Mint Marketing

17/09/2026

A recent study has revealed t that two thirds of business buyers would rather get through a purchase without talking to a salesperson, and nearly half used AI somewhere in their last one.

Our co-founder Alice Moore is joining Indicator Live on 22 September to talk about what buyers look for while they're researching you, why your website has become the reference document AI tools quote from, and how sales and marketing stay on the same party line.

Tuesday 22 September, 11am, online via Zoom. Link in comments

15/09/2026

The results are in from the Mint AI Champion Awards. We have invested a lot in AI over the past 18 months and we've also invested in our people adopting AI because we are strong believers that AI is nothing without human expertise driving it. Shayne, our CEO put together the Mint AI Champion Awards to celebrate the great things that happen when expert humans utilise AI for the benefit of us, and most importantly, our clients.

Results:
🥇First prize: $1000 awarded for commercial impact - winner: Alison Van Minnen, Head of Media
🥈Second prize: $500 awarded for a time saving solution - winner: Deb Filmer, Website Optimisation Strategist
🥉Third prize: $250 People's Choice award for making something fun for the team - winner: Georgia Jeffries

11/09/2026

Opinion piece from our Co-Founder, Alice Moore.

We've built more than 300 websites over the years, and for the most part, we've found that service providers never put their pricing on their site (for lots of valid reasons). But in the age of AI we now find ourselves in, we might need to...

The big change is that now, when someone asks Claude or ChatGPT how much something costs, the answer gets built out of whoever published pricing on their site. If you haven't, you won't get a mention. And obviously if someone is asking about pricing, they're a pretty keen buyer and you want a bid!

This is something I've been thinking about since AI really took off, and I've finally had time to sit down and write up my thoughts + what the research says. I've also got some advice for those businesses who are at the premium end and would rather not publish pricing at all.

Link in comments 👇

07/09/2026

We're hiring a Project Manager at Mint, a newly formed role based in our Christchurch office.

You'll be the person our client managers and delivery teams rely on to keep projects on time, on budget and through the quality checks before anything ships to clients. You'll take an agreed scope at handoff, turn it into clear prioritised work for the web, creative, marketing and strategy teams, run the weekly workflow and resource planning, and pick up scope creep early enough to flag it for a variation. You'll work hand in hand with our client managers, so the work we've promised turns up the way we promised it.

We're after someone with five or more years managing projects across web, digital and creative delivery, ideally agency side, who's as comfortable talking to a developer about a technical blocker as to a creative about a brief. Whoever takes it on gets to build the operational backbone for how we deliver, and shape how the role grows from here.

Link to Seek listing in the comments 👇

03/09/2026

We're hiring a Client Manager, for either our Christchurch or Auckland office.

You'll be working across our strategy, creative, digital and web teams to help our clients achieve their business growth objectives.

We're after around three years in agency account management with the commercial thinking to keep projects profitable and the organisation to juggle a few at once without dropping the detail.

A bit about us: we ranked in the top 5% in the world for team culture in an independent survey, and Deloitte's Fast 500 has named us one of the fastest growing agencies in Asia Pacific four years running.

Links to Seek ad in comments 👇

Know someone who'd be great at this? Please send it their way.

27/08/2026

Have you been to One NZ Stadium yet? We've just wrapped the first phase of a virtual tour project for Venues Otautahi and One Stadium, starting with their event spaces so planners can walk through a venue online before they ever set foot in it.

Since 2015, we have been using Google Street View technology to capture virtual tours. For One Stadium, it means anyone booking an event can get a proper feel for the event space, the layout and the flow before committing. This is just the start too, with the full venue tour coming next as part of the wider rollout.

26/08/2026

Havas asked 87,500 people about 2,400 brands and found that 84% of them sit in a state of "consumer indifference", where people don't dislike a brand, they just can't bring it to mind when it's time to choose. The brands that do create genuine desire are 2.4 times more likely to grow, hold 87% more pricing power, and are up to four times more likely to get surfaced by AI when someone asks it for a recommendation.

Our Senior Strategist Kerry has gone through the research and written up what it means for New Zealand businesses, where you're rarely going to outspend the big players but you can still be the brand people actually want.

Worth ten minutes if you're planning next year's marketing, link in comments

25/08/2026

24/08/2026

Brand is back! (But did it ever really go anywhere?) Havas research from Cannes this year found 84% of brands sit in what they call consumer indifference, where people don't dislike you, they just can't bring you to mind when it's time to buy. Les Binet reckons that's what years of chasing leads and return on ad spend gets you. Performance marketing finds the customers who are ready today, and brand builds the ones you'll need next year, a bit like a savings account you keep forgetting to pay into. We've written up what the research means for New Zealand businesses, link's in the comments.

18/08/2026

A wise strategist we work with says that the size of the strategy should be dictated by the size of the problem.

It sounds obvious but it explains a lot of what goes wrong with marketing strategy and why a small plumbing business ends up with a 70 page strategy document. Totally overcooked. When a business already has a clear picture of who it sells to and why people buy from them, a directional overview and a well built plan will do the job nicely. When a business genuinely doesn't know why its customers choose it, or whether it's even talking to the right ones, that's when the bigger strategy piece earns its money, because planning tactics without those answers is just expensive activity. We sometimes refer to it as "random acts of marketing".

Strategy and planning get used interchangeably far too often. The strategy sets the direction, the why and the what and the who. The plan is the action, the how and the where and the when. Plenty of businesses have paid for one and walked away assuming they got both.

Most New Zealand businesses are small and moving quickly, so what they need is a strategy sized to the actual problem and a plan they can start on Monday. A strategy that is too big and never turns into action is a waste of everyone's time and money.

So before you sign off on the next strategy piece, get clear on what the problem actually is and how much thinking it genuinely needs. Sometimes the answer is a lot and often it's less than you'd expect, and the rest of the budget is better spent on doing.