The importance of personalized experiences: Interview with Michal Szaniecki

"There is nothing more important than understanding the customer journey and delivering personalized experiences to your customer" Michal Szaniecki, Managing Director SEAT and CUPRA, Volkswagen Group

The future of marketing is personal. Brands are looking to create an in-depth understanding of the customer journey and how they can offer personalized interactions. Knowing your customer and their journey is down to effective use of data, and with more touchpoints and levers available to marketers than ever before the opportunities to engage are ample.

As we get ready for the Brand Marketing Summit Europe, we spoke with three leaders and summit speakers to discuss how to successfully engage your customers and the innovations that will shake the way you work up.

Incite Group has brought together key figures from Aon, Volkswagen and Spark Networks to discuss the key issues affecting brands marketing strategies and where they see the big, exciting opportunities arising for you in 2019, with the full range of insights available in an exclusive whitepaper.

In this interview series, we cover the big issues such as:

• How to effectively map the customer journey and how you can understand your customer beyond traditional segmentation
• The technologies and trends that you need to know about in 2019 and how you can leverage them to inspire brand loyalty and drive engagement through the roof
• The state of AI, ML and what it means for your future campaigns

Contributing marketing leaders include:

• Michal Szaniecki, Managing Director SEAT and CUPRA, Volkswagen Group
• Arjen Vissers, EMEA Marketing Director, Aon
• Bart Visser, Director of Brand Marketing, Spark Networks

The first interview of the series was with Michal Szaniecki. Michael is the passionate (and rewarded) Leader of Change for Global Brands in FMCG and Automotive with Brand and Business Building responsibilities in CEE, Germany and Switzerland.

He is also a member and Head of Juries (Drum Marketing, Effie, Young Creatives), while actively shaping the marketing landscape and digital revolution as a member of several international marketing associations, including Partner of Facebook C.A.Board; international coach in "business of non-conscious choice" for brands and students on three continents. In addition to all of this, Michal is a keynote speaker on CX.

Could you tell us a bit about your current role and responsibilities surrounding marketing?

As Marketing Director at Volkswagen, I had a unique pleasure of shaping and leading the customer journey and customer experience revolution for the brand. In my current role as a Managing Director for SEAT and Cupra, I joined a great explorative adventure with my team to build incredibly emotional automotive brands, for which the truly motivating nature of customer experience is still to be discovered.

What are your top three priorities for 2019 when it comes to your brand's marketing strategy?

1. Maximize conversions alongside the customer journey.
2. Build emotional resonance to invite more consumers and de-rationalize
the pricing component.
3. Build added value for consumers to navigate them to trade-up.

What new technologies or trends do you see impacting marketing and customer engagement in the wider industry this year?

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are well set, now the time has come to gain even more actionability and simplicity with data management and visualization to detect and monetize behavioral patterns in big data quicker than the competition. I’m still waiting for more profound and disciplined use of non-conscious choice savvy and neuroscience in shaping marketing strategies.

How important to your brand is understanding the customer journey and delivering personalized experiences to your customers?

There is nothing more important than that. With the 900 interactions and three to six-months-long process to get just one transaction – there are plenty of chances to win and lose your consumers along the way. Understanding the customer journey and drivers and barriers along the way directly impact your profit and loss (P&L).

As a speaker at this year’s show, what are you hoping to learn and take away from the summit?

This is always a great opportunity to listen to, share and transplant CJ and CX ideas from diverse industries you would never think to get inspirations from – and to find missing components to your CJ puzzle.

Don't forget to access Incite's Group exclusive whitepaper to discover more of the insights gained from this interesting interview series.

Make sure you also find out more about this year's Brand Marketing Summit Europe and who is speaking, as well as download your brochure.