Patrik Hansson, CMO of Arla Foods, has spent the period since joining in 2022 leading a marketing transformation at the dairy cooperative. Speaking on The Marketing Week Podcast, he reflected on how he laid the foundations for long-term growth — and why the function had lost its way.

"We got stuck in too many discussions about delivery services or capacity utilisation, which is of course a big part of the business marketing role, but doesn't mean the other thing is not equally important, and still needs to be nurtured," Hansson said. The business, he admitted, had a "hard time creating magic" for its brands.

His diagnosis: the marketing team needed to reconnect with "real marketing" on top of its commercial responsibilities. He laid out four takeaways from the turnaround.

Become the CEO of your brand

Hansson's career began in finance at P&G before moving into marketing at the FMCG giant. One lesson stuck with him throughout his career: "You become the CEO of your brand." That means "everything" from supply chain to pricing to sales "sits within your ownership".

"That marketers need to be business owners, and not only marketing marketers," he said.

Arla has "strong business-oriented marketers", similar to P&G, he noted. But the company had "somehow traded off" the business side against the marketing side. "We got stuck into too many KPIs," he said.

That imbalance spurred the transformation. "People felt that they needed more of that consumer centricity, storytelling, magic of creating brands, because that was ultimately why most people went into marketing to start with," Hansson explained.

Marketing owns long-term growth

"As a marketer, you are the only function that can drive long-term growth for the company," Hansson argued. "This was something that I aligned with my CEO very early in the [transformation]."

While marketers naturally "come up with short-term plans", over a decade it is marketers who can take a company "from A to B", he said.

"That is something that finance is not very good at. It's something that supply chain has a hard time doing, and there's only one function in the company that can do that, and it's marketing, in combination with communication," he said.

To bring the team along, leadership had to "instil a pride in being a marketing organisation".

"If you're a marketer, you develop the future of the company, and you have that task from the CEO, and therefore that means you need to be brave in where you try to move the company, so you're not only getting stuck in the short-term, but have a long-term perspective on where you want to go," he said.

End "remote controlled customer centricity"

One of the biggest changes at Arla concerns how the function approaches customer centricity. Hansson found the team was overspending on "customer service and tests" and relying on what he calls "remote controlled customer centricity": "you get reports and you read it, but you don't go out and talk to people, you don't go to the homes."

That approach misses the "richness" of true customer insight. Relying solely on surveys means "you lose a lot of opportunities", he said.

Hansson built a customer centricity programme that sends the team out to visit customers. "We set up a structure for that. We've done a lot of customer immersion trips and days with our organisation," he said.

The habit still requires reinforcement. "It's still a little difficult to find the time for doing that, so we still need to continually remind people that this is basically an essence for making great work in today's environment," he added.

Arla has also expanded its insights team to act as a stronger partner for marketing, aiming at "better consumer understanding, better innovation, and we see better communication". The insights may not always be comfortable — the team is "asking difficult questions early in the process" — but, he said, it delivers "better results at a faster pace".

One way of marketing

"It's difficult to run a marketing function globally if there is not one common way of doing marketing," Hansson said.

Over the last decade, more tools and distractions have "crept in" to the function, "all with good intentions" from previous marketing leaders, though some missed the mark. New hires also bring tools from previous employers, meaning teams in different markets "might be using totally different tools".

"It was very difficult to navigate," he reflected, "and sometimes the tools were relatively complex and sometimes contradicting each other."

Hansson instead created "one way of doing marketing" so that "when we talk about marketing fundamentals, we use the same templates, jargon, ways of working". The team cleared the deck and simplified the toolkit.

"We had as a mantra, 'it needs to be simple'," he said. "It needs to be concise and while we cannot solve everything, it needs to solve the necessary things."

Source: Marketing Week (https://www.marketingweek.com/you-develop-the-future-of-the-company-arla-foods-cmo-on-establishing-marketing-transformation/)