Appetite for disruption

Egos are in check and management boundaries are clear insist the fast-talking, high energy duo of Henry Innis and Mat Baxter in a market-shifting move which sees Baxter take on the APAC CEO role for Mutinex officially from tomorrow.

A “marginal gains” philosophy using processing power and AI to uncover and discover incremental growth improvements inside a business at scale and pace is the new mantra from the Mutinex mavericks who want to become the “world’s leading growth decisions platform”.              

But already the lines have blurred with the Innis and Baxter remits in tackling the US market – a point Innis shrugs off with indifference: “If I was worried about titles and all that stuff I’d piss off to a holding company”.

Baxter says Innis is “probably the most opinionated person I’ve met, certainly in the top two or three and up there with me”, but both say they’ve gone deep “between each other personally” at the behest of Innis mentor and Deloitte Digital global marketing and commerce lead, and one-time Clemenger BBDO CEO, Nick Garrett. 

“Henry’s young, ambitious and wants to rule the world and I love that – it’s why I’m joining. But he’s the product guy. Where we need him is on the product and to free him up from all the worrying about account management all the other important operational stuff. I want every every waking hour of his life to be doing what he does best: making a world class product that beats the shit out of all our competitive products.”

But equally, Baxter says he wanted to work with someone “intellectually, commercially and philosophically challenging and who’ll tell me I’m being a dickhead….yes Henry’s opinionated, yes he’s difficult, yes we’re going to come to blows, but God he’s smart and I’ll get pushed to places that I’m not used to being pushed than in a more conventionally-scaled agency network business.”  

Baxter says he had at least a dozen conversations with various players – including other start-ups and agency networks – but landed on Mutinex as the only option he wanted. “This is a product company … we don’t sell people hours, it’s the product that creates the value,” he says, echoing his views last year in Mi3 where he outlined why agency groups charging on a head hours basis would ultimately see AI break their business model. “I’ve talked about the need ad nauseam to pivot from people and hours to product and outcomes,” says Baxter. “This is a product and outcomes company.”

Plus, he says the product is good enough not to have to dress it up. Not always the case, per Baxter.

"Most of the time in my career, whether it be for clients or the businesses I've worked for, I've been given a product that was far from ideal, and I've had to accommodate and make up for that imperfection or under delivery through packaging and wrapping and other components to the role that I was going to play ... This is a truly transformative product that I can work with."

For his part, Innis is in wild agreement on Baxter’s worldview and their respective strengths.

“We have different superpowers and we both recognise that,” says Innis. “My superpower has always been product and working on the engineering and data side. That is what I've built over my career and [co-founder] Matt Farrugia has helped me build that as well. Mat [Baxter’s] superpower is packaging – not just what something looks like but how something feels, how you engage with things. It's every single touch point that sits around a product. If you want to be world class, you hire the best person in the world at that – and that's Baxter.” 

'Blow shit up'

Innis too insists he wants people to tell him he’s wrong and articulate why sharply. “You don’t hire entrepreneurial people to constrain them – you hire them to partner with you and make you fantastic so you can reinvent and blow shit up together.”

And blowing shit up is what both fast-talking execs have in mind. They want to redefine the company and the category it operates in globally around market mix modelling to predictive growth analytics. It’s a position and capability Innis and Baxter say leaves their competitive set and the traditional research sector in trouble – current MMM models are slow, sometimes up to six months behind the market data that’s fed them – and not granular enough. That is, they won’t get down into specific channel and tactical ROI comparables for brand owners who operate the Mutinex platform internally. 

Innis and Baxter argue rivals don’t have the tech prowess to match where Mutinex is headed in its global ambitions to allow commercial teams, typically led by marketing leaders, to use the platform to “process and predict” their data for multiple, incremental growth scenarios across a business.

“Nothing in marketing now gives you 50-60-70 per cent upside” says Baxter “because the marketing orange has been juiced to such an extent that it is the incrementality of many, many things combined that gets you a compounding effect to transform brands from stagnant or even declining brands to a growth brand. You need a platform and a system that gives you the frequency and the granularity to make those decisions and to plan those scenarios out. It’s the margin gain philosophy. And we're not talking about a comparative product or system here with Mutinex. We're talking about something that is a leapfrog product. It’s going to absolutely disrupt the global research industry and it’s a big reason why I joined. Mutinex is a transformative business and most importantly for brands. You don’t get this come along very often.”

Innis concurs – he argues data is hardly tablestakes in today’s business environment – it’s using it predictively in business scenario planning. “We wanted to level up our business and our business community to actually move beyond just being a pure play data business, just it being a pureplay, MMM business and move this platform of growth to the mainstream and really start to drive it to be the world's leading growth decisions platform.”

Baxter says Mutinex is an Australian company that doesn't just “disrupt Australia it disrupts the world” and market research and analytics, he says, is one of the most “conventional, legacy-embedded industries” in the market. “The global research industry, quite frankly, is overdue for disruption. It’s why I’m pumped about this business and why I’ve invested.” 

Big ambitions, big personalities, big game plan – now for world domination if these two execs and the Mutinex coders have their way.