Smart Looks to Nail Proposition and Inject “Personality and Energy” into Salary Sacrifice Category

Salary sacrificing business Smart is undergoing a five-year-long “business-wide transformation”, led by newly-appointed marketer Nikita Mehta, whose first priority is hunting for new customers.

Nikita joined in November as general manager of marketing after almost five years at Afterpay, where she was senior director of marketing across AUNZ. Her remit at Smart is to “create a single destination for our customers and to just simplify their customer experience,” she told LBB. 

That started with a rebrand launched late last year with agency partner M&C Saatchi, which saw “five or six main brands, running different, slight[ly] nuanced product offerings” but operating in the same category consolidated into one master brand: Smart. That single platform will allow the business “to have a bit more fun with our ideas and how we bring it to life.”

“There was this immediate win to go, how do we simply bring these five separate brands into one banner that's easy to communicate to our customers,” Nikita said, noting a significant portion of customers for salary packaging or novated lease services are frontline workers and government employees.

Ben Harrison, the managing director at Re, the branding agency part of M&C Saatchi Group, said the brief was bold: create one go-to market brand that was “easier, clearer, and more intuitive.”

“We started with two key pillars: a strategic proposition for the brand and a new brand architecture to unify everything under one roof. The goal? To elevate the customer experience, making it more valuable and user-friendly across the board,” he explained.

“Naming was the next step, and luckily, the answer was right in front of us. Smartgroup already had the perfect asset: 'Smart'. It’s short, memorable, and does a lot of the storytelling for us. It stands for smart choices, efficiency, and ease, everything the brand is about. 

“More than a name, it became the mindset that shaped how we talk about every product and service. Sometimes the smartest move is recognising the gold that’s already there, that's what we did.”

Ben acknowledged the biggest challenge was the category’s complexity and dryness. Smart’s competitors all “had the same stale and complex tone, boring experiences, and endless stock photos,” so Re focused on leveraging existing brand assets and “injecting some much-needed personality and energy”.

“Smartgroup has a significant job ahead of operationalising the transition of six brands under one banner,” he added. 

“But this work lays the foundation for bringing the vision to life: making salary packaging simpler, smarter, and more engaging, and transforming it into something that inspires real behaviour change and ultimately growth and progress, both for them and for their customers.”

Behind the scenes, the business is building its tech capability and operational rhythms, and transforming its product pipeline.

“Then the next step is 'How do we now start to build our communication strategy, our loyalty and advocacy frameworks, our growth strategies for new product development and new customer acquisition in the future, and then how do we bring that through our employee value propositions within the business?'” Nikita said.

“I was part of the same journey for HCF health insurance, which was my role prior to Afterpay, where we did exactly the same thing. The whole business went through a significant transformation, and marketing and the brand aspect of it was front and centre.”

She has her sights set on creating and rolling out a “true connected B2B2C proposition”.

“It all starts with our relationship with the client and the employers, and then, of course, translates into a dialogue and a connected experience with the employees or our end customers, who ultimately get the benefits.

“So running that continuous cycle between the client and the customer is a great, fascinating model that I really want to supercharge next year. It's what I used to do at Afterpay. That was my bread and butter.”

She arrived at the business without category experience, after finishing at Afterpay last April and taking a career break. The marketer was attracted to the challenge of selling a “great product that just needs to be articulated in a simpler, more creative, more effective way, and just incredibly smart people trying to turn the business around and get it to a place that it's never been before.”

“To be on that transformative journey and be part of the leadership team to build that was too good to be true,” she said of the decision to join Smart.

In her first week in the job, a colleague observed that the business saves end customers - employees whose employers use Smart’s services - money, “‘because these are tax benefits that are available to them, they just don't know about it'. And I just thought, 'Wow, when is that ever a reality?' Everybody's living in this cost of living pressure.

“Here is this little nugget just hidden away that actually helps a lot of those Australians who are at that median level of salary and earning and really trying to make ends meet. And so to me, that purpose and mission is fantastic.”

To reach and educate those potential customers, her first priority is to understand them, versus becoming hyperfixated on the product.

“How much can you tell me about the customer we're trying to serve, and how do we currently get to them, and what are their pain points in trying to interact with the business?” she has asked her team.

“Where are we missing a beat around helping them realise the true value of what we've created here?”