How one CMO is bringing creativity back to New Zealand with MiniMBA

MiniMBA delivers Golden Age marketing “in a package,” says Goodman Fielder CMO Frankie Coulter

Veteran marketer Frankie Coulter grew up at the likes of Kellogg and Kraft Heinz – institutions with a longstanding reputation for marketing excellence. When he took over as CMO at Goodman Fielder New Zealand, Frankie wanted to bring back some of the spark he remembers from what he calls “the Golden Age of marketing.”

As the country’s largest FMCG company, Goodman Fielder was ticking along happily enough, but the business wasn’t investing in creativity. They were leaving market share on the table and losing uninspired marketers to other careers or organisations.

This wasn’t only a problem at Goodman Fielder, it was endemic. Over the past 20 years or so, Frankie had witnessed a sharpening decline in the quality of creative work coming out of the industry – a lot of playing it safe and playing by the ‘rules,’ he says.

Frankie wanted to put creativity back at the heart of marketing in New Zealand. And he’s leading the way with bolder, more strategically nuanced advertising campaigns across the Goodman Fielder portfolio.

By re-anchoring in the marketing fundamentals, understanding consumers and re-thinking the way Goodman Fielder harnesses market research, his team has delivered a series of award-winning creative campaigns that are driving real business impact. It all began, Frankie says, with MiniMBA in Marketing.

Agency partnerships as a two-way street

Despite looking after some of the nation’s favourite brands, Frankie had inherited a marketing department that was undervalued, under invested-in and lacking in confidence. Instead of leading brand strategy, his team had been relegated to executional admin – “outsourcing the intellectual responsibility to agencies.”

For years they had followed a restrictive third-party model, handing the entire creative process over to their agency. Who, in return, delivered “safe” ideas they knew the old guard would sign off on. Neither side had been empowered to step up and try something different, “even though we have some powerhouse brands with 100 years of heritage behind them,” Frankie says.

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

After conducting an internal audit, Frankie discovered that many of his team had never worked on large-scale creative campaigns. He says, “It wasn’t a lack of talent; it was a lack of exposure.”

Frankie wanted to shift their role from executional to becoming more involved in leading the strategic direction of the brands and categories. And this meant getting some proper, strategic training in place. They needed to put down the tactical distractions and get “back to the basics,” he says. “When I saw what MiniMBA was doing, I thought that’s exactly what we need – and I started putting people through the course.”

MiniMBA in Marketing is a foundational training that cuts through the noise of digital-this or performance-that. In 12 weeks, marketers learn how to understand their market (“Diagnosis”), how to leverage those insights to achieve specific business goals (“Strategy”) and how to successfully activate that plan (“Tactical Execution”).

Since taking the course, his team has the confidence to assess creative concepts on merit, rather than opinion or agreeableness. With a solid grounding in marketing strategy, it suddenly becomes easy to ask and answer the important questions – does this creative match up with our brand positioning? Does it deliver on our handful of SMART objectives for this campaign?

“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… The conversations and work we are doing has transformed.”

The biggest thing MiniMBA gives people is confidence

“The biggest thing MiniMBA gives people is confidence,” says Frankie. “It’s helping me accelerate what I’m trying to do here and I’m really proud of that.”

The first campaign the team launched under Frankie’s leadership was for the company’s flagship brand, Vogel’s. In less than two years, the brand netted a 10% increase in market share.

 

“I told DDB, ‘If you give us great work, we’ll buy it.’ That completely changed the relationship. Now, instead of getting two or three conservative ideas, we get five, six, seven scripts… some bold, some wacky, but all pushing the envelope. The Vogel’s Gareth ad was actually the fourth script – the one they weren’t going to show us. Now, agencies know to bring us their best, boldest ideas because we’ll back them.

New Zealand used to be a hotbed of amazing creativity… It was always seen as quite irreverent. And it was fun

“New Zealand used to be a hotbed of amazing creativity with some of the best advertising in the world – like the famous Toyota ads, for example. It was always seen as quite irreverent. And it was fun. That’s what we used to be good at and known for.

“But then everybody went down the road of science. Byron Sharp came out with How Brands Grow and everyone went that way, or they went down the purpose road with trying to copy Unilever, and it led to a lot of stuff that was all the same, basically.

“Marketers lost, in my opinion, their individual reasoning to say, you know what? I’m going to try and understand what is best for my brand and my consumer.

“I’m pushing an agenda for marketers in New Zealand right now to be more brave and buy the creative work from their agencies to see if it works. And it does. Especially in this market, people love good advertising.”

That doesn’t mean throwing market research and creative testing out the window – far from it. While Frankie is keen to get back to basics when it comes to the marketing fundamentals, as new and better tools arise to facilitate those overarching principles, he’s ready to make good use of them.

Redesigning market research

Goodman Fielder has dramatically shifted their approach to market research. They can now gather insights and test creative ideas much quicker and more efficiently, using technology-driven market research tools and companies such as TRA, Ideally, Tracksuit and Kantar.

“We’re using AI to collate and test our concepts before we put them into human testing,” Frankie explains.

For deploying LINK AI, Goodman Fielder’s ‘Variety is Good’ ad for Freya’s bread took first place at Kantar’s Creative Effectiveness Awards 2025 – and the ad boosted unprompted awareness for the brand by 4%.

 

This new approach to market research has been spearheaded by Head of Insights, Kay Bramley. Frankie gave Kay free rein to rethink how Goodman Fielder harnesses consumer intelligence.

Kay has said: “When something new, different, quicker, and easier comes along, we give it a try. Frankie has given me the autonomy to trial new methodologies, platforms, and tools as they emerge.

“The change has made us more agile. If we identify a missing piece of information, we can test it and get answers in 24 hours. Whether it is advertising, product awareness, or NPD launches, we now have consumer input at every stage… something we just were not doing well enough before.”

Businesses are stagnating because they’re not brave enough

Frankie says, “It’s people that are not confident in their ability, or not confident in marketing being respected in their organisation, that use research as an excuse to do nothing. No new campaigns, no new activity, no new anything. In New Zealand, we’ve got some amazing capability, amazing people, amazing processes… Businesses are stagnating because they’re not brave enough to use them.

“That’s what I think MiniMBA is doing a great job of – making marketers more confident in their ability to stand up and say, ‘You know what? We should be doing this. And here’s why…’”

Capability breeds creativity

MiniMBA in Marketing gives marketers a three-step process that is simple, repeatable and unpretentiously effective: Diagnosis, Strategy and Tactical Execution. Along with a practical examination of each stage, course professor Mark Ritson explains the best-practice methods and frameworks at every step.

“Everything comes back to MiniMBA,” says Frankie. “By giving marketers a really clear, simple way of doing those three things… It gives marketers confidence when they’re talking in the business – to anybody – that they know what they’re talking about.

“We are trusted in the business. That is 100% down to MiniMBA, because we know what we’re doing – and we’ve got results that prove it.”

We know what we’re doing – and we’ve got results that prove it

The certainty that comes with knowing decisions are insight-backed and on-strategy means marketers can reach further with creative. Instead of toeing the line with mediocre ads that aim to cover all bases, his team is able to say yes to bold campaigns – even if they might raise a few eyebrows, Frankie says. “The best backhanded compliment we’ve ever had is from our Head of Operations, who said: ‘Looks like the world’s worst yoghurt ad is working. The factory is at capacity.’”

That “world’s worst yoghurt ad” is another fruit of the reformed, two-way partnership with DDB Aotearoa. This time, for KALÓ – the brand’s first new ad campaign in five years. Starring a sentient supermarket checkout machine, the playful campaign resonated with consumers so much that market penetration increased by +3.2%.

 

The team is continuing to drive brand metric victories across the Goodman Fielder portfolio, including unprompted awareness, consideration and brand power, as well as significant jumps in sales volume and market share.

Last year, Frankie was crowned Marketer of the Year at the YouTube NZ Marketing Awards, and they’ve had a slew of wins and nominations for their creative campaigns at recognised industry awards.

But the biggest win for Frankie is the positive change within his team – who are thriving and more engaged than ever, he says.

Again, the numbers speak for themselves. Frankie has recorded an incredible 56-point swing in employer brand value since taking over as CMO, and team turnover has dropped from 25% to almost zero. He’s also made five internal senior promotions already, with “three more rising stars” on their way up.

“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.”

Golden Age marketing “in a package”

Frankie has followed the work of Mark Ritson since his days as a young brand manager – looking forward to his candid weekly columns in Marketing Week. So, when Frankie had a need for marketing training, MiniMBA was a no-brainer, he tells us.

“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. I come from a generation where we were taught the basics in marketing by the people that were actually doing it in the 80s and 90s… As an industry, we’ve lost that fundamental basic competency.

“Mark has always been straightforward in the way he approaches marketing and that’s what I’ve always liked,” says Frankie. “Then to see him doing the courses, it resonated with everything I’ve always thought was important in marketing – getting back to real basics.

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

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