Building Engaging Consumer Experience: Tech-Driven Personalization at Scale

Nataliya Chichkova will talk about how L’Oréal leverages AI and data to personalize consumer journeys. She will discuss cases to exemplify how the organization leverages AI and Generative AI to create targeted and relevant content. Nataliya will share insights and challenges on:

• Moving towards one-to-one marketing and higher level of personalization of consumer journey – the approach to creating targeted and relevant content while taking a responsible approach to consumer data
• Leveraging Beauty Tech – using AI to reformulate products and augmenting consumer care with Generative AI
• Working with Gen AI taskforce to deliver the right content within a personalized funnel and adapting it to different generation’s needs and behaviors – approach and dilemmas
• Why organizational setup is the key to success with AI and data – and the need to de-silo the organization, enable visibility across the funnel, and collaborate across functions

Building Relevance and Creativity After 90 Years

For the past 90 years, the LEGO Group has been driven by its mission to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow. While encouraging children to learn through play, the LEGO Group continues to blend innovation with tradition and remain not only relevant, but pioneering in a constantly changing landscape.

Turning the Brand Around – Doing Things Differently and Maintaining Momentum

Torsten Brodt will talk about the journey of taking a Deutsche Telekom brand back to growth. He will discuss the key role of collaboration and doing things differently in making the project a success in a risk-averse company. Torsten will share learnings on:

• The approach to driving brand growth – getting the board’s support, changing mindsets, and taking a customer focused approach
• Setting up a cross-functional team – bringing siloed expertise from development and marketing to sales in one room and working in value streams in contrast to the organizational practices
• Taking smart risks to turn the brand around and influencing customer’s price-value perceptions
• Moving away from long-standing practices of NDAs for projects – and making projects announcements to entire sales department ahead of media announcements
• Maintaining momentum by creating a playbook with chapters in lieu of a stand-alone project or campaign to shape the market, increase customer satisfaction, and keep internal drumbeat
  

Reimagining Corporate Branding – Getting Buy-in and Leveraging Storytelling

Hannah Bernard has led Avery Dennison’s enterprise branding project from its inception two years ago. She will talk about the journey of building and launching the initiative in September this year. Hannah will share insights on:

• Framing corporate branding – from key challenges to reimagining brand perception and matching future ambitions
• Getting stakeholder buy-in and taking the organization on the journey – and leveraging employee storytelling
• Taking a with human led marketing approach and combining inside-out and outside-in perspectives
• Lessons learned

Key Practices to Transforming Commercial Capabilities – and Pitfalls to Avoid

Stefan Stremersch will talk about how organizations can transform their commercial capabilities. He will discuss the pitfalls to avoid and share practical strategies companies can leverage to build competencies and adapt to the fast-changing environment

• The factors fueling the transformation of commercial capabilities – from market complexity to the rise of AI
  
• The common pitfalls that can make commercial capability program ineffective – and how to avoid them from governance through needs analysis to engagement
  
• The approach to take in creating a commercial capabilities program that enables teams to succeed in an everchanging context

Customer Insights – The Roles of Marketers & Innovators, and the Need for Training & Sharing

Stefan Stremersch will lead on a lab on how to optimally use customer insights to supercharge the front-end of innovation. He will introduce some of the most powerful yet often overlooked methods to put voice of the customer in the innovation process. This will be followed by group discussion:

The lab participants will learn and work on the following:

• Examine how effective their organizations’ current methods are – and where to improve
  
• Understand how to drive intuition based on small data and leverage crowdsourcing to really learn about customer behavior and opportunities
•  Learn how to activate Gen AI for needs discovery
  
• Leverage the ‘customer insights wheel’ to foster collabortaion and leverage intuition across areas including co-creation, imaging, and observing

Driving Commercial Success through Change – Leveraging Integrated Marketing, Customer Experience and Gen AI

Kunal Mehta will discuss how dsm-firmenich drives brand growth and commercial success through a seamless blend of offline and online touch points, while navigating through the B2B value chain challenge. He will share insights on managing change the agile way while delivering results, including on:

• The B2B value chain challenge and how to overcome it
• Managing strategic change internally and externally to deliver consistent experience
• Operating through a complex digital platform landscape for smooth integration
• Building blocks to driving annual marketing plans and initiatives
• Audience Mapping, Customer Target Portrait and Content Strategy
• Use cases of AI in marketing and beyond – and the AI challenges to gear up for

From Strategy to Scaling Success: Leveraging Team Collaboration & Data Systems towards Purposeful Account Engagement

Julia Kurtz will talk about Henkel’s approach in Industrial Adhesives to creating interconnections between different functions. She will detail the rationale and the approach to developing and implementing Strategy to Business. Julia will also discuss how the organization developed a digital tool to steer sales in a strategic way. She will share learnings on:

• Addressing the challenge of strategy fragmentation across functions – building Strategy to Business as an umbrella process to make a single person accountable for the entire process until the sales takeover
  
• Moving towards interconnections and having the Strategy to Business owner working closely with the different functions including innovation, marketing, and sales
• Bringing the process to life – having very clear roles and responsibilities, and managing challenges
• Developing a tool for integrated steering for sales – taking a strategic angle to direct resources to the most attractive opportunities
  

Lessons Learned on Leveraging Mixed Media for Brand Growth

Gianluca Toccafondi will talk about how IKEA leverages mixed media to drive growth. He will discuss key elements to driving growth through mixed channels, including the importance of continuous experimentation and internal capabilities. Gianluca will share insights on:

• The journey of collaborating with media partners to creating dedicated resources for delving into the nitty gritty of digital media
• Learnings from mixed media modelling – the need to include TV, and build a set of capabilities internally
• Insights from practical applications and deep dive – why digital media can only do a part of a job for a brand, and how to get to the level of reach and creativity that enables growth
• Leveraging continuous experimentation to build a strategic perspective on mixed media modelling – and setting up media and creativity teams at national levels
• Lesson learned including the need for C-level support, why not to overinvest in performance marketing, and more
  

Flexing Marketing Competences – Transforming the Organization and Changing the Ways of Working

Bill Law will talk about Volvo Construction Equipment’s approach to reorganizing the entire marketing setup around competencies and projects. He will also touch on how the organization embeds a holistic purpose-driven perspective into brand initiatives. Bill will share learnings and challenges on:

• Transforming a traditional organization with direct reports and structure into a flow-oriented organization – shifting from a hierarchical into a flexible network- and topic-based system and ways of working
• Building centers of competences and setting up temporary teams around projects – taking a demand and supply approach to creating solutions and driving entrepreneurial and flexible mindsets
• Pivoting to dissolve a digital marketing center of competences and embed digital within all centers
• Engaging brands with purpose – and extending brand activities beyond customer-centric perspective and towards a holistic stakeholder one
• Lessons learned including the role of leadership, the importance of ways of working over organizational setup, and more
  

Building Bridges – Customer Experience, Insights, and Engagement

The panelists will discuss how to leverage customer insights to create seamless and engaging customer experience. They will share learnings, experiences, and challenges in leveraging data, aligning engagement strategies with customer expectations, and building impactful customer experience.

Tackling Dilemmas: Learning How to Spot Contradictions and Deal With Them

Thomas Ritter will lead a lab on dilemmas and contradictions. He will briefly introduce the issue of which dilemmas leaders need to solve and to make tough decisions about. Thomas will start the lab off with a short teaser dilemma. This will be followed by group discussions.

The participants will learn and work on the following:

• Understand how to spot and analyze dilemmas and contradictions
  
• Share and discuss in groups dilemmas from their respective companies
  
• Work in groups on improving contradiction leadership
  
• Harvest discussion results

Brand as Growth Driver – Changing Mindsets to Unlock the Brand as Value Generator and Taking a Data-Driven Approach

Annika Payn will talk about KONE’s journey to building a strong brand. She will discuss the approach to driving change and getting people to see the value of a strong brand within a traditional engineering company. Annika will share insights on:

• Building the brand from discovery phase through setting the ambition to execution
  
• Managing change internally and shifting mindsets – getting people to understand the benefits of a strong brand
  
• Taking a data-driven approach to get leadership support and unlock the brand’s commercial value
  
• Lessons learned from the journey, including the need to get buy-in, build competences, leverage data to demonstrate value, and more

Building Bridges – Customer Experience, Insights, and Engagement

The panelists will discuss how to leverage customer insights to create seamless and engaging customer experience. They will share learnings, experiences, and challenges in leveraging data, aligning engagement strategies with customer expectations, and building impactful customer experience.

Innovating with AI-in-the-Loop — Framing and Structuring Projects with Gen AI

Dan Kraemer will lead a lab on how organizations can leverage Gen AI within their innovation process. He will introduce frameworks that can facilitate structured thinking and integration of custom Gen AI tools and AI agents. This will be followed by group discussion.

Participants will learn and work on the following:

• Understand how to integrate Gen AI into innovation approach in a structured way
  
• Work on defining a use case where AI agents can create value for customers or internal teams – and the value the use case would create for the business
  
• Frame and structure the use case project for AI agents by identifying tasks for AI agents and the tools needed for the AI agents to deliver on those tasks
  
• Harvest exercise results

Supercharging Innovation with Generative AI – Expanding Opportunities, Generating Insights, and Increasing Speed to Market

Dan Kraemer will talk about how companies can integrate Generative AI into their innovation approach. He will discuss how to incorporate new capabilities and tools to identify more hypotheses, expand thinking, and increase speed. Dan will share insights on:

• Interweaving Generative AI into the innovation process – making ideas less linear, expanding the thinking, and increasing speed across the innovation funnel
• Leveraging Gen AI to identify unmet needs and creating synthetic customers to test solutions
• Taking an agent-focused approach to AI with multimodal models to think more holistically and fill in blind spots
• Advantages and benefits of leveraging AI for new ventures – from generating instant insights from qualitative and quantitative data through greater data accessibility and solution validation
• The changing role of innovators as curators and co-pilots of innovation – and the critical role of culture in leveraging AI successfully

Building Bridges – Customer Experience, Insights, and Engagement

The panelists will discuss how to leverage customer insights to create seamless and engaging customer experience. They will share learnings, experiences, and challenges in leveraging data, aligning engagement strategies with customer expectations, and building impactful customer experience.

Playing the UX Blackjack – Exploring User Experience Perspectives

Niko von Saurma will explain the unique UX Black Jack card game in more detail and play a joint card game with all group attendees. No worries, everyone will win!

Thinking Differently about Customer Value – Innovating Beyond the Product, Leveraging Passion and Empathy

Organizations can easily fall into the trap of building solutions that fail to deliver for the customer and the business. Daniel Cho will talk about how organizations can think differently about delivering on customer value drivers. He will discuss the limits of AI and automation and the crucial role of empathy in solving customer pain points. Daniel will share watchouts and best practices on:

• What it takes to create customer-driven innovation – from why solving a portion of the customer’s problem isn’t enough to considering the solution and customer maturity
• Ensuring AI and technology serves customers in the right way – solving human problems with empathy and passion with AI and tech as an enabler
• Why innovating on the product alone doesn’t cut it – and how to innovate on commercialization and deliver on promised outcomes for the long-run
• Addressing customers’ pain points with a new subscription model – creating real value for customers illustrated with examples

Building Profitability into Value Propositions from the Concept Phase

Customer driven innovation starts and ends with customer value in mind. This exercise will engage participants in examining how innovation development links to core customer value drivers. Participants will work on a provided case to identify key value drivers that impact buying and pricing decisions. They will translate product features into customer value, to then quantify the value for each segment and use it to develop the price.

Building Inclusive Innovation Based on Real Customer Problems and Long-Term Thinking

What happens when we write “Innovation Department” on a door. Do we encourage the rest of the organization to innovate or stand back? How to create an inclusive innovative culture in an organization that is based on inclusive design. Example of intrapreneurship at IKEA Home smart. Bilgi will talk about failures and not only success in this session. Some lessons learned:

• Finding fantastic problems rather than fantastic solutions for lasting success
  
• Inclusive innovation both for innovators and the customers by eliminating idea ownership
  
• Prioritizing user outcomes over business outcomes with the power of UX
  
• Celebrating failures – before during and after a project

Design Thinking Crash Course – Launching Design Thinking In Your Organization & Effectively Training Mindsets

Camilla Damgaard-Soerensen will lead a design thinking crash course where participants will experience and learn the method as well as get a taste for the most important design thinking mindsets for their organization. Camilla will also discuss how to get started with design thinking in your organization tomorrow.