Less words, more action: Developing a high performing marketing team

Lindsay Rogers: Hello, and welcome to the Brand Hunch podcast, where we explore ideas and hunches around how marketers are growing great brands. It's a look under the hood at how much is marketing science and how much is built on a hunch. In today's episode, I'm joined by Toni Westlake. Toni is the head of brand and marketing at Big Red Group.

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It's the largest experience network in Australia and New Zealand, and the umbrella company behind experience brands like Red Balloon, Adrenaline, and Experience Oz. Big Red Group's network offers more than 14, 000 experiences across 3, 000 operators. And Toni is one to watch. She's young, dynamic, a powerhouse when it comes to marketing cohesion, and I can't wait to take a look under the hood today. Toni prides herself on achieving commercial growth through the power of brand, as well as developing high performing teams and cultivating demand in new and existing markets. 

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Toni, welcome to the show. 

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Toni Westlake: Thank you so much for having me. 

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Lindsay Rogers: So, unlike many guests on this pod, you did not start your career in agency land and then switch over.

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You have always been on sort of brand or company side. Why do you think you took that route? 

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Toni Westlake: I really wish I had a really kind of cool line that was like, oh, you know, I just knew from the moment that I was born, I was destined to be a brand marketer, but that is a 100 percent not the case. I actually started my career in sales working for a company called Bend on Lingerie and I absolutely loved it because we had the brand’s pleasure state, Heidi Klum Intimates and Lovable. And I just loved that feeling when I went to one of my clients and I'm like, I love that brand, and I think if I was maybe a little bit more wired to be a salesperson, I would have just seen the dollar signs in my eyes. But instead I was like, oh, that just makes me feel so good.

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Like I love working for a brand that other people love. And I think really my career has just been chasing that high ever since. I just want to work for brands that people love and I want to be able to use my expertise to make people love them. And so I think that's why I've always gone for in-house roles because I'm sure, you know, with all of your favourite brands, it's not actually the big marketing campaigns that make you love them.

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It's the really cool packaging that they had at Christmas. It's that awesome customer service experience that you had. It's all those like little things that I can't really control from an agency side where you have to do kind of a polished, finished output, instead in-house you get to actually feed into all of that.

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And I definitely see the biggest difference, from someone who's never worked in an agency before, the biggest difference is I get to be an expert in my customer, like not a channel expert, not a craft expert. I get to actually talk to them, I guess, to listen to phone calls where they're complaining to our customer service team. I get to do research on them. I get to know them. And so I actually get to figure out solutions for things that they want from us. And I think that's what really, that's what drives me. 

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Lindsay Rogers: And when it comes to the sort of sales component of your initial roles, do you think, or has it impacted how you think about marketing in your subsequent career?

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Toni Westlake: Yeah, well, I kind of think sales and marketing go together hand in hand, but for me, sales is just one to one and marketing is one to many. So in sales, you get to know your customer because they are a person. They are just one person. You're like, I know exactly what you need. I know your KPIs. I know what you're trying to do and marketing you have to make a couple more assumptions when you're talking to the masses. So it definitely pulls on a lot more of the creative side of your brain to be able to do that. But I don't think you could ever separate the two. 

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Lindsay Rogers: Yeah, I think from reading up on you, you then went over to Seafolly and then to Bisley Workwear, obviously all in the sort of fashion apparel space. 

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What then prompted the jump over to sort of experiences and tech? 

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Toni Westlake: So, I think anyone who knows me knows just how obsessed I am with activities and I have a really big problem with not being able to say no to things. So, there was, just looking at the brands, and I definitely started on Adrenaline, which is I hate to say it, my favorite child, but being able to start my first week in an aerobatics plane that went negative four to eight G's, I definitely threw up on the landing a little bit. Like those kinds of things just fuel my passion for life. 

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And so, there's such a big difference between like apparel marketing, which was all just about once you, you know, put on the clothes, what it unlocked for you, all of the feel good stuff. For me, experiences are just like, that's how you want to live life and having a product you're so passionate about and the team there was just incredible.

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So it's like, well, this is a no brainer. 

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Lindsay Rogers: I had no idea that you actually go and experience experiences when you work with Big Red Group? 

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Toni Westlake: Yes, absolutely. I think because I've been there for four and a half years now, I think I've done the most at the moment. 

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Um, the downside is of course I see my face skydiving and advertising a lot. Our upcoming summer campaign, everyone in my team is in it somewhere. Um, when we're going on, like in gyms, on bus sides. And I'm not sure if you've ever had a photo taken on an experience, but they're not your best. You are, you are falling over. I've got some of me and my team learning to surf together, which is definitely a bonding experience if you ever want one.

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Um, but yeah, we definitely try and take all of the team out because it's really hard to sell a product that you don't know. And then, once you are out, we use your face shamelessly in advertising for the foreseeable future. 

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Lindsay Rogers: It makes so much sense. But I, yeah, I hadn't stopped to think about it. And I would assume there's a huge shift culturally from stuff to experiences? I mean, I would assume there's a bunch of research showing that. I know from a personal context, a huge shift amongst present giving and how we spend our time to new and interesting experiences.

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Um, what's that meant for the brand? 

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Toni Westlake: Yeah. It really is a cultural shift and particularly with the younger audiences that we're seeing coming through, um, that they've got enough stuff and they actually just want to spend more time connected with each other. Like, you know, when we're spending all this time online, we're not actually spending time face to face and we're feeling lonelier than ever.

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So actually being able to go and be like, actually, let's go do a Paint and Sip together instead of just chatting on our phones. Like that just changes the dynamic of relationships. So we're definitely seeing that coming through, particularly for Red Balloon, where it is all about shared experiences, things you can do together.

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And we actually, I had this article recently that was, Australia is one of the most active, outdoors and adventurous countries in the world. And I think New Zealand were upset about it. Um, but we're also seeing this shift into people having hobbies that they're like, I want to go outdoors and do things.

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We're seeing more people picking up, like, BMX riding. We're seeing more people picking up, uh, scuba diving. And just wanting to start something new and get yourself out. 

Lindsay Rogers: I'm planning Chello's annual retreat at the moment for March. And, um, there's a huge shift even just in our context from sort of boozy anything really to much more experience led sort of like, yeah, I'll have a drink or two, but I don't really want to spend the whole night getting boozed. And so what else can we do? 

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Um, and that bonding that comes with activities and a shared experience, especially when you're putting yourself out of your comfort zone, I think it's a different type of bonding than the usual things we do, but a huge shift as soon as, as an employer, as soon as we're not doing a big boozy dinner as the event, you sort of have to work a bit harder to keep everyone, you know, of all different athletic and personality styles engaged in activities that sort of are new and unique. 

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Toni Westlake: Yeah, it is so true. I've seen the shift in my team as well. Thankfully, we actually have access to all these experiences all the time. But we've seen the shift from, does everyone want to go out for a drink after work on a Thursday, to, okay, we've had a workshop all day, I've organised an experience for us to go to. Otherwise people are like, I’ve got a Pilates class. I'm out. I don’t want to do this. But if you can lure them in with something that's, pretty fun, like an escape room, um, then you have that to also talk about, and it, like, really builds that social capital that you can't do just getting drunk together.

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Lindsay Rogers: Yeah, we went on retreat last year to Hobart and we did an escape room that one of the challenges were two teams against each other. And you sort of have a, like a window between the two. So it's as much, well you've got to choose your strategy, but it's as much about winning the actual game as it is about distracting and sort of tormenting the other team. And it brings out so many incredible, um, bonding moments, but also just personalities and sort of the talkability from it is those beautiful memories that you make with people that become friends.

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Toni Westlake: 100%. I know our team went on V8 racing together and I will always hold it over my boss that I went faster. 

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Lindsay Rogers: So good.

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So you joined the business as a Brand Manager, then you were promoted to Senior Marketing Manager. Now you're Head of Brand and Marketing. What chapters did you write at each stage or what were the different learning blocks that you've built upon?

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Toni Westlake: I was actually talking to someone about this the other day. I genuinely cannot recognise the person I was before I started at BRG. Like that was also before COVID. So, whole different world, but definitely as I started as a Brand Manager, for me, the biggest things that I was trying to learn at that time were how to develop a brand, like doing customer research, running brand immersion.

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So, I'd never had to talk to non-marketers about marketing before and make them understand and get as passionate as me about it and also working with agencies. I'd worked with lots of media agencies before, but had to start working with creative agencies, real creatives who are doing more than you know, churning out what we told them, to actually coming up with really cool ideas, writing strategy, and also just learning that my words were really important and people would tune out very quickly, so making them more meaningful. 

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And I feel like each chapter that I've had at BRG is quite punctuated by probably some formal learning that BRG has given me. They're very big on, you know, internal development. So that one was, I did the mini MBA in Brand Management with Mark Ritson. Um, and that I think just gave me a really good format for brand planning on, okay, this is the diagnosis. This is what we need to go after. This is how to simplify it. And then I still use a variation of that format to this day for all of my teams. 

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Then kind of went into Senior Marketing Manager. And that's when I had to be a lot more about financial forecasting, hiring properly, um, doing long term strategy and actually translating that cool strategy that looked awesome in a deck into a plan for a team to execute on, which is always very challenging.

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So, For me, the two things where we did this leadership training through 10,000 hours, which really helped to plan out how to do goals, how to make them SMART, how to make your team care about them, um, and then also PIP decks. I'm not sure if you've ever used them, but they're like, they've got storyteller tactics and, um, like leadership tactics.

And they're just these little cards that you can pull out to help you run workshops and ideation, things like that. I feel like that really helped me. 

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Um, and then as a Head Of the biggest shift for me has been, it's less about the work and more about making my team do the work. And so for me, it's been team leadership, community and the biggest one for me is empathy. I think we were talking about this a couple of weeks ago, where, you know, it's definitely a hard thing to learn if you don't, if it doesn't come naturally. 

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It's where I read the book Surrounded by Idiots and I absolutely loved it because it really just helped to understand everyone thinks in different ways to you, um, and as long as you can kind of find ways to bring them together, show up for them, and actually be the leader that they need, regardless of kind of how they interact and how they talk, then that's really, for me, what this chapter looked like, and it's still looking like. 

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Lindsay Rogers: Yeah, it's so true, leading teams, I think we fall into a trap of thinking people think like us or act like us, or if we respond a certain way, someone else will. I always get that realisation when I see mapping, like disc profiles or personality profile mapping where you see people on a scale and you realise that, like, wow, you are so do you value things really differently to me and the importance of, I don't know, over communication or soft touch or other things that perhaps, you know, one person doesn't value someone really needs, which I think leading teams is hugely important for buy in and for energy and, you know, pace of work. 

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Lindsay Rogers: So I think you sit alongside two roles, the head of performance and the head of digital experience as peers. How do you guys sort of, how do the roles interrelate and how do they sit separately? 

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Toni Westlake: So, the way that we've structured our team, I’m sure everyone's heard of the long and the short, um, but what we found is the short was too short, like so focused on the day to day, but it didn't enable us to do some of the other bigger things that you need to do.And the long felt way too abstract. So, it was really hard to secure time and investment for it. So, the way that we think about it is more like long, mid, short, and forever. And that's kind of how our team is structured. So, we've got the short, which is our performance team. They're very focused on the day to day, um, conversion rate onsite, rollouts in our performance channels, they’re search experts, social experts, and can trade the hell out of a website.

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Then we've got the mid and the long, which sit in my team. So, mid is where my campaigns team sits, and they're focused on consideration. So, they're trying to drive consideration just before a key retail moment. So, in experiences, that's like summer school holidays, Christmas in the like, two to three months before those key moments, that team is working tirelessly to make sure everyone's like, oh, Christmas is coming up and I can think of experiences rather than stuff, just to get that consideration in before the performance team then goes hard into the retail moment.

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Then I've got my brand team who are focused on the long, like they are not really tied to an in-quarter revenue target, but we know that that's kind of the foundation for the future success. And so they are working on multi-year partnerships, long creative ideas, brand consistency, uh, social media ambassadors, influencers, those kinds of things that build the saleable asset for the brand if you were to ever sell it, that's like, oh, that is what makes it valuable. That's what they're working on. And that's how we kind of pitch for that budget. 

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And then we've got the forever team, which is our digital experience team, who, um, have most of our own channels at SMS, email, transactional comms, WhatsApp, where they're looking at all the data points that we have to try and make people have a better experience every time they come back to us and to go see what all of the new things that we have available.

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So that's kind of how our team is structured, but you can see with like the Head of Performance, Head of digital Experience, we have to work together pretty seamlessly. And we've got this pretty solid trio, um, that any big business challenges, they come to all of us and we go, I'm not alone. I don't have to do this all by myself.

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Toni Westlake: Um, they're there to really help go, well, this is my view on it. This is how I've done it in the past so that we can join our experience, to then go the best solve to this would be a subscriber acquisition play. This is a brand challenge. This is actually, we put the wrong products into this campaign. This is how we fix it so that we can be aligned and cascade it to the teams and go, this is the solve. And they all work together. 

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When it's working, that's what it does. And when it's not, that's where we have to try and have those arguments, those kind of disagreements so that whatever comes out of that, the team is still aligned for the rest of the business. 

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Lindsay Rogers: Yeah, that's incredible. I love the breakdown and the way that you think about it.

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I know that you've gone on a real journey in terms of in-housing, out of housing and, uh, sort of contracted support, where have you landed and how has that evolved over time? 

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Toni Westlake: So, I'm so excited by our new creative team structure. Um, and it has been, it's been a journey. So when I started at BRG, we were fully in house. Um, the biggest challenges that we had with that were, um, although we had all the IP in house, the team could work really quickly, um, they were learning and growing with each campaign iteration, they ended up not being super inspired by what was happening outside of our business, got very same, same, and they got really demotivated because it's really hard to have creative people doing the same thing every day. They don't love it, which is what I've noticed. 

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Um, and then we went kind of full agency mode where we went, we want all of our big ideas to sit with a creative agency. Um, we want to lean on external expertise to do that. And we found it was very expensive to start with.

Um, but also we didn't really have the IP. So, we didn't have anyone in-house who truly understood how we got there, so then how we could iterate on that. 

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And for agencies, like, I found that a lot of them really want to work on things that are going to look good for them, like, win awards, like, do something really inspiring and new. But a lot of what we need is kind of just a slightly better iteration of what we've done in the past. And so it wasn't necessarily overly inspiring briefs for agencies either. 

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Then we went to kind of freelancers. So all the strategy was done in house and I had a group of freelancers doing that work that just led to, we got pretty much what we asked for and we stopped getting that really inspired creative vision and view.

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So where we've landed now is I've now got a team of four creatives in-house, my awesome creative art director, um, video editor, graphic designer, and a content writer. So that's like our core who work across the three brands who then have a group of awesome influencers that can go and create content for us.Freelancers that can help us to scale during Christmas or anything where we've got five campaigns all happening at once. And then also being able to access agencies for anything specific where like, actually, we really want some expertise. We want some external thinking. We want something big here so that we can scale however we need to for the business because it grows so quickly for us that having all of those resources in house isn't sustainable. Uh, and it's probably not going to work in my best interest for how I use the money across my team. 

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Lindsay Rogers: And so shifting to this sort of more flexible or more, I guess, um, varied input model. What have you learned about managing creatives? 

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Toni Westlake: That was a big one. Um, and it was definitely one I feel I've spoken to you about before that managing creatives is a totally different ballpark to managing Suits, Account Managers or Brand Managers.

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Um, and I got the best advice when I first started doing it from my old boss and mentor, Matt Gudge, where he said, creatives don't think like you. And the worst thing you could do would be to create an environment where you force them to. I was like, Ooh, that gives me shivers and fear in my gut. And he was so right. Like all of the creators that I have, they are, it's almost like I can tell they're good because they don't think like me. And I just had to create an environment where there were really clear guardrails and they could be as creative as possible. And that's what we're trying to still develop at this time, because it's a brand new team and all of the ways of working that have to be embedded over time.

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But I think for me that like the two big things were. It's not easy. It's not an easy balance because any commercial creative team has to balance out, you know, like deadlines and creativity, objectives, big ideas, and just like the investment versus the outcome. Like, there's never going to be a time where you can just do exactly what you wanted to do.

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And so all great creatives will continue to push, and all great Account Managers will pull. And so you've always got that tension. And it's just to make sure that's healthy rather than “I think” versus “I think”. And the way that I've kind of found was best for us is you always start with a strategy because creatives, I found, were really comfortable working in the gray, and I found a lot of my A type personality people were not. And so if you give creatives, like I kind of want this. Easy. Yep. I've already come up with ideas and I'm going in this direction and that's not the same direction as anyone else was thinking. 

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So what I found is that if you've got to have a really clear view on how you think with this campaign or whatever project you're doing is going to win for the customer, what you will do and what you won't do. You just have to formalise that, get everyone on the same page, and then everyone's talking the same language. And that's where I found, um, really helped for me. I did Mark Pollard's Sweat Head workshop, which just has a really great framework for talking about creative strategy. And it was in such simple words that I can use it for all of my different teams.

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And I even did a Lunch and Learn with the whole business to go this is how we're now talking about creative strategy. Makes perfect sense. Even some of my engineers were like, I love what you did. Pretty sure you don't talk like that, but I'm proud of you. So, it's really good to see if everyone's talking the same language and everyone gets it, you leave less room for interpretation and more room for actual creatives to do creative work.

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Lindsay Rogers: So I was going to ask you, out of interest, has your briefing process or the way that you brief changed moving from agencies to internal creatives? And it sounds like it has. 

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Toni Westlake: It has, um, because really, if you don't have a good brief, you don't get good outputs. And so I think with agencies, they hold you to account pretty well where they're like, this is a terrible brief. We're going to rewrite it for you, or, um, we'll only be held accountable to what's in the brief because we're charging you for it. Whereas in-house, I feel like people think that they can be more flexible with those. 

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So we've gotten quite rigorous on what is included in a brief. And we've also just got this, you know, um, like creative ticket scheduling software where we've got almost like a shame bucket, which is like incomplete or bad briefs. And so if it's not ready, you just get moved there and no one looks at it until it comes back. And then also we've started trying to help the team get much better at giving feedback. So making sure if it's not in the brief, you can't feedback on it and making sure I'm also doing that.

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Like if I show up going, yep, I didn't put it in my brief, so I'm not going to feedback on it. The only things that I can do is if it's in the brand guidelines and you haven't hit it, or if it's in the brief and you haven't hit it, otherwise this is actually your world and I have to trust you. So it's made us much tighter at writing briefs and it's also given my creative director freedom to be like, no, this isn't a you versus me. This is a, I'm an expert and I answered your brief, which has been quite fun, 

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Lindsay Rogers: Incredible and a whole lot more respect right for the craft, a for your team in making sure it's succinct and actionable and clear and for the creatives that lack of gray and more black and white for them to thrive and most creatives do thrive with barriers or sort of guardrails. So I think hopefully you only continue to see more relevant and creative work. 

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I was reading on your site, um, and I quote, we have everything you need to connect a world of experiences to quality customers. Together, we can deliver millions of life riching experiences and fill the world with stories, not stuff.

And that's, I guess, from a BRG perspective, what's your perspective or journey been around storytelling?

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Toni Westlake: It's a great question. Um, so it's actually something that we found really challenging at BRG to be able to tell so many individual stories, because when you look at like, Oh, less stuff, more stories, like that makes perfect sense.

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I know all the stories that I've created going in hot air balloon rides in aerobatic flights, trying skydiving for the first time, like I know my stories. But the more we looked into it, the more we realised every single person has a completely different experience. And it's very hard to capture that because it all happens internally.

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I guarantee you the person that you are when you get into a skydiving plane the first time is a different person to when you land. And watching that transformation and being able to communicate it is really, really hard. So we've found that the best form of storytelling is enabling actually the people who are doing it to tell that story.

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Like, we have moved almost exclusively away from overly produced shoots. We don't really script anything that we do. Um, and, our brief is pretty much show everything as it happens, like it's okay if you swear, it's okay if you fall over, because that's real, and that's what we've found really connects.

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And so for Red Balloon, it's about the real moments where you're like sitting there under the stars and just look at your partner and go, oh, you're like, you're the one like, that's it. That's it for me. That's the moment we want you to capture. 

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For Adrenaline, it's all about, I achieved something great and I feel so good about myself. Or I was so scared and now I'm this, like showing that transformation of self is what we really look for. 

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And then for Experience Oz, it's all about kind of being able to connect with your family, spend time with them, because everyone who has kids knows that they grow up way too fast and all the things that you can do with them change so quickly that being able to capture that and just go, this is our family. This is it in its real and messy form that nothing went to plan, but we had a great time. That's what we want you to capture too. 

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Lindsay Rogers: Because on top of the 14, 000 odd experiences you offer, you've also then got different audience segments. I mean, you've got people that are buying vouchers that might not be the recipient of an experience, you know, think of an elderly person buying it for an active grandchild, say, and then you've also got, I would assume direct to consumer, wholesale, corporate, like you've sort of got, and then the experience operators themselves, you've got a lot of different people you're talking to in different ways.

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How do you decide on where to place your energy? 

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Toni Westlake: So, we do have a lot of different customers, a lot of different teams that cater to those different customers, but we do use a lot of research to help us identify who those core customers are and how we can win with them, but also what size of market they are.

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So, my job is to make sure that when we look at each of our brands they are differentiated and they're a big enough total addressable market for us to actually win in. Because there's no point in meaning a whole lot to a very small amount of people that won't buy from us or they don't have a future with us.

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So when I look at Red Balloon, yes there are two kind of very clear target audiences there. One is the gift giver and one is the gift recipient. Um, and what we've found is people don't tend to give experiences if they don't value experiences. So usually you are still someone who goes on experiences, but the one you choose for other people will be different.

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So, If you're like, oh, I would love to just go to dinner with my kids. And that's, that's what I would love for a gift. You are more likely to go onto Red Balloon and go, well, what would they like to do? And so then it becomes more of a reciprocal relationship between the gift giver and the gift recipient, because we also know that people who go on an experience are more likely to gift it within the next 2 weeks.

And we also know that the act of giving an experience is an act of recommendation. So, um, they are inextricably linked. 

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Adrenaline is, we've got our target customer, his name is Eddie, and everyone knows an Eddie who just has one or two hobbies that they're absolutely obsessed with,  but when you ask them what they're doing this weekend, it will be something completely rogue.

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So, they may be super into surfing and BMX bike riding, but you ask them like, oh, yeah, I'm just scuba diving this weekend or I'm at a rally. I've decided to pick up this new thing. Like that is our Eddie. And that is who we go after consistently for that brand, because he's all about doing it for himself. If you want to come along fine, but he's not going to let that stop him. 

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And then for Experience Oz, we know that the decision makers in family activities are the parents. They get influenced a lot by the kids, but it is the parents. So then all of the places that we target, all of the creative that we use is really specific to what do parents need from us. And most of the time it's peace and quiet and just to be really easy. So, really the positioning around Ex Oz is more fun, less fuss. And that's really how we choose that audience. 

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But we have found synergies across our consumer. If you love experiences and from a consumer lens, you're also more likely to bring it into your team bonding, into your reward and recognition, um, and into kind of the businesses that you work in. So there is a bit of an ecosystem there. 

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Lindsay Rogers: I guess what you're tapping into before when you're talking about user generated content, people that are experiencing an experience at any one time is around showing, not telling, you know, it’s one thing as a marketer to say, “this is so much fun”. It's another thing to watch people genuinely having so much fun.

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What's your approach then to sort of nurturing and the whole kind of suggesting things that people might like, I assume there's an ecosystem you have there that with an Eddie does one thing doesn't yet know that perhaps, I don't know, some sort of extreme bungee jumping thing is on his radar yet until you let him know.

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What's been your sort of journey around the nudging and mapping?

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Toni Westlake: Yeah, so we actually did this really cool piece of research that started with our driving category because we assumed there were gateway experiences—where you would start with one experience and it would unlock all of these other ones. And what we found for driving was particularly interesting: a V8 hot lap, where you sit in the car and someone drives you around, was one of those gateway experiences.

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Quad biking was another one. And rally, sitting in a rally car was another. So we're like, if we can get you in on that level. Those tend to be the three that we really focus in on for new customers who don't know the brands. Then the next level down is driving a V8 yourself, driving instead of a quad bike, it's a go-kart. Or a Formula Ford experience, which is kind of a high-powered go-kart. And then for rally, it's like going into stunt driving or driving a motorbike. Or, and so we saw, if you went twice, you're more likely to do these ones. Three or four. And then once you get to five times, you're like, 'I'll do anything. This sounds really fun.’

 And so we've kind of got that mapped out for what are our entry points. So rather than entry price points, we've got kind of entry intensity points.

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Lindsay Rogers: Yeah. Like mindset. If I'm fine with this, then I might sort of ramp it up a bit and do more. 

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Toni Westlake: Yeah. Cause we also found that customers come in with different needs states. So less likely to go, Oh, I really want to drive a big eight car more. I really want to just go really fast, or I just want to feel free. I want to push my limits. And so that's where we started to also group experiences across categories based on why you would want to do them. And so that was also part of that research to help us categorise why you would do something.

And that's been really helpful for us too, for those second and third purchases.

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Lindsay Rogers: How much of an impact is cost of living having on a business like yours? Is it that it doesn't impact as much because people are in upper income brackets or is it sort of that they're choosing less than value experiences?

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How has that sort of impacted you? 

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Toni Westlake: So it's impacted us in really interesting ways that we found the bottom level of our price points stayed pretty consistent. So people were still buying the like under 150 experiences because they didn't want to stop doing them. We found the middle bracket tended to be the most impacted, which was like the things that you would do kind of on the weekend, but without having to plan it too much.

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So things like going kayaking or canoeing or jumping on a jet ski, things like that, that sat in the mid price point we found were more impacted. And then we've got that upper price point, which tends to be more gifted. And we found that those actually grew. So it was really interesting to see, and we've got a bunch of hypotheses on why that might be.

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And we're thinking it was potentially people who have the money really want that for the people in their life. So they use a gifting opportunity to share that and say, 'I know you've always wanted to do this. You probably wouldn't do it for yourself.' And this has given me an opportunity to do it for you.

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Lindsay Rogers: One of the things I know from talking to you previously is that you use a brand tracking software, you use TrackSuit. What was the decision to engage, uh, at any kind of time? Tracking software and how have you found it? What's been the main benefit to you?

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Toni Westlake: So we have always done kind of brand pulses just to check to see if all of the investment that we're doing in the brand was actually doing anything. So when I started, we did a twice-a-year brand pulse that just looked at our awareness, consideration, preference, and a couple of brand statements around quality and trust. The problem with that is it kind of was just used as a health measure rather than a diagnostic tool or something to show what we'd done had worked.

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So that's where, when we heard about Tracksuit, this was probably about 14 to 15 months ago, like this seems perfect. Like, this seems like a way that we can actually go, we did this activity in January. Look, we're starting to see an impact here, here and here, and to bring metrics into the conversation around brand investment, because I'm sure every brand marketer knows that it's the first budget to get cut because it doesn't feel like it's having an immediate impact on revenue.

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So that was really helpful for us to be able to start that conversation around why we invest on a longer-term basis, how we can see that always-on investment working. Um, and then also when we go into planning, it enables us to look. Actually, our awareness went up last year, but our consideration stayed the same.

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We know from our research that in our category, there are a couple of things that drive consideration. And so we've got those as our brand statements that are like trust and quality. We are a brand that relates to me, like all of those certain things. So we can go, okay, that hasn't changed. Our goal for this year is to move our quality metric.

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So that we are now number one. So that has to move up 10 points. That then becomes an actual metric for our team that we then put into annual goals, quarterly goals that we consistently report on. And it feels then just as powerful and, I guess, accountable as any other metric that we have in the business.

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Lindsay Rogers: And you have these metrics at a board level, right?

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Toni Westlake: We do. Yes. So, um, one of the things that we brought in when we did this is I wanted to get our board and our senior leadership team as excited about it as I was, because it's really hard to get them to invest in things that aren't measurable, but they also don't believe in.

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So when I first brought it in, it started with this education piece, which was a kind of lunch and learn for the whole business on what the Tracksuit platform was. We gave access to anyone who cared, and including our CEO loves looking at it. Um, and so then it just started the conversation that we're all talking the same language.

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So now when we report to the board, 'Hey, we want to do a board meeting. Big brand investment. It's going to hit this time of year.' These are the metrics that we're going to go after. And they'll be like, 'Oh yeah, we know that if you hit that, that will mean a really good thing for us in six months' time.'

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So we've started to kind of see through having them trust us to start with, having the metrics to prove it, and then having the testing and learning. So they can kind of connect the dots between what we're doing and the long-term impacts on the business. So that has become part of the board pack going forward.

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And it was even as we went into Christmas, um, my CEO pulled me aside and said, 'Are you sure we've invested enough in the brand to hit our Christmas number?' And I was like, 'My dreams just come true.'

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Lindsay Rogers: Job is done here. That's incredible. And that's such a huge cultural shift around the importance and relevance of the long and short and not just being focused on short-term activities.

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Although they are incredibly important and usually more discussed at senior levels, bringing brand up for buy-in and conversation. I think you've done an incredible job. Um, do you map all of the different brands in Tracksuit and how, I think you've moved to a shared services model. Is that right? How do you look at, how do you think about the brands and track them over time?

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Toni Westlake: Yeah, so they're all, they're all in Tracksuit together because they're all fit in a really similar environment. So we can kind of track them all next to each other and against each other so that we can make sure also that if we're pushing really hard on Red Balloon, then it's not impacting the other brands because we can start to see the correlation between us and all of our competitors.

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But yeah, we have moved from kind of separating the brand so that we had kind of the same team, but for each of the different brands into a combined model like within my team. So we've got some specialists in the team who just work on one brand, but what we found is being able to connect the dots across the teams and the brands was so much more powerful because we usually learn something in Adrenaline.

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And we're like, that's immediately applicable to Red Balloon and Experience Oz. If they're not on the same team, not working together, they won't hear those things unless they read a PCR. You know, 10 months down the track, so it really helped that we could have specialists who like, 'I'm really good at media’, ‘ I'm really good at social’, ‘I am great at strategy’. And they ended up sharing all of those things just to make all of the brands better. So that's definitely how we wanted to build out that team, but also, you know, that way we've got say like a consideration metric, which is kind of brand and it's kind of campaigns.

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So it's like mid and long-term both of the teams have to work really closely together to do that. And so being able to share that expertise across the teams, we just needed to bring everyone much closer together.

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Lindsay Rogers: Yeah. Incredible. In terms of, I mean, you went from twice-yearly sort of audits or brand tracking to now sort of always-on.

How often do you think now you would either reference or are you in the platform having a look? What kind of cadence are you working with?

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Toni Westlake: So we get an update every month. So I definitely have to go in every month because you can guarantee I will have an email from my CEO. He gets the email too, um, saying, 'Why did this go up?'

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'What have you done here? What are we doing about this?' So we'll always go in at least once a month to see what the tracking has done, but usually we'll use it in planning for any campaign for any quarterly goals process. And then as well, we're consistently looking at it at the moment. We're doing a whole lot of planning for the next kind of 18 months.

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And it's a tool that I have consistently open because being able to look at what the trends are across different age groups, as well as different regions means that we can then go, 'Okay, Victoria is an issue state for us. Let's do a geo holdout test to just say, what are we going to do here? How are we going to test a bunch of hypotheses just in Victoria, and then if we're able to do that, we'll then apply it across the country.'

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So, yeah! It's definitely on my laptop, open a couple times a week.

Lindsay Rogers: You mentioned before about hypotheses, in other words, sort of, I guess, a gut feel or, you know, making the best guess you can with the information you have. What's your relationship with sort of hypotheses, testing your gut? Um, it sounds like you've got some pretty great data points to be able to then reference and pivot.

How do you navigate that?

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Toni Westlake: Yeah, look, my view on it is that data will always tell you what you've done. It's not going to tell you what to do next. So you have to rely on hypotheses or instinct to gut to determine what to do next. The data that we use will definitely tell us where we should be spending our time or investment, like what the problem areas are, what customers we're losing, which ones are growing. You know, it really tells you, gives you a lay of the land to focus your priority, but I definitely think a lot of what we do in marketing has to be, it's either, I've learned it from, I've seen this film before, we've done this before, i've read about this before, I've failed at this before, or based on how well I know my customer, I think I can make a call for them. And to me, that's the duality of instinct that I don't think it's this innate thing that comes with you that you're like, 'Yep, I was born with this. And I know exactly how to market this from the age of two.'

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It's all about being able to fail at things across your career so that you can pass on the knowledge of how not to fail in that specific way. That's been really helpful for me. And then just once you know your customer inside now, you've called them, you've spoken to them. When you see a call, you can think, 'I don't think this would sit right with John.'

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It's almost like you get an internal pub test, which I find is really helpful to be able to make a call on what to do best. If you've got your customer at the heart of it, they usually forgive you if you do it wrong.

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Lindsay Rogers: Yeah, incredible. And back to your earlier point, knowing your customer deeply and, you know, is the best use of your role and, you know, your voice within the organisation to have a gut instinct on behalf of them.

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Pivoting slightly to the topic of high-performing teams, I know that a couple of your company values are around growth-minded and we own our outcomes. How does this look like for you in the context of your team? What's an ethos or a motto that you sort of run your high-performing team with?

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Toni Westlake: So my team motto is, um, 'We challenge and support each other.'

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Um, we definitely have that up in a lot of our workshops because. You need to have a safe environment to have a whole bunch of high-performers who just want amazing outcomes. They want to do great work. They want to have things on their showreel at the end of the year. They need to be able to have a safe environment to put those things forward, challenge each other, and then go, 'Okay, let's do this.'

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'This is a good call. What do you need from us?' And that's how I really like to run my team and be able to create that group of high-performers who are consistently high-performing. You really have to do a couple of things to make sure that they stay that way because everyone knows that one person who's not performing that is just allowed to coast then brings everyone down.

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So I think for me, the three things are just absolute clarity. Be really clear on what everyone's role is. What your expectations are of them and what they're meant to be doing. So for me, I love having like, what are those two things a year that you want to be super proud of? what's going on your showreel, and how do we make sure that those things are going to happen and are going to make a big impact for your customer.

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Second is feedback. So it's really hard to be clear on something and then not know how you're performing. So that's not always negative feedback. It's just that consistent, 'Hey, you did a really good job here. I know you're trying to write your first brand strategy by the end of the year. This was a really great step.' 'You did a really good job. Keep doing that.' Or 'I know you're trying to do this, but you went off in a slightly different way. Here's how we can bring you back.'

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Just be consistent. So people start to expect it. It's not like, 'Hey, I need to give you feedback.' And you get a sinking feeling in your stomach. It's a, 'Hey, I need to give you feedback.' And they're like, 'Oh, good. Thank you. I really wanted that. I wanted to know how I'm going.' And the third part is the consequence. So a lot of people would say that it's either like reward or punishment.

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Because if you are doing well, you need to be consistently rewarded for that. So whether that's just recognition, the positive feedback, some people just like to know that they're making an impact. But it's one of the things with the whole learning empathy and learning how to lead a team is everyone wants to be rewarded in different ways, and you just have to ask them is what I found really works there. But also it means that if someone's not doing their job, if someone's not stepping up, if someone's consistently underperforming, you have to also deal with the consequences.

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So there have to be negative consequences to not living up to the ethos of the rest of the team.

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Lindsay Rogers: Yeah, incredible. I'm scared of you. Um, I love that you're taking into consideration the things that your team, the couple of things that your team want to do throughout a year and then building that into your annual planning as a broader team for the buy-in.

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And I think listening to, taking the time to ask the right questions, such an underrated and obvious skill in great leadership. Who, or sort of what, or where does it come for you personally in relation to sort of running a high-performing team? What drives you and who are you accountable to?

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Toni Westlake: So I feel very accountable. Like accountability is honestly one of my favorite parts about working in-house as well as running a team. So I can hold myself accountable to a very high standard. And I think I'm probably the harshest critic that I have, but I kind of have both formal and informal ways of holding myself and the team accountable.

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So, in terms of formal, um, I have this awesome document. I'm so proud of it, where I've just listed out all of the expectations for all of the roles in my team. So anyone can access it. So even my job description, all of the things that I should be able to do, I list out. Anyone in my team can access it.

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So I can also in one-to-ones go, 'Hey, am I living up to your expectations? You know what my role is. Am I doing well? How can I do better?' So I've got kind of more formal documented things. We've got performance reviews and performance ratings, which enable my boss to tell me if I'm doing a good job.

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But then the informal ones are more like being able to question, 'Am I making an impact for my team?' And my personal favorite question that I ask myself of every piece of work that I send out is, 'Am I proud of this work?' And if I genuinely can't say yes, I have to go back and it's not ready to show anyone else.

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It's probably the most brutal feedback someone else can ask you. My old boss used to do this all the time. Show them something like, 'Are you proud of this work?' No. No, I'm not. I'll go back. I'll redo it because, and now I just have that internal voice that's, 'Are you proud of this work?' And it's not like, 'Is this your best work?'.

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Because nothing that we do can consistently be our best work. There are always going to be limitations. There was always a budget smaller than what you wanted to have. There was a KPI that was different to what you would have done, but if you can say, 'I'm genuinely proud of what I was able to do here,' then that's what keeps you motivated.

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It's what gets the next project on your radar at the right time, where you're at the same level of excitement.

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Lindsay Rogers: Just looping back to something you said before you were talking earlier around the relationship to external and in-housing and how sort of sometimes you just need creative that's a little bit better, but doing a similar thing that's worked in the past in light of that, what's your perspective on creative bravery?

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Doing sort of really out there, create wild, creative ideas. Like what place does that have in the business?

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Toni Westlake: I think that has a huge place in the business. We kind of call them big bets and that's where we often have a business case around them, because if we're looking at our normal forecasting process, you always have to go, 'If we did this last year, how do we make it a little bit better?'

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'If we spend a little bit more money and we make it a little bit more efficient, we can get a little bit better.' And then we've got, uh, we want to do something that we've never done before. It's going to scare everybody and that's okay. Um, and that's where I'll often put a business case together with whoever's come up with the idea.

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Um, so say it's a really cool partnership. Like, we did this for Adrenaline. Uh, we had an awesome partnership with GoPro where it was, you know, like a business case. 350,000 investment. So it wasn't a small investment and we had to go, 'This is what it's going to do for us.' They're really excited about doing it, but we really had no idea what the impact was going to be.

It ended up far exceeding all of our expectations and it just outperformed all of our wildest dreams. But upfront, it was really hard to say what that was going to be. And so it just started with a, 'Hey guys, I've got an idea. Are you ready to back me on this?' And then we would kind of go, 'Oh, what if we did this?' 'Oh, and this, let's do this together.' And then you had a whole team around you that just went, 'Do that.' And then we took it to the senior leadership team and went, 'We need money for this.' And they're like, 'Okay.'

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Lindsay Rogers: It's incredible. It sounds like, I mean, an educated, but hunch in terms of like, I think these things, styles are all aligning for this kind of uplifted outcome, but I couldn't tell you exactly how it's going to play out.

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Looking back at your career, working with consumer brands, how many of those sort of hunches have paid off for you and how many of them have completely failed?

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Toni Westlake: That's, that's really hard. I actually don't know. The ones that kind of come to mind first, uh, the GoPro partnership was one of the first ones that we did for Adrenaline.

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It was one of the first big brand investments that we did. That one definitely paid off and it's now led to an ongoing partnership strategy with kind of key people in the adventure space on how we continue to build that. When I was at Sea Folly, we did a really interesting partnership with Chandon where we wrapped the summer sleeve with a print from Seafolly Swimwear so you could match your swimwear to your champagne at Christmas, which was really important. What we didn't realise is that all these people get married in the summer and everyone wanted those bottles along the tables because they just looked so pretty And they ended up just selling out much more than our biggest expectations because there was just some factors in there that we weren't expecting.

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Lindsay Rogers: It's really tough for you being really successful.

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Toni Westlake: I know, I know. It's really hard to find the, I've maybe just blanked out all the ones that I'm like, 'Ooh, that was a bit of a miss' because I feel like with brand, there's rarely a downside to investing behind it.

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Like there is just something to say for we were in market and people saw it. And there's almost the, 'If people got offended that at least they spoke about it,' but I feel like the biggest flops for me have been when I failed to fight for brands. When I went, 'Actually, it's probably not that important right now. 'We've got other things going on.' And then you start to see the metrics decline and you go, 'That was a bad call. That's on me.'

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Lindsay Rogers: Well, I guess your new team structure is also allowing for that instead of having to choose between priorities with one single team across short and long-term activities.

You have both, you know, like you're able to look at, look at doing both. I'm sure with different sort of budget allocations and focus areas, but it's not having to choose one at the detriment of the other. You can split things out.

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Toni Westlake: Yeah, but the downside of that is always if you do too many things at a lower level, they never have the impact that you want it to have.

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So actually going, 'We've got to pull this and go big,' I found has a big impact. Whereas all of the little things that make you feel like you're doing something, make you feel like you're taking a step change are actually not making the impact that pulling all of that money into one big thing and doing a risky bet would have. Um, but that's always the push and pull that if I just did one thing a year and it didn't pay off, I'd be in a bit of trouble. Uh, but if I do 20 things a year and 10 don't pay off, then less trouble.

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Lindsay Rogers: Moving to your perspective on what you think makes a great brand, who or what is a great brand that you admire and why?

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Toni Westlake: So I'm one of those people who gets very obsessed with brands and won't stop talking about them. So the three that I have on my radar at the moment that I think my partner would be happy if I never spoke about again, uh, LSKD, Kick and Frank Body. And the reason that I love them is honestly, all the brands that I love are just, they've got enviable basics.

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Like they have a really good product, like a quality product at the core of what they do. They have a clear vision of where they want to go and what impact they want to make, they listen to their customers and they just show up consistently with a clear identity and personality. Like that's all the things that when they do that well, I'm like, 'Oh, this is amazing.'

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But for me, LSKD, the way that they listen to their customers, you see people commenting on their social posts saying, 'Oh, if only you had it in this color.' And then two months later, it'll be out in that color. And they're like, 'Hey, Lindsay, by the way, we made it in forest green for you.' You're like, 'That is so cool.'

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I absolutely love how they do that and how they kick the dialogue up. I think it's just such a fantastic product and the way they've got, uh, Laura and Steph in everything. So that in their marketing,

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Lindsay Rogers: This is a fitness app, right?

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Toni Westlake: Yes. So it's the, um, Steph Claire Smith and Laura Henshaw's fitness app. Um, but they're like, they're in the videos, doing the workouts with you, kind of sweating along with you.

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They're in the advertising, they're in the social comments, they're even in the Facebook community. If someone asks like, 'What was Steph wearing in this video?' And she'll be like, 'Hey, I was wearing this brand.' Really having that consistency of they are the brand, they own the brand and they interact with it.

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It's just so powerful for me. And then Frank Body, I think their tone of voice is so fun. It's just, they have a really clear vision, which is just inexpensive, great skincare, like it's great Australian skincare. Like that's, that's all it is. And they have the cheekiest tone of voice. They haven't kind of increased their prices massively.

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They're just cute, fun, and they show up in every single place in the same way. And I just love them.

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Lindsay Rogers: Amazing. What do you think is next for you and or BRG? What's coming up?

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Toni Westlake: So, I feel like it's always a big year at BRG. We don't know how to have a quiet year and just chill out. Um, I'm not sure anyone really does who attracts high-performers in their team, but we've got a big launch of the Adrenaline new website coming this year. So that's something we've been working on for a few years now, developing our own website and it was so good because it was happening at the same time we're developing the brand strategy.

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So that actually got to feed into some of the functionality and formats that we get in it. Um, so that's all launching. I think it's in the next few weeks in the whole new identity. So that's going to be a big one for us where we can then really ramp up the Adrenaline brand because all those need states of why people come to the website, they're able to shop via those.

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All of the research that we had is now kind of showing up across the consumer touchpoints, which is going to be so good. Really still keeping on focusing on embedding that creative team. Because we know, like, I think we've got the right format, but creative excellence takes time and it takes building trust and it also takes being able to do a bunch of campaigns that were like, 'Oh, we haven't done this before.' This is new. This is exciting.

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And so we've got a couple of those coming up with Adrenaline's first kind of brand campaign that this team has done. That's going to be launching in the next week as well as we've got some big, uh, brand campaigns coming for Red Balloon in the middle of the year, uh, with a bit of a brand refresh and then also from a tech side.

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We, like, we know there are all these experiences that we don't currently have because of the interconnection with the tech that we have versus the res techs that they use. So we're getting a whole bunch of those so that we'll have so much more in the wellness category, lots more things to do for like kids and things on the weekend.

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So it's just… our tech this year is going to be our big unlock to doing so many more cool things.

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Lindsay Rogers: Incredible. It has been such a joy to chat with you. I've learned so much. There's so many resources you've mentioned that I need to go and look up. It's been such a great chat with you. Thanks so much for joining.

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Toni Westlake: Thank you so much.

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Lindsay Rogers: What I loved about this chat with Toni is her approach to the long and short of it across the brand and marketing team, and I think it makes so much sense rather than choosing activations within performance or brand that both are, and midterm campaigns are all happening at the same time. Same time in different capacities.

And the second one is around the brand metrics that are discussed at a board level and that the CEO is actively involved in brand conversations. I think that's a huge shift. We'll continue to see more of.

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