This year’s inaugural CMO Awards weren’t just a showcase of Australian marketing leaders doing an excellent job of marketing stewardship and effectiveness. We also introduced the Best Growth Initiative of the Year award, supported by Publicis Groupe, to single out and recognise strategic growth initiatives led by marketing teams.

In this podcast episode, we bring together Jenni Dill, CMO of inaugural award winner, Arnott’s Group, with Cath Brands, CMO of highly commended Flintfox International, plus inaugural judge Ty Hayes, former Curtin Uni CMO and founder of Growth Generators, to delve into what it takes to unlock growth that delivers business-grade impact. From first identifying the opportunity, to how they freed up capacity and gained cross-functional buy-in to make it happen, these marketing leaders from very different B2C and B2B worlds shed light on the programs of work that led to success – and importantly, where they had to rethink and pivot.

For judges, Arnott’s Gluten Free was a clear winner for Best Growth Initiative of the Year award for its gluten free effort – the most incremental launch the FMCG has had to date. Today, gluten-free biscuits make up approximately 10 per cent of the total biscuit market, with an impressive annual growth rate of 40 per cent. Remarkably, Arnott’s has driven 82 per cent of this growth in the past year alone, chalking up $40 million in sales.

“When we got into it, what people really wanted was our biggest, known, loved icons, but gluten-free versions with no taste trade off. So that pretty quickly set our true north,” says Jenni Dill. “That meant a multi-year journey to invest in new bakeries, establish new ways of working, new methods of baking, new ways of going to market, new locations on shelf. It really was a concerted effort, but we also wanted to make sure we weren't waiting two or three years to do something. So we had to get an MVP in the market. We had to start with our simpler products that were easier to get taste equivalent matches to in a gluten-free version. And then everything we did from a marketing perspective, had to make sure that everything was as incremental as it could possibly be.”

At Flintfox, meanwhile, the growth opportunity was to take an Australian-made pricing solutions offering into the German, Austrian and Swiss markets.

“The team and I had two goes at this,” Cath Brands admits. “In the first attempt, we did it the lazy way – we put a translate button on the website, did some contextual translation of what we did and decided to buy some LinkedIn media. Turns out that that's not how you go to business in Germany. That's not how the Germans play the game.”

Take two required an all-encompassing approach: Native product extension, translation and new integrations with SAP, identifying nuanced user and macro conditions, building a market presence from scratch and a go-to-market approach. The result was winning two really big customers in Germany last year worth millions.

For Ty Hayes, however different this year’s winner and highly commended brands may be, each identified strategic, innovative, approaches to drive significant net new revenue. “That was either attacking a new category or creating a new category, or entering a new market,” he says.

They also demonstrate what Hayes sees as the top three things every growth initiative of substance needs: “Insight, foresight and experimentation”.

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The CMO Awards Podcast Ep6: Best Growth Initiative of the Year in focus: CMOs of Arnott’s Group, Flintfox share how they unlocked growth opportunities in the very different worlds of B2C and B2C

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