In the end of January we had Jonna Vähänen as a guest lecturer in HAMK. Jonna is originally from Hämeenlinna, but currently lives in Sweden and works for the online store Care of Carl.
Personally for me this was a very cool experience, since Jonna and I have worked together couple of years ago, and it was really interesting to see what kind of amazing things she has been doing after her career in Lindex. She started as an extra and later became the visual merchandiser of our store, where I was working as a sales person. After Lindex, Jonna got a job as store manager in Carlings Hämeenlinna. This job didn’t last very long though, because she got the awesome opportunity to move to Sweden and do her masters on fashion marketing and management there. During these studies she got to do her internship for NA-KD online store. The company also decided to hire her and she continued working there for six months before getting the job from Care of Carl.
Care of Carl is a Swedish menswear store, which was founded in Borås in 2010. Last autumn they opened a web shop for Finnish customers. The products of Care of Carl are very high-quality, high end clothes for men (especially business men). They sell big famous brands such as Armani, Loake 1880, Ralph Lauren etc., which are very pricy.
Jonna told us about her typical work day. Her job is for example to check and evaluate the sales results and making an action plan for the day and the whole week. She uses Google AdWords, Google Analytics and social media as tools in her work and follows factors such as KPIs: sale against budget, marketing percent against budget, amount of new customers, average order value and ROI: return of investment.
Another topic on the lecture was branding, and why to brand your company. The answers is of course to get competitive advantage: no one actually needs clothes nowadays but companies make us believe that we need them. The goal of branding is to make the customer choose their brand and to teach people to think as the brand thinks when asking the question “Why do I need to buy this stuff?”.
Important factors in branding are that the company stands for something, sends a united message, is interesting and relevant: being aware what is happening around the world and the market and being present. We also learned that online marketing is very important: more than 90 % from people entering a website come from Google.
It was interesting to learn about different kinds of marketing tools when making campaigns; by adding pictures on Instagram, it is very easy to reach customers and get lots of likes, but you can’t see who has bought the items after seeing them on Instagram. Sending e-mails may sound kind of old-fashioned and boring, but that way it is really easy to follow who clicks themselves on the website and decides to buy the products because of the e-mail.
Some of the most important things to consider when building up a campaign are of course the brand itself, the customer, perfect timing, what we want to achieve by the campaign, the story of the campaign and country expectations.
It is also very important to choose the perfect influencer for the campaign. It is not very convincing if the face of the campaign doesn’t share same values with the company.
