BRAND STRATEGY

 

After guiding our Brand Planning, Brand Positioning & Communications Strategy process for the last 4 years with a string of successful workshops and strategy sessions, Via Marca has quickly been established as a key partner to the Sanitarium Marketing team.  Anne has a refreshingly unique and passionate approach to brand-building workshops, utilising a wealth of FMCG Marketing know-how to deliver us powerful and productive session outcomes for the brand.  Each session is thoughtfully put together with modular customisation to best fit the brand and the problem you’re there to solve.  A few qualities we really appreciate in Anne is her ability to push a team out of their comfort zone, without resulting in discomfort; the way she delivers with structure and rigour but via her uniquely adaptable and flexible style which seems to be informed by a kind of “sixth sense” that can read a room, and then just run with it. In this line of work, you don’t see many get this right and I think that’s what makes her outstanding.

Jessica Manihera, Head of Marketing, Sanitarium

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After identifying some gaps in our planning capability at AMP Capital, we invited Anne to partner with us to help recraft our business planning process to build compelling, insight-led strategies across our retail portfolio. Our collective experience with Via Marca has been exceptional, and we have continued to engage with Anne during our annual business cycles. Anne helped us build significant cross-functional capability and embed a rigorous yet efficient process that delivered stronger, more compelling business strategies and plans for our assets, our teams and our investors. Our priorities are crystal clear and directly support and inform the future growth vision for each of our assets. We look forward to working with Anne to continuously improve and evolve our planning process as our business needs evolve. I would recommend Anne to any business that is seeking to elevate its marketing capability and strategic planning outcomes. She is a gifted, strategic marketer with a passion and deep talent for building and embedding marketing capability into businesses.

Georgia Karaboulis, Director of Research & Insight, AMP Capital

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Throughout the development of various brands, including the master brand strategy for Ramsay Health Care, our team had the pleasure of collaborating with Anne and her team. Anne's approach involved working closely with our marketing team and relevant stakeholders, including front-line workers who had direct insights from our consumers. Anne encouraged us to question the status quo and think outside the box, while always prioritising our consumers and business objectives.

One aspect that proved invaluable was the meticulous preparation and research Anne conducted before each workshop. She thoroughly examined our competitors, market trends, and provided an outsider's perspective on our business. This, along with the toolkit used throughout the sessions, ensured that everyone involved had a comprehensive understanding of the subject matter, leading to engaging and lively sessions.

Anne didn't just conclude the workshops and leave us to determine the next steps on our own. Instead, she actively took the outputs from the workshops and collaborated with me to develop a comprehensive strategy. This partnership resulted in strategies that the team and I were proud to present to the Australian Executive Team.

Andrea McDougall, National Marketing Manager, Ramsay Health Care

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We have used via Marca to help us develop our 3-year strategic plans at Vitaco for the last four years.  Anne has done a brilliant job from the outset.  The strategic planning framework, process, and tools she introduced to the team were clear, understandable, and actually quite simple to apply to our brands.  She was highly accessible to the team during the whole process and she has a rare skill of being about to engage and coach all levels of the organisation which made the actual workshops highly effective.  The resulting strategic plans we developed were a huge step up from previous years and what was almost as important is that we have built planning capability across our organisation.  I would highly recommend Anne and the team from via Marca.

Alex Boden, General Manager, Vitaco (Musashi, Nutra-Life & Aussie Bodies)

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Anne with her process & toolkit helped us to: articulate and focus our brand; identify priority issues and our most promising markets; and facilitate a new brand direction and campaign. She challenged us in every way and, frankly, what could have been a painful process was genuinely enjoyable and incredibly fruitful because of her engaging ways. Anne has a way of asking the killer questions with a smile. She is a delight as well as an incisive, strategic brand guru.

Kirsten McGregor - Executive Director: Marketing, Media & Communications, University of Southern Queensland

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MARKETING CAPABILITY

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Anne and I originally connected out of the blue – to network on LinkedIn. After being impressed by her posts on my feed, I decided to approach her to lead a major piece of work for me; developing a new Integrated Marketing Connections (IMC) approach, including the process, tools, capability materials and workshops for rollout across the Lion marketing team & agencies.
I’ve worked with agencies in the past, with a similar brief, so I know what to ‘expect’, but I found working with Anne such a delightful change. Why so?

• Anne brought in the right balance of deep personal knowledge (of marketing and capability), complimenting with my own inputs, builds, requirements. There was no tension over what was correct, or better. We collaborated easily, and seamlessly on process, content, & capability.

• Anne moved with such pace. I had a reasonably tight deadline and it never felt for a moment like we would miss that. Anne was able to deliver enormous amounts of work in a short time.

• Anne has existing “off the shelf” materials that she uses in her own marketing programs, that she was happy to include for my project. This meant easy, fast, validated content.

• Lastly, all the little things that you’d hope don’t mess things up and get in the way (fees, billing, project management etc) didn’t get in the way!

Net, Anne was GREAT and I’m extraordinarily happy with the results.
I’m glad we connected out of the blue & I’m even more glad that I rolled the dice & used Anne/Via Marca for my project. I can’t endorse her highly enough!

Mark Fisher, Marketing Capability Lead, Lion

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We engaged Anne earlier this year to run a marketing master class series for the mighty Kennards Hire marketing team. Thorough, easy to digest, packed with fantastic tools and templates, the team relished in the conversation, the practical examples and the ability to leverage the time , information and templates to develop their own strategies and plans which propped up our FY24 marketing plan.

Anne’s easy to understand approach, gentle challenge questions and ability to create a warm learning environment had the entire team thinking and challenging each other in a safe environment.

The best part being, since our course with Anne, they have been coming to me with extremely well thought out briefs and tackle each project with the “problems we are trying to solve” approach, critical honing into the underlying strategic objective.

We have loved the work we did with Anne and I highly recommend Anne’s master classes to any marketing team wanting to learn, unlearn, relearn and refresh themselves on core marketing principles which is so required to get out of the weeds and focus on big picture.

I look forward to connecting with Anne on a frequent basis to continue the conversation with the team over many years to come .

Manelle Merhi, General Manager Marketing & Customer Experience, Kennards Hire
 

We had our Australia & Asia Pacific All-Hands yesterday and there was a massive shout-out to the brilliant comms brief-writing training sessions from across the team. I also surveyed my team on culture, and it surfaced regularly as a highlight of H1. Your course has lit a fire in the team.  They have adapted your tools and are putting extra focus on briefing after your brilliance, thank you!

Andrew Morley – Head of Marketing ANZ. Uber

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Via Marca was selected to conduct our Asia Pacific Marketing capability training after a detailed review of multiple providers throughout the region. Our brief to was to conduct the training with participants at varying levels of experience and capability across our Asia Pacific unit, including ANZ, Philippines, Korea and South East Asia. Anne's framework, content and delivery stood out versus other well-established suppliers in this space, with category-relevant case studies and a unique custom-built approach. Throughout the execution of the training, Anne created engaging and meaningful content, which the teams immediately responded to. Navigating through the challenge of running the sessions online in numerous time zones, Anne stretched the teams to think deeper, making use of a current business challenge. Our teams have come away with a framework for building commercial, executable brand plans that will deliver sustained growth. And, they are all supremely more capable of selling those plans to their internal stakeholder groups, building their "fact-based storytelling" superpowers. I would highly recommend Via Marca to anyone looking to build the competence and effectiveness of their marketing teams.

Samantha Hansen - Country Manager Perfetti Van Melle

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After a tremendously successful track record as a Marketing leader within Campbell Arnott’s, Anne Ricci has continued to make substantial contributions in her capacity as Founder and Director of via Marca – our Marketing Capability partner. Anne has brought to us in Asia Pacific a rare combination of both foundational capability training as well as insights into more contemporary practises and case studies. Her coaching methods and style have consistently resonated with members of my team from all levels of experience and across the Region earning her the highest of evaluation ratings. As we strive to become the most effective Foods Marketing team in the Region, we continue to rely on via Marca to be building the necessary Marketing skills and disciplines within the team that befit such an ambition.

David McNeil, Vice President Marketing Asia Pacific,  Campbell Arnott's

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I had the pleasure of collaborating with Anne on a Brand Impact training.  I found the training to be one of the best training sessions that I have attended.  This is due to Anne’s ability to simplify a process with true clarity and transforming a training process into a working tool.  Truly this is the difference between process driven consultancy and REAL ‘I-live-it’ EVERYDAY collaboration.  The opportunity from the training output to both my team and myself is in the ability to focus on what is truly importance in making the difference to our business and knowing the impact of the difference.

I continue to look forward to all opportunities I have to collaborate with Anne and highly recommend her as a trainer.

Michelle Nunis, Marketing Director, Campbell Soup Company Malaysia

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Anne is an exceptional marketer & fantastic trainer.  Anne was able to structure the content of the marketing course that suited the needs of marketers with a wide range of experience from ABM to Marketing Managers using simple, logical templates and real life brand examples.  In addition, the valuable collective discussions during the course had really helped stress test thinking on our own brands and business challenges to enable us to build brands that are truly distinctive.  I highly recommend a conversation with Anne about any areas of marketing capability training that team your team needs.

Anna Tu, Brand Manager, Hort Innovation

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