Marketing With Academic Depth
What happens when your Founder and Creative Director also teaches marketing at university level? You get thinking that goes deeper and output that's cleaner.
Katie O'Rourke is a Teaching Associate at Southern Cross University, where she shapes the next generation of marketers across the Lismore and Gold Coast campuses and online. She currently teaches Strategic Marketing, Digital Marketing, and Marketing Research, and has previously lectured in Marketing Principles, Marketing Communications, and Consumer Behaviour. Outside the marketing curriculum, Katie has helped facilitate mindfulness programs for SCU students, helping them navigate the pressures of university life with greater clarity and resilience. It's a small detail that says something bigger about how she approaches everything she does.
Her qualifications include a Bachelor of Business majoring in Integrated Marketing Communications from QUT, a Graduate Certificate in Research Management from SCU,. She has also applied that thinking at scale, leading the Guido van Helten integrated marketing campaign for SCU's own marketing team, a campaign that reached more than 23 million people and counting. Read more
University level marketing and business level marketing are not the same conversation. At university, you go deep. You pull apart consumer behaviour, stress test strategic frameworks, and understand the evidence behind why things work. It's rigorous and expansive.
At a business level, none of that complexity can show up in the deliverable, but it is there nevertheless underpinning the strategy. A client needs a roadmap, not a research paper. The thinking has to be deep and the output meets the brief, be it simple, actionable, relevant, emotive, dynamic, sales-focused and more. That crossroad is where Katie operates and it's a rare place to be.
Marketing Manager Lauren Duguid brings that same balance to the CAKE team. With a Business degree majoring in Marketing, she operates with the same fluency between strategic depth and practical clarity that defines everything CAKE delivers.
CAKE turns the complex into the clear, delivering a guidance to our clients that is easy to understand, easy to hand to a team, and built to move.
Ready for marketing that delivers more?
Let's start the conversation.