Host Mark Jones is joined by Andrew Baxter for a reflection on where we are right now and how best to prepare for the year ahead.

After a couple of years of disruption, consumer confidence in Australia at its lowest in 20 years.

The pandemic has done more than just create uncertainty, it has impacted and changed how consumers behave. People are more likely to look and shop locally, connecting them with different communities.

According to Andrew Baxter, now is the time for brands to push through. Habits are formed in an average of 66 days, according to research in the European Journal of Social Psychology. Given the lengths of lockdowns over the past two years, it was inevitable that new habits have been formed.

“As a marketer you've got to figure out, are those behaviour changes that have happened in that period of time good for your business and therefore you need to encourage those to continue, or do you want to reverse them as quickly as possible once we get out the other side of whichever wave of a COVID outbreak we're in? I think that's something that not as many marketers are asking themselves as they should,” says Andrew.

In his ‘12 Marketing Matters that Matter’, Andrew lists trust as the number one matter that should matter most to marketers. In fact, it's the question he is most often asked by CEOs and board members about marketing. CEOs often ask how to build trust with customers and how do to maintain it. If we lose trust, how do we get it back?

“It all sounds quite fundamental, but there's a great saying that trust is won in drops and lost in buckets. In other words, you've got to do lots and lots of little things to build up trust with your customer, particularly in the B2B space. But one thing that goes wrong, you could potentially lose that trust,” says Andrew.

And as always, marketing leaders are the bridge between consumer sentiment and an organisation’s growth agenda. Marketers find opportunities, creative angles and tell stories that connect.

Covering trust and consumer behaviour, to Influencers, AI and Martech, data transparency through to the good old-fashioned power of creativity, there’s a lot on Andrew’s mind this year.

Find out which 12 marketing topics should be at the top of your mind in this episode of The CMO Show.