools.

• Corporate fear: Many companies still restrict AI tools, driving employees to use them unofficially, creating new security risks.

“If you don’t let your team play with these tools,” Steph said, “they’ll do it anyway, and you’ll lose control.”

The Human Advantage

The conversation circled back to one truth: while AI might power the next wave of marketing, humanity will define it.

“AI gives us time back,” said Matt. “But what we do with that time, that’s the real question.”

For brands like EVT, that means focusing on emotion, experience, and authenticity. For marketers, it’s about curiosity, creativity, and judgment, the things machines can’t replicate.

Conclusion: Keep It Human

As the audience clapped and the gyoza plates emptied, the live debate at SXSW wrapped with a clear takeaway: AI isn’t the future of marketing, it’s the future with marketing.

Technology may change how we work, but not why we do it.
The future still belongs to those who can connect: human to human.

“AI helps us find the patterns,” Ben closed. “But marketers find the meaning.”

The Hidden Psychology of Packaging

When we pick up a product, our brains are already making judgments about price, quality, and even taste. Ben and Steph unpack the subtle cues that do this work for us:

• Colour: Pastels for premium RTDs like Pals, dark tones for sophistication, bold colours for value or impulse buys.

• Texture and materials: Matte vs. gloss, paper weight, embossing all signal quality.

• Shape: Think Toblerone or Coca-Cola; distinctive shapes act like logos in three dimensions.

• Typography: Serif for heritage, sans-serif for modernity, handwritten fonts for warmth and craft.

Packaging isn’t just a design decision; it’s behavioural science in action.

Premium Brands: When Packaging Is the Product

From Louis Vuitton boxes to Aesop bottles, luxury brands integrate packaging into the product experience itself.

Ben brings a “show and tell” with examples from Italian fragrance designer Orto Parisi and New Zealand candle brand Curionoir, where even the box feels precious.

“When packaging becomes something you keep, that’s when you know you’ve made it,” says Ben.

Luxury brands understand that people don’t just buy the product; they buy how it makes them feel. And the unboxing moment is where that emotional hit happens.

The Supermarket Reality: Shelf Wars and Seconds to Impress

On the other end of the spectrum lies the supermarket, where packaging isn’t framed in boutique lighting but crammed onto shelves beside a hundred competitors.

Steph explains:

“At any given moment, you’ve got seconds to get someone’s attention. If your category is unplanned, packaging is what converts someone at the point of purchase.”

Some of her insights from the episode:

• Design hierarchy matters. Ensure customers can instantly find their preferred variant (e.g., “crunchy” vs. “smooth”).

• Stay consistent. Change too much and your loyal buyers might not recognise you.

• Know your category codes. What works for premium skincare may flop in budget cleaning products.

• Think about feel, not just look. Thicker cardstock or embossed detail can subconsciously signal trust.

Ben adds that even “commodity” products like flour or coffee can achieve cult-like loyalty through packaging, citing Edmonds and Havana Coffee as examples where design consistency equals brand comfort.

The Risks and Realities of Rebranding

Steph’s case study on the Telegraph Hill rebrand shows just how delicate the balance is.

The original bottle was lime green and red “so ugly it hurt,” she jokes but customers had come to know it. The new version introduced gold foiling, cleaner typography, and a modern label cutout, elevating it from pantry filler to premium dressing.

But, as Ben notes, “if you change the look too much, you risk alienating your existing customers; they literally can’t find you on the shelf.”

Lesson: Evolution beats revolution. Refresh strategically, not impulsively.

The Sustainability Tightrope

Sustainability often costs more, and can clash with brand goals.

Steph, who has worked in sustainability, points out:

• Recycling isn’t standardised in New Zealand, creating confusion.

• Greenwashing is rampant. Brands claim recyclability that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

• Some materials mislead. Coffee cups and toothpaste tubes often can’t be recycled, even if they look recyclable.

Ben’s view: simplicity is key.

“Just because something is cheap doesn’t mean it can’t be sustainable. Strip back, use less, design smarter.”

Both agree that the best packaging is beautiful, functional, and reusable; whether that means refillable bottles, compostable wrappers, or timeless boxes worth keeping.

E-commerce and the “Phygital” Shift

What happens when customers never touch your product before buying it?

Packaging’s role changes, but it doesn’t disappear. Ben explains how a product photographs or unboxes on camera can make or break an online brand. From 3D spin models to AR previews, digital experiences are becoming extensions of physical packaging.

Steph shares the example of a candle company that redesigned its packaging from a flimsy box to a durable sleeve. The result?

• Fewer product returns

• Higher perceived value

• Better unboxing experience

And yes, it came with a cost increase, but one that paid off in customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Cutting Costs Without Cutting Corners

Sometimes the smartest packaging move isn’t about adding, it’s about simplifying.

Steph describes “cost-out” projects, where brands reduce elements like multiple labels or expensive foils to save money without hurting perception.

“In high-volume manufacturing, removing a neck label or combining front and back labels can save thousands; and it can make you look more modern and sustainable at the same time.”

Ben agrees: less clutter, more clarity.

Lessons & Takeaways

Here are some key lessons from the episode for marketers, founders, and brand designers:

• Treat packaging as part of the brand, not an afterthought. It’s one of your most powerful brand assets.

• Know your audience. Premium buyers value texture and craft; value buyers want clarity and simplicity.

• Think in systems, not silos. Your packaging should align visually with your advertising, website, and social media.

• Design for experience. The unboxing moment is a real marketing moment, especially for e-commerce.

• Be strategic about sustainability. Do what you can, but don’t pretend. Authenticity beats greenwashing every time.

• Keep your assets consistent. Fonts, colours, shapes, these are the memory triggers that make your brand stick.

Closing Thoughts: Packaging as a Brand Philosophy

Packaging isn’t just the wrapping; it’s the brand in 3D.

Steph sums it up:

“If you think about all the products in your bathroom or your pantry; those are the brands you live with every day. That’s what packaging does. It keeps you connected to a brand long after the ad stops playing.”

Ben adds:

“Packaging is one of your biggest brand assets and deserves as much love as your campaigns.”