CMO of the Year: 

Marketing must transform to new reality

By Rikke Sternberg, Corporate Journalist, SAS Nordics 

As part of the quest to fulfil its customer promise, to help people achieve their ambitions by making daily banking and important financial decisions easy, Danske Bank has intensified its focus on advanced customer insights and the capability to act on this knowledge. Group Marketing is in the middle of this journey, led by Director of Group Marketing & Communications, Jeanette Fangel Løgstrup.

When Jeanette Fangel Løgstrup became head of Group Marketing & Communications at Danske Bank in 2014, she knew she was joining an industry, which was challenged in many ways. Waning customer approval ratings and rapid digital innovation meant that banking as an industry and bank marketing needed to reinvent itself. Jeanette Fangel Løgstrup decided that this would be her next professional challenge.

Since then, she has helped gear the marketing department in Danske Bank embrace a new reality in which conceptual creativity and long-term campaigns take a backseat to real-time marketing tactics based on customer interactions.

In January 2017, she received the Danish CMO of The Year Award for her efforts and skills across the marketing and leadership disciplines necessary to steer a modern, customer-focused brand.

We caught up with Jeanette for a talk about the changing role and tasks for marketing professionals in the digital age.

On marketing’s changing role: “Many of us ‘grew up’ as marketers learning to build brands and campaigns in collaboration with advertising agencies. Generally speaking, our role is becoming much more specific. From spearheading long-term, broad campaigns, today just as often it is our task to help shape the actual customer experience across touchpoints and deliver tactics just in time. Due to changing customer behaviour and a more fragmented ecosystem of channels, it is a new way of working and it is transforming marketing organisations.  It takes new competencies and to some extend a different, more analytical mind-set as well as people with technological expertise. We also have to collaborate very closely with other parts of the organisation to ensure a coherent customer journey, and although of course we still work with external agencies, going forward it will probably be even more important to make sure we are aligned with our own IT department and their capabilities”.

On organising for excellence: “Our approach is to create Centres of Excellence within the marketing organisation in order to ensure that we foster deep knowledge in core areas such digital marketing, CRM and 1:1 marketing. The analytical capabilities in our marketing Centre of Excellence is definitely growing, and when we need a stronger analytical muscle, we collaborate closely with Bjørn Büchmann-Slorup and the analytics Centre of Excellence team”.

On her focus as CMO for 2017: “We are in the middle of a major transformation as a marketing organisation, learning to work much more on the basis of ongoing customer insight. Our most important task is to help make it attractive to be a customer at Danske Bank. At the same time, we have to find the right balance in terms of using personalised information – our customers must never feel uncomfortable or unsure about how we use their data. That said I do see a generational difference. I believe that younger customers will have a different relationship, even different expectations of us in terms of the relevance we have to be able to offer. This is a very interesting challenge going forward.”