The best solutions arise at the intersection of strategy and creativity.

In today’s diverse business landscape, creativity is an essential skill that modern business leaders need to have. It is synonymous to imagination and innovative thinking — specific skill sets that are necessary in pushing workforces to be progressive.  

Financial brands are already fast-tracking the adoption of social channels in their marketing strategy in their quest to personalise the customer experience.

We’ve gathered the top 10 social media trends financial services need to know in 2019.

Kickstart your week with 10 marketing statistics worth exploring. Today we feature statistics around data-driven marketing, marketing technology, and disruptive technologies.

As with all relationships, a client-agency relationship is a two-way street. As a marketing agency with almost a decade’s worth of experience with clients, we’ve had our fair share of insightful experiences with clients. So we want to share some gold nuggets as to how to help build and sustain a great relationship with your marketing agency partner.

Earlier this year, CB Insights analysed 101 startups post-mortem to know why startups fail, and the number 1 reason has nothing to do with technology.

Being a Lean organisation means being able to maximise the value customers are willing to pay for while eliminating waste. Leaders are finding more value in it as it’s all about doing more with less, focusing on continuous improvement, minimising waste, and training your staff to improve the work through problem-solving.

So if you aim to create more value for your customers with your limited resources, read on.

Our CEO, Ashton Bishop, reveals what businesses can do to find their next step change, and how to implement the Big 6 Challenges for business growth in this 7-minute Marketing the Invisible podcast with Tom Poland.

In the age of disruption, businesses may find themselves questioning whether strategy matters in a world of constant change. But in a time where silos are crumbling to disruptive trends and industries are shifting to accommodate new technologies, strategy matters now more than ever.

Are you proactively influencing how your target audience sees your brand in relation to all the other options available to them (a.k.a your competitors)? 

From a no-name free-range egg brand, Happy Chicken Eggs is now the eighth highest-selling SKU in Coles — in less than six months after it was launched.

Running a business or managing a team is no walk in the park. Along the way, we realise that failure is unavoidable and sometimes even necessary. In this fourth video of a five-part interview series, we asked former Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts on what we can learn from failure and how to make the most of it.

Big announcements from the agency on our roadmap to growth, plus a look at the Step Change culture — all in this week’s Step Change News.

Today’s customers and prospects know exactly what they want and go online to find it. To market your business in this new age, you need more than just the right message to stand out and drive customer loyalty. You need to do more than just create the right offer.

Many agencies who are at their optimal performance are striving to achieve peak performance thinking that is what is needed to win.

So we asked former Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts how to maintain peak performance in your team and as an individual. In this video, he also shares how he has been able to put this into action to get to where he is now.

Finding a product, a service, or a niche that delivers results largely depends on understanding exactly what your customer needs. And in a time where the competition is manic and ruthless, it is all the more essential to deliver a high-quality product and service that gets the right traction.

If great strategic thinkers like Anita Roddick, Jean Nidetch, and Mother Teresa would run your business, how would they transform your customers into raving fans?

It was Steve Forbes who famously said, “Your brand is the single most important investment in your business.” But some, if not most, businesses tend to misunderstand this. Here’s why.

In the second part of this series, Insights from Kevin Roberts, we ask the former CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi what goes on in his head when he talks to clients.

Look into any business and marketing is usually the first budget to be ignored — or cut out entirely. 

Sustainable competitive advantages are becoming harder to find and harder to maintain. There are really only 2 ways that you can define these. What are they?

The best marketers know when to make and not to make decisions. This is why understanding Behavioural Economics as a science of decision-making and looking into the human behaviour is a must for CMOs. Here are 6 Step Change-recommended books on Behavioural Economics that CMOs should be reading.

Former Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts sheds light on essential matters like organisational growth, change, and creativity in this one-of-a-kind interview with Head of Strategy, Glenn Bartlett. This is the first post of the five-part video series. 

The Chief Financial Officer is a key player in any organisation and is someone you need to successfully engage with if you want to create positive change in an organisation. A CFO can be your biggest ally — or your greatest nemesis.

With our popcorn boxes ready and our digital thinking caps on, we stepped into The Dendy for Step Change Movie Night last week. We welcomed more than 200 clients and friends — our biggest audience ever.

The Practice of Powerful Presence is a series of concepts and exercises that let you consistently bring out the best in you so you can be the best leader for others.

The next Powerful Presence is in Adelaide on 24th - 26th August. Register Here. 

This is not another leadership tool or app you can simply download — it’s the complete operating system you need if you want to think clearly, think creatively, be powerfully present, and have an edge in your communications.

At the Chief Strategy Officer Summit’s Stump the Strategist session, a key question raised was, “How do I develop an effective strategic plan in a VUCA world in the absence of a business model?”

This week’s insider bits: An invite to reimagine marketing, plus a glimpse of the complete Step Change Service Menu (in case you’re mighty curious how else we can help your business grow).

Do you know when and how disruption is coming to you?

On the Admatic stage delivering his recent keynote titled “Disruption³”, Jeff Cooper, shares the top disruptive trends that may be affecting businesses and the strategies to deal with disruption. 

Join us in congratulating Mercer’s Chief Customer Officer, Cambell Holt, who now joins the top ranks of the most innovative CMOs in Australia!

In other news, we had Stump the Strategist during last Friday’s Open Haus!