Volkswagen’s Anders-Sundt Jensen ‘Doesn’t Need To Reinvent The Wheel’

The head of global marketing communication at the second-largest car manufacturer in the world steers the brand towards “reaching out to people generating ideas.”

Volkswagen is the second-largest car manufacturer in the world. For the past 18 months, it has been dealing with the diesel issue around compliance with emissions standards. But away from the headlines, the company is in the process of changing its approach to marketing-becoming more customer-centric and always-on in its communications and investing heavily in targeting and predictive marketing.

Anders-Sundt Jensen is head of global marketing communication for the Volkswagen brand. He’s been at VW since 2014 following 20 years at Mercedes Benz, which culminated in him being head of global brand communications there from 2008 to 2013.

He spoke recently to CMO.com, and the first thing we discussed was the way VW is reorganising its marketing department.

Jensen: We are organised around processes now. We are going very deeply into being consumer-centric, being always-on, being where the consumers are, which leads to the fact that we have one communication and media planning department. We channel all our activity from the very beginning via our media plan before we even start talking to our creative agencies.

The second department is content management, where everything we do in the field of content is consolidated. We have an edit process where all the key players sit around the table and make an annual plan, and, of course, for all kinds of communication activities we have a team caring about what kind of content we intend to produce.

Fifteen years ago we were all happy to talk about 10-year integrated communication plans and about 360º communications. Today it’s completely different, because we need to be very targeted. We can’t afford to be in areas that miss the target, which again means we need to be very careful about the planning process upfront.

Then the third part of my responsibility is what we call internally Volkswagen Live, where we have all our partnership activities, sponsorship activities, auto shows, events, and also what we call branded entertainment-all of our engagement activities, which are much more directed today towards creating content for social storytelling.

It’s a very simple structure. Everything is tied to each other. But it’s a different way of working to a lot of other car companies.

CMO.com: How does it work across the different regions?

Jensen: We have global responsibility. We have the final word because it doesn’t make any sense if everyone creates their own content. That is what goes for the classical campaigning part at least-the launch part-and a lot of other occasions that go hand in hand with the different kind of offers we introduce to the market.

CMO.com: Have these changes flowed from a rethink of the company into the marketing department? Or has marketing led the thinking in terms of a new digital approach?

Jensen: The role of marketing and the marketer is changing. Marketing has always been an interface and the translator between the market and a producing unit. However, marketing today is much more than that. It’s directing a company in the right direction.

If we are very honest, we have been doing data-based marketing for decades. The biggest difference is today we have an ocean of data. We have a completely different possibility to source data, to combine data, to make data transparent, to build up correlations than we did in the past. That has very clearly changed the way we work.

Here you come to a huge challenge for all big, established organisations. You will never manage to change your people completely overnight. There is a very simple sentence that says: “You have to change the people, and if you can’t change the people, you have to change the people.” But you can’t just push the button and change them all or just throw half of them out because they don’t fulfil modern requirements. It doesn’t work like that. You have to have a continuous process of changing mindsets following up on that change process. That is something that marketing drives.

The company itself needs to understand this isn’t just a question of process, and systems, and digitisation. It’s not just a sales and marketing thing. This is something that has a huge influence on the complete company. It doesn’t help if we start changing the way we communicate or even changing the offer downstream if we do not also change our processes upstream. The complete organisation is touched by digitisation.

CMO.com: What do you think are the key marketing challenges faced by the automotive industry and by VW in particular? How are you thinking about those challenges?

Jensen: The automotive industry is very special due to the fact that we have been developing innovations and technical solutions within the businesses for 100 years. We have initiated demand and brought offers to the market.

Today it’s completely different. Suddenly we are faced with the challenge that innovations and ideas do not necessarily need to be developed by us. We can learn from others. That means we need to relax a little bit about being the most intelligent people in the world and believing that we are the only ones who can create innovations.

CMO.com: When you talk about the customer-centric approach, what are the particular challenges that creates?

Jensen: One of the biggest challenges is speed-time-to-market-because big industrial organisations need to split up. We need to find ways of taking decisions much quicker. We need a quicker response to developments in the market.

CMO.com: How are you attempting to address that challenge?

Jensen: It’s actually a corporate question. I can only do my part, which means safeguarding the people who really understand how the market works and what people’s needs are. I can only do that by working together with market intelligence and consumer insights, and by being very data-based in what we are doing in terms of real-time communication, dialogue capabilities, and directing the offer to the right people at the right time.

On the one side, the technical solutions and the way people are responding to specific issues and to our activities is a huge challenge. On the other side, it’s a huge chance to be more targeted than we have ever been.

CMO.com: How is this notion of being always-on manifesting itself in Volkswagen?

Jensen: Always-on means that we are changing our overall process and moving into the structure that I talked about earlier. It also means that we are shifting our focus down the purchase funnel.

The funnel has changed a lot but the steps are still the same: awareness, familiarity, consideration, and triggering. We know that when we target our communication activities or our offers, more than 40% of those considering us also buy us. That means it’s better to put our money into activities that are directed at people in the consideration phase than spending all of our marketing money on awareness. We have changed that significantly. Almost 40% of our media spending already goes on consideration, and it could be even more in the future.

When we talk about predictive marketing, I’m convinced that, within two to three years, at least one-third of our media spending globally will be in the field of predictive. That means suddenly you have a marketing department being much more data-driven and working much more analytically.

CMO.com: The other thing I wanted to talk about was partnerships around innovation. What is your process for looking outside the business for new ideas?

Jensen: It is an area where we’re starting to open up in terms of becoming a harbour for startups. We do a lot of hack-a-thons. We work with different kinds of institutions. We have a lot of different co-operations established.

The most important thing is that internally we are in the process of establishing how to reach out to people generating ideas, who have ideas but don’t have the possibility to scale them.

The world is so transparent and you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. There are so many good examples out there you can look at. You need someone to screen them, so we work with people who screen. We work with people who give us great ideas. And, of course, we develop our own ideas.

The most important thing, however, is again that you start working in the field of mental change so that people open up and start saying they’re happy with not-invented-here.

CMO.com: How do you encourage that change?

Jensen: Only by doing it over and over again. Of course, you have a lot of frustration as well. People have ideas that are not being implemented, so it’s easy for them to start saying: “I had a good idea and it hasn’t been implemented, so I don’t feel like generating ideas any more.” You need a trial-and-error culture, and that takes time to establish.

CMO.com: How do you see your relationship with your agencies changing?

Jensen: The traditional agency setup that companies have will not survive. We need a completely different setup. That has nothing to do with Volkswagen; everyone who wants to market something needs a completely different setup.

You see today that the borders between media, media buying companies and creative agencies, analytic agencies, digital, social-you name it all-are getting more and more grey-shaded.

One of the questions I ask the CEOs of the big agency networks is why they haven’t started to bring it all together and offer me something which the world hasn’t seen today. That means combining everything and giving me the possibility to get everything from one source. I don’t really care what that agency is called. And I know very well that they will also work for others. I just need to see that I have the best possible team. And due to the fact that we represent such a huge volume of possibilities for a partner, I am also convinced that I will get the best possible treatment.

Very clearly, the way we work with agencies will change within the next year, in certain areas fundamentally.