The future focus driving the ANZ marketing transformation
ANZ’s recent overhaul of its marketing division has been designed to drive marketing further up the value chain and to ensure capability is geared towards technological innovation, head of customer centricity and capability, Kate Young has told Mumbrella.
Young, head of customer centricity and capability, said the sweeping changes enable the business to better “get under the hood” of its customers and be able to show and think about ways the bank can be helpful – especially amid the current economic environment.
ANZ Bank head of customer centricity and capability Kate Young
“ANZ’s brand promise is all around financial well-being to helping Australians get on top of their money,” Young told Mumbrella.
“Marketing’s role in this structure and thinking about dedicated brand teams really enables more of a dedicated focus around solutions that will help customers make the most of what they do have in these times and be able to achieve a better level of financial wellbeing.”
Young led ANZ’s marketing function redesign and restructure, which commenced at the start of 2022 and was completed earlier this year.
The entire marketing team in Australia has been completely reorganised. None of the previous siloed titles from the previous structure remain.
Marketing was decentralised in 2018 amid the bank’s own transformation focusing on a transition of working to agile methodologies.
“For the most part, marketers were moved out into a decentralised model working in tribes or product-related teams, which was really great at that point in time,” Young said.
“But as we’ve moved forward, we’ve recognised the need to bring functions together for things like best practice sharing or being able to operate more efficiently and effectively by reducing siloed ways of working and reducing duplication in work.”
Young said the transformation sought to address how ANZ would build a high-performing team, recognise the best of what the agile transformation brought but also recognise where there could be potential gaps in agile.
Some of the gaps identified were capability building.
“When you think about marketing, it is a really fast-changing function, from as early as the introduction of e-marketing in 2010 to the advent of automation platforms with AI, machine learning over the last two or three years,” Young said.
“All of a sudden, marketing is starting to look and feel really different, so we recognised that and when we think about how we upskill and reskill our people at ANZ, it can’t just be about traditional learning and development programs.
“It can’t just be about sending people off to do a course, it has to be about what people are doing on the job. That led us to think about the role that structuring and design of organisations could play in helping us achieve our ambition to build more marketers, build a high-performing team and think about what are the emerging capabilities that were needed in ANZ today and the future, and what structures and roles were going to be important as a result of that.”
Young said leadership layers, roles and remits were considered, as well as what the operating model that was needed to evoke to ensure the transformation’s goals were being realised.
“The entire leadership team has nine heads of marketing across different areas, whether that be our front areas like home loans, or credit cards and personal lending, all the way down into roles, like planning operations, growth and performance, digital sales, et cetera.”
That team now rolls up under recently appointed general manager for brand strategy and marketing Sian Chadwick, who officially started this month.
Young said the changes all boil down to ANZ moving to a “different” type of marketing, with brand categories now agnostic.
“In the past year, if you worked in banking, you competed with the banking sector,” she said. “Now we don’t – we compete with everything. We compete with the last great experience a customer had.”
She said if a customer had a great experience with other services that personalise their interactions, customers now also want that same level of personalisation from their banks, where customers can feel the bank understands them and their needs.
“The way we compete with brand categories is changing, but more importantly because of digital adoption, the way we interact with brands is changing as a result,” Young added.
“What we were doing in the past was really fit for purpose at that point in time, and all of a sudden we’re noticing this dramatic shift in people’s adoption around automation and personalisation, and brands saying they have a plethora of data collected from customers that could help market them on a one-to-one, or at least a one-to-one segment basis.”
She said ANZ can improve on that through micro segment communication and understanding customers from the data it has collected from them, and not just responding to customer needs in a personalised way, but also in anticipation of our customers’ needs.
“The role of marketing looks different, so how are we showing up to train our people? Not just in some of those emerging capabilities, but to make sure we have role types and role structures that mean they can go back to their day jobs and start to actually try some of those principles on the job,” Young said.
“That’s all focused on in this structure and making sure it is agile and adaptable enough that it can morph and change over the next few years as those emerging capabilities become more prevalent.
WOW…… there’s a couple of big conversations in here. Marketing is about the activities of customer engagement and communication, but product is about CX and UX. So the idea of decentralising marketing, only to rebuild connections and hierarchy in the pursuit of being “Agile” feels incredibly circuitous. Surely a better approach would have been the promotion of what Jared Spool calls Infused UX Design? Building capabilities and competencies in cross-functional teams, establishing design libraries and tool coherence, and building strong customer advocates within each team.
I am consistently frustrated by this idea that Agile is a process. It isn’t. It’s a philosophy of iteration and adaptation. There can’t be gaps in this, unless you’re talking about gaps that don’t align with executive pressures to operate in a traditional rather than Lean business approach. Agile says that sometimes you will fail, and failure informs future successes. Traditional business says failure informs firing an executive so make sure you dilute responsibility.
Will be interested to see the outcome of these changes at ANZ. Should I expect to start seeing more nuanced and targeted ads in my feeds?
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