KPMG names Jarther Taylor as marketing director for Australia
Seasoned marketing veteran Jarther Taylor has been appointed as the new marketing director of KPMG Australia.
Joining the professional services firm at the end of last year after nearly two years heading up customer experience agency Datarati, Jarther Taylor has now been announced as KPMG Australia’s new marketing director – described as a key member of the firm’s Brand and Engagement leadership team. Taylor brings over two decades of marketing, CX and sales experience to the role.
“We are delighted to welcome Jarther to head up our renewed and reinvigorated marketing function,” said Margaret Cowle, KPMG National Managing Partner for Brand & Engagement. “A seasoned and innovative marketer, Jarther has led transformation and CX initiatives both as an internal champion and as a consultant. His experiences helping organisations to deliver differentiating experiences across multiple channels will be a great asset as the firm continues to grow and we our brand, culture, data and technology to support our clients create value.”
Starting out for three years between Sydney and San Francisco as an account executive with Saatchi & Saatchi in 1996, Taylor has since held brand, advertising, and marketing leadership roles with Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, IBM and Telstra – the latter where he was where he was General Manager for Marketing at Telstra Business for four years following eleven years at IBM, where he ultimately served as Group Marketing Executive for Global Business Services
From Telstra, Taylor took up the chief executive role at Datarati in 2017, adding adjunct professor duties at UNSW as part of the faculty delivering the university’s Executive MBA programme – of which he himself is an alumnus, together with holding a bachelor’s in design from the University of the West of England and having undertaken studies in strategic marketing at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
“I’m excited to be part of the leadership team that will transform how KPMG goes to market through integrating brand, marketing and customer experience,” Taylor said of his latest challenge. “KPMG is a dynamic, forward-thinking organisation that is working with clients to make an impact. Being part of that is thrilling.”
Taylor is joined by former Telstra colleague Steven Daskalakis, associate director of marketing for KPMG’s management consulting business, who crossed to the firm last year amid a raft of high-level recruits to its marketing function – further including former Publicis CEO Andrew Baxter as a senior adviser, and industry veteran Sudeep Gohil as head of brand strategy, who previously served as the CEO of now Accenture owned agency Droga5 in Australia.
In addition, KPMG last year added customer experience and innovation consultancy UDKU (U Don’t Know Us) to its Customer, Brand and Marketing Advisory (CBMA) business, which was formed in just 2017 and has since expanded to more than a 100 professionals, including other high profile senior names such as Karen Halligan (from Zenith), Carmen Bekker (J. Walter Thompson), Amanda Hicks (Acuity), Justin Gurney (Publicis) and Lisa Bora (Google).
