Aegon’s CDO/CMO Bakker Creates New Marketing DNA

Robbert Bakker, chief digital officer/chief marketing officer at Dutch financial services firm Aegon, had a unique opportunity to build his department—its mission and culture—from scratch.

Dutch multinational financial services giant Aegon’s digital transformation includes creating a fully renewed and centralised marketing division, while also adding an entirely new direct selling channel.

It’s a huge task and one that is being led by chief digital officer/chief marketing officer Robbert Bakker, who joined the company as chief digital officer in 2013. He was previously director mobile marketing & online at KPN, the incumbent Dutch telco.

Bakker spoke to CMO.com recently, and he began by explaining the development of his role at Aegon.

Bakker: I started as chief digital officer for Aegon. Financial services companies are a bit behind telcos in terms of digital transformation, so my first task as CDO was to create a strategy for Aegon; not a digital strategy but a strategy covering all the digital transformations that were about to hit us.

If you look at Aegon—and most financial services companies are the same—we’re facing a transformation. In the old days, we produced complex products—because we thought the world was complex. If you then look at the digital world, you need to digitise your processes to reduce cost, but also in distribution we face big changes as customer needs are changing fundamentally.

Customers choose their own channels, sometimes advisers/intermediaries, sometimes direct. It is up to us to enable customers to work with the channels of their choice, and enable those channels to maximally support customers in their needs. So, for example, we make digital tools for intermediaries available too. The customer is central in this strategy—regardless of the channel he or she chooses to organise his or her financial future.

We realised two things. Firstly, we couldn’t continue just using the indirect channel because customers more and more choose different channels next to intermediaries, leading to a rapid decline of the number of intermediaries. And we know that many customers want direct interaction with us. So we aimed to become an omni-channel company. Then, secondly, as customers go directly to Aegon, we need to fulfil needs instead of selling products. We needed to transform from a producer with a single product to a customer-orientated, multi-product, omni-channel company.

The funny thing is, after we’d decided to be a data-driven, digital, customer-oriented company, we needed a strong marketing department. If you are a producer, you can just produce something and give it to the distributor. If you talk directly to customers too, marketing is even more important. They need to understand who you are as a company, your brand, your values.

Often in a company, you create a plan, and the end-result is you get told to go and put it into action. So after agreeing the strategy, they said: “Okay, now you act upon it, and you are the head of marketing.” That’s how I became chief marketing officer.

CMO.com: So you created a fully renewed marketing function. Not many people have that luxury. Most people have legacy issues to deal with. What does your marketing department look like?

Bakker: We were able to build the department 80% new, with a little bit of legacy. We started with our mission, because we want people working for us who believe in it, and it’s the reason they get on a train or get in a car to go to work. That was the biggest luxury, being able to select people who wanted to work on our mission.

Then about a year-and-a-half ago, we talked a lot about culture. We recruited psychologists and did a lot of interviews with companies like Google, Booking.com, and Disney—leading companies in either digital or customer orientation. From that we created our required DNA. We want fact-based marketers who really want to help customers achieve a lifetime of financial security. We want marketers who understand how you can read data, what you can do with data, how you can optimise selections based on data, how you can do A/B testing, etc. It’s different from a lot of marketers from 20 or 30 years ago.

Thirdly, we combined product management, marketing, and the online channel in one department. In the old days, you created a product and then you gave it to the marketing and sales channels to market and sell. Now our online channel is part of our marketing unit, so we do it the other way round. We have the online marketer looking at what the customer needs, and at products that are so easy to understand that we can introduce them in the online channel. We’ve changed the way we create products. We start with the customer, translate that to the needs of the online channel, and we add marketers to that channel, and, in the end, we create solutions that customers understand and want.

By doing that we could also flip the way we introduce products and solutions. We use the principle of Minimal Viable Product (MVP). We put MVP solutions on the market via the Web and test whether they’re successful. If they’re successful, we build them, instead of building something and then seeing whether it works.

CMO.com: That’s a radical departure for a financial services institution. People expect financial services companies to be conservative and slow-moving. Did you have any customer pushback to this approach?

Bakker: Not customer pushback, but I must say my risk department had some hesitations at first.

CMO.com: How did you overcome that?

Bakker: Luckily, I have a CEO who believes in this approach. And by our fact-based approach, which convinced the departments to support our strategy. Another important reason we are able to do this a little bit is because we recruited a lot of new people, of which a big percentage is of young, more risk-taking people.

CMO.com: Can you give an example of something you’ve developed that way?

Bakker: A nice example is our new car insurance under the Kroodle label. We started with the Kroodle website and said: “This is our product, do you like it?” We had a hundred customers. It seemed there was a little bit of demand, so we went ahead and built it. We brought out USB sticks that you can put in your car that show the way you drive. I had one developer, one product manager, and one online marketer. They developed an app in six weeks based on this USB. It used a current product and gave a discount based on your driving behaviour.

CMO.com: Is this now the accepted way to develop products in the company?

Bakker: We see it working because we decreased our spend on this particular product development by up to 80%—partly because you only use what’s there, but also because you stop a lot of development. Three iterations will show if something doesn’t make sense, or if there’s no demand. So within the marketing department we are convinced. Our CFO is extremely happy. Our CEO believes in this way of working. Of course, our approach is also challenged by various departments, which is good.

The biggest part of our digital transformation is not the technology, it’s the culture.

CMO.com: At the start of your MVP process, where do the ideas for new products come from?

Bakker: Firstly, we have an investment fund for new technologies. We have €100 million and we have a couple of people working there, and their job is to continually scan the market. Secondly, we have a couple of online marketers/developers who have the skills to develop new products.

You don’t need to invent the wheel; the reason for an MVP approach is because you can go to market faster. Ninety per cent of what we’re doing is not something we’ve invented ourselves, but something we saw in the market and thought maybe we can do something with it, or maybe, if we combine these two elements, we can create a unique solution. We are not a lab that is creating completely new stuff. We just look around and try to do it better.

CMO.com: But you actually have a dedicated function monitoring new developments to be able to say: “This and This. Let’s put them together?”

Bakker: One of the most important lessons I’ve learnt over the past two years is that the smartest people don’t work for your company. The problem with big organisations—and the bigger the organisation, the bigger the problem—is they think they need to invent everything themselves. That’s nonsense, because 99% of all the smart people in the world don’t work for your company. Use that smartness and be able to connect with other solutions, be able to connect it to your brand. That’s how you can create speed.

CMO.com: You talked about building a brand—how important is brand to you?

Bakker: In this world, where we have more and more solutions, where we have more than a million apps in the app store, what matters is the quality of the brand. In the end, the brand will be the company, and the company will be the brand. There is no distinction between the two as people need somebody they can trust in this world. Everything is changing, and there is a lot of abundance. But who is going to guide you? Having not only a strong brand, but a brand that people trust, is the only way to survive.

CMO.com: How do you feel about this idea that the customer experience is the brand? That at every touch point you are building your brand?

Bakker: Everybody has direct interactions with customers, and the frequency of those interactions is increased by digital. So I believe that customer journeys are a big part of the brand, but it’s a combination of everything the customer sees that builds the brand. I don’t believe that the customer journey alone will create strong brands that customers will trust.

I was in California recently. Have you seen the number of ads that Apple places? Everyone says: “Apple is only about design and customer experience.” Yes, and they also run a lot of advertisements.