Sigrid Drost – CEWE

Sigrid Drost is a Marketing Brand Manager at CEWE Benelux. CEWE is a German company that actively specialises in premium photo services throughout 26 countries in Europe. CEWE started in 1961 in Germany as a photo film developer but shifted to digital printing with 15 printing labs in Europe and consumer photo printing stations in stores. It entered the Dutch market in 1961. Besides selling premium photobooks, CEWE offers other photo products like wall decorations, calendars, cards, gifts and phone cases.

MAIN KPIS FOR BRAND GROWTH

The two most important KPIs for CEWE are brand awareness and brand preference. Sigrid elaborates: “Our KPIs are measured internationally from our main office in Germany once a year, which normally happens around January. Although, I would prefer to measure our brand performance more than once a year. We conduct consumer research 1 to 2 times a week, and with my arrival at CEWE, we did start pre-testing TV commercials, which improved our commercials in terms of attention and getting our brand message across. Because the testing is quick, we can really make use of the results.”

“We are growing year-on-year, and TV support helps in further growing our brand awareness and preference. We are currently busy preparing for the Christmas period, which is one of the most important times of the year for us. Normally, the focus is on photobooks and our premium additions. However, this year, we also include wall decorations in our ATL support to give photos a nice place on the wall.”

MOMENT OF TRUTH

Concerning the Moment of Truth for customers and why they would choose a photobook from CEWE, Sigrid responds: “Customer happiness is our top priority and is very important to us. We capture our consumers’ special moments and emotions through a photo book, so therefore we truly capture the feeling of that moment and they can go back to that moment and emotion.”

“Customer happiness is our top priority. It’s about bringing back the feeling of that moment, the one in the picture, back to the people.

”A real Moment of Truth for us is when our customers, for the first time, see the result of their own creativity and the quality of our photo books. It is all about emotion, so the happiness of this moment defines our fans.  Sigrid further explains: “As we are growing more and more in business and marketing maturity, we have been able to target specific audiences through online and offline marketing initiatives. While CEWE is the market leader in Europe, in The Netherlands it is a challenger, so as a company, we focus on increasing our market share and not necessarily expanding the market.’’

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

Brand awareness plays a crucial role for CEWE. But how do they attract customers via its website? And how do they keep them interested? ‘’As an e-commerce player, we are very committed to the customer journey on our website. Besides our qualitative products, we also want to offer help and inspiration in developing photo products. So our focus is not only on the products but also on helping our customers to make our products, with instruction webinars and tips & tricks. We have inspirational stories for each campaign that links to newsletters and our magazines, where we share further information that can inspire and help the customer create the perfect photobook.” says Sigrid.

“An extremely important asset within the entire customer journey is to be there for the customer and to genuinely help and assist them.” Sigrid indicates that customer service plays a major role in customer satisfaction: “Customer service often receives positive feedback from the customer about the help they received and being happy with the photo book. Sometimes they even send a thank you card, mutually we also send our customers a card for all kinds of reasons. Moments like these are crucial to us as a company, and we call it our USP and a Moment of Truth.

“Being there for the customer is a very important asset for us within the customer journey.”

Sigrid speaks about CEWE commercials: “As our products and photobooks capture real stories, our campaigns are built around real stories. We do not work with actors for our commercials, but we work with testimonials of our customers, with real people and real stories. So if you hear a sob during the commercial, it is an actual sob. Not a single thing is pretended or acted. This is truly the core of our brand, moments of joy to be enjoyed, again and again.”

THE ROLE OF DATA IN THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY

How does data play a role in the customer journey for CEWE? Sigrid: “We mainly focus on traffic, conversion, and sales, so data plays a major role in defining the right customer journey. We carefully track how people enter our website and observe their click behaviour. In addition, we check when the customer activates promotions and codes. And we also keep track of how successful our newsletters and customer magazines are. All this information is used to develop further and fine-tunes our plans.

AI-OPPORTUNITIES

According to Sigrid, the biggest opportunity in future in the market mainly lies in Technology: “The use of AI could play a major role for the photo industry and for CEWE. In the future, maybe, CEWE will also use AI for its photo app CEWE myPhotos. This app is like a shared album – you can easily collect, share and save photos from different devices and with various people in one place. It communicates with our software, so it simplifies making your photo products, which makes collecting and sharing photos with family and friends much easier.

CHALLENGES FOR THE PHOTO BRANCHE

The Corona pandemic also hit the photo industry and CEWE, although we bounced back well. Sigrid explains: “Corona has left its mark on the travel industry, which also impacted CEWE. Because people no longer went on holiday, they did not make photo books, which affected sales. Yet, interestingly consumers finally got the time to make photobooks and used ‘old photos’ to hold on to the memories of special moments and holidays.”

‘’Even now, we are in a difficult economic period, where people watch their money and spending. Fortunately, CEWE does not see this reflected in their figures. The demand to create a photobook still appears to be there, but the needs are driven by other motives.”