Stockholm Symposium: Old brick brewery sets scene of marketing innovation

The old München­bryg­geri­et (The Munich Brew­ery), a mas­sive red-brick palace of build­ing, sit­u­at­ed on the water of Söder Mälarstrand with an unbeat­able view of Stock­holm City Hall, dou­bled in the blank reflec­tor pool of the nar­row coastal inlet of Rid­dar­fjär­den. A pret­ty decent set­ting for this year’s Adobe Sym­po­sium in Stockholm.

New dis­cus­sions in old settings

Foot­ball super­star Zla­tan Ibrahimovic’s cloth­ing line, inter­act­ing with mil­len­ni­als and cre­at­ing engag­ing online videos. These were some of the top­ics addressed by 400 of the Nordic region’s top cre­atives and mar­keters as they got togeth­er to dis­sect and recon­struct the future of the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, cross-chan­nel mar­ket­ing and of course, data-dri­ven marketing.

World Class cus­tomer expe­ri­ences for Zla­tan Ibrahimović’s A‑Z.com

As one of the world’s pre­mier foot­ballers is branch­ing out with his own line of fit­ness clothes and acces­sories, it is it obvi­ous that his A‑Z.com brand has to pro­vide the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence matched by his foot­ball prowess. A great ses­sion on how to build a brand from scratch and how to real­ly lever­age real-time online mar­ket­ing to dri­ve success.

One fun anec­dote from the brand build­ing process was when Zla­tan reflect­ed on the name A‑Z.com: “I like it. It com­mu­ni­cates that there is some­thing for every­one, from Ama­teur all the way to Zlatan”

Pandora’s no to the Expen­sive Old Organization

Cus­tomer Devel­op­ment Man­ag­er Hei­di Mejl­by Hem from the Dan­ish jew­ellery com­pa­ny Pan­do­ra, talked about the chal­lenges on com­mu­ni­cat­ing in a unique way to every cus­tomer when you have mil­lions of them and your prod­ucts are sold in thou­sands of shops all over the World.

One of the key learn­ing from Pan­do­ra was “New Tech­nol­o­gy + Old Orga­ni­za­tion = Expen­sive Old Organ­i­sa­tion” – you have to rethink the orga­ni­za­tion in a new way when deal­ing with dig­i­tal transformation.

Sarah Örhwall on dig­i­tal trends

Some­one had to take the lead with­in AI and Big Data dur­ing the day and keynote Sarah Örhwall, one of Sweden’s dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion experts, was the most evi­dent advo­cate. After Sarah’s ses­sion there was no doubt that we will all be affect­ed by arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, both pro­fes­sion­al­ly and pri­vate­ly, very soon.

Sca­nia towards social engagement

Eri­ca Zan­delin from Sca­nia explained the strat­e­gy behind the devel­op­ment of the recent­ly-launched Sca­nia web­site to build an out­stand­ing new cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. Eri­ca also detailed how new data on cus­tomer inter­ac­tions led Sca­nia to trans­form its media strat­e­gy, shift­ing focus towards social engage­ment and away from tra­di­tion­al channels.

Swedish adver­tis­ing pow­er­house Fors­man & Boden­fors led the audi­ence in a dis­cus­sion on how to cre­ate engag­ing online videos today. Unfor­tu­nate­ly we did not get the mag­ic recipe for suc­cess, because there is not one. It is all about hard col­lab­o­ra­tive work and using the data avail­able to make the best pos­si­ble choices.

“Dig deep and be one team”, said Johan Oliv­ero, copy­writer at Fors­man & Boden­fors after walk­ing us through the glob­al hits of Vol­vo Trucks’ “Jean Claude van Damme’s epic split” and the grip­ping “Left­over Women of Chi­na” cam­paign for a Japan­ese cos­met­ics com­pa­ny aim­ing for the Chi­nese market.

The four ele­ments of expe­ri­ence business

Through­out every ses­sion it was clear how new tech­nol­o­gy is chang­ing the mar­ket­ing indus­try and that we now real­ly are in an expe­ri­ence busi­ness econ­o­my. How­ev­er, if you were to break­down what expe­ri­ence busi­ness actu­al­ly is, as Adobe’s John Wat­ton did, you could find all four part to the concept.

So what is the first step in becom­ing an Expe­ri­ence Busi­ness accord­ing to John Wat­ton? You have to start by get­ting a “sin­gle view of the cus­tomer”. This was some­thing that clear­ly was put into prac­tice by Jonas Nys­tröm, CRM Oper­a­tions at retail­er Clas Ohlson, who spoke about how the com­pa­ny start­ed all of its cam­paigns with one clear ques­tion: “Who is our cus­tomer? – That’s where we need to start”.

The sec­ond step is to ana­lyze and get insights into key audi­ences, a state­ment evi­dent­ly sup­port­ed by cre­ative copy­writer Johan Oliv­ero from Fors­man & Boden­fors. Who pin­point­ed the fact that the first thing you need to do is “dig deep” and get insight in to your tar­get audi­ence, not just in the plan­ning phase, but in all instances of the cre­ative process.

The third step in becom­ing an expe­ri­ence busi­ness is to “deliv­er the right con­tent seam­less­ly across chan­nels”, some­thing def­i­nite­ly adopt­ed by the Varn­er Group when launch­ing A‑Z.com with only one objec­tive in mind – to pro­vide a world class cus­tomer expe­ri­ence across all channels.

The fourth and last part of the expe­ri­ence busi­ness is to “make the expe­ri­ence con­sis­tent, com­pelling and con­tin­u­ous”. This was some­thing every speak­er addressed in many dif­fer­ent exam­ples and sce­nar­ios, how­ev­er Axel Schäfer put it all into one pot dur­ing his keynote where he led the audi­ence on the whole cus­tomer jour­ney — from anony­mous prospect to loy­al advocate.

Sign­ing off

All in all, a tru­ly inspir­ing day, real­ly touch­ing the heart of the chal­lenges and pos­si­bil­i­ties of online mar­ket­ing, both today and tomor­row. See you next year!