Welcome to the next edition of Leadership Matters where we ask leaders around the Pacific Zone for their insights and advice about leadership matters to support our continuing journey of personal and professional development.
In this edition, we hear from Vice President of Marketing Communications Josette Addinall. Josette is responsible for the marketing, communications, e-commerce, commercial excellence, and digital customer relationships teams across Australia and New Zealand.
Prior to her current role, Josette was the Marketing Director at Telstra, driving digital marketing transformation while managing to achieve a significant growth in sales pipeline. Before her eight years’ service at Telstra, Josette was the Business Director at DDB Australia, leading globally-recognised, multi-award-winning advertising campaigns.
With 16 years’ industry experience, Josette is a data-driven marketing leader who creates and executes strategic vision that delivers significant and tangible business outcomes and is passionate about digital innovation.
What motivates and excites you about your role at Schneider Electric?
I love working for a company that has such a positive and impactful purpose – to empower all to make the most of our energy and resources, bridging progress and sustainability for all. Our role in marketing is to make sure this is brought to life in everything we do.
I also love that no day is ever the same at Schneider Electric – one week I might be focusing on launching a customer event, and another week I am spending time with our e-commerce customers to understand how we can partner with them to grow their business.
What makes you most proud of your team?
I’ve only been at Schneider Electric for 10 months, but I’ve loved coming into a team that is so passionate about what they do. We have such a diverse team and I am so proud of how the team comes together to work with colleagues across the business to deliver on the customer and business objectives.
How do you see marketing evolving in the next 5 years?
With the acceleration of digital and technology and importance of data, there has been a significant shift in marketing over the past 5-10 years. We’ve moved away from being the ‘colouring in’ team, to being a team that adds value to the business. We do this by delivering customer insights and delivering marketing programs that take customers along the buyer’s journey.
Over the next 5 years, as these areas continue to accelerate and customer centricity becomes even more critical, marketing needs to evolve to be the growth engine for the business – the first port of call when their business needs to grow or close a gap. This will be achieved by knowing our customers (including having the right insights to predict their behaviours and delivering world-class omni-channel experiences), delivering tangible commercial outcomes to the business, and creating a purpose-led brand that our customers want to partner with.
How does marketing support our leadership in Electricity 4.0 in the Pacific Zone?
We support Electricity 4.0 in a number of ways in the region. From a thought leadership point of view, our communications team works with the business to create thought leadership pieces, which amplify our message in market. Our marcomms team executes campaigns, like ‘Building of the Future’, which support the overarching proposition. At a more tactical level, we also support this through the work that our digital customer experience team executes (e.g. e2e journey of the electricians), as well as the e-commerce team.
We’re one of the leading companies in the world when it comes to sustainability. How is your part of the business contributing to this leadership?
Our role within the marketing communications part of the team is to bring our sustainability proposition to life. We showcase our leadership position in this space by the work that our communications team does with media – such as customer stories and thought leadership pieces. We also amplify our key thought leadership themes across sustainability, electricity 4.0, next generation automation and the home energy landscape, and share these with our customers and partners through our targeted communication.
Describe a ‘customer first’ moment that you’ll never forget.
This shows how important coffee is to me, but a recent experience that resonated with me was when I asked my daughter to buy my coffee from the local shop. She had ordered my coffee incorrectly (she is only seven), and given they know us pretty well, they made my usual coffee order and left a little note saying “we hope we got your order right, if it isn’t come back and we will re-make it”. If that is not customer first behaviour, I don’t know what is!
Which of our other values resonates with you most and why?
I love the ‘Dare to Disrupt’ value. Starting my career in digital, when websites were something that companies were just building out, we were always having to disrupt and try new things. I love data, technology, and using customer insight to try new things, which is why the value resonates with me.
Today, disruption doesn’t need to happen just on the technology side of things but can happen anywhere – from developing customer centric campaign and improving processes within the sales journey, to mapping out the customer journey to reach new customers. There are so many opportunities; the challenge is finding the ones that create the most value to the business or the customer.
What makes someone a leader?
I think a good leader is someone who has a great vision, but also someone who can enable the those around them to become successful. A great leader also is someone who has empathy, who can foster and grow talent, and can have those tough conversations when needed.
Who has influenced you most during your career and how?
There are three people who come directly to mind – all have always encouraged me to believe in myself and given me the confidence to do things that may be a little out of my comfort zone.
The first one is my dad. I grew up with three brothers but was never treated just like a girl. I was taught to not let gender hold me back. Then there was my managing director at a creative agency I worked at. She saw something in me that others didn’t, mentoring me and growing my role so I could experience other areas of advertising. Finally, my last manager at Telstra. Again, he took a punt on an up-and-coming talent for a role he believed I could do.
What is the best advice you’ve ever received?
Early in my career, I would have sleepless nights if I made a mistake, such as sending out an email to customers with a typo. It was very small, but they felt really big at the time. But I was reminded that while what had happened wasn’t great, in the grand scheme of things they weren’t worthy of the concern they caused me.. It is more important is that you learn from mistakes rather than dwell on them, so I always remind myself to “don’t sweat the small stuff, and it’s all small stuff”.
