Alexander Meyer on forming emotional connections through creativity

Alexander Meyer, Chief Marketing Officer at THE ICONIC, talks to host Mark Jones about the transformative role of creativity in establishing a brand identity.

Technology has disrupted every facet of our lives - how we communicate, how we work, and even how we shop. 

What technology has yet to disrupt however is the demand for positive and memorable customer experiences. 

So, how do we as marketers ensure that we remain agile when things are rapidly changing? 

According to Alexander Meyer, CMO at Australian online fashion and sports retailer THE ICONIC, the key to success in the face of change is listening to your customers.

With more than a decade worth of customer-centric and innovation-driven marketing experience in roles around the globe, Alexander is fiercely passionate about digital transformation and creativity.

“The biggest transformative power that I foresee for a business like ours lies within marketing and creativity. We will enter a commoditized era where everybody will be able to offer the same experience and you will have two advantages. One is creativity and the other is that you have first mover advantages by being a lot bigger,” says Alexander. 

Against the backdrop of Australia’s online retail industry becoming increasingly competitive, Alexander draws on his experience at THE ICONIC to discuss what it takes to build a brand and stand out.

“I would say one of the biggest challenges a retailer naturally has is that they're not known as a brand that comes out with a product. Usually it is a product that builds a brand. So my first belief is that a brand is what it does and not what it says,” he says.

Alexander says that once a brand has an established following, the next step is remaining agile in a forever evolving market.

“If you have a learning culture, a very flexible culture, and a leaner organisation and you're working digitally, you ultimately can go about technological developments and customer experience development very quickly.”

“We have a learning culture and an agile culture. Agile not only in the sense of the methodology from a tech perspective, but also a flexible mindset. And if you have a learning culture and a very flexible culture, you ultimately can go about technological developments and customer experience development very quickly.”

Tune in to this episode of The CMO Show to find out how THE ICONIC is staying ahead of the curve with the transformative power of creativity.

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The CMO Show production team

Producer – Charlotte Goodwin & Natalie Cupac

Audio Engineers – Daniel Marr & Tom Henderson

Got an idea for an upcoming episode or want to be a guest on The CMO Show? We’d love to hear from you: cmoshow@filteredmedia.com.au.

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Transcript

Host: Mark Jones

Guest: Alexander Meyer

Mark Jones: In marketing and communications, the difference between an award-winning campaign and an average campaign is creativity, that spark of inspiration that really gets you excited. Likewise, in online retail and technology, we have a lot of great businesses, but the really excellent ones nail the customer experience, and they have that creative spark that makes you want to come back for more.

Mark Jones: So how are you harnessing the most transformative power of all: creativity?

Mark Jones: Welcome back to the CMO show. Mark Jones here. Great to have you with us. My guest today is Alexander Meyer CMO at THE ICONIC.  If you're like me, you might recall being blown away in the early days of THE ICONIC in about 2011, and it was this three-hour window. You sit at your desk and order a product, and bam, it turns up. 

Mark Jones: So, we've been really excited to bring Alexander into the studio to have a chat about how far the brand has come along since those early days, what his experience has been like, and what insights did he bring from working in Germany and Switzerland and all these fabulous places around the world and how has he been able to take those experiences and bring them into online retail. 

Mark Jones: And without wanting to give too much of it away, he talks a lot about how the answer lies in this age-old idea that you need to listen to your customers as much as possible.

Mark Jones: So, let's get into it, and here's my conversation with Alexander.

Mark Jones: Alexander Meyer, CMO at THE ICONIC. Thanks for joining us.

Alexander Meyer: Thank you for having me.

Mark Jones: Very quickly, what's your background? There's a German vibe I'm picking up.

Alexander Meyer: Yes. I was born in East Germany, so I'm East German. And I was 15 when the Berlin wall fell. So I grew up in the eastern side and then stayed in Berlin until I was 30. 

Mark Jones: And what brings you to Australia?

Alexander Meyer: THE ICONIC. So I came with my family three and a half years ago, we lived in Switzerland at the time. I met my wife in Amsterdam where I lived for six years. We moved to Switzerland for another role and then THE ICONIC role brought us over to Sydney.

Mark Jones: That's incredible. What was the appeal?

Alexander Meyer: It was ultimately the deep dive into the digital reality. When you are a marketeer there are ultimately two avenues you have to hit at some point. It's either the pure creative brand agency side or it's the digital side, if you want to be well rounded for the future. And so I decided to deep dive from a technology angle ultimately. 

Mark Jones: let's just think about THE ICONIC. You're a fashion business, you're a retail business, you're into logistics and you're into technology. So what business are you actually in?

Alexander Meyer: I would say, even though this might sound corny to some, I think we're in the business of identity. Because what it comes down to with fashion is that it has a double function. It protects you from the world, but it also projects you to the world. And when we introduced as a business three hour delivery, we saw something very interesting. People went absolutely nuts for it. And we learned really in the process of talking with our customers about it that we're not just delivering a parcel to someone, but a piece of someone's identity. And I think what we learned very quickly is that the reason why our team is so passionate about what we do, is this feeling of making a difference, not only in an industry, but for people's lives when it comes to one part of their life. In this case, fashion. So, democratising the access to certain fashion and fashion knowledge. Being able to go against the pretentiousness of fashion. Giving them better choice with better price. And really making a difference in terms of seamless experience, especially in a market that was very old school still in certain ways. If you think about Australia as a market, many industries has a monopolistic or duopolistic approach. You have one or two big players for a long time and there's no need for quick innovation or disruption. So what really was connecting everybody, whether it was the view on retail, tech, or fashion was this passion for breaking down barriers and creating a new world, so to speak.

Mark Jones: Let's just go back to that three hour delivery window because I remember at the time, that's actually how I discovered, and I think many people discovered THE ICONIC was quite simply that hook of "I can have it right now."What aspect of somebody's identity is satisfied by "I can have it right now?" Because if you think about a retail store experience, you're actually three hours delayed.

Alexander Meyer: Yes, but the thing is that what we saw very quickly is a trend, almost a sport, of a lot of young females, especially, ordering every Thursday or Friday afternoon for the same evening to have different type of choice while knowing that they can return for free and very seamlessly.

Alexander Meyer: At the end of the day, it's part of our USP and our proposition to shop in a way that you can have choice and that it is seamless for you. If you think about it, if you are in your office on a Thursday afternoon and it takes you five minutes to order three dresses for the evening, whereas otherwise you would have to go to a shopping centre and you have a lot less choice. 

Mark Jones: I'd feel a level of panic if I was going out in three hours, "are the clothes going to come?"

Alexander Meyer: You should try it.

Mark Jones: But actually my point is, customer experience, we talk a lot about customer experience in marketing. It's obviously a buzzword from a marketing discipline perspective, but also from a tech perspective. How do you connect customer experience to identity?

Alexander Meyer: Well, you have to ultimately focus on the customer. ] As a business, we've really aligned around one customer focused KPI as our key KPI that we always talk about, that we always lead with when it comes to our management conversations, when it comes to our strategy papers, when it comes to our approach of reviewing the business. It is our own adjusted NPS, that brings the entire business together.  It stands for a very customer centric focus. So for example, from the tech side of things, we start with empathy maps. From a marketing point of view, we test and learn along the way. And there is interestingly a book that the entire executive team has aligned around which is "Great by Choice" from Jim Collins. So we've, about three years ago, all read the book and all signed up through long conversations and workshops around the book as this being a core of our operating model.

Alexander Meyer: And one of the things that Jim Collins speaks about in his great way of creating certain models based on the knowledge he's garnered is the twenty mile march.

Alexander Meyer: A concept that speaks about how you don't overextend yourself in times where you do well and how you don't underperform in times of let's say stress or bad performance. And it is a concept that talks about the consistency of a focus of something you subscribe within a bandwidth to. And for us, that twenty mile march is really about the customer focus. So it is really embedded in everything we talk about and everything we do and the way we look at KPIs. 

Mark Jones: You mentioned an empathy map. What's that?

Alexander Meyer: An empathy map is an approach to understanding how a customer feels, acts and reacts and trying to identify behaviour of a customer. We always talk to customers, test with customers. We have different types of ways of how to get customer feedback or input and ideation.  We want people to love THE ICONIC beyond the sale so that we create an emotional connection. By how we tap into the cultural zeitgeist and talk about and own conversations that matter to our customers. I think it's really about just providing the best customer experience that is seamless and inspiring.

Mark Jones: Okay. Yeah, I find that fascinating because I've read some commentary recently around the concept of customer surveys and how you actually get this data, which I think is increasingly part of a CMO and marketer's role is to really get that. Because surveys, generally speaking, are pretty light. So what would you say is different about the way that you turn those ideas into tactics?

Alexander Meyer: So for us, it's not so much about surveys, it's more about A/B tests and geo split tests. So it's really about actual customer behaviour. One of the concepts, again that Jim Collins speaks about that fit very well to our testing culture and mentality and learning culture at THE ICONIC is the idea of bullets versus cannon balls. So that you go with small ideas and small tests out to the market and see how customers react to it and how they behave and what they prefer or not. And that's really how we look at testing customer behaviour. so yes, we have qualitative sessions with customers where they come into the office-

Mark Jones: More formal, yeah.

Alexander Meyer: And we also have eye-mapping and where they go on the screen and those kind of things. But for the biggest part, it is about real life behavioural A/B testing.

Mark Jones: That concept is not new though, right? This has been in marketing pilots for the longest time. Is it just that you've figured out a way to do that maybe more rapidly in a digital environment? 

Alexander Meyer: The one thing is that it's easy to do it digitally quickly. But the other element to it is also that you adhere to it at all times. And I think the way we look at it at THE ICONIC is that we have a learning culture and an agile culture. Agile not only in the sense of the methodology from a tech perspective, but also in the sense, philosophically speaking, a flexible mindset. And if you have a learning culture and a very flexible culture, a leaner organisation and you're working digitally naturally where you can be very quick, where you subscribe to a testing approach, you ultimately can go about technological developments, customer experience development very quickly.

Mark Jones: Okay. Let's talk about brand. THE ICONIC is a brand. You sell a lot of brands. And clearly brands are part of the identity piece that you speak to from a customer perspective. What's your philosophy on building a brand?

Alexander Meyer: So first of all, I'm a big believer in the power of brand and in the power of brands. I would say that one of the biggest challenges that a retailer naturally has is that they're not known as a brand that comes out with a product. And usually it is a product that builds a brand. So I would say my first belief when it comes to brand is that a brand is what it does and not what it says. While what it says can empower and enable what it does, it starts with what it does. Now of course in a social culture, it's not even surprising that someone like Seth Godin would say a brand nowadays is what you say and not anymore the product and what you do. So that's a whole different story of where we're going and how you have to cut through with messages to spark an interest in someone. 

Alexander Meyer: As a retailer, you have a huge challenge to build a brand of your own if you're known for representing a thousand brands. And they all stand for something. And so the way I look at it at THE ICONIC is you then have a completely different aspect to it. Which is the context of the lifecycle your company is in, the resources that you have. And so if you layer that over being a retailer, we are going about building our brand very different than the big companies that normally are spoken to about brand building.

Mark Jones: How different?

Alexander Meyer: We're building it in small increments and actions and tactics and customer experience aspects that ultimately aim to each and individually tap into cultural zeitgeist.

What we're focusing on is for example our summer swim show.

Alexander Meyer: So in 2017, we had our second summer swimwear runway show at Mrs Macquarie's Chair in Sydney with a floating catwalk on the harbour and the opera house in the background. And we have gone full diversity and inclusion, which meant that the Sydney Morning Herald dubbed this runway show as a watershed moment for fashion in Australia. And what we've started doing since then is really owning the conversation in the market on body positivity and inclusion. And last year, we had our next iteration of that runway and it was dubbed by media as the world's most body positive runway. Created huge media exposure. We had a media reach of over 77 million. We're doing the next one now and taking it on the road to Brisbane at the end of November this year. And what we're basically doing is really trying to tap into a conversation that matters to people. So for example, on the back of our purpose, we decided to deliberately take the diversity approach in a territory that was very hard to do so.

Alexander Meyer: And what I mean with that is that sample sizes and different body shapes is very hard to bring to life, especially when it's the most connected fashion piece on a body, which is swimwear. And brands often don't want their swimsuits on curvy models because they don't think it's aspirational. So we had to deliberately overcome a lot of issues and challenges in the industry to actually bring this to life from a model selection point of view and the availability in the model industry looking at what is even possible with the agents and the models that they have hired in the past. Overcoming the emotions from brands that are old school when it comes to what aspirational means.  We deliberately did that and had huge success with our customers on social media, in the media as a whole. And also starting to change the industry little by little by showcasing what is possible and how customers react to it.

Mark Jones: What's interesting to me about that is that the concept of hosting an event and generating earned media coverage tactically is not new. But the content and the approach that you took was different. So give me a sense of the impact then of that.

Alexander Meyer: Well the impact is that we've realised when it comes to brand love, when it comes to loyalty from certain customer groups, when it comes to social media reactions, when it comes to audience development in the upper part of the funnel, we had ultimately seen results that we had never expected and have never seen from anything that was more brand related with little resources. And the very simple formula here is really what we talk about internally ishow you tap into the cultural zeitgeist. What is important for our customers? And how do you as a company fill the trust gap that something like the Edelman PR Report has spoken about largely, the trust index. This year they spoke hugely about that the gap is getting bigger and bigger and people not trusting governments and media anymore. But ultimately trusting businesses and NGOs more. And they mostly trust their own employee more. There's a trust gap in society and how do you fill that? You fill that by tapping into the cultural zeitgeist and really understanding what is possible and what is needed. And then going on a transparent journey.

Alexander Meyer: So we've developed a mantra internally that is "progress over perfection." We really wrestled very long internally about the question of can we go out with a certain statement or a certain topic? What if there is a social backlash? But we said "you know what, in this everlasting question of the chicken and the egg, you have to be on the journey and you have to be transparent about where you are in the journey and then be able to react and adapt based on customers' feedback and reactions naturally." And if you do that, you're doing the right thing. And that's what people will honour you with and react positively to.

Mark Jones: I want to talk about storytelling. But just briefly, how did you track the ROI from a sales perspective? How did you connect all the dots and what did you see there as a result of this campaign?

Alexander Meyer: It's an ongoing challenge. And the way we do that is we have an input output approach to everything we do and every channel and every activity we look at. And the way that we look at brand as a whole is that we look at what are the input metrics that we hypothesise on creating a certain output over time? So that is a story that we haven't solved yet. And that is a journey that we're on for a year or two now to really get better at that. And so we have individual KPIs, so for example we have a big content strategy and we look at dwell time, we look at how does it feed the funnel overall? How many new users come into the funnel? All those kind of things. It's a lot harder with events. So when it comes specifically about events, one of the things we do, we have different measurement points such as engagement for competitions before, tracking data of people that have the event as a touchpoint and what it means for their customer lifetime value over time.

Alexander Meyer: So competition sign ups, participations, social media engagement. All those kind of things bundled then, and look at it over time. And the problem or challenge that we have as a retailer is we have so much going on at all times: representing a thousand brands, going to market with different key destination stories and trend stories. Content strategies, social channels that are always on, that it's very hard to distil impact of one event immediately.

Mark Jones: Yeah. And many marketers that I've spoken to about this topic would say "we shouldn't actually have to manufacture an ROI from something like that because it is building the brand, it's an investment and it's required," right? So it's interesting to see how you're trying to keep things in balance.

Alexander Meyer: Exactly. And that's ultimately where I come from. My personal intention in life is balance, purpose. I always talk about intention. It's ultimately something where I think that creativity will be the big transformative power of the future  If you apply data to it, then you will absolutely win. It will ultimately be boosted by data and the approach there. So for me, as a marketeer, always on the search for new development and growth and learning, the deep dive into how to build a full funnel strategy or understanding what each activity does to step in the funnel is the most exciting piece right now. Because naturally, creativity comes to me. That's why I'm in marketing. But the data piece can ultimately enhance it to unknown levels.

Mark Jones: So,  how do you define storytelling?

Alexander Meyer: So for me, storytelling, I always say everything is a story. So if you think about it from the point of view of your personal life, your family, your business, your department, your team, your country, they're all a stage, almost like a theatre stage with characters in them who influence each other, who have an influence on the outcome of the story that they generate together. And for me, storytelling ultimately means that you can identify the story that you're in and that is happening and ultimately with that, have the power to influence the story and the development of the story. So every character has an influence on the plot, but ever character also shapes the narrative. 

Mark Jones: What would be the difference, I call it brand storytelling, so brands like yours, organisations that appropriate storytelling for a commercial outcome versus media versus the arts and so on. What's the difference between the two?

Alexander Meyer: So in its root, I believe there's no difference at all. And what I mean with that is, I'll use a quote. William Faulkner, one of the greatest writers of all time, during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech said something along the lines of "every great story ever written or told is about the human heart in conflict with itself." And if you think about what we're aiming to do as a business, creating seamless and inspiring experiences and making a difference for people, it is really about understanding challenges and problems of people and making life easier for them and better and inspire them along the way. And that, in its core, is nothing else than getting inspiration from a book. It has a different purpose at a different time for a different moment, but at the end of the day, we're here to really celebrate and develop the humanity in all of us.

Alexander Meyer: And from that, whether it is about how you tell your story in your day to day business or for your kids at home in the evening, or for an audience in a special moment is ultimately all serving the same purpose from a complete human perspective.

Mark Jones: I noticed on LinkedIn you have my iconic story and I've seen profiles of somebody from accounts payable, somebody from software engineering, quite clearly there's a strategy from your comms and social people around personalising and humanising the employee side. Give me some other examples about how storytelling is tactically being appropriated.

Alexander Meyer: So we have defined our internal purpose, and let me start with the purpose there, as liberation. And what it means for us is that we're here really to empower our partners, our employees and our customers, So that's for our employees and customers and partners alike. And that's how we approach our decision making on strategy and tactics. And what that means is ultimately that from a social perspective, for example, we've deployed a new content strategy where we really want to advise people on fashion. So very simply speaking, we bring out a lot of articles and videos on how to impress when you meet the parents or how to wear the summer dress with accessories We realised that as a middle man between brands and customers, having more than 60,000 products on site, we have a lot of styling activities, a lot of photography activities. We're of course really experts in all aspects fashion.

Alexander Meyer: And so in the past, we had not really brought that to life in any way, shape or form, other than showing a good looking catalogue and being good at paid performance marketing. So we've really deployed a very conscious content strategy to utilise the power and strength we have from a fashion advice point of view. Along that way, we have then realised that we don't want to talk just about influence marketing, but about the notion of influence. And influence comes from genuine authenticity. And that comes of course from people. And we're all humans and it is all about the people. Whether it is your customers or influencers or your team and your employees. So what's stronger than also talking about your employees and humanise the brand and showcase who we are and what we do and why we do it. And inspire people along the way and take them with us along the way.

Mark Jones: Does that mean you're ostensibly becoming like the influencers that we see on social? It sounds like you're almost competing with them.

Alexander Meyer: I don't see it as a competition, necessarily. I see it more as a complementary additive fulfilling the full picture. Influence comes in many faces. So for me, it's really about many pillars of how influence comes to life, but what I'm very excited about is this internal understanding that we've built now that we're really a middle man that can help connect dots. And whether it's on the topic of fashion advice, whether it's on the topic of how we utilise the power of brand and brands, whether it is about sustainability. There are many things that we can do in the best possible way to create an ecosystem and support an ecosystem.

Mark Jones: Yeah, it sounds like you're much more closely aligned with the utility aspect of how this brand will work, how it connects to identity as opposed to influencer marketing, which is ultimately about the influencer herself or himself. So that's interesting to me. Let's just step back and think about the online retail sales because I know that a lot of people are interested in, just broadly speaking, how the whole business is going. Generally speaking we've seen that of course online retailers are a very small component of the entire Australian retail landscape, but I've been looking at some of the recent news. We've seen Kogan, incredible expansion, we've got Bunnings getting into the online marketplace. You've just been plugging away in the background and building up your culture and this great story that you've been sharing with us.

Mark Jones: What's your view on how you see the future, how you see these trends playing out? Are we going to see the continued growth of online retail? 

Alexander Meyer: So I think we're in the most exciting time for retail in a long time. Because it's about the customer and the customer getting a lot more power and control over what makes sense and what not. If you think about what happened to the music industry, they went through a tough time, but they're happy and growing at this moment in time. So this is a fantastic time for product for people because there's more choice, there's more opportunity to do the right thing if you think about sustainability because customers have an influence and the proactive consumer, I call them the "prosumers," have an influence on what makes sense and whatnot. So it is really about understanding for a business what role they play in this lifecycle of the industry.

Alexander Meyer: And of course being on the digital side, it feels like we are, it sounds almost a little bit silly, but on the right side of history. And we foresee a great future for us and for digital as a whole. If we look at Australia specifically the digital penetration is humongous,However, the uptake of online retail is relatively low versus a lot of other countries. And that we see purely as an opportunity. There is an organic growth element to it. There is for us a beautiful chance because we were protected for a long time in the past when there was not that much competition online. So we've really carved out a strong position for us. And at the end of the day, I believe the right thing is happening for retail, which is make sure that the right experiences come to life, that the right amount of product is in the market. And there are always some adjustments in the lifecycle of an industry, naturally. But we look at it very positively.

Alexander Meyer: And ultimately, to be honest with you, online competition supports all of online and all of online supports for offline and bricks and mortar to develop better. So the outcome is best for the consumer and instead of B2C, the power is now from C2B and I think that's a good thing.

Mark Jones: It's a great perspective. 

Mark Jones: Just briefly on the environment. What are you doing in that space?

Alexander Meyer: Big deal, fashion is a big culprit and the fashion industry is really one of the worst industries from that point of view.

Alexander Meyer: If you think about community, ethical sourcing, sustainability, nature impact, there are a lot of different types of angles to look at. We're on this journey of progress over perfection and one of the two highlights that I would mention is our “considered edit”. We've created a filter where we showcase, it's our second filter on the filtering page after the category filter, products that are connected to certain sustainability parameters or values. We have a set of 30 values that we've connected behind five filters.

Alexander Meyer: And what we've realised is that we have a humongous power there as a middleman helping to change the industry forward because people, when they visibly and easy without going out of their way, that's the art here, without going out of their way, have the chance to choose a black dress that is made out of organic cotton versus a black dress that is not, they will most of the time choose the one that is made out of organic cotton. So by us putting up that filter, as the second one on the site, within half a year now, we've been able to go from 6,000 products on site out of 60 to already double that to 12,000 products on site. By simply using our data to change supply.

Mark Jones: What's happening upstream with manufacturers? Because clearly they're going to see the sales data coming back.

Alexander Meyer: Yeah, so one of the things, we're of course also having private label businesses, so we have labels that we create ourselves. And our fantastic head of sustainability has gone through a rigorous programme where we've stopped working with a lot of factories and consolidated the ones that live up to the standards that we've defined. And we regularly have conferences with them in China where we also educate them. So we're working with the factories, we're working with the suppliers, we're working with what we can do at our fulfilment centre and our company here in Australia. We're very transparent about where we are in the journey, whether it is about carbon offsetting, whether it is about with whom we produce, how we approach it, how we filter and define parameters and for example, during our annual swim show we hold a round table with media and brands to discuss the state of the industry when it comes to sustainability, but also diversity. And we'll have the same again, releasing a white paper on that topic this time around for our next summer show.

Alexander Meyer: So we're very active in this space and very transparent and showcase where we are and what needs to be done and what we're aiming to achieve.

Mark Jones: Just finally, as a CMO, what's one thing that you think will define success for you in that context?

Alexander Meyer: For me personally, that is really about how to deploy creativity and unleash creativity when you have less resources than a big, longstanding 100 year old large corporation. Because creativity often comes with a price tag, seemingly. And at the end of the day, we are in a test to learn culture. And sometimes, that's not easy for creativity to shine through. So when it comes to the reality of our business being a retailer and coming from the online space originally, The biggest transformative power that I foresee for a business like ours lies within marketing and creativity.  We will enter a commoditized era where everybody will be able to offer the same experience 

Alexander Meyer: And you will have two advantages. One is creativity and the other is that you have first mover advantages by being a lot bigger.

Mark Jones: It's interesting that you say creativity because earlier in our conversation you were speaking about the decision about whether to go into agency and brand and creative versus tech, and it sounds like you're maybe doing a bit of both.

Alexander Meyer: Well that's going back to the balance. And that's ultimately, the way I personally look at life is if you're really good at something, you don't need to invest all your time into it. But you should invest your time into what you still need to learn and what you still need to become good at. That's the one thing I would even advise my younger self, where I was always just going for what I like only and what I was able to do already instead of focusing on where can I advance my full rounded experience. And going back to this William Faulkner quote, "the greatest stories ever written come from the human heart in conflict with itself." That's the space where magic happens.

Mark Jones: Well I can imagine a lot of people listening to our conversation, if you're in marketing and comms will be a bit green with envy because it sounds to me like you've got an incredible freedom to explore and to innovate and to test and learn as you say, to make stuff happen. So quite clearly that's a big part of your success. So Alexander Meyer, CMO at THE ICONIC, thank you so much for being our  guest. 

Alexander Meyer: It was a great pleasure. Thank you.

Mark Jones: Thank you. 

Mark Jones: So, that's another episode of The CMO show. I hope you enjoyed it.  It was encouraging to hear from a CMO talking about this connection that we all have with our customers and how it's vital for growth and success. I also wanted to touch on the fact that this learning culture, which is something Iconic has done really well, remains important for all organisations, so how we can be agile when things are changing and responding to not just the customer input but what we're getting from other stakeholders in the industry as well. So, some really fantastic insights, and I hope you've been able to maybe take away a few gems of your own. So, that's it from us this week at the CMO show.

Mark Jones: But before I go, a big shout out to my whole team here at Filtered Media and the CMO Show, We won the Australian Marketing Institute's Content Marketing Award, for the CMO Show podcast. I've got to say thanks to you as well for being part of our audience. So, once again, thanks very much, and do subscribe on all the channels, and we look forward to talking to you next time.

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