Please join us in congratulating John Chatterton on his appointment to the new role of Chief Marketing Officer. John, who brings a wealth of international experience as a marketing leader, joined Macquarie in late April as the Interim Director of Marketing.

We asked John a number of questions about his professional background, aspirations for the role, and the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

What’s the elevator pitch/layman’s version of your professional background and expertise?
Prior to Macquarie, I spent my career marketing fast-moving consumer goods, predominately food brands you’d find in your local Coles and Woolworths. Although the similarity between food and higher education marketing might at first glance appear elusive, the principles of marketing apply regardless of the product or service being marketed.

How have you found the change from corporates to university life?
I knew the University was a complex organisation, but nothing can prepare you for the hugely diverse range of perspectives, interests and opinions you discover when you try to align everyone to a single goal.

What attracted you to working at Macquarie?
It is an honour to be given the opportunity to lead the development of the Macquarie University brand. But the clincher for me was the strong desire from the University’s leadership to change their approach to marketing. I want to help the University communicate its successes, to develop a greater sense of pride, and engage our audiences to create a vibrant reputation in the region.

What do you see as the opportunities and challenges for Macquarie Marketing in the next year?
In April we embarked on a journey to centralise our diverse marketing resources to better serve the University’s needs and engage our audiences in Macquarie’s many stories. With more than 20 marketing teams across the University, the sheer scale of the task cannot be under-estimated. I’m heartened by the success the Office of Financial Services and Human Resources have had with their centralisation, and plan to have our new team in place and ready to go for 2016.

What do you hope to achieve in the new role?
Joining the University from a commercial background allows me to bring a fresh perspective and approach to our communication. I hope to refresh our advertising, PR, social media and internal communications with a new approach to build alignment, efficiency and effectiveness, but most importantly impact.

Aligning our communication is crucial to develop message consistency, so the many messages we communicate every day through a range of different channels build over time to create a single proposition for the University with our audiences.

How do you improve the impact of a single message?
I’ve found a five-step process helps to step-change the impact our communication has with our audiences.
1. Insight: A better understanding of our audience helps us to position our message in a relevant way to the audience.
2. Strategy: It creates a clear purpose to communication and ensures stories are told with consistency so the strength of the message builds over time with our audience.
3. Content: Compelling stories tailored for each audience create engagement.
4. Creative: Even when we are not unique, we can be distinctive and impactful through creative approaches.
5. Media channels: Selection is critical to creating efficient communications.

What are you working on at the moment?
In addition to the centralisation of the procurement of our marketing services to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our spend across the University, we have developed a new, six-month student recruitment campaign to launch in August. It’s still being finalised, but I’d like to offer our community a sneak preview of our campaign concept.