What you need to know:

• Paul Connell is joining Big Red Group, the suite of experience marketplace brands like RedBalloon and ExperienceOz, as Chief Marketing Officer. He started last week.
• Connell spent more than a decade at Unilever before leaving and growing his own consultancy business, Build on Purpose, which developed purpose within organisations.
• He says some businesses are “cause jumping” and overcrowding certain subject areas in an unhelpful way, and should instead focus on where they can have a positive impact on stakeholders. The multi-stakeholder model is best. 
• Businesses don’t 'need to be Mother Teresa', Connell says, but even Mother Teresa focused her efforts to what she was gifted at.
• Connell said Big Red Group has big growth ambitions post-Covid, and would work with its 3,000 business suppliers to become the dominant experience supplier in Australia. 

Businesses should avoid “cause jumping”, token presentations and double down on their strengths, stakeholders and communities to find growth as purpose-led firms, Paul Connell, a former Unilever marketer and purpose consultant says.

Connell has today been named as the new Chief Marketing Officer of Big Red Group, the largest experience marketplace in Australia and New Zealand. He started last week, covering its RedBalloon, Adrenaline, ExperienceOz, Local Agent and Lime&Tonic brands.

For the past two years, he has been Chief Marketing Officer at Naked Wines, after founding Build on Purpose, a management consultancy that redesigned businesses to be purpose-led. In that time, he saw a lot of businesses grapple with purpose as a concept – both the good and bad.

“There's a big spectrum of kind of real purpose-led companies that get it and put it the heart of their growth model – and they've been proven to accelerate and therefore it delivers growth,” Connell said.

“And there's some where it still lives in the marketing department and in HR and there’s a little bit of kind of greenwashing, where the growth doesn't come. I think if I was being really provocative, I’d say if you're a purpose-led company and not growing, it's probably not at the centre of what you're doing slash it's probably not quite the right purpose.”

Running presentations and sessions for Build on Purpose clients, Connell said he would often tell brands they could achieve more by reducing their scope. Mother Teresa was so successful because she focused on what she was gifted at and devoted her life to it, he would say. You don’t have to be Mother Teresa – but be more like Mother Teresa.

“I think there's a little bit of kind of like cause jumping. And that's meant that sometimes businesses were showing up in places where, really, they didn't know how to help or why they were there. No doubt your consumers and your suppliers and all your employees are probably also asking, 'why are you here?'” Connell said.

“It's nice that you showed up. I'm glad that you're here. But I could tell, in the old business, like in a paramedic environment where someone hits the floor and everyone crowds around and tries to help, the paramedic goes like, 'give me some air'. And everyone just lets the paramedics do their thing. That's almost a parallel, I think for kind of businesses with purpose.”

His comments come against a backdrop of P&G’s top marketer, Marc Pritchard, flipping to growth that funds ‘good’, not vice versa, at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity.

“We were saying 'a force for good to be a force for growth'. But we found we spent so much time on the good, you know, we need to make sure we pay enough attention to the growth,” Pritchard said. “If you're a force for growth that is good – especially right now – because that brings economic good, that pays wages that helps partners.”

Connell, who spent more than a decade at a senior level at Unilever, said he saw CEOs who wanted to “feel good for a day” before business as usual the following day, and there were others – like Big Red Group – who were legitimately up for change and a serious purpose focus. Doing good and growth don’t have to compete with each other, he said.

“I understand why the CMO of a large organisation with an activist investor on his board has to say, 'please don't misinterpret me' and therefore just switch the order. But I think it's a better conversation to say, ‘well, how do they go hand in hand’ and keep showing that?” Connell said.  

“That's my view. I think if you've got your purpose right and it's congruent to your growth and you're not just doing it around the edges as a bit of CSR, you can have one and the same.”

Big Red Group a case study in purpose, post-Covid

Connell has big ambitions for the Big Red Group, which he got to know and understand while working as a purpose consultant. There are good things to do – last week, he said, the business helped a ballooning company design an accessible hot air balloon.

“It's going to be really bloody important to make sure that if we're asking the world to bounce back, that everyone has a chance to do it and that we help them innovate in that space,” he said. 

Big Red Group has more than 3,000 business suppliers, a 150-strong team and is aiming to capture the experience economy – and believes now, post-Covid, is the time to do it. There are 50,000 potential suppliers out there, even while the international market ramps up slowly.

“If Australia is going to take a little while to rebuild its international tourism, how can we through partnerships and brands like ExperienceOz make sure that people really do experience Australia when they're here?” Connell said.

“So even if there's less people, they still contribute to the community and those guys can be ready for when Australia's back at 100 [per cent], which is probably still a couple of years off.”

The opportunity for the CMO of a group of brands is to see what one can do with their power combined. While there are no current plans to launch a media business – that would favour big businesses, not their smaller suppliers – there are digital opportunities to seize.

“From an opportunity perspective, you start to think about, well, personalisation being the buzzword of the industry, but to really capture the experience economy. How do you understand the people that bought the experience, that received the experience, that went on the experience to be able to do different things in that space?” he said.

“How do you for our suppliers but also for ourselves and the experience can we gather data? There is no one single source of truth on what's happening in the experience economy at the moment, but I hazard a guess that between us, we’re sat on all of the insights that could tell that story in the same way that some tourism bodies have used to really help small businesses back to growth.”

In the meantime, there are partnerships with tourism bodies like Tourism Australia, potential acquisitions on the horizon and joint ventures and partnerships to explore.