1 session inside Boa
Jo Robinson
Chief Marketing Officer, The Iconic
Jo is the CMO at The Iconic, where her remit covers marketing, customer service, partnerships revenue (retail media and ad sales) and creative and e-production. She started her career at Procter and Gamble in Perth as a territory rep covering 100 pharmacies, later moved to Sydney on the Coles account, worked at Colgate-Palmolive, then spent six years in Dubai with Unilever. She describes herself as a traditional FMCG marketer and brand builder rather than an e-commerce marketer.
The session
What Jo teaches
Fix the 5 Ps before you optimise a single ad dollar
Jo argues small budgets get wasted because founders jump straight to ROI optimisation without the fundamentals. Start with proposition (what do you actually stand for, in the way The Iconic settled on "a better way for people to shop") and people (exactly who you are for). Getting those right is what drives the efficiency of every dollar afterwards. Trying to be all things to all people dilutes the brand, even on a large FMCG budget.
From The Iconic's CMO on getting off the paid performance drug →Watch for churn as the signal that paid performance has topped out
The Iconic counts a customer as churned if they do not purchase again within 12 months of acquisition. Jo found they were spending heavily on paid performance, acquiring customers once, then losing them, which she describes as literally buying customers. Track first-purchase-to-repeat over a 12 month window. If acquisition spend keeps rising while repeat rate stays flat, more paid budget will not fix it.
From The Iconic's CMO on getting off the paid performance drug →Use unprompted brand awareness as the metric that justifies brand spend
The Iconic's unprompted awareness was declining quarter on quarter because they had done nothing beyond Google, banner advertising and a little SEO. Jo used that decline as the board argument for shifting spend to the top of the funnel. She warned it could dent short-term sales and would take six months to a year to show. Awareness has since moved up 4 basis points against competitors who outspend them.
From The Iconic's CMO on getting off the paid performance drug →Profile customers psychometrically, not by age bracket
With research partner Retail Doctor Group, The Iconic ran limbic profiling of its customers. Jo's point is that a 25 year old and a 50 year old can be near identical on personality, how they approach life, whether they are extrovert or introvert, and what brands they like. That is far better targeting territory than "25 to 35". Layer it over behavioural data like heat maps, browse patterns and wishlist behaviour.
From The Iconic's CMO on getting off the paid performance drug →
Watch the full sessioninside Boa.
Session notes are free. The recordings, the live advisories and the founders in the room are for members.