From “cost-centre” to marketing powerhouse: Goodman Fielder

New Zealand’s largest FMCG company has transformed their approach to marketing – winning ground in market share, profitability and employer brand value

When Frankie Coulter became CMO of Goodman Fielder NZ, marketing was seen as a cost-centre – underfunded, undervalued and misunderstood. Rather than tweaking performance at the edges, he saw an opportunity to fundamentally shift how the business thinks about marketing.

Central to that transformation was MiniMBA. By embedding it into onboarding and development, Frankie built a team that spoke the same strategic language, challenged old ways of thinking, and proved that skilled marketers can drive serious business results.

Find out how a shift in mindset, backed by capability building, helped one company reframe marketing as an investment and reshape its commercial future…

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New Zealand’s largest FMCG company, Goodman Fielder is home to some of the nation’s favourite food and drink brands including Vogel’s and Meadow Fresh. When CMO Frankie Coulter took up the role in 2022, he came with a mission: create a training ground for world-class marketers. Not just at Goodman Fielder, he says, but in New Zealand and beyond.

“New Zealand has a history of being world-class in so many areas, from rugby to aviation. So why should our marketing be any different? I wanted Goodman Fielder to be recognised alongside organisations that operate at a global standard, regardless of where they are based.”

Frankie set to work building a major business transformation programme. An internal audit highlighted three areas for focus: internal capabilities, marketing culture and performance.

Using MiniMBA in Marketing as the foundation of his transformation programme, his team of 26 marketers has now all done “at least one MiniMBA.” It has become a key part of their onboarding process – “regardless of what level people are,” he says. “Any new person that joins the company, I put them through MiniMBA in Marketing.”

Under Frankie’s leadership, Goodman Fielder has had a phenomenal few years. A culture of investing in people has become the new normal, and there’s been a seismic shift in the way marketing is viewed within the business. Some of the headline wins include:

• +3.2% penetration increase on KALÓ yoghurt
• 3:1 ROI on Vogel’s bread
• 56-point swing in employer brand value
• Team turnover dropped from 25% to almost zero
• 5 internal senior promotions
• Frankie named New Zealand Marketer of the Year 2024

“Three years ago, people laughed when we said we would be a world-class marketing team. Now, agencies worldwide want to work with us, our team is more engaged than ever, and we are pushing the boundaries of marketing in New Zealand.

“We’re doing good work and people in the industry are seeing that. I don’t even need to recruit anymore – I’m getting people from Fonterra, Coca-Cola… sending me CVs.”

Reshaping Goodman Fielder’s approach to marketing

Frankie knew his first hurdle as CMO was to reshape internal perceptions of marketing in the business.

“Goodman Fielder NZ historically has not been a big believer in brands and brand building, even though we have some powerhouse brands with 100 years of heritage behind them,” says Frankie.

“We classified marketing as DME – direct marketing expense. The first thing I did was sit with the board and explain: marketing isn’t an expense, it’s an investment. We changed that to ‘Direct Marketing Investment’ and just by changing the language around how we approached marketing at a board level, it transformed people’s opinion of what they were getting for their money.”

We classified marketing as DME – direct marketing expense

Frankie’s next step was to get that investment spend up, making his case with both an evidence-based approach and a touch of theatrical flair: “I literally took a box full of white bags and put that on the table in front of the executive board,” he says.

“Our core portfolio is commodities, so we’ve got flour, sugar, bread, milk… I said, look if you don’t believe in marketing, I’ll put everything in a white box, but you’re not going to make any money. The value of the company comes from whatever design or brand logo we’ve got on the pack and then what people think, feel, believe about that.”

While this helped get the message across, Frankie still had a challenge ahead to get marketing budgets where he wanted them. He’d cut his teeth at Kellogg in the 1990s, where they were spending 16% of net sales value on marketing expenditure.

“When I took over in our business, we were spending between 1-2% on advertising and support. We’re a billion-dollar company and we were spending a few hundred thousand here and there across 14 brands.”

Throwing more money at brands is not a solution in itself. Proper marketing investment needs properly trained marketers behind the wheel to generate results. Frankie needed to show the board how skilled marketers with real spending power could impact the bottom line. And so, with the board’s backing, Frankie and his team got to work with their flagship brand, Vogel’s bread.

“I was able to demonstrate that by investing a dollar in marketing, I could get three back. That earned us the trust to go and spend more on other brands.”

While he was working on increasing marketing investment, Frankie took a similar hard-line approach to investing in his team.

“When I first started, all my team was doing was mopping up for other departments. Marketing would be the go-to for everything from ‘we need somebody to send samples down to Napier’ or ‘marketing can organise that’ – admin, basically.”

Determined to make ‘marketers’ marketers again, Frankie sat down with HR and drew up some new job descriptions to get everyone in the business clear on what his team would – and wouldn’t – be doing going forward.

“That clarity was absolutely critical to getting my team focused on what they should be doing, which is marketing and any activity related to understanding the consumer and the business.

It wasn’t a lack of talent; it was a lack of exposure

“We did an audit and found that many in our team had never worked on above-the-line creative, like television commercials or large-scale campaigns. It wasn’t a lack of talent; it was a lack of exposure. We were outsourcing the intellectual responsibility to agencies, which meant our team wasn’t learning or growing in those areas.”

Enter: Mark Ritson and his MiniMBA courses.

The culture impact

“Everything Mark Ritson talks about is what marketers used to get taught at companies like Kellogg, Mars, PepsiCo… and that’s why I have always resonated with him. He’s been talking about these things for 20 years – it’s just in a package now with MiniMBA.

“The reason why I’m attracted to the course is that MiniMBA is like a one-stop-shop where your teams can get completely trained. It accelerates the process of building people’s capability.

It’s what marketers used to get taught at companies like Kellogg, Mars, PepsiCo… it’s just in a package now with MiniMBA

“It’s great to see within my team because a lot of the tools MiniMBA teaches is how we used to do things back in the day… In my opinion, the Golden Age of marketing was the 80s and 90s. Your marketers were really good, they could all speak that common language, and they understood market orientation and creativity… And at some point, we lost it. There was a love and a passion for our profession that you just don’t see anymore.

“I came into the CMO role with the intention of recreating what good marketing and good brand management once looked like – that was my plan from day one.”

His plan is working. Staff happiness and retention is through the roof, they’re driving measurable business results, and his team are excited about their roles for the first time in years. Since taking over, Frankie has recorded a 56-point swing in employer brand value and team turnover has dropped from 25% to almost zero.

“We’ve gone from being a team that was undervalued and wanting to leave the company, to a team that’s in a happy place. We feel supported, we feel like we’re being invested in, and we feel successful.”

Frankie’s team development plan is underpinned by MiniMBA in Marketing, but he doesn’t stop there. Frankie supports his team through further capability training, external and internal Women & Leadership programmes, industry mentorship and on-the-job learning opportunities. His “Have a Go” model, for example, puts people into roles where they can step up – “even if they make mistakes,” he says. “I work on making people happy first, then I work on their capability.”

For Frankie, this means getting people in the right seats and upskilling further based on individual strengths and passions. For example, putting aspiring brand managers through MiniMBA in Brand Management.

The output of all this, Frankie says, is “awesome, awesome marketers.” He’s already made five senior promotions within his team, with three more rising stars on their way up.

“Any one of them could go work in any company in New Zealand right now and they would smash it. We are creating an academy of marketing that will benefit Goodman Fielder and the industry for years to come.”

The capability and cultural change within marketing is so infectious it permeates the whole business

This sea change isn’t going unnoticed throughout the rest of the business. Goodman Fielder’s Head of Retail Sales plans to follow Frankie’s lead, saying: “The marketing high performance leadership model is now the benchmark for the rest of the business to follow.”

While the Head of People and Culture has said: “The capability and cultural change within marketing is so infectious it permeates the whole of Goodman Fielder with positive energy and optimism for the future.”

Even Goodman Fielder Australia is taking note. After seeing the positive changes happening across the water, Goodman Fielder’s Australian CMO enrolled 10 of her people in the latest MiniMBA in Marketing class.

The business impact

Frankie had set the stage for a new era of marketing at Goodman Fielder by returning 3:1 ROI on Vogel’s. The business could now see – indisputably – the impact of marketing investment and brand building. This gave his team autonomy to go and apply their MiniMBA learnings with the trust and financial backing of the wider business.

“We are trusted in the business – and it’s not just me,” says Frankie. “My key leaders are trusted just as much, if not more than me on some topics. That is 100% down to MiniMBA, because we know what we’re doing and we’ve got results that prove it.

We are trusted in the business – and it’s not just me

“We are seen as a credible business unit and that’s thanks to MiniMBA. It’s your market orientation, it’s understanding your consumer and it’s Mark Ritson giving people the confidence to be – and this is the phrase I use with my team – intellectually curious about their brand and their business.

“With our agency DDB, we have been having many proper brand conversations that my team could not have had before doing the course and believing in themselves. It is so rewarding to see a team of people grow as much as mine has. The conversations and work we are doing has transformed.”

 

 

In 2023, with DDB Group Aotearoa, his team launched the first ad campaign for KALÓ yoghurt in half a decade. Starring a sentient supermarket checkout machine, the playful campaign resonated with consumers so much that market penetration increased by +3.2%.

Frankie says the best backhanded compliment he’s ever had comes from their Head of Operations, who said: “Looks like the world’s worst yoghurt ad is working. The factory is at capacity.”

This success is a now-consistent theme across the Goodman Fielder portfolio. Frankie and his team are driving brand metric victories in awareness and consideration, as well as market share gains of up to +10%.

…market share gains of up to +10%

Frankie’s role in the transformation at Goodman Fielder New Zealand was recognised at the YouTube NZ Marketing Awards, when he was crowned Marketer of the Year 2024.

“People are copying us now. I’ve got pretty much every CEO in the land wanting to understand how we are doing it. We are a very friendly society here, so we all get along, and my message to everybody is: it’s not that hard if you know what you’re doing. If you understand the marketing fundamentals and you apply them, you’re probably going to win for your brand and your business.

“I would hazard a guess that you’re going to be seeing more companies from New Zealand and Australia putting their people through MiniMBA, because we’re quite vocal in the market about how the investment in capability of our people is helping to drive our performance.”

Frankie’s plan for 2025 and beyond is to continue investing in marketing capability at Goodman Fielder. Giving his team the tools that they need and the confidence to use them, Frankie says he wants to raise the bar on performance – they may have “won” but they’re “not done.”

…we’re quite vocal in the market about how the investment in capability of our people is helping to drive our performance

 

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