The Marketing Club officially launches in Australia
New Zealand-based marketing community The Marketing Club has officially launched in Australia following “strong” response to early events. Founder Chanel Clark spoke exclusively with Mumbrella on why such an organisation is needed.
The Marketing Club launched in October 2022. In its first week, it had 180 members. Six months in, it had over 1,000.
Clark started The Marketing Club because of the industry’s “loneliness problem”: coming up as a young marketer herself, she said she felt there was a lack of support, conversation, and connection.
“I was either the first marketing hire, the only marketing hire, or the only marketer within a small product team,” she told Mumbrella. “I was just out of uni, and was suddenly supposed to know exactly what to do, and no one in the industry was really helping me. I felt like there was so much knowledge at the top that was being gatekept.”
Chanel Clark
Marketers are under increased pressure, and if they too are a single marketer in a company, that pressure can get to be too much.
“In what other industry does a CEO or boss expect one person to know everything, and be able to adapt and move that quickly?” she asked. “It’s lonely, it’s overwhelming.”
Not only does the marketing industry have a loneliness issue, Clark said it also has an ego issue.
Having had poor experiences at other industry events, including one where she was “probably one of only three females in the room, and the only person under 30”, she said the “safe space” she was often promised was a let down.
“Everyone else was pale, male, 50 plus. No one talked to me, it was very clear that no one even wanted to really smile at people they didn’t know,” she said of her experience. “And I was thinking, this can’t be the knowledge, the information sharing, the safe space that the industry is supposed to be providing marketers.”
One of the most important things to Clark was to ensure The Marketing Club wasn’t like that.
“It’s interesting, because a lot of people think marketers are mainly women. Which is true, until you get to the C-suite. And the way things have been run, the experience that I got, made me feel like I didn’t belong in this industry. And that’s rough,” she said.
“And with TMC, while there was a lot of intention to build the opposite of what was happening in the industry, I think because nothing like us had existed with our ethos, the community naturally started coming together.”
With Clark’s move from NZ to Brisbane in 2024, she decided to bring the club across the Tasman, soft-launching with events in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne. The club has over 11,000 members across New Zealand and, now, Australia.
Members of TMC. Source: Instagram
“Demand came first. Aussie marketers were following me on Linkedin, and that hyper-sped up the need for TMC in Australia,” Clark said. “But me moving sealed the deal.”
And the growth, she said, has all happened organically.
“We’ve never had a budget, I haven’t spent a single dime on marketing because I’ve had no money to spend,” she said. “Everything I’ve paid for has been to actually have TMC function, like domain hosting, email subscription, that stuff. So it’s been cool to have the community latch onto it as hard as they did.”
The Marketing Club is powered by a Slack group where members can swap advice, share job leads, and offer real-time support. It also runs regular networking events and educational sessions, and has a structured mentoring program now underway. It will also run its first-ever major conference in Auckland later this year.
It also recently unveiled its inaugural board, with five members include Clark as chair, designed to support the community through this next phase of growth.
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Lauren McNamara is the associate editor at Mumbrella, covering the creative and PR beat. She joined in November 2022 as editorial assistant, after completing a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) at UTS.
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