Gloria Jean's Marketing Manager: "AI Will Never Be Able To Replicate That" | Michael Marr

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:56:07 -0300

TALKs Season 1, Episode 2.

Michael Marr is Marketing Manager at Gloria Jean's, part of Retail Food Group. Now operating 100+ stores across Australia and 600 more internationally in a highly saturated market, Michael’s background spans wine, spirits, the world's first fashion hotel at Versace, and a run of Gold Coast properties with IHG.

In this episode, Michael talks about what a sales background does to the way you build campaigns, why the best marketing sits close to the salespeople, what's working in QSR right now, why Gloria Jean's grew by taking items off the menu, how you hand a brand to franchise partners across 33 territories without losing it, and the one thing he's certain AI will never replicate.

00:00 Intro

01:33 The Jimmy Choo x Midori campaign that kickstarted Michael’s marketing journey

02:47 Gold Coast, Versace, and the world's first fashion hotel

03:36 IHG and the importance of storytelling

04:04 Coffee: a global category and a saturated market

04:33 What a sales background does to the way you market

07:34 What's working in QSR: innovation that creates conversation

08:51 Local and community marketing behind a national brand

10:06 Menu architecture, and why they stripped items out to grow

11:11 Going global: handing the reins to franchise partners

14:30 Future-proof skills and the one thing AI will never be able to replicate

17:22 The future of QSR: personalisation without losing authenticity

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TALKs is a podcast about marketing

Every episode is a long conversation with a marketing leader about what's going on in their world right now: the trends shifting their industry, the challenges specific to their market, and what all of it means for marketing more broadly.

Along the way we get into how they got to where they are, what they're building now, and the things they learned the hard way.

Hosted by Cooper Jitts, Founder of Talk Agency.

Subscribe so you don't miss the rest of the season.

Talk Agency:

Talk Agency - https://talkagency.com

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/talkagency

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/talkagency/

Talk Agency Founder: "It's Not A Demand Problem, It's A Clarity Problem" | Cooper Jitts

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:52:44 -0300

TALKs Season 1, Episode 1

These are TALKs: a series of yarns, chinwags, musings and the occasional hot take about marketing. Hosted by Cooper Jitts, Founder of Talk Agency

Recorded in London, episode numero uno puts our host, Coop, in the hot seat, talking about the reasons that marketing gets harder as a business grows.

What we get into:

• What businesses think is causing their marketing problem, and the most common misdiagnosis

• The three things that break marketing: unclear ownership, slow decisions, misaligned execution

• What it looks like inside a company where nobody owns the outcome

• The growth stage where it usually breaks

• What changes first when clarity actually lands, and how you'd know

• Why marketing gets harder as a business gets bigger, not easier

• Whether the UK market has the same problem as Australia

PLUS, the first step for a founder who resonates with any of this.

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