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Former Virgin Australia chief customer officer Mark Hassell joins KPMG

Former Virgin Australia chief customer officer Mark Hassell is joining KPMG Australia as a partner, leading customer and brand transformation for the firm’s newly established Customer, Brand and Marketing advisory business.

Hassell was previously Virgin’s CCO for five years, having previously worked at British Airways and Qantas. He started his career at BA in the customer-facing front line as a flight attendant before moving into senior executive positions.

His appointment, which starts tomorrow, brings KPMG’s combined Customer, Brand and Marketing advisory team total to 59 nationally, including eight partners.

The firm kicked off its expansion with the acquisition of North Sydney-based Acuity Research and Insights, marking the first major play for its Customer, Brand and Marketing advisory venture.

Back in July, former Google senior exec Lisa Bora joined the newly-formed team, bringing with her five years of experience at the tech giant. She joins ex-M&C Saatchi design thinking expert Nathan Baird.

KPMG’s suite of services now includes customer and brand strategy, customer experience design, product and service transformation, sales, channel and marketing transformation, and customer research and insights.

Speaking to Mumbrella about his new role, Hassell said: “Lots of companies say ‘the day of the customer is here’, or ‘the customer is at the heart of business’ … but actually sometimes struggle to understand what that means and how are they going to bring that to life.

For Hassell, these solutions are “quite often fairly simple strategies” but because a lot of businesses don’t truly understand what the issue is, “can spiral off to fairly expensive solutions, when actually that may not be addressing the causal factor.”

He also points to a need to “have the experience how to embed and implement, which a lot of people struggle with, especially when that involves culture change, performance of your people – the difficult things.”

KPMG Australia’s expansion into the design and marketing sectors follows an industry-wide shift towards creative, customer-focussed thinking.

In May, Accenture bought The Monkeys and design business Maud, while August saw PwC take a minority stake in creative agency Thinkerbell. Just last week, Deloitte poached four McCann Melbourne staffers to launch its new brand creative and media offering.

“The fact that the professional services in general are seeing this as a growth area is very much born out of the fact that there is a stark need there that firms such as KPMG are out there to solve,” said Hassell.

Paul Howes, partner in charge, Customer, Brand and Marketing advisory said: “Mark brings not just this understanding, but also years of experience at the coalface in all aspects of brand transformation, including crucially, how to implement and embed it to deliver on business objectives.

“It’s becoming increasingly fashionable for leaders to say that the customer is at the heart of their business, but for too many Australian organisations this clearly isn’t true.

“As one of the key investment areas of the firm, KPMG is ambitious to grow our customer practice and respond to the demand we know exists today in Australia for customer advisory services,” he added.

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