Earlier this year, News Corp Australia announced the launch of The Growth D_Stillery, a dedicated research and intelligence service offering consumer insights to help marketers navigate brand challenges, anticipate consumer trends and understand where best to invest.
See Also: Behind The Growth D_Stillery: News Corp’s newest research and intelligence offering
The Growth D_Stillery amplifies key research insights on trade marketing platforms, and on News Corp Australia channels. As a part of its release into market, the platform has launched a series of vodcasts hosted by News Corp Australia’s director, Growth Intelligence Centre Dan Krigstein, with guests from all corners of the marketing world.
Dan Krigstein
Released fortnightly, the vodcasts aim “to really humanise these insights,” according to Krigstein, and tackle a new marketing challenge every episode.
This week, Mediaweek spoke to Yolanda Saiz, CEO of the St Vincent de Paul Society NSW.
“I’ve been in the role of CEO for three months now, and have been with the organisation for quite some time. They reached out to us and said that they’d be interested in talking to me about the purpose versus commerciality, marketing, and branding around an organisation like Vinnies,” Saiz says of how she ended up on the vodcast. “I thought it was a really exciting, interesting opportunity to talk more broadly about the organisation in a way that people sometimes are not used to thinking about.“
With both store fronts to manage as well as the charity aspect of the business, Saiz says that the team manage that balance by always keeping a key question in mind before they make any moves.
“The most important thing is to always have the people that we assist at the core of all the decisions we make – whether they be commercial, service provision decisions, or marketing decisions. How is this going to benefit the service that we provide in the community?
“We’re obviously mission-driven organisation, it’s why we all turn up every day. It’s why we actually exist. We do all of these other things – like the retail network, the commercial businesses, marketing brand, and fundraising events etc, all with the same purpose – to raise funds to allow us to help people experiencing poverty and disadvantage.”
More broadly, Saiz says that there are a couple of key areas that brands should be focussing their attention on.
“Consumers generally are looking for brands that are socially and environmentally minded. I think the younger generations are looking for that more than perhaps than people of my generation or the generation above me. For any brand, they really do have to have an authentic social and environmental agenda for people to be able to engage with them, and they need to articulate that really well.”
When asked about the biggest hurdles she believes marketers and brands currently face, Saiz points to trust as well as “cut through and authenticity.”
“There’s a lot of messaging out there about social and environmental responsibility, but how can you actually show that you’re authentic about that, that you’re committed to change in that way? Having some skin in the game and being at that frontline really makes an enormous difference for organisations like ours.
“A lot of recent polls show that there’s not much trust in most large institutions, including organisations, government, and other institutions. So I think that trust is a really huge issue for most organisations – how do they build trust with consumers or with supporters? That’s a really significant issue for corporate Australia.”
Ultimately, Saiz says that she would like the episode to highlight how Vinnies works behind the scenes, and that she hopes viewers leave with a renewed appreciation for the organisation.
“It would be really great for people to take away a different view about how complex charities like the St. Vincent de Paul Society are – all the challenges we have to navigate, how we have to be really responsive, really commercially minded, efficient, and effective in order to actually be able to help people. It would be really good for people to understand just how large the support from organisations like Vinnies is in Australian communities, and how big the gap is between people who are doing okay, and those that aren’t.
“If they could understand the commerciality of charities, I think that would be really interesting for people. I don’t think that most people think of organisations like Vinnies as being commercial, or concerned with efficiency and effectiveness. We do all that, with a very clear mission in mind.”
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Top Image: Yolanda Saiz