Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing

Patience of a saint, ‘glass half full’ mentality and commercially persuasive: These may not be the first things you put down on the list of attributes required in modern marketing leaders. But marketing today is as much about exercising influence internally as it is about delivering compelling creative and content externally. And exercising this muscle is never more important than when you’re trying to convince the organisation to back a bold new program of work, agree CMOs from Pernod Ricard, Tassal and Australian Unity.

Marketers are often building the vision and executing against a future and growth prospect that doesn’t yet exist. At a time where pressures to do more with less is also palpable, that makes for a lot of stakeholder management and influence if you’re to truly sell in brand programs that actually move the needle long term over a short-term performance hit.

Recognising you’re standing on a burning platform, then using it to create momentum for change, is a major ingredient – and that certainly helped Pernod Ricard’s Kristy Rutherford attain significant investment for the first Altos tequila brand partnership with the Australian Open in 2026. Having held an early leadership position in the burgeoning tequila category, the FMCG was “a bit shocked” to find itself declining in a growing category just 18 months later.

“You either get on strongly at the first point in development of a category, and put yourself in the top few players, or forever chase your tail for the next 10, 20 years trying to get on that wave. We knew we had to do something quite significant,” Rutherford says. But that’s not just a case you can make on the day.

“To begin with, we had to really work out strategically why it was important – and that brand awareness piece was critical for us,” she says. “But then it’s the internal sign-off piece – it’s engaging the entire people, both locally, but also through Singapore, Paris and globally, that you need to get on-board in order to say yes to a partnership like this. It probably took us a good year end-to-end to do that process.”

Getting what’s historically been a farming-led business focused on functional benefits to understand the power of brand to unlock greater value was the big task at hand for Tassal’s Matt Vince. His tools included providing data-driven benchmarks to support the argument, better articulating the drivers of brand power, as well aligning the c-suite around common language and a strategic mission of becoming an ‘iconic’ brand.

“When I joined the business, that [brand thinking] was the lens missing – it was all farming-led. But how do we – before we even think about farming it – understand who is going to consume it, where’s it going to go, what’s the occasion we’re trying to obtain three years prior versus as it’s comes out of the water, when we’re then a bit rushed? That certainly straightened us up,” he says. 

It’s been the lack of growth Jee Moon has leveraged across her varied career to drive bold programs forward. “That’s been the fire I’ve run towards across the likes of Best & less, OPSM and even Nuix,” the CMO says. “The burning platform was super clear: The mandate for marketing is often in these business transformations to lead and create a vision of what can be, while the business works to line up towards that. In order to achieve that, you have to buy the hearts and minds of the people ‘within’ first, before you create that impact externally.

“That’s always been my approach: To find the language that resonates internally and motivates and inspires. You're asking for a lot from people who predate you, have lived through the decline and have been wearied trying lots of different things … So to find something that motivates them, to then get them to dig deep again and try one more time is what’s key.”

Listen to the full CMO Awards episode here.