NICKI SHIRLEY

As head of marketing for Qrious, Nicki is passionate about achieving business growth through innovative and effective marketing. With an emphasis on building brand equity and developing clear marketing communications, her focus is on showcasing the extens

What do you think is the most crucial element in marketing and why?

An open mind! Consumer behaviour is changing all the time and they now have high expectations for how they want to interact

with a brand. Marketers need to be open to new approaches and possibly even new tech. What worked five or even two years ago may no longer be hitting the mark, so a constant mindset of analysing and optimising is crucial to staying relevant and improving marketing ROI.

What inspires you?

I find being on the receiving end of clever marketing really inspiring. When you know that a marketing team somewhere has taken a sophisticated approach, applied some data and smarts, and delivered me a piece of marketing that got my attention – that’s really awesome! The other day I got a very clever email, that instead of just sending me their weekly specials, they personalised the email, and based on my shopping history data only showed me the relevant specials of the items that I typically buy – I got super excited (and was pretty impressed) that they were finally showing me something personalised to my preferences.

How do you grow and lead great marketers?

I think great marketers need to be continually looking at new or different ways of doing things. The marketing industry is evolving at such a rapid rate – the way you did something two years ago may have completely changed. So always being open to new ideas and continually reviewing your approach.

To nurture new ways of thinking I encourage my team to get out to conferences and networking events and speak with other marketers. It can be really easy to get stuck at your desk and keep doing what you’ve always been doing. But hearing about inspiring marketing successes or talking to peers about how they tackle a problem, has really helped the team to stay in touch with marketing trends, think about things from a different angle, and bring new and exciting ideas to the table.