Here is a transcript generated by Otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with VeraContent’s Shaheen Samavati and Carlos Werner, on adapting to changes in marketing:

Shaheen Samavati 0:13
Hi everyone, I’m Shaheen from The Content Mix and I’m excited to be here with Carlos Werner, EMEA marketing director for ASSA ABLOY, which is a global leader in building ccess solutions. Thanks so much for joining us, Carlos.

Carlos Werner 0:25
Thank you for having me.

Shaheen Samavati 0:26
Yeah, it’s great to have you here. And just to start out, can you just introduce yourself in your own words? And tell us a bit more about kind of what you do and your background?

Carlos Werner 0:37
Yeah, so I’m Carlos Warner. I am originally from Brazil, which is a funny story of how I ended up working for ASSA ABLOY. I’m based in London. So I’m running marketing for the open solutions division. So ASSA ABLOY, I usually say it’s the largest company you’ve ever heard of. And I can bet that after hear the story, today, you’re going to see us absolutely everywhere you go in and out of—any building. So I originally studied engineering, but ended up making and having a very long career in marketing. I worked with companies like Bosch, Samsung Electronics, Ford of Europe, I worked in a smart home company in Portugal, I worked in consulting strategry at Kantar for few years in London as well. And then I ended up at ASSA ABLOY, which is a very interesting company. I’m having a lot of fun there. There is a huge task of bringing some kind of consistency around more than 100 countries that were responsible for. So I think we’re going to have a chance to learn a little bit more about ASSA ABLOY.

Shaheen Samavati 1:46
Yeah, very cool. Well, I mean, maybe you can already tell us kind of, I mean, what are building access solutions? What does that mean, exactly? What does the company do?

Carlos Werner 1:57
Yeah, so basically, you can find our products in homes, workplaces, schools, shops, airports, hotels, hospitals—every kind of building that you can imagine will have our products. So we’re talking about keys, locks, doors, hardware that goes into into the doors, into windows, up to even e-passports and identity solutions. So if you look at your company bag, it’s probably going to be ours. If you look at your keys, there’s a good chance that it’s ours. It’s basically providing access in and out of buildings and having people move in and out of places, having places secure. We usually say that our our purpose is to make the world a safer and better place. We give security and freedom at the same time to people to move around. So in a way, we don’t want you to notice that we’re there. But we’re making everybody with our products. So just take a look at your locks and there’s a good chance it’s going to be ours. The interesting bit is ASSA ABLOY itself is a name that is not that recognizable yet because we are a company that was built on acquisitions. And it’s a young company—it has less than 30 years as it is. Originally it was the it was a joint venture between a company called Assa in Sweden and another company called Abloy in Finland, and it was very successful. After the joined, they started buying and consolidating other brands around the world. So there were more than 350 acquisitions until today. It’s mind blowing. Still, today, we have more than. So even though you don’t see immediately that it’s an ASSA ABLOY brand, there’s a good chance that it will be. We’re talking about names like Yale, for example, in the UK, it’s going to be very big. In Spain, you will see a brand called TESA, which is absolutely everywhere. And the UK, Union in Germany effeff, in France it’s Vachette. Basically all the leaders in every country as part of our family.

Shaheen Samavati 4:00
Wow and you’ve only been there a year and you really have a lot of knowledge of the company already.

Carlos Werner 4:06
Yeah, I mean, it’s it’s smart that the complexity we have is mind-blowing—this is what makes it so interesting. One of our biggest challenges is to make this big ecosystem make sense and make it really competitive. And the interesting part of the story is also that we are in a very, very fragmented industry that is composed of very small and local companies all with, sometimes 100/200 years of history. Yale, for example, they were the inventors of the padlocks, as we know—they weren’t invented 180 years ago. We have other brands that are 200 years old. So we have such a strong legacy and history that is enjoined into a global global company that can bring all the efficiency and can make accessible and bring resources to continue the story. So it’s a balancing act of keeping going, keep this heritage alive and continue investing in innovation. So in we’re the forefront of identity solutions and smart homes. We have the best smart locks in the market, for example. And at the same time, we have all these products that are still working after 100 years in a historic building, for example, and we have the capability of modernize you have cases in cases of these century old universities that were equipped 100 years ago, and now they have to modernize and be completely secure. So we have a capability to work on these things.

Shaheen Samavati 5:41
Awesome. So you mentioned you’re working for like one business unit within ASSA ABLOY?

Carlos Werner 5:47
Yes, exactly. So we have five business units. The one I’m working in is called open solutions, which is the one that actually makes the locks and the keys. We have some others that focus a little bit more on hospitality and hotels. There’s one particular division that works specifically on identity solutions. More on the technology side, there’s another one that works on these huge hangar doors and rotating doors that you find on shopping malls and hospitals. My division actually focuses on EMEA. We have two sister divisions that focus on the Americas and on Asia, the APAC region. The reason for this is that each country has different specifications, different legislations, and usually a different set of brands that are present. So my division specifically works. And this, we call it in EMEAI because it goes all the way from the tip of Iberia all the way to India—it’s more than 100 countries that we work with. So it’s a very complex and rich, rich, rich region.

Shaheen Samavati 6:52
Wow. So can you tell us like what’s a typical day at work like for you?

Carlos Werner 6:57
I would say that today, it’s like most people, you spend most of the time in front of the computer behind the screen talking to everybody. On a typical month, outside of the pandemic, I would be traveling all around on the grounds with with regions today and basically talking to all the regions, we are working on lots of projects to bring common platforms and increase efficiency. We also work on lots of campaigns and marketing material that are done centrally so that the regions can localize. So it’s it’s a very broad and varied routine. With so many products in so many regions. It’s a balancing act of keeping consistency, leveraging local knowledge. So it’s basically a coordination role. At the same time, we’re producing quite a lot of content, quite a lot of material, that the region’s use, everything is rolled out either on social media and campaigns from the Salesforce. Bringing leads into the company. So it’s a classic regional marketing role, where you have like several layers of global marketing and regional marketing, local marketing, it’s that balancing act of, of trying to keep consistency and bringing efficiency with keeping the local identity of each of the countries and all of those arts and crafts. So it’s it’s a very interesting challenge. In a very, very wide job scope. There’s no routine. It’s even difficult to say what I do. When I explain to my kids what I do on a day to day basis, they would say like you’re on the computer writing emails and talking to people.

Shaheen Samavati 8:39
Definitely, but you’re working, I guess, with the sales teams across the region? Then you also have like your own team of marketers?

Carlos Werner 8:45
Yeah, we have a central marketing team that coordinates and creates the central campaigns. And we also work with the remote marking team. So we have dozens of markers around around the countries that on a matrix line, on the dotted line, they relate to us. So we coordinate some of the central campaigns, check for consistency, give them help. So our main challenge is to increase the capabilities of the country. So you can you can assume that you have countries with a very highly developed marketing team. You look at Germany, you look at the UK, where we have lots of big businesses. And then you look at the highly fragmented regions. If you start going into the Middle East, for example, if you start going to Eastern Europe, you have each one with 2030 countries with very small teams, sometimes you don’t even have a whole person taking care of the country, you have half a person. So the level of resources and even expertise sometimes varies a lot. So our main role is to support these, some of these regions increase the overall capability. January the central campaign so we make their lives easier. We don’t want 100 countries each wants to make their own campaigns and produce their own content. Sometimes they do, because they’re very specific things. And sometimes we produce these things sexually. So my team would produce these campaigns. And then we have very tight process for translation, localization. And we make recommendations of how they roll out, always respecting local knowledge and the local characteristics of each country. And lastly, I think the big big challenge is to take care of the brand portfolio. So we have a very complex brand architecture, with things like master brands and strong endorsed brands and soft endorse brands, independent brands, things like that we’re talking about more than 190 brands at the moment. So sometimes we have to rationalize these brands. And we have to, we need to make it make sense for the customer. And he has to know that every product from every one of those brands compliment and talk to each other. So we have huge initiatives to make our ecosystem ecosystem talk among each other. And we also continue to acquire new companies, we’re kind of in a crusade to, I wouldn’t say consulting the industry, but make the industry more competitive, as opposed to having a swarm of very, very small companies have one company that can actually address the big concerns and really push the industry forward.

Shaheen Samavati 11:22
Yeah, super interesting. And I was curious how you how do you use content marketing? And like, what kind of content are you creating and and who is it more?

Carlos Werner 11:33
This is a very technical industry, I would say. So we have B2C brands, like Yale, for example, so we’re targeting people like you and I that are able to buy a DIY product at the shop and install it yourself. We have brands for that, but the big chunk of the businesses actually on the construction business. So it’s very, it’s very regulated. We have fire regulations, we have all these things that the builders have to respect. And we have so many personas that we need to trust, we have specifiers, we have architects, we have builders, we have the owners, we have the users, we have the security consultants. So content is key for us. Because it’s so technical. We need to help them understand our products. At the same time, increase awareness, strengthen the brand, convey the trust that we can we can bring them and content is what makes this happen. So not only in form of campaigns that we would be making ads—were not the kind of brands because of the nature of our business that are going to be doing advertising on TV. But we need to be very present in the trade media and specialized media, on social media as well. Because if you think of locksmiths, for example, they’re all people that read Facebook and read Instagram, they’re on LinkedIn, they’re on all of those channels that we’re used to. So we really need to reach them and have a very strong digital presence—give sales, the tools to also convey central message. And this is part of our content production. So there’s a lot of thought leadership, about trends about what about what happening, we just issued, for example, a brilliant piece of research called “Wireless access control Report” where we talk to people, also—a lot of clients—and we try to understand what’s happening in the industry so that we can also help educate and be a resource to our customers. So content is king, and it is fact. Content production is the backbone of our marketing activity. That’s what brings in the leads and that that’s what makes people trust us. I love content!

Shaheen Samavati 13:54
Absolutely. Yeah. So I wanted to go to your like career journey a little bit I’d like in your background, and kind of, well, how you got into marketing in the first place and how you ended up coming to Europe. Just a bit more about your story.

Carlos Werner 14:11
So I mentioned I’m originally Brazilian, which is funny, and I studied engineering. So I ended up in marketing for some reason. I my first real job was was at Bosch, Bosch, Latin America. I worked with a lot of sales, working the automotive industry. I worked also in a few other industries that Bosch dealt with, and I ended up in sales doing a lot of a lot of product management. After that, I decided to do an MBA, at INSEAD in France. So I was traveling a lot to Germany while working with Bosch. This is kind of my link to Germany. My father comes from a German family my mother comes from from an Italian family so my wife is Portuguese actually. My kids are Portuguese, though they were born in Brazil. So I’m kind of a mixed person, half Latin American, half European. So I did an MBA in France and lived there for a year. After that I came to work in London, working for Ford. I spent some time working with electric vehicles, working with pricing and product specifications for launches like Focus, like Fiesta in countries like Greece, France, UK, and so on. After that, I decided to move back to Brazil. I joined Samsung Electronics, so I was head of marketing for the region, which is a very similar role of the one I have now. Samsung was a really interesting story. They had left Brazil, which is a huge market, they came back into the country. So it was a brand rebuilding exercise. It came from almost nothing to billions in revenue. So it was a huge, huge, growth story that I lived and I’m very proud of. After about seven, eight years, I decided to come back to Europe with my family and I worked a little bit any smart home startup, which was a very interesting project. And this is what actually led me to ASSA ABLOY away because it’s in a way it’s in the same industry. I also worked in London for for Kantar Consulting, so I had a glimpse into the fast moving goods, brands, which was a little bit different from the durable goods that I was used to working in. So because I’m an engineer, I always ended up working with either cars or products or construction, things like that. So it was very interesting to see how the fast moving products would think about branding, would think about the categories. And then ASSA ABLOY, this is… this joins everything. We’re in the construction industry, in the security industry, we have so many brands, we have such a huge challenge in terms of brand architecture and brand management. We have even a Greenfield of how to do marketing in this region, because it’s so fragmented, because there’s so many target groups that we have to address that sometimes we have to experiment a lot, we have to kind of come up with new forms of content, new forms of campaigns. This is not an industry that traditionally invests a lot. And at the same time with the pandemic, we see everything changing as well. So we were always on this digital transformation, crusade, changing things, rolling out these huge mobile platforms, making them available to the countries and at the same time respecting the century of heritage in this this local knowledge that we have that is really really rich and valuable for us.

Shaheen Samavati 17:50
Yeah. Yeah. I was curious on the digital transformation side, like how much has that been accelerated by everything that’s gone on in the past year, the pandemic?

Carlos Werner 18:01
Yeah, I think we got much better at working remotely. It’s interesting that my office is in, it’s in in Woking, close to London. But even when I was working in the office, most of my job was remote. So now that we’ ve really gone to remote, we had to up our game and everybody, I think, improved their skills. The cusp of the clients and the customers actually are more skillful in doing things remotely. We lost the ability to be in trade shows, for example, and having in-person meetings. So we’re in a way, we have to substitute this with richer and better content that is easy to consume. At the same time, it’s a constant war out there, we’re being bombarded more than ever. So we have this attention problem that we have to grab. Everybody has so much information flowing their way. So we need to be more than ever, very relevant for our customer. And we have to grab their attention, because we just can’t knock on their doors anymore. So things changed, changed very, very quickly. And in a way for the better because we’re so fragmented and spread around so many countries, that it made us more proficient in what we were already doing.

Shaheen Samavati 19:13
Yeah, absolutely. I was curious, like, specifically with social media. I know, like, a lot of manufacturing companies that were not very active in social media just a few years ago. I don’t know how, what’s the been the evolution? I know you haven’t been there that long, though. So maybe you don’t know what it was like before. But anyway, what trends have you seen there?

Carlos Werner 19:35
Yeah, I mean, we’re trying to get things more or better organized, because coming from such a fragmented company. In social media, in my last audit, I counted more than 300 accounts only in the immediate region, which is mind blowing—how can we, how can anyone manage something like this? So we’re trying to consolidate things, to better manage things, to use the capabilities of the platforms a little bit better. So that we can, we can appear as being a better—or not better organized—but a more global company that we have, or each of these brands have the perception to be. So things are changing very quickly for the better. That’s the bright side of all the things that happened. It gave us some time to breathe, and forced us to up our game. So it was, amongst the negativity, this was kind of a bright outcome for us I’d say.

Shaheen Samavati 20:32
Yery cool. And you mentioned, you’ve worked in like, several different industries. I mean, how does what you’re doing now compared to previously, like in terms of approach to marketing?

Carlos Werner 20:44
It’s…I mean, it’s, it’s interesting that sometimes we see things that have been done forever, in a certain way. And you see other industries doing it differently, and things are applicable. In that industry, for example, sometimes doing sports marketing might be valuable, because you know, the locksmiths are there, and so on. And we don’t do it. Sometimes investing a little bit more on social media on, Facebook than we traditionally did. Because we know other industries do that better than we do. Make sense for us. We’re always benchmarking outside of our industry as well. And it’s interesting to see how the other companies organize around marketing, around thinking around, market intelligence. So it’s always knowing what’s outside of our own industry. We tend to look at our competition, we tend to look too much at ourselves. So this is what was interesting to me. I was brought in exactly because I had an outside view and you know, this is what we needed at the time. Because if we only hire people from the same industry, we tend to the same things over and over again. In my team we have people that came from other industries as well. And it’s important to have people from the same industry because that knowledge is also very valuable. But we need to have a mix of both things.

Shaheen Samavati 22:03
Yeah, definitely. I think like, the more specialized that a company is in a certain industry, or in a certain topic—I don’t know if that’s the right word. But like the, the more they tend to look for people who already have that experience, like, especially if something is very technical, I mean, like they want someone with that technical experience. But yeah, a lot of times, they’re like transversal skills, especially in marketing, which is such a creative field work. But yeah. Anyways, I’m going on a tangent, okay, I was gonna just ask you kind of, I mean, what’s, what’s your favorite part of your job?

Carlos Werner 22:39
What I like the most is actually the breadth of the job and this multicultural reality. We’re very global. So one day, you’re looking at countries in Africa, the other day you’re in the Middle East, then you’re in the Nordics. You’re talking to people as if they were your next door neighbors. So that’s the most important thing. In fact, that it’s, it gives us such a good opportunity to experiment. Things are changing so quickly, it’s so Greenfield of things that we can try, we have the chance to experiment things. So that’s what makes it very, very interesting. It’s not the industry that invests the most—you can’t compare with fast moving consumer goods, for example, we invest a lot less. So we don’t have the luxury to use huge agencies and to buy all the services and work with consultants, although we do those things. But we have to learn the hard way sometimes. But this is what actually makes it fun. We have to be very hands on. It’s a very tough challenge for us to to coordinate things. But every project we meet, we have stakeholders in all corners of EMEA and this is what makes it interesting—the chance to talk with so to different people. It’s really, really international company. That’s the interesting part.

Shaheen Samavati 24:00
Yeah, that’s awesome. So I want to ask, like, what do you have any, like daily habits that you’d attribute to your success? And also any tips for productivity?

Carlos Werner 24:12
Yeah, I mean, the classic things are separate work and private life. And this is more important than ever. And this is something that I always tell my team—respect your hours. Turn off your email after hours. There’s one hack that I learned too. On my phone, for example, I don’t like to carry two devices, one work and one personal phone because it’s simply too much and it’s very uncomfortable. So inside my phone when I have a special Secure Folder. I use a Samsung phone for obvious reasons.

Shaheen Samavati 24:44
Still loyal!

Carlos Werner 24:48
But I have something which is really cool. It’s called the Secure Folder. It basically locks the phone into your phone and you even locked in, you turn off the notifications and it’s it’s kind of a separate life inside. You can take a peek, but it’s not going to wake you up, it’s not going to keep you anxious all the time. So this is one of the life hacks that works beautifully for me. The thing, the other thing that I like to do, I mean, we have so many things with the platforms available to us that we use that crosses the professional and the personal life, things with Google, Microsoft tools, Cloud Storage things, even the traditional Office applications on the cloud. It’s so easy now to link your home computer with your professional computer and make jump things and keep her cell phone yourselves organized. So if you use it, to its full capacity, and I know few people do that. It’s so powerful. It’s very powerful. Things like keep notes, for example, I basically have my life or my memory, notes from myself to myself, you wake up at night with an idea, you quickly send it to yourself. So one of my life hacks is sending notes to myself using all these tools, and even email. Email is amazing. It’s something that has been going on for 30/40 years. But it’s an amazing tool. That if you use it well, it really works in your favor.

Shaheen Samavati 26:17
Yeah, that’s like optimizing your like personal way of working, personal systems.

Carlos Werner 26:22
Exactly. So I think that’s that’s key. You need to have a personal system—things that work for you with the stuff that you have at your disposal. If you’re into the Microsoft ecosystem, use it to its full extent, if you’re into Google, you can use it to your full extent. They all are wonderful platforms that you can you can rely on. And then all the platforms for music, for players for podcasts, I think it’s also big part of your life. And what keeps my focus is I have my players on all the time. I use things like iTunes, you’ll see backplayer things like that. It’s an important part of your life. And if you work with marketing, it’s very good also to have some knowledge on all you on video concepts. Because even when you’re talking to an agency, you can’t read direct things very well, if you don’t have someone’s right knowledge about compression, about how image work, ow about sound work, so this personal use is actually very interesting. Podcasts are a big part of our life to keep informed. I have a long commute from London to Woking, so I spend a lot of time in my car. So I listen to a lot of podcasts. Or when I’m in the Underground. Even when I’m doing sports and running and walking, when I’m doing gardening, I always have a podcast on.

Shaheen Samavati 27:46
Any particular one tha you recommend for a podcast?

Carlos Werner 27:51
There’s quite a few! Yours is wonderful, by the way—I love it. I mean, I like the podcast from from Harvard Business Review, the HBR podcast. They have I think three or four. There’s the CMO podcast from Jim Stengel, which is amazing. Ad Age has a very good one. It’s interesting if you go local, in every country, there are so many podcasts from agencies, I think I listened to quite a few from Brazil, from Portugal, from France from Germany—you find that you find amazing things, done by amazing people that come and go in this sphere. So if you do a keyword search of whatever field of marketing that interests you, you will find a dozen podcasts that are really good. Obviously, I love listening to lots of tech podcasts as well—construction, IoT things that are from the industry. But if you’re interested in marketing, these marketing management are the ones that you cannot miss viewing.

Shaheen Samavati 28:50
Yeah, those sounds like some great ones. I’ll definitely have to check them out. Well, any other ways you keep up to date on marketing trends? Other resources that you recommend?

Carlos Werner 29:00
Yeah, amazing newsletters. Newsletter are an amazing resource. The problem with newsletters, is that if you subscribe to too many of them, you get overwhelmed. So I even have a personal system. I use Google for that. I set up everything and it goes directly to a tab to read. So it’s this continuous flow of 100 newsletters that you get per day—I can’t possibly read every one of them. But I have a few that I like for example Work News, The Drum, Ad Age, some vendors have really good newsletters. Whatever industry you’re in, you will find some very good ones. So I’m in the construction and security business so I subscribe to probably a dozen of these newsletters, but I can’t possibly go through all of them. But it’s very important that you sometimes scroll through them and that it doesn’t mix with your important email. So you need to have a personal system to separate things because if you have everything bombarding you, you will get lost in the work emails in your personal emails. Podcasts is a very valuable resource. MOOCs are very good. There is so much content, so much free training and paid training out there on platforms like Coursera, EdX, LinkedIn learning even some independent platforms that you have at your disposal. Vendors are very good at putting knowledge out you have vendors like—

Shaheen Samavati 30:21
—Content Marketing, no?

Carlos Werner 30:23
Content Marketing Academy, for example, is brilliant. HubSpot Academy is brilliant. Google has quite a lot of training out there. You just need the time grab it. It’s amazing what you have at your disposal today.

Shaheen Samavati 30:35
Speaking of the online courses, any that you’ve taken recently, in particular, that you recommend?

Carlos Werner 30:40
I love to take the hard skills courses, online classes from Microsoft, for example. There’s things that we do on a day to day basis. Excel, for example. If you go really deep into it, in data science, for example, the concepts that you learn are things that you can apply immediately, and you increase your level of your productivity immediately. And then if you go into Coursera, for example, I did quite a few around communications, around concepts, around even politics, anything that you like, even psychology, for example. I’ve done things in the past that are quite memorable. That really, really is a compliment to your even to your, to your academic backgrounds.

Shaheen Samavati 31:30
Very cool. And then just if you have any, like a book recommendation for us? Marketing or business book?

Carlos Werner 31:38
I mean, the last ones that I read are quite amazing that really make your ways of thinking. I love the work from Byron Sharp, for example—there’s a book called How Brands Grow. It’s very controversial, by the way, because there’s kind of a tug of war between people that like to segments industries, that like to really target, microtarget your consumers. And he has kind of a different theory, where what is really valuable is the amount of exposure that you get—how big a brand gets. And I had a proof of this concept and I actually subscribed to it when I was working at Samsung and I saw it, I saw it in motion. So I really subscribe to this way of thinking. I love the book from Erin Meyer. She’s a professor, by the way, it’s called The Culture Map. So for somebody who deals with 100 plus countries, the way you understand how different minds work and different cultures and how it’s sometimes opposite to each other, is quite important. The way you speak with a German is completely different from the way you speak with somebody, even in France or in the United States or in Brazil, or in Portugal or in Spain, and this book gives a very interesting framework of how this works. She actually mapped it quite well. I think, to me, one of the central works in B2B that we see their charts, all around are Les Binet and Peter Field. So they have a book called The Long and The Short Of It. And you see there’s so many videos of them speaking. And they basically talk about the effects of doing, or the optimal mix of performance marketing versus investing in brand building. They’ve done a lot of research, and they have a lot of evidence, hard evidence. And this is very useful to be able to do your media planning to be able to plan your marketing mix. So for me, this is one of the most essential pieces of work in marketing. I love all of Malcolm Gladwell’s work. I’ve read so many books from him Outliers, Blink, Tipping Points. David and Goliath as well. Yeah, because I was in the smart home market, I ended up reading, Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore because in this industry, I think we’re exactly inside the chasm, which is I always use his to try to explain where we are in this industry at the moment. So I think it’s also the the brilliant theories, we all know those products, Life Curves from Kotler. And this book basically puts a valley in the middle and it makes a lot of sense ifyou actually see this happening for real in the technology industry. So this is one of the quintessential pieces of thought leadership that I’ve that I’ve read. And I also love reading biographies around biographies. I won’t give any specific examples because they’re things from these big icons, Steve Jobs…Jack Walsh, for example. But sometimes you see people from the industry sometimes people you know, people around us people from that are not really known people. But because you’ve witnessed their stories, they’re sometimes really, really valuable. I’ve read books from friends that are kind enough to put them on paper. And those are the ones that are really meaningful. So if you have friends that have the time to write their biographies, read it. It’s so interesting to understands people, but you actually know.

Shaheen Samavati 35:21
Yeah, wow, that’s really cool. And yeah, but tons of excellent book recommendations! I’ll have a lot to add to my list now. But I was going to be my last question but I was actually curious, though, I have to ask you about the the first thing you said about like seeing in action at Samsung, this kind of theory about the exposure time. And I mean, could you just like, tell us quickly, kind of how you saw that? Or like, what?

Carlos Werner 35:48
Yeah, it’s because sometimes you have brands and companies. And I think we, I would say suffer this as well. Sometimes you have brands that are so big, portfolios that are so broad, that if you end up segmenting too much, you’ll end up capping the amount of exposure that you get. And we had these discussions at Samsung all the time—how much should we micro target our customer? Because if you think about it, everybody is your customer? So how do you segment this? How do you plan your media when you’re in a situation like this? So in this book, you see some interesting thoughts of how a big brand actually has an advantage, how you get into a virtuous cycle, when you start some more when you get more share of market. This actually brings into into a virtuous cycle of bringing more exposure, building heavier brands, being more visible—it’s just a different way of thinking.

Shaheen Samavati 36:52
Think of the flywheel effect, like once you reach a certain point.

Carlos Werner 36:55
Yes, it is, it is. And today, we tend to rely too much on technology. You have all these vendors bombarding you, we can see whomever is visiting your website, well, I have millions of visitors—what am I going to do with a single piece of information like that? So for some businesses, that might be relevant, but if you are head of the very big brands, with this huge flywheel, it’s a different way of thinking. And I think this book encapsulates this very well.

Shaheen Samavati 37:24
Very cool. So we’ll we’re reaching the end of the time for the interview, but I just want to ask you for your kind of final, any final takeaways or parting advice you have for other marketers?

Carlos Werner 37:36
Yeah, I mean, it’s so it’s a mix of being a generalist. And having focus. You need to really be good at something, really have the technical skills, but not lose sight of the overall business. And that’s where you can really add value. Today you see lots of digital marketers, for example, that are super good at one thing or another that go very, very deep. But if you really want to grow in your career, and you really don’t want to be outdated in few years, because if you are too technical, things change. You really have to keep your eye on and understand the business and the industry you’re in. So this would be my big advice for anybody who’s starting—be very technical, go very deep, but do understand your business.

Shaheen Samavati 38:23
Excellent. Well, that’s a great advice and a great note to end on. So well before we finish this. If anyone wants to get in touch with you, or follow what you’re doing, like what’s the best way?

Carlos Werner 38:34
Obviously, I have my LinkedIn profile and my Twitter profile, feel free to follow me. Follow ASSA ABLOY, obviously, we have all those channels and things like. That’s why I always read and in touch with whoever is there. But I think the easiest way is to actually check the LinkedIn profile.

Shaheen Samavati 38:54
Excellent. Yeah, so we’ll definitely put a link to your LinkedIn and all those links, also put the company’s channels on on the show notes that go along with the with this episode. So well, thank you so much, Carlos, for being with us today on the podcast.

Carlos Werner 39:09
Thank you. It was a pleasure to speak with you.

Shaheen Samavati 39:11
Yeah, pleasure is all mine. And well thank you to everyone for listening in. And for more perspectives on content marketing in Europe, check out at VeraContent.com/mix and keep tuning into the podcast for daily interviews with content experts. See you next time. Bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai