November 2026

Back to basics

Earlier this week, my son had his last couple of HSC exams, one of which was Business Studies.

Helping him prepare for that exam provided a timely reminder of the value of Marketing – versus Finance, Human Resources and Operations, in case you’re wondering.

“Marketing is the only revenue-generating activity or function in a business.”

It’s a business truth that’s often forgotten, but one that we could all do well to remind ourselves and our peers.

From reading the subject syllabus and my son’s notes, this is what I learned we teach our children in school:

Finance is ‘profitability management’.

HR is all about ‘wages, policies and procedures’.

Ops is focused on ‘cost leadership’.

In which case, a business without Marketing and its ‘customer orientation’ would seem to be the equivalent of your leaders running the business blindfolded.

Sometimes it helps to go back to basics.

Let’s hope my son’s revision notes are accurate, for all our sakes ;)

Partners in brand and business

It’s been a couple of years since we developed our own Employee Value Proposition and established its role in shaping our employee experience.

Seize the future.

It’s not normally the type of thing I might share so publicly as this but it seems pertinent to the recent news that Christina Kokkinakis and Victoria Berry have been elevated to partners at FutureBrand in Australia.

Or rather, to be more accurate, they have elevated themselves to partners.

Because that’s what an impactful EVP can do for an organisation and its people – as we well know from our own experiences of helping our clients to forge and foster their own EVPs – and I daresay there’s no clearer demonstration of that impact than this.

Christina and Victoria sat down with the editor of Marketing-Interactive for this interview and it’s worth reading for their own perspectives on the move to becoming partners, what it means to them, and the importance of giving employees a visible pathway to leadership.

For mine, it’s another benefit of how being both independently owned in Australia and globally connected via FutureBrand's network gives our clients the best of both worlds – and gives our own people a combination of growth opportunities like no other. Whether those be global brand transformation projects, immersive learning trips to FutureBrand's offices around the world, or indeed local partnerships with a direct stake in the future.

AI again (and again)

It’s been another month of AI dominating the news cycle and inevitably we find ourselves helping our clients navigate what it might mean for their brands and businesses – and answering questions from increasingly inquisitive media.

Firstly, my comments at VOCAL’s breakfast event caught one journalist’s attention when I proposed that ‘B2A’ might become a natural precursor to B2B and B2C.

Business to Artificial Intelligence. Business to Business. Business to Consumer.

B2A. B2B. B2C.

So much so that it sparked this op-ed about the ever-evolving language of AI.

Then, it was Sam’s turn to add his own commentary when contacted for this news story about ChatGPT’s plans to bring visuals to answers via a new ‘Intelligent UI’.

I think Sam summarised things best when he said: “A living room mood board might be a real opportunity for IKEA, but a prompt to turn my friend into a banana doesn’t mean I want to see the Coles specials.”

It seems that the age of AI is here to stay but I think it’s worth reminding us all, once again, of Amara’s Law. Which states that we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short term and underestimate the effect in the long term…

Future tense

For more than a decade, FutureBrand has conducted a series of global research studies to explore the intersection between brand perception and business performance.

Whether that’s the FutureBrand Index: which also inspired these 3 lessons from those 10 years of data.

Or this FutureBrand Index sector study: which took a deeper dive into the Finance sector and the role of trust.

Or even this Employer Brand study: which the team here in Australia wrote in order to surface insights into how your brand can give your business an inside advantage.

Now for the first time, we have taken a deeper look into the Australian market to complement our global knowledge with brand-building insights gathered locally through a qualitative research study involving almost 100 senior brand, marketing and business leaders.

Here’s the blurb:

Future tense: what’s on the minds of Australia’s brand leaders, and what are they doing about it?

Changing times. Fast-moving tech. Customers counting every dollar, and businesses counting every dollar too. The pressure on brand leaders is real, but so too is the potential. Be among the first to hear the latest in-depth research from FutureBrand: to understand what’s testing Australian brand and marketing leaders, and to explore how they’re moving forward.

We will be launching the research study and sharing its findings at an event hosted by the Sydney Marketing Community on Wednesday 18 November.

Click here to book your ticket and join us for the evening, I hope to see you there.

That’s it for this month of news, views and insights, we hope to see you at the Sydney Marketing Community event.

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