THE FLAVOUR OF NEW ZEALAND

After cutting her teeth in marketing departments of locally-owned and operated organisations, it’s not surprising Jo Mitchell, McDonald’s NZ director of marketing, was unsure of the role she would play when she joined the global restaurant group.

But what she found was autonomy, rather than a job heavily prescribed by global management.

“People think there’s some golden rule book that gets handed down from global and that’s so far from the truth,” she says.

“We do our creative here, we do our planning about what we are going to bring to market, we do our customer and market research and we do some product development.”

While completing her bachelor of management studies at university, Mitchell developed a passion for marketing, with a love of its creatively-driven strategy.

She described her entry into