Raimon Gort – Reshift

Raimon Gort is one of the 4 primary co-founders of Reshift. In his role, Raimon is responsible for marketing, commerce, and partnerships. He is also formally the CEO of Kieskeurig.nl and business owner for the gaming cluster. Since 2013, Reshift has grown a large portfolio of brands and creates, spreads and delivers unique content, reaching over 8 million people monthly.

engagement & relevance

When it comes to growing the brand, Raimon shares how the company doesn’t focus much on the Reshift corporate brand, but rather on the separate end user brands: “It is very difficult to find a correlation between an end user of games, smart home solutions, and washing machines. Our brands cover many different segments. We don’t want to be a core brand for our other brands, which is why we don’t actively showcase the Reshift brand. An important KPI for us is the engagement that the brands have managed to achieve with their audience and the extent to which authority is conferred within the customer base. Are we able to keep the reach of our brands at least stable? The most primary KPI is that every brand has to be relevant. It is also the interactions you have with your end users. These interactions could be the number of likes you have on an article, visitors to an event, or whether it is picked up and pushed by Google. We set specific growth objectives for each brand, from penetration to focusing more on a particular segment or product group.”

‘’Let’s take  Power Unlimited, now better known as PU.nl,  as an example”, Raimon continues. “On paper, the business decreases every year, but if you are looking at how many people the brand reaches through YouTube, Twitch or TikTok, it really says something about the health of the brand. Back in the days, print was a very important distribution medium for content and iconic for the PU.nl brand. The focus shifted from print to online, then from online to social media and Web 3 is probably next. As owners, we think we can get more value out of PU.nl’s efforts. We are successful on TikTok which is great, but the primary benefactor isn’t us, it is TikTok itself. For BTB  communities, we don’t have a growth objective other than wanting to serve the same group of people further up the value chain. We don’t need to serve 2,000 people instead of 100, but we do want to know more of those 100 consumers so that we can serve their (information) needs better. Each of our brands operates at different speeds. During lockdown, we found that some brands declined, while others shot up by 200 or 300%. Therefore, each business unit has specific growth targets or KPIs.’’

“My parents used to think that MTV was just hollow entertainment. Now, as a parent myself, I sometimes think the same of TikTok.”

role of research

According to Raimon, it is important to play a crucial role in the ecosystem of a specific market. ‘’Reshift tries to conduct as many studies as possible to test innovations before launching. We do a lot of surveys around our innovations, both for clients and for ourselves, and use heatmaps during the development process. We also ask colleagues what they think. We usually don’t really believe in getting ideas from the market or consumers, we have experts that have enough knowledge who facilitate in making decisions. But we do test and refine everything before we implement it.’’

‘hollow entertainment’

To get inspired, Raimon reads a lot of articles to keep up with the market: “Because of the internet, the world has become local, and that opens a lot of opportunities to get inspired. You can walk in any city and look at what other businesses are doing in terms of communication and advertising. LinkedIn is also a regular source of inspiration n, and I think it is very important to keep up with the newer social media platforms as well. For platforms like TikTok, you need to understand how these media is consumed. If you notice how quickly teenagers swipe and scroll through their feeds, business need to adapt. The value perception of the younger generations is different from yours or mine because of the time we grew up in. My parents used to think that MTV was just hollow entertainment. Now, as a parent myself, I sometimes think the same of TikTok. As a business, you need to move with the times and accept that value patterns change across generations.”

“The speed of innovation in the media and marketing landscape is very high, so you have to dare to make choices, position yourself, and stand out.”

main challenges

‘’A big challenge for Reshift is and remains being present where your consumer expects you to be, both consumers and business target groups’’ Raimon continues. ‘’The speed of innovation in the media and marketing landscape is very high, so you have to dare to make choices, position yourself, and stand out. Dare to grind as a business, especially if you want to compete with the big players. On certain trends you want to anticipate directly, others are better off running their course. Sometimes innovations go so fast because someone with a lot of passion is making big moves with their start-up founded in their attic, and you can’t compete with that. The speed with which some innovations are introduced is hard to keep up with, even impossible sometimes. There are many start-ups today that are developing rapidly in areas where you think ‘I should have been there’. In hindsight, you can see where you went wrong or should have acted, but there are simply too many start-ups to keep track of. The most important thing is that you show courage, dare to make moves, and you can only learn from that as a business.”

Future

Thinking in terms of short and long-term innovations, Raimon shares that you need to do what is important to you and what you feel confident about:  ‘’Our goals differ per day, week and month. Does Reshift have a plan where we identify ourselves for the next 3 years? No, currently we don’t. Should we have done that? Probably. Nevertheless, we know where we want to be in the next 2 or 3 years. There is a huge information overflow right now, and not only in information but also in opportunities. An example is Web 3. It is not applicable yet, but I think it is going to be the biggest innovation and ‘business disruptor’ we have seen in years.”

“Where wide reach used to belong to the happy few, innovation in the media landscape has opened many doors.”

Next to opportunities, Raimon also sees new challenges for the future: “I think the biggest challenge is to keep reaching the younger generation. Where you used to reach them with MTV or BNN, nowadays young people consume an infinite amount of content on an infinite number of platforms. Today’s generation is all about instant gratification. If you don’t deliver, you’re done. As a company, it is important to continuously adapt to the target group and their needs. Access to information has become easier for consumers, but so have the ways of conveying that information. It is now a lot more efficient, easier and more cost-effective to reach a group of 2000 people than ever before. Where it used to belong to the happy few, innovation in the media landscape has opened many doors.”