Knight Frank's APAC marketing chief Wendy McEwan departs

Wendy McEwan, APAC head of marketing and digital for property group Knight Frank, has left the company after over two years, joining UiPath as chief of staff for Asia Pacific and Japan. McEwan (pictured) leveraged Knight Frank's client service and long-term relationships to deliver connected customer experiences across developed and emerging Asia. According to her LinkedIn, she also explored the changing nature of the broader real estate industry through the intersection of people, place and technology alongside the complex movement of wealth and capital across the world.

McEwan was previously customer experience and marketing strategy director at Oracle Asia, where she worked closely with senior executives on how to transform their business model, people and processes to deliver better customer experiences. She also helped build Oracle's customer experience strategy and go-to-market plan for the region, adapting the requirements needed to cater for both developed and emerging digital economies. McEwan has also previously worked at CBS Interactive, ExchangeWire.com and mig.me, where she managed teams experimenting with innovation, dealing with disruption and building community.

McEwan told MARKETING-INTERACTIVE that after twenty years of selling to marketers, she found it humbling to actually be a marketer for the last two years. 

According to McEwan, one of the highlights of her time at Knight Frank was the brand's last pre-COVID live sales offsite in Manila at end 2019, which she felt was a great way to onboard into the business while curating the program and event experience. Another memorable experience for her was learning how to produce big production digital events on the fly, when she was tasked with building and executing webinars via virtual event platform ON24 within a week of receiving the login last year.

During her time at Knight Frank, McEwan learnt that at the end of the day, everyone is a seller and a marketer. "I’m a big believer in building a brand through the people of the business and I feel there continues to be misalignment in how it’s possible to drive growth through connected customer experiences for a business. Where businesses are yet to digitalise their data and connect across information silos, opportunities like next best action are much harder to identify.  Aligning sales and marketing is easier with connected data and attributable touchpoints across the customer journey," she explained.

From her personal experience, McEwan said marketers can build a good relationship with stakeholders by finding ways to simplify the complex and learning the language of the stakeholders they wish to engage with; such as learning their KPI's and how what they are doing is going to help the stakeholders be successful.

With a plethora of marketing and sales tech tools in the market, marketers might fall victim to the "shiny new toy" syndrome and find it challenging to determine which to select and implement. According to McEwan, marketers should not be afraid to meet vendors and vendor partners. According to her, much of their job is to help educate the market, be open to hearing the pitch or attend vendor roundtable sessions and hear from their customers.

"Find online academies and training tools to help upskill yourself and your team on what’s possible with technology and tools on the market - many vendors offer training and the opportunity to utilise the product to some extent, don’t be afraid to try," she explained.

She added that brands should invest in building a peer community within their business, across borders and across industries and learn what works for them and how they did it. Marketers should also listen to podcasts and follow thought leaders in the space - either on marketing tech, brand building or lead generation - depending on what works for their business.

Join our Digital Marketing Asia conference happening from 9 November 2021 - 25 November 2021 to learn about the upcoming trends and technologies in the world of digital. Check out the agenda here. 

Related articles:
Wendy McEwan departs Oracle Asia to head Knight Frank's marketing in APAC
Knight Frank makes management appointments for project marketing team
Knight Frank Property fires associate after clips emerge of harassment of train commuters