A panel of marketing and thought leaders discuss strategies to drive better customer engagement. 

Consumer behaviour is changing more rapidly than ever and businesses and marketers are lagging behind.

In celebration of her new book, Closing the Gap, BrandHook CEO and founder, Pip Stocks, collaborated with Publicis and CMO to host a panel of marketing and thought leaders in Sydney discussing the challenges brands face trying to better connect with customers in today’s competitive marketplace. CMO Magazine captured this discussion.

Transformation and disruption are two of the most used business buzzwords of the past five years. And for good reason: only 12 per cent of companies in the original listing of the Fortune 500 some 60 years ago are still on that list. But which companies have had the courage and vision to transform and disrupt themselves to their own benefit?

Ideation, innovation and creativity: all closely intertwined, all highly subjective, and all without a guarantee of success.

Yet at the end of last year, 79 per cent of senior business leaders ranked innovation as among the top three priorities at their company, the highest percentage since Boston Consulting Group began asking that question 10 years ago.

So how do marketers maximise their efforts around ideation, innovation and creativity? How do they give themselves the best chance of success?

Australia has long had a love of advertising. Its “Mad Men” such as Mo and Jo and Singo (Alan Morris, Allan Johnston and John Singleton). Its campaigns that made their mark on Australian popular culture such as Qantas’ I Still Call Australia Home, Yellow Pages’ Not Happy Jan, and AAMI’s Rhonda and Ketut. And its ability to cleverly adapt to the changes in the industry through depressions, world wars, GFCs and more recently the digital age.

"We like to think of performance reviews in the context of sports teams, or an orchestra, where members of the team are evaluated at the end of every period of play,"