How this global company’s first CMO made marketing everyone’s business
What would you do if you walked into a fast‑growing global company as its first ever CMO with no marketing playbook and no inherited systems?
That was the challenge and opportunity facing David Levingston, Global Chief Marketing Officer at Aero Healthcare. In this episode of The CMO Show, David shares what it takes to build a marketing function from scratch that is treated not as a bolt-on, but as the connective force across product, data, brand and customer experience. The conversation explores sequencing intuition behind data and facts in the planning stages, looking for clarity before creativity and rethinking approaches to named vs generic brand strategy.
Building a marketing function from the ground up
Stepping into an organisation without an existing CMO or formal marketing structure presented a rare opportunity: the chance to design the function deliberately rather than retrofitting it later. Rather than focusing purely on demand generation, David describes marketing as a connective capability, one that brings product, sales, operations and brand together to support long‑term growth. With Aero Healthcare experiencing consistent organic growth across multiple international markets, the challenge was less about exposure and more about alignment. The task was to ensure that what the business stood for internally was reflected clearly and consistently in how it showed up externally.
Trust, integrity and responsibility in healthcare marketing
In a sector defined by regulation and high stakes, trust sits at the centre of the conversation. David argues that strong regulation isn’t a barrier to brand building, it’s an advantage for organisations prepared to invest in evidence, accuracy and transparency. Rather than relying on exaggerated claims or surface‑level storytelling, Aero Healthcare focuses on aligning clinical evidence, product performance and brand presentation. This approach ensures that every touchpoint, from packaging through to fulfilment, reinforces credibility and integrity rather than undermining it.
Differentiation, branding and ‘owning both’ ends of the market
The discussion also explores the ongoing tension between branded and generic products, particularly in pharmacy and FMCG‑style healthcare environments. David shares Aero Healthcare’s deliberately counter‑intuitive approach: rather than choosing between the two, the business aims to play both roles. By investing more heavily in R&D, materials and design for its own branded ranges, while also operating as a contract manufacturer, Aero Healthcare creates value at multiple points in the market. Packaging, visual identity and consistency across brand touchpoints are treated not as decoration, but as signals of quality, trust and care.
Leading marketing through change and uncertainty
Looking ahead, the conversation turns to the impact of AI and emerging technologies on marketing, procurement and customer behaviour, particularly in healthcare. David cautions against rushing to the bleeding edge, instead advocating for considered adoption that improves production pipelines, content accuracy and operational efficiency without compromising trust.
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This episode of The CMO Show was brought to you by host Mark Jones, producers Kate Zadel and Kirsten Bables and audio engineers Ed Cheng and Daniel Marr. This is an edited excerpt of the podcast transcript.
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Mark Jones
Most of the time in our working lives as marketers, we're dealing with changing the status quo. We come into a new role, and we try and turn things around. I wonder what it'd be like if you had a completely clean slate. You were the first marketer to step into an executive role at a large company. What would you do?
Hello, and welcome to The CMO Show. Mark Jones is my name. I'm your host. And I am excited to bring to you this very first episode for 2026. The CMO Show, of course, is brought to you by ImpactInstitute, in partnership with our friends at Adobe. As we kick off the new year, we are going to hear a story about a CMO who has stepped into a new opportunity. He's the first CMO at a global company called Aero Healthcare. David Levingston is his name.
A few years ago, he had the opportunity to step into a growing company, 30% growth a year. Think about how would he develop a role that did more than just move the needle on the top line, but actually transformed the way the whole organisation dealt with its growth, its constant development. It was part of a whole cultural programme where innovation and constant improvement is very much the name of the game. This is probably, I think, one of our less understood Australian global success stories as well. So, fascinating conversation. Let's get stuck into it.
All right, David, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
David Levingston
Mark, absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me today.
Mark Jones
I want to kick off with what might be a Captain Obvious question, but what is Aero Healthcare?
David Levingston
We get that question quite a few times. I have to admit that it's probably my fault to some extent as global CMO to not have that better understood already. Ideally, every Australian should just go, "Oh yes, I know what Aero Healthcare is and does." And that's our ideal for one day. But the way I like to describe it is that Aero Healthcare is an Australian-born global success story. We started in Australia, we moved into the UK, and then we moved into America as well, across those three different continents. We really deal in that medical suppliers, first aid emergency, first aid medical equipment environment, focusing on wound care, pharmacy ranges as well.
Mark Jones
Well, I'm sure a lot of people in the health sector would know. Certainly, those first responders would be all over it. Are they products packaged as Aero? Or are they something else?
David Levingston
Look, we're, I guess, a bit of a hybrid of a house of brands and a branded house. So we have our own Aero-branded range. And then over time you sort of limit the limits of the brand personality for just that one sort of product range. So we start to add on and become a house of brands over time. So we are a manufacturer and master distributor for what I'd call a house of brands, but we do also have a brand that relates more closely to our head brand, which is Aero. So if you go into any pharmacy in Australia, there's over 5,000 pharmacies that stock our products. You'll probably find an Aero-branded product in there, if not a rather large stockist or range on display.
Mark Jones
Well, David, I wanted to get you on the show with that story in mind and also the fact that you're the first CMO. So I'd really like to hear about that, because it's always fascinating when you meet people from a company where it's been able to grow without a lot of the traditional above the line marketing and a lot of the external work that we do. So I'm interested to hear about the transformation, what's going on, and maybe we should start with how you ended up at the company.
David Levingston
I did not envision myself becoming a marketer or heading down the marketing line when I was younger. I actually went to university and did economics and econometrics. I think I was probably one of the few in that class in that year that went through, that really took a love towards econometrics and statistics. The reason why is because it gives you these powerful tools to derive truth from uncertainty through statistical modelling.
At the same time I was going through university, I met the love of my life, rather young, and decided that getting married rather young was a fantastic idea as well. And I stand by that decision. We're still happily married about 12 years on, which is great. But getting married while still studying full-time meant that I had to provide at the same time. So I started working full-time. My first job that I ever got was in a marketing role, as a junior marketing person. Within a week or two, I started to see how my different interests, so interest in statistics and econometric modelling, my other sort of hobbies like software development and interest in psychology, were all starting to come together in this one field really beautifully where you have that complexity and uncertainty when you're dealing with humans and humanity, but you also have those powerful statistical model tools which allow you to gain insights that aren't always intuitive or what you would expect them to be.
So I decided then and there that I wouldn't actually pursue post-grad. At the time, that was what my plans was, were rather. I wanted to go further into studying that field, but instead I wanted to pursue this area and bring the value, that a statistical approach to the creative and rather intuitive field of marketing can actually bring by uniting those two. So I think that that was my first foray into it, but keeping a key focus on technology, on data, and then putting the assumptions at the door and bringing them back in later on when you need to retest hypotheses is how I really started to grow in this field, I suppose. So that's how I started here, and then eventually I ended up at Aero Healthcare, leading their marketing function.
Mark Jones
When you think about your first few days at Aero Healthcare, this is a firm that didn't have a CMO, what was that like? What was the appeal of stepping into taking on a completely new opportunity?
David Levingston
It was unreal, I have to admit. So it was a fairly young company in a way where a lot of the systems weren't there yet, a lot of the technologies weren't there yet. I did a bit of consulting work in this area beforehand. So I saw what was working across multiple industries, across multiple businesses. When I stepped into Aero Healthcare, I saw a company that had a customer-centric focus. They had a product-centric focus. This was demonstrated in some of the amazing statistics that they were able to achieve. So we had DIFOTs of 90 to 96% in the industry, which is fantastic. We had relatively good NPS scores, which have only continued to advance since then. I think that we're a relatively small organisation, around the 24 million mark. It wasn't overly sophisticated in many ways. But the sales staff too also had the ethos of, customer is king at the end of the day, and they would bend over backwards in order to please customers.
So from a marketing perspective, you actually have this dream business to step on into and then start to raise awareness about it. So it didn't have all these systems in place, which is the awesome part where you get to build them and you get to participate in steering the narrative across the different departments as to what will elevate the organisation towards growth over time. I mean, since then, we've had our CAGR sitting around 30% driven by organic growth. There's been no acquisitions during that time, although we've definitely looked for those synergies and looked for those opportunities. And then on top of that, we've grown NPS to over 86%, which is pretty much unheard of in this industry, with a 97% retention ratio over five years, 3,500 SKUs now across 50 different brands. It's really a very successful company in this space and no longer a small player by any means. So being part of that growth journey, but ultimately, that was rather made possible because of really core cultural and vision foundations put in place, was just fantastic. And that's what really motivated me to actually want to jump on the Aero bandwagon.
Mark Jones
It kind of begs the question: what was wrong with it though? There had to have been a need for a CMO. There was a gap still. I mean, it sounds great, and I'm really impressed. I'm also, by the way, impressed by the fact that you've got these customer-centric salespeople you made reference to. Now, I guess, you might say to me, "Well, in health care, you would expect that because we have to be patient-centric." We have to be thinking about the impact on people, but nevertheless, salespeople are driven by the drive. So was that one of the gaps or something else?
David Levingston
There are many gaps. The culture and the vision to make better products and to take those products to the market with a very human hands-on approach were baked in to the organisation. That was the CEO's, I guess, imprint on the company. And that's what influenced that hiring from the sales perspective. So I think that that really did enrich and empower the sales function of the organisation. The thing that was probably letting it down was, I guess, where it then moved into that visual representation and brand representation and digital technology as well.
So coming in on in and then being able to, I guess, steer, execute, and expand what was already innate in the organization's culture into a visual and digital representation so that we could then expand it through either TTL, BTL, and occasionally ATL, marketing strategies meant that anything that you were doing was never hindered later on. I mean, I think that we often talk about building brand trust. How do you achieve trust? Well, it's ultimately linked with integrity. So if you're representing the truth of what the company really is and the values that it brings to the market and the solutions that it's offering, then customers can see and taste that, and tell that immediately, and buy into the vision that you're actually representing to them.
Mark Jones
The visual representation. Can you explain that and maybe give me an example of what you mean? Are we just talking about the logo, the design, the way things are packaged, or something else?
David Levingston
Every visual representation touchpoint that a customer or an internal staff member or anyone will potentially have with the brand is the extension of the brand identity at the end of the day. So yes, things start with logo, obviously, and then websites matter, presentations matter, every single packaging piece matters. So you want to have that key representation of the brand identity so that even if you only experience a portion of it, you can uniquely associate it with Aero, and then all those other emotions and feelings and interactions that come with experiencing and touching on that brand identity gets imbued in the visual elements, if that makes sense.
Mark Jones
I started to get a picture in my head of like the Apple unboxing experience. Are we talking about medical products, and you open it up, and then the sort of choirs of angels singing as the whole thing, so to speak?
David Levingston
We haven't been able to secure the choirs of angels yet, but we're working on it. That is absolutely the goal, because every single point in which the customer interacts with your product or with your company is an important moment. This is what Apple actually understood way ahead of most other companies. This is why they invested copious amounts of money. And I can't remember the exact numbers here, but huge amounts of money into the unboxing experience, because they understood that every single point along that customer journey that they have to interact with your product matters. So if you can optimise that so that it's a true representation of not only the experience that they want to have, but the experience that you want them to have is just important upon that journey. That's a point where in marketing, that's what we want to achieve, optimise, and enhance.
Mark Jones
What would you say then is the story for Aero Healthcare?
David Levingston
Yeah. Our company ethos is really summarised with our strapline, with our motto, that healthcare, we make it better. So I think keeping that mission and focus in mind really does drive every element of how we engage in the market. And then when we're succeeding, actually achieving that goal, the market rewards us appropriately.
Mark Jones
Is there an example of what making it better might look like? So obviously there's a nice unintended pun possibly there with making people better, but the experience better, the product better. What are the source of forms of better, if I could be that unsophisticated?
David Levingston
No, I don't think that you can dumb this line down enough. It's a cultural line that really needs to permeate across every single department in the organisation. I think as a CMO, yes, you're there as marketing externally, but you're there also to clarify and drive that mission internally as well, and to make sure that it's embodied by the entire organisation. So the dream here and rather the goal is to make sure that when we have a pick and packer, for example, dispatching a product, that they know that they're not just moving a box from one end of the warehouse to the other, but they're actually moving a product that could potentially improve a patient's outcome or even reduce preventable deaths. So the impact that every single role has in the organisation is potentially massive and almost beyond comprehension.
Mark Jones
Well, what's your take on the basic dynamic I think we all face in the chemist, the pharmacy? They say to you, "Would you like the brand product or the generic?" In my mind, generally speaking, if you say, "Well, is there any difference?" They'll say, "Yes, the cost." But it's the same core ingredient, carry on. That's obviously something that illustrates what you're up against every day, yes?
David Levingston
100%. I mean, part of our rationale is to own both. So we're a contract manufacturer as well. So if we can be the brand either way, that's fantastic.
Mark Jones
Oh, amazing.
David Levingston
The element there where we want people to pick up the Aero product is, we put R&D and we put extra effort into our own brands, typically, that exclude it from being in that home brand range ultimately.
Mark Jones
Okay.
David Levingston
We want the best substrates, we want the best products, we want the best healing technology, if it does have any of that sort of stuff in the product, in our own brand, so that we're not cheapening out, we're actually making it better for the customer. We know, at that point, if we articulate it well, or if we present and communicate it well rather, that that should actually drive the customer to pick up our product as opposed to someone else's. The other aspect here too is packaging. So packaging does make a massive difference in terms of our propensity to pick up one product than the other one. So, good product or perceived product differentiation in the packaging really does matter at that FMCG level.
Mark Jones
Of course, it's highly regulated, the space that you're playing in. How do you factor that into your storytelling and the way you position things?
David Levingston
I actually appreciate a lot of our regulatory limitations in this space, because you see this in other maybe less developed countries. It really is a bit of the wild west with claims with companies misleading consumers. In Australia, when a company makes a claim on a medical product, even if it seems quite audacious, 99.9999% of the time, you can be pretty certain that that claim's actually true or clinically verified or backed up if you dig into it. That is the benefit of a very thorough TGA. The FDA is similar in America, and Europe's got similar or even more aggressive standards again. So it's not actually hindrance. It's an enabler for those who want to do the right thing because it means that it doesn't become this scrap to the bottom of rubbish claims ultimately.
But what it does mean is that you do need to be precise in what you're saying. You need to understand the clinical body and clinical evidence extremely well. And then you need to invest in that really well again in order to be able to make that more audacious claims and the bigger claims of greater performance, which you ultimately want to do because that actually helps the consumer with a better product in the long run. So the regulatory framework here isn't a hindrance. It's an enabler at the end of the day. Something that actually means that Aero Healthcare has an area of strength and product differentiation that it otherwise wouldn't if we just had market entrance all over the place that could come on in here and advertise without any repercussions.
Mark Jones
Before we start to wrap up, I think it would be remiss of me not to ask the standard AI question, and obviously which is, how is that changing healthcare marketing?
David Levingston
I think Bill Gates had the line that the impacts of any new technology are massively overestimated in the short run and they're massively underestimated in the long run.
Mark Jones
Yes.
David Levingston
So when we're looking at any of this technology, it's very easy to get caught up with the immediate hype before technological maturity. So one of the lines that we've taken initially isn't to be resistant, but rather don't be on the bleeding edge of the implementation, because it's bleeding and you'll just lose money and time and productivity off the front end of it. But as we've moved into the later models, ChatGPT-5, now Gemini 3, later versions of Grok and Complexity, we're seeing greater and greater utility in terms of what these AI tools can bring to our production pipelines. So we use it heavily across our technology stacks from our loyalty programme optimizations right down to content enrichment on our PIMs. We still want to make sure that we're not full into traps of hallucinations. But there's not a point where we're not actively looking for production pipeline optimization with AI assistance.
Now, what will that look like in the long run? I'd hate to think. I mean, I don't know. I don't know if I'll have a job in five years time, let alone anyone else. But I mean, on the internal production side and data analysis side and software development side, is making a lot of profound impacts in our teams already in many good ways. We're achieving a lot more. On the procurement and customer interaction side, that's the point where we're starting to speculate and try and understand what this is going to look like, but it will have profound effects. So I think Google even stated the other day, or there was one study that picked up that news, links had dropped by 70% in click-through rates. And in healthcare, it's also a similar diabolical number. Now, we haven't seen that drop off on our own analytics at this point in time, but the way in which SEO is working, search is working, content optimizations working is changing.
So actually understanding that, understanding what Google's saying and claiming there, and trying to read past their own marketing spiels is really important. But we're trying to gear up at this point in time without going into too much detail, because I know that we're probably pressed for time, but we're trying to gear up at the moment to anticipate what agentic will bring in terms of the procurement process and the purchasing process as well. Because if we're not leading on that front and proactive on that front, we'll potentially fall victims to what could be massive amounts of market consolidation and procurement optimization. So that's one of the things that we're trying to anticipate and understand. But to be honest, it's quite terrifying in terms of what the real impacts could be there.
Mark Jones
Yeah. Well, from the sound of it, you're all over it. Staying ahead of, or at least tracking with, a lot of these developments. And it's encouraging to hear about how you're thinking about it through all of the parts of the work that you're doing. Fun, last thing, you're in Armadale, in the regional. It's in Northern... Wait, no, Northern... What do we call it?
David Levingston
Northern Tablelands.
Mark Jones
Northern Table, that's what was escaping my mind. Beautiful part of New South Wales. What's it like doing a global marketing role from the Northern Tablelands?
David Levingston
Well, I recently just moved back from London, so we're over there for a year. So I actually have some basis for comparison now between London and regional Australia. And the reason why we moved back to regional Australia is, well, we live on acreage and we've got unabashed views of a mountain, and it's a pretty nice area to live, to be honest. I'd say that the workforce is, it's in a global role. It's remote work, whether or not you're in the office or not. Now, I love the face-to-face communication. You cannot compensate for the sheer amount of information bandwidth that you get from actually meeting with someone face-to-face and the relational building capacity that comes with it.
But in reality, if you're working a global role, you've got people in New Zealand, in Australia, in America, in parts of Europe, really all around the world that you're interacting with daily. So there's no real ideal time zone to work from. Now, if you're going to be in Australia, it's all rubbish because we're at the bottom of the world, and we're not synced up with UK or Europe and America as well as they are with each other because of the overlaps. But if you're going to live with a rubbish time zone, you may as well live in a nice area where you're not commuting a great deal if you do need to get somewhere.
The other benefit of Armadale too is, I mean, Starlink is fantastic because I can live in an actual regional setting, have high-speed internet without having even fixed Wi-Fi NBN or anything like that, which I'm relying upon. There's also a nearby airport where it's only a 45-minute flight down to Sydney or to Brisbane, which we've got offices and staff at. So it's really not a hindrance at all. If anything, it's a plus because I'm not commuting three hours a day, or an hour and a half each day or something.
Mark Jones
From looking at your background, you're much closer to your guitars as well, which as a guitarist myself, it's very nice to see. So well done on that one.
David Levingston
Yes. Yeah.
Mark Jones
All right. Well, David, it's been so great to understand a bit about how you're seeing the world and the perspective you bring to integrating marketing throughout the whole organisation. It's great to see an Australian company growing so well here and over the seas as well. So again, thank you so much for being my guest today on The CMO Show.
David Levingston
Pleasure. Thank you for having me. I had a really great time.
Mark Jones
It never occurred to me when I was talking to David about the generic versus the branded product in the chemists or the pharmacies. I'm sure we all have that experience. He just said almost without thinking, "Well, we obviously want to own both." And that's the sort of counterintuitive thinking I love in business. Why can't you own both? Of course, there's maybe some legal reasons why, why not, or maybe there's commercial reasons why or why not. But it's a great reminder that in marketing, and also more broadly in business, when you take the path less trodden, it starts to create all sorts of new opportunities.
This is a really great case study in how to also extend the role of the CMO into all these different facets of the organisation. He admitted to not really knowing where the boundaries were. And I think that's actually a great example of somebody who's become part of a really cohesive management team and an organisation that's pushing the boundaries in a really healthy way. So it'll be great to see how this organisation goes.
So that is it for this first episode for 2026. Thanks for rejoining us again, and I hope you've had a great start to the year. We will see you again very soon. My name is Mark Jones. This is The CMO Show. Thanks for your time. See you very soon.