Interview: Cassia Bennett-Burkhardt

With a strong marketing background, inquisitive nature, and open mind, Cassia has achieved a lot in her career. Read Cassia’s story, including why she chose a career in marketing over animals, what she’s working on, and what she hopes to be doing in 2022, in our latest Industry Women interview.

Please provide your name, job title and company name.

Cassia Bennett-Burkhardt, Digital Marketing Specialist, Hettich

How long have you spent in your current position?

1.5 years. I started in a lockdown, and I am responding to this in a lockdown. So that’s a neat circle…

What job did you have before your current role?

Previously I was a Marketing Manager in the health & safety industry, and prior I worked for a digital marketing agency.

To date, what has been your career highlight?

Every time I look back at my career I can see many highlights, but I can also see that the more time passes, the more I get to do work I enjoy and feel proud of. I think there will be even bigger highlights to come!

Who have you admired or learnt from the most in your career and why?

I mean, you should really learn something from everyone. But I have learnt the most from managers who have trusted me with a job I hadn’t done before, but they’ve believed I had the skillset to do; the Agency Director at my first digital job, the CEO of my first in-house marketing role and my current Managing Director, Rob Deed, in my first role marketing products as opposed to services.

Are you doing what you thought you’d be doing when you were younger? If not, what type of job did you expect you would have?

Actually, I was planning on making like Noah’s Ark and having two of every single animal. As it turns out, not a viable career choice. And you can’t own a tiger in New Zealand without a license. 

In all seriousness though, marketing plays to a lot of my strengths and it’s no accident that I’ve ended up here!

What do you think is the most important quality or skill you need to succeed in your current role?

Something that is important and valuable in marketing is that you keep proactively learning; you follow industry news from several different sources, you read or discuss other people’s experiences and you constantly look to validate or improve your knowledge.

What’s one thing you hope to achieve this year, either at work or in your personal life?

From a work perspective, my major goal is to launch Hettich’s new end consumer and designer focused website. This presents a different approach to how we give our customers and partners the best tools to specify and install Hettich’s products, and we hope it will become really valuable as time goes on.

On a personal level, this year is about doing the mahi to (hopefully) reap the benefits in 2022! I’ve just signed up with a team of close girlfriends for the Oxfam Trailwalker 2022 and the training schedule has just started. I specify the training schedule because I have certainly not started training, but I guess I better because 100kms is a very long way. And I hope to achieve that – training – this year.

Do you have any tips or advice for those just starting out in the industry?

Look at what those around you are doing and keep learning from it.

To be successful in marketing or sales it always helps to look not only at what people are doing well within the industry, but more broadly too. Understanding what good marketing within your industry looks like is important in understanding what your customers expect, understanding what good marketing looks like everywhere else could help you exceed their expectations.