What It Really Takes to Turn a Brand Around

When you look back at the last few years, as you said, you have been in the industry for quite some time and working in marketing.

What would you say? Were there any decisions that actually mattered more than others in getting Telenor to where it is today?

I think that there were a few decisions, sure.

Absolutely.

So let me give you some context.

When I came in about three years ago, the company was well known in the market.

Yeah.

I think for consumers, it was hard to know why they should choose Telenor because the market is so saturated.

It's a very competitive market and we offer sort of the same products as everyone else in the market.

So it was an awareness problem.

It was more of a preference problem.

Yeah.

And then what I could see was that the biggest change was probably to recognize what problem we were trying to solve.

We had high awareness, of course, but why should someone choose Telenor and start working on why? How do we become relevant in people's lives? And then at the same time, back then, I saw that we had become quite fragmented.

There were a lot of campaigns, lots of activities and messages, and we used a lot of media channels.

So I think for me, what I saw was that the fragmentation wasn't really supporting becoming more, increasing that awareness, or sorry, increasing the preference.

So we had to make that fundamental shift.

From asking, you know, what else should we do or can we do more activities to what actually matters? What is going to get us there? What's going to solve that problem?

Yeah.

And that led sort of to the fewer but better solution.

It sounds much better in Swedish, fewer but better.

It's not doing less for the sake of doing less, but it's concentrating our resources because you have that media budget and it's finite.

So you have to spend it wisely.

Definitely.

So we made clear choices so that the work could actually build on each other.