“We looked very carefully at which of our three brand names to go forward with - and we are certain that Countdown is what smart shoppers want,” Progressive Enterprises managing director Peter Smith told the Herald when announcing the $1 billion consolidation of the brands Woolworths, Foodtown and Countdown into a single entity.
A mere 14 years later, that confidence seems somewhat misplaced - and the company is now forking out a further $400 million to change the name to Woolworths to bring it in line with the trading name in Australia.
Marketing commentator and owner of ad agency The Goat Farm, Vaughn Davis, says while many people are wondering why the company is changing its name, the better question is why Woolworths wasn’t the name chosen when the initial decision was made. Read more >
The shock announcement that MediaWorks would be scrapping 90 jobs could serve as a precursor of what’s to come.
The leaked statement from the company’s chief executive Cam Wallace carried a line that should catch the attention of people working in any industry across New Zealand.
“We are not immune to the impacts of the current economic factors including a likely recession this year, which will see a dampening demand from advertisers across the board,” Wallace wrote to his staff.
Declining advertising is the first dry cough you hear from an economy heading into a recession.
Marketing is at the pointy end of business and is often the first thing to be cut when belts start to tighten. Advertising is ultimately about growth and this becomes far less important when businesses are treading through the sludge of a recession.
MediaWorks might be the first New Zealand company of 2023 to announce a large cull of workers, but we’ve already seen this playing out in the tech scene.
Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter have parted ways with tens of thousands of workers as they adjust to the economic realities of today.
It’s notable that all of these businesses are funded by that canary down the coal mine: advertising.
But there’s also more to this story than just advertising. Read more >
Wendy Palmer’s fast action at Today FM looks akin to throwing sandbags out of the Hindenburg in the hope it stays airborne.
Leaked information suggests that the acting chief executive has admitted to staff that she wouldn’t have taken on the role had she known how dire the financial situation was at MediaWorks.
The finances meant that Palmer wasn’t going to wait around for Today FM to continue a dismal run of form, in which the station desperately clings to 100,000 weekly listeners.
As Today FM’s morning broadcast was ripped off air, broadcaster Duncan Garner described it as “betrayal”.
Staff at Today FM will feel particularly hard done by given they were sold a five-year project when signing on to join the team. The idea was that they would build something from the ground up.
That may have been the case if former CEO Cam Wallace was still around, but his departure left his brainchild vulnerable to this brutal sort of desecration.
Palmer wasted no time. Read more >
ANZ chief executive Antonia Watson recently noted that in the near future, 35 per cent of the potential workforce under 14 will identify as Māori.
“If we haven’t got pathways for them to come into the workforce and get to the senior roles, then we won’t have any workers left,” Watson told the Front Page podcast.
“It’s really important to understand the demographic make-up of New Zealand and where we’re going, because we need to make sure that our organisations are thriving in the future.”
This was a stark warning to New Zealand’s changing demographic makeup means that businesses will need to put the building blocks in place now or risk facing a talent crisis in the future. Read more >
An Italian advertisement for the Fiat Motor Company released earlier this year provided a lesson in marketing strategy that the Labour Party would have done well to pay attention to in the lead-up to this election.
In the ad, Fiat CEO Olivier Francois walks through the vibrant streets of the town of Lerici in Italy, talking directly to the camera about the fact that grey is the single most common car colour on streets around the world.
“German grey, Japanese grey, French… It’s an easy sell… it always sells. But here we’re not talking about Germany, or Japan, or France. We’re talking about Italy.”
After that careful set-up, Francois then proceeds to promise that Fiat would outright stop the production of any grey cars.
By excluding grey, Francois tells us that Fiat stands for the colour and vibrancy that has always represented Italy.
The act of exclusion is not reductive; it actually enhances our understanding of what the brand stands for.
The best brands in the world are often defined by the things that they do not do.
This brings us to Labour under the tenure of Chris Hipkins as Prime Minister following the departure of Jacinda Ardern.
Hipkins’ leadership has been defined, in part, by discontinuing activities started by his predecessors. The so-called “policy bonfire” saw Labour jettison the TVNZ-RNZ merger, the clean car upgrade, the social insurance scheme, alcohol reforms, the biofuels mandate and hate speech legislation among many others. Labour has also shifted its tone on law and order becoming tougher on crime despite previously focusing more on rehabilitation.
The problem with each new exclusion is that they didn’t provide any clarity on what differentiated the party from the competition. If anything, it has led to criticism that Labour is starting to look a bit too much like National. Read more >
Damien Venuto is an Auckland-based journalist with a background in business reporting who joined the Herald in 2017. He writes columns and articles, often focused on the intersections between business and creativity and up until the end of 2023 was the host of The Front Page podcast.
