Corby Spirit and Wine Limited

Maria Sweeney currently serves as the Brand Director at Corby Spirit and Wine Limited. In her role, she is responsible for establishing vision, direction, and culture for the broader organization. She oversees portfolios of Brands across various categories, consumer occasions, and target segments to over-deliver share targets and value growth. Additionally, as a Coach, she manages a team of 8, overseeing the development of annual and long-range plans and execution of campaigns across multiple channels, measuring their success through post-campaign evaluation and ROI.

What are the major challenges and trends impacting the brand management space?

Fact-Based Marketing is one of the most popular marketing strategies in today's business landscape. Due to the exponential growth of digital technology, businesses need to market their services more efficiently than in the past. In the past, when there was limited competition, conventional marketing strategies were enough to promote goods or services. However, today, things are different.

“Evidence-based marketing has developed to adapt to modern consumer needs and choices as a result of marketing techniques keeping up with contemporary technology.”

Companies now use evidence-based or fact-based marketing, one of the most efficient methods, not only to sell their products but also to make them available to potential buyers. This marketing method, which has recently gained popularity, strives to boost ROI and streamline promotional procedures. Evidence-based marketing has evolved to adapt to modern consumer needs and choices, driven by marketing techniques keeping up with contemporary technology.

This strategy has also enabled us to measure marketing campaign results, set business goals, and define their metrics. It relies on theoretical knowledge, relevant audience and customer research, and results. Additionally, collecting data and presenting it accurately is crucial to measure the marketing metrics. Businesses must be very careful and proactive about obtaining information and using this process. They must also have the competence to make changes in every possible situation.

How do you identify the effective tools that are beneficial when it comes to the core capabilities of managing a brand?

The effectiveness of measuring metrics in marketing is one of the most interesting uses of marketing technology. The challenges, as well as opportunities that we see through that, is that it is very much focused on the effectiveness of the media channels. Yet it can't layer in the creative and cannot isolate the creative against the efficiency of the boss. Hence, it gives us a one-dimensional view of effectiveness, which can be limiting our ability to have competence in making decisions just based on the technology recommendation.

What are the technological and process elements that you’ve leveraged to make a project successful?

The marketing software technology at Corby is implemented from a global structure, and we’re using it to provide some interesting perspectives on how we look at measurements across different media vehicles and the levels of appropriate spending across the year eventually. This enables us to optimize more information and gain more clarity. It’s about balancing what the data is supporting in terms of information with experience in the intuitive decision-making process.