Sparkling new era dawns for jewellery giant Michael Hill

ASX-listed jewellery retailer Michael Hill has taken its new brand to market. The Growth Agenda meets its makers.

Miranda Kerr will front Michael Hill's campaigns for 18 months as its new brand ambassador

Michael Hill’s new global flagship at Melbourne’s Chadstone shopping centre has marked a pivotal moment in the company’s 45-year history after a three-year-long brand and business transformation of the ASX-listed jeweller, company chief marketing officer Jo Feeney has said. And this moment is an indelible one for the business, as it embarks on a “new era”.

The flagship opening also followed a new advertising campaign launched in April starring Miranda Kerr, who will front the brand as an ambassador over the next 18 months.

Over the past three years, the company has been setting the foundations for a new phase of growth, which in many ways marks more of a return to Michael Hill’s heritage than a departure from it. Early in the process, the ­company dropped its price-led promotions that had dominated the marketing of the business for decades, and instead embraced its origins centred on the story of its founders, Sir Michael Hill and Lady Christine Hill, who established the jeweller in New Zealand in 1979.

A significant part of the ­jeweller’s recent transformation process included the appointment of Ms Feeney in 2021.

Ms Feeney, a former McDonald’s marketing director, mobilised a team of top creative talent, including creative advertising agency CHEP Network, who were tasked with repositioning the brand to be viewed and experienced as a more contem­porary and prestigious jewellery retailer.

The decision to drop the prices from Michael Hill’s commercials in 2021 was one of many small but pivotal early decisions that came from Ms Feeney, which now ­ladder up to what customers are seeing from the brand.

“Jewellery is a very emotional category. It’s a very personal gift, either to yourself or to someone else. I’m a very big believer in emotion in advertising and making people feel something,” Ms Feeney said.

Michael Hill chief marketing officer, Jo Feeney

The scope of CHEP’s work covered an extensive brief across Michael Hill’s entire brand identity, including its website, packaging design, a bespoke fragrance for the flagship and in-store music.

The agency has also advised on the development and design of new products, and has created recent TV adverts, such as the Christmas commercials which align with the jeweller’s peak trading period.

CHEP Network’s national head of design, Christian Hewitt, said of the firm’s scope: “It was from ­button to billboard … it was across everything. It’s a testament to Jo that she understood that she needed to connect all the dots. If you do something, and it’s just a shallow thing and you come up with a new piece of advertising, but you don’t change anything else, then customers aren’t going to buy into that. They can see through it,” Mr Hewitt said.

The change to the Michael Hill brand is intended to endure in the long-term. “When we did our design work, we made sure everything was rooted in a brand truth. And we didn’t chase trends or fads,” he added.

For instance, the new colour palette takes inspiration from New Zealand’s landscapes that inspired Lady Christine Hill when the brand started. The “brand mark” is also a tribute to the much-loved window displays that Lady Hill designed and made the stores famous in New Zealand. Michael Hill also engaged The General Store, a retail-focused ­creative agency, to deliver the Chadstone flagship.

The three-year rebrand effort has offered a critical prologue to bring the business to this point.

“Three years ago, we could not have done what we’re doing today. We weren’t in the right place. We hadn’t earned that right, from either our current customer or our growth customer,” she explained.

It was around a year into the rebrand that Ms Feeney said the business “recognised the need for a total brand change, not just a small change.”

“It was a total business transformation that we were embarking on. We started rethinking some of our products. ESG, whilst it’s been important for us, really started to take more centre stage for the brand as well.”

Whereas “change” can be daunting to even the most seasoned of executives in a shaky economic climate, it is understood the opportunity to take the Michael Hill brand in a different direction has not only been well-supported but championed within the business, particularly as Ms Feeney demonstrated the efficacy of the early creative efforts to reposition the brand in the market.

Ms Feeney proved, for example, how advertising was starting to change how consumers felt about the Michael Hill brand. Ms Feeney told The Growth Agenda in late 2023: “Using advertising to showcase modern and unique products rather than being price-led has increased the rate of our target customers who feel we have modern unique products by 18 per cent”.

Over the past four years, the company has also said it is gaining market share in the category, and has recorded a 30 per cent growth in average transaction value.

“It was change that we chose, but it was change where we saw growth [and] where we saw the opportunity,” Ms Feeney explained.

CHEP Network executive creative lead Christy Peacock has worked with Michael Hill from the very early stages of the rebrand process. “It really came down to just a small group of like-minded people understanding that for the brand to survive, it really needed to change. And the way it needed to change is where it ended up. This isn’t about mass marketing. This is quite the opposite. It’s about emotional marketing, and building that emotion to then drive reappraisal,” Mr Peacock said.

The shift to emotive marketing also supports the introduction of newly designed products that now command higher price points.

“The idea of making a higher spend product comes about really easily when you’re in this ­emotional world. You’re not in a discount, ‘cut price’ world. You’re in a more emotive world.”