Branding Brilliants – Pia Dahlman
- 17 min reading time
Pia Dahlman is a force. When she steps into a room you can feel the energy shift. She has a certain sharpness and edginess about her that makes her stand out. It’s clear that Pia is a people person and an inspiring leader. She makes you laugh, blush and ready for action all at the same time. On the whole, this super lady has a unique approach and it is no wonder that that approach has paid off professionally as well.
Today Pia is the CEO of Folk Finland, an award-winning marketing agency famous for the quality of its work. We wanted to chat with Pia about her learnings in creating brands and her experience in piloting a creative marketing agency. Here is what we want to share with you:
Creativity is such an abstract concept. Anyone can do it to some extent. How do you make sure that the creativity you sell is of high quality?
It’s all about ideas, isn’t it? And how to make sure you come up with the best idea? I believe that you need to give time and space to creativity. In an agency, this is an important internal attitude on how to prioritise hours and profitability.
Throughout my career, I have seen many agencies where invoicing trumps creativity meaning that you are allocated X hours to finish your idea. We do not do that. Giving time for creativity is one of our most important values and the reason is very simple; our work is our calling card. It needs to speak for itself and sell our work and our agency. So, limiting the time spent on creativity is silly from that perspective.
In practice ‘giving time’ means making sure that people have enough time to do their job well, enough time to learn, practice and recover. Creativity is a process. We do our research, enlist the best storytellers, scriptwriters, visualists and empower them to make magic happen.
Here’s what I’ve learned and what it all boils down to: Best ideas do not happen by chance, they require hard work.
How do you feed your team inspiration?
We put quite a lot of effort into feeding our creative minds. One way to do it is to involve people in the creative process and work on tasks jointly. So, every Friday we have a timeslot when we work on one client’s specific challenge together. Everyone can be creative, so we want the whole company to take part in this, not just the creative team.
On top of that, we invite inspirational speakers to Folk and our creative directors make presentations on interesting topics, e.g. Cannes Lions cases or some new trends. The idea with these is, of course, to inspire and to motivate but also to keep us up-to-date with what's happening in the world.
I have also learned that creative people like to do things with their hands. I guess it’s about seeing the output of your work, the power of craft. We try to carve out time for these types of activities, e.g. a while back we went to print posters with the traditional method. That was fun. Seeing how you made posters in the 70s and imagining having to make 600 of those and each of them ending up a bit different from one another.
You said that good ideas require hard work - do you have examples of this?
Yes, this case goes way back. Back to the time when Lidl decided to come to Finland. I wasn’t at Folk then but I have heard this story so many times. So, this goes back to July 2001. People from Lidl called our CEO saying “we would need a marketing plan for our Finnish launch and we want you to come and present it in two weeks”.
First of all, two weeks is not a lot of time to come up with a campaign concept. Secondly, it was July and pretty much everyone was on holiday. We were not the only agency they called but I can imagine that quite a few of the agencies said no thanks because of the timing.
At Folk, we saw it as an opportunity to land a big client, so we went to work. Three people from our company locked themselves into a room to create the idea. They would not come out until they had a ready-made concept. And that’s how ‘Epäilevä Tuomas’ (Doubtful Tuomas) came about. A concept that not only worked but worked really well and became a huge success.
While the origin story is nice and an ode to hard work, the campaign itself is also very interesting: a middle-aged cynical Finnish guy is doubting everything about Lidl: are the goods stolen? Do they speak Finnish? Do they accept Finnish currency? It took guts from Folk to present such a concept and for Lidl to run it. In the end, they ran it for 6-7 years.
You have created a career around building brands. You have done it for your clients as well as yourself - how would you define one?
A brand is not a “thing” and nothing a company can truly own. You can do your best to shape your customers' brand experience, communicate certain values etc. but at the end of the day, a brand is a representation of a highly valued idea that resides in the minds of consumers. It is the consumer or customer who decides what a brand really is.
I have seen a lot of cases where a company’s brand attributes might say that they are sustainable or easily approachable. The problem is that if the company does not operate according to those values people will not experience the brand as such and that’s when you lose control of the image you are trying to convey.
"At Folk we believe that the most important thing to understand is the purpose of the company. This sounds really boring now that everyone is talking about it but it applies and it is where we start our cooperation with our clients."
In fact, we often whip out Simon Sinek’s ‘Start with Why’ because that illustrates the need perfectly. The goal is to understand why the company exists and why anyone should care? It’s a nice and simple tool for situations where the purpose is a little muddy. After that, if the customer is missing a brand strategy, we will go ahead and create it. These early steps are neglected way too often. The truth is that it is very difficult to build impressive and meaningful marketing if you don’t know why the brand should exist to begin with.
What does that brand strategy contain?
The one we make is a one-pager. A short document where we incorporate the most important aspects of a brand. You have the purpose of the brand, the brand attributes, the target groups, the ways in which the brand communicates and makes an impact etc.
The most important thing to remember is that we are not pulling rabbits from a hat, rather, this document is created together with the customer, often in a workshop.
Once you have created the brand - how do you make sure it stays consistent in the hands of the customer?
Taking the brand to the real world is a bit of a challenge. In a branding process we create the look and feel of the brand and give the creatives and all guidelines to the client. Many of our clients have internal marketing teams who then proceed to bring the brand to life and this is where the classic problem may arise and we get new versions of the brand we just created.
To tackle this, we aim to keep some control of the process, e.g. first drafts of materials come through us and the creatives for the biggest media campaigns are all made by us. I believe that we get the best outcomes by working closely together so that the brand keeps consistent.
The problems of inconsistent branding appear mostly in internal communications where someone may create sales materials by themselves or order physical marketing swag.
Folk has some international clients - is there a framework you follow when a client of yours is entering Finland?
No, we don’t have a framework or to-do list we follow. One thing we sometimes have to make clear to some clients from Sweden is that while we’re neighbouring countries the cultural differences are quite big and that the use of humour in particular is different. This means that copying a campaign from Sweden to Finland may not work very well. Usually, if a client has trusted our vision things have gone smoothly.
While we’re neighbouring countries (with Sweden) the cultural differences are quite big and that the use of humour in particular is different. This means that copying a campaign from Sweden to Finland may not work very well.
An example of these cultural differences is the work we’ve done with Byggmax. They wanted to enter Finland and asked for a concept proposal. Our concept was a true Finnish man who goes to a hardware store but does not want any service. He wants to get shit done, so to speak, and has no need for talking to anyone. He comes in, handles his business, goes to the self-service check-out, and leaves. A true Finnish man.
We at Folk found this “Don’t ask me anything” concept very funny but the Swedes didn’t understand it. Like at all. After some back and forth they caved and said “ok, I guess you know your stuff”. We ended up winning an Effie with that campaign. It was cost-efficient, gained attention and had commercial success.
Folk Finland has a thing called ‘the people council’, can you talk a little about that?
This is both a tool and an attitude that makes us different from the other agencies out there. The People Council is a group of people we have recruited to join us in the creative process and we use them to find insight and test concepts.
In practice, we may round up 10 people for a chat. We record the interviews and discussions and use the learnings to find opportunities for our clients. We try to focus on the positive instead of the negative and a lot of our work is based on these findings. Folk was originally founded on the premise that wisdom does not reside in marketing agencies, it lies in the minds of people. We wanted to understand people better so that we could do a good and impactful job.
What is the biggest learning you have received from the council?
I have learned a lot. I have noticed that people like honest brands that talk about real things and things the brand believes in. Finns like brands that do not feel “better than”, rather, the brand can laugh at itself and admit to being wrong every now and again.
Also, Finns react well to humour.
"I have noticed that people like honest brands that talk about real things."
As you mentioned earlier, creativity does not always seem to go hand-in-hand with business goals. How do you tackle the fact that business leaders do not understand the value of big brand campaigns?
This is a discussion I have daily. A big part of my job is to sell ideas to clients and that discussion is where the money comes face-to-face with a potential impact a concept might have. I need to be able to justify the investments made in marketing. One thing we do is that we read up on marketing research and studies done on the impact of branding. Having a gut feeling is not enough even if you have a good track record. So doing your homework in terms of research, having a great body of work, and being able to show that award-winning campaigns bring more sales than tactical marketing is essential.
My job is to make it clear that from a brand perspective you need to invest some if you want to create a dent in the status quo. That said, I want to highlight that concepts are not created only on creativity’s terms. Our goal is always to grow our client’s business and we are super proud of the fact that we have received Effie awards every year with different clients. And that is of course a good selling point for other new potential customers. Being able to show that creative award-winning concepts increase your sales and that we are the house that creates concepts.
Eyes on the price. Are you always eyeing an award?
I love awards and winning. And so do many others at Folk. But it’s more of an internal rating scale. The truth is that we simply do not want to do an adequate job. We want to do an excellent job. We see our work out there, on the tv or out on the streets. We want to get results and we want people to like it. So, whatever your role might be in this agency, you want to be proud of what we do. For an agency of such a small size, we are one of the most awarded agencies. We are good at winning awards, but that’s not the ultimate goal.
How do you keep your team’s standards so high? What's your secret?
It’s the people. We have gotten a bunch of self-critical people who never feel happy with what they have created. Even if they come up with something brilliant they walk around wondering whether it's good enough. There is no need to micromanage nor a need for a Don Draper type of creative director who pushes the team. People do it themselves.
You are at a creative agency, how would you feel about moving into more technical marketing?
I have to say that I'm in the right place. I choose storytelling over digital optimisation. But you do need it all. I love Coca-Cola’s 70/20/10 rule. Their marketing investment strategy is that about 70% of their investment is in “Now”, or established and successful programs; 20% goes to “new,” or emerging trends that are starting to gain traction; and 10% goes to “next”, ideas that are completely untested.
So, you want some crazy creativity and a bit of courage to test stuff that might turn out really bad. A winning recipe requires tactical stuff and optimisation etc. but for my part, I’m happy that we are able to do the creative stuff.
What about what’s the role of physical, real-world, marketing today and in the future?
I believe physical marketing leaves a stronger engram – the memory of that experience – than digital marketing. Consumption today is so different and if you have something your customer or audience can touch and feel you are creating a personal connection.
On top of that, there might be less noise on the physical side now and you may have a bigger opportunity to stand out and run memorable campaigns. Especially, in the world of algorithms that limit everything you do. An example of a brand that is doing nice things in the physical sphere is Kyrö Distillery. I like what I see. Isn’t it that you guys at Framme (Sam and the Brand’s parent company) have done some work with right?
Your career development is impressive and it has for sure required a lot of personal growth. You were a professional football player back in the day, what made you choose marketing?
I have to admit that my career is something of a fluke, as life often is. I have done all kinds of things in my work life: I played football for 26 years, I was a travelling saleswoman selling shampoos around Finland, and I worked at Stockmann selling perfumes, and computers at Sony centre. I feel like I have done it all.
Then one day I happened to notice an ad where PHS marketing agency was looking for interns and I thought to myself “Here we go, I’ll take my chance”. As faith would have it I was interviewed by an ex-football player. We talked about sports and here I am, 16 years later.
Who is your Northern Star idol?
I like Brené Brown. She is amazing. I like her work of studying vulnerability, shame and courage. Those topics appeal to me and I must admit that I have put a lot of effort into working on myself within those parameters. In my younger years, I was quite hard on myself. I would be of the opinion that you should excel at everything you do and that screwing up is a sign of weakness or lack of talent. The idea of accepting failure because without failure there is no innovation or creativity hits hard. Once you truly understand that you start giving yourself some slack. You realise that you don’t have to carry the burden of perfection or performance and you can start enjoying failure.
This same idea is something that I want to take to Folk as well. For example, we gave an award for failing. It was given to someone who dared to do something new, to push themselves out of their comfort zone even if they ended up making a mess of the whole thing. We wanted to signal that fucking up was ok and that we actually encourage people to push boundaries.
Three things we learnt from Pia
- When doing branding, the most important thing to understand is the purpose of the company before starting any work
- Coca-Cola’s 70/20/10 rule: Their marketing investment strategy is that about 70% of their investment is in “Now”, or established and successful programs; 20% goes to “new,” or emerging trends that are starting to gain traction; and 10% goes to “next”, ideas that are completely untested.
- Physical marketing leaves a stronger engram – the memory of that experience – than digital marketing. On top of that, there might be less noise on the physical side now and you may have a bigger opportunity to stand out and run memorable campaigns.
