Interbrand Thinking

Five Questions with Arjan Sissing, Head of Brand Marketing, Deutsche Post DHL Group

DHL

Arjan Sissing, Head of Brand Marketing, Deutsche Post DHL Group

What are the big success stories for your brand over the last 12 months that have driven your brand strength and growth?

The biggest success for us as Deutsche Post DHL Group has been to keep delivering for our key stakeholders globally, our employees, our customers and our investors in these unprecedented COVID times. We are very proud that over 570.000 colleagues around the world rose to the challenge as one team. As the “Enabler of Global Trade”, we significantly contributed by keeping logistics going, be it through delivery of vaccination, medical devices or other goods or services. These are all tasks that cannot be performed when working from home. In our home market, Germany, for example, 118,000 Deutsche Post employees were on the road day in, day out. Our customers have expressed their appreciation for this achievement on many occasions.

Our brands, DHL and Deutsche Post, have truly lived up to our brand promise: “Excellence. Simply Delivered”. Deutsche Post DHL Group has continued to make significant investments in brand strength, also in times of crisis, whether it is our Deutsche Post and DHL communication campaign with Jürgen-Vogel in Germany or our most recent “Keep up with the clicks” global eCommerce campaign for DHL. Looking at our brand partnerships, 2020 was an unprecedented year for sports, entertainment and culture, with events being cancelled or happening behind closed doors. In collaboration with our partners, we came up with new ways and innovative digital experiences to keep engaging fans and followers forced to stay at home, increasing the reach of our activities to above pre-pandemic levels.

All of the above contributed to, enhanced and demonstrated the resilience of our brands and people. This in turn has led to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.

In collaboration with our partners, we came up with new ways and innovative digital experiences to keep engaging fans and followers forced to stay at home, increasing the reach of our activities to above pre-pandemic levels.

Thinking about the customer: we have a hypothesis that consumers once made purchases to signify their economic capital, then later to signify their intellectual capital, and most recently to signal their “ethical capital”. Does this hypothesis resonate with you and how do you address it from a brand standpoint? What about your brand do you fix & what do you flex? 

As the world’s most international company we are operating in more markets than the UN. This brings with it an enormous and diverse range of customer wants and needs. We are working with start-ups, SMEs and large customers across the entire value chain in logistics, from warehousing to transport. It is tough to identify “ethical capital” as the dominating trend. We see it as one important trend though not necessarily a new one, as it is one which we have addressed as a brand for some time already. Our purpose is connecting people, improving lives, and serves as a focal point for our efforts made public with our Code of Conduct. This makes living up to the highest ethical standards in our business living reality and safeguards our “license to operate” every day.

Our Group has made commitments to tackle environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues with our Sustainability Roadmap which the Group released in March of this year. We make good on these commitments by targeted brand marketing efforts. For example, we leverage our sponsoring partner program to develop sustainability-focused activities that engage and inspire, touching people’s hearts and amplifying our shared vision for the environment and society. Our efforts to make sustainability a top priority have encouraged our partners to further develop and expand their ESG goals too.

Over the last year, we have also witnessed that customers have come to put more emphasis on and demand that our products and services be more environmentally and socially responsible. For example, more and more companies and government agencies are using our GoGreen options for climate-neutral shipments. Among our partnerships, the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship actively promotes electric mobility and renewable energy solutions reduce air pollution and fight against climate change around the world. In September 2020, it became the first global sport to be certified with a net zero carbon foot­print from inception. From the very beginning, we have worked with Formula E to push the boundaries of sustainability with a tailored, multimodal transport approach that maximizes efficiency and optimizes the Championship’s carbon footprint. We are also a key enabler of Formula E’s Legacy Program – an initiative designed to positively impact Formula E host cities throughout the season and beyond.

We observe that today’s customers – especially young people – are more sustainability-conscious than ever. This means brand success depends increasingly on culturally connected individuals worried about the well-being of the planet and society. COVID has energized many more people around the world to be much more demanding of companies from the “S”: the social perspective. We also take action to ensure trusted, transparent and compliant business practices in all communities we operate in. Strong compliance, clear governance with well-defined targets and KPIs along all sustainability dimensions and working with sustainable and resilient partners and suppliers make Deutsche Post and DHL trusted brands for the world in which we live.

Within this framework we flex our products and services and our brands’ activities to cater for the needs of our customers and emotionally engage with our various and varied target groups.


Increasingly we see that traditional industry or category conventions are less helpful to understand a brands’ commercial landscape. And that understanding and planning around consumer motivations or desires gives a better sense of the true competition. Does this hypothesis resonate with you and how do you address it from a brand standpoint.

Our commercial landscape has always focused on putting the customer first. Motivated people lead to great service quality, which leads to loyal customers and in turn to profitable networks. We make considerable investments in gathering brand intelligence through extensive market research efforts where we capture the voices of our customers – and importantly – of those who are not yet. We feedback this brand intelligence to our global marketing and sales teams across all our business lines. This helps them to develop targeted value propositions to our customers, whatever and whoever they might be. It is worth noting though that select established categories and industry definitions remain valid to date in logistics.

The competitive landscape is evolving, and we see continued activity from established competitors in all our business lines. In many markets we also see local competitors that try to grow their business both in the scope of logistics services offered as well as in geography. We also see new entrants into the industry from players outside our industry that focus on, for example, owning the last mile as a key milestone in the customer journey that they are keen to dominate themselves.

We observe that today’s customers – especially young people – are more sustainability-conscious than ever. This means brand success depends increasingly on culturally connected individuals worried about the well-being of the planet and society.

One key value that our brand projects in their DNA is that we are striving to be globally local. On the one hand we offer customers the opportunities that a global mail and logistics network has to offer. On the other hand, we are local in every market that we operate in that we understand and act as an incumbent to meet customer expectations specific to every market. As we strongly believe in data-driven and fact-based marketing we continually monitor how well we meet our customers’ expectations. Through a host of brand intelligence tools and through our continued First Choice efforts we make sure that we make continuous improvements in everything we do all the time.

It goes without saying that continued digitization of processes and communications drive the many-to-many and therefore tailor-made approach on a daily basis, along with the form these appear in.

Our company, our staff, our customers and society as a whole have shown during the pandemic that we can all respond much more flexibly to changes than we would have assumed when the pandemic first started.

Post-COVID, post Social Justice – the world is settling back to a new normal. How have these events affected your brand strategy?

We are not sure the world is settling back to a new normal just yet, when we see what is happening in different parts of our world. We have always looked at our brand in three dimensions – along the three bottom lines that our Group Strategy 2025 has defined as its core: Our people, our customers and our investors. We do not want to boast, but we have performed spectacularly well as a brand for our investors over the past year, and this continues to be an important aspect of our brand building efforts.

Equally important are DHL and Deutsche Post as employer brands. Our 570,000 people are ambassadors for the brand, not just because they interact with them on the basis of our brand promise “Excellence. Simply Delivered”, but also because they play a major role in helping us win new colleagues. Key to this is that our colleagues understand what the brand represents in its core values, and that they serve as role models for our brands every day. We are very happy that our internal research shows that the great majority of our employees identify very strongly with our brands. We are tapping into this huge potential jointly with our colleagues from Human Resources.

Our company, our staff, our customers and society as a whole have shown during the pandemic that we can all respond much more flexibly to changes than we would have assumed when the pandemic first started. Hopefully this insight will remain front-of-mind for everybody in our company overall, and for us brand marketing folks ultimately contribute to and accelerate positive change.

During the pandemic, Deutsche Post and DHL saw a surge in deliveries which we were able to manage thanks to a set of very strict anti-COVID safety measures, we expect that demand will normalize after the pandemic and the need for continued COVID specific measures will ease. Our brand strategy however will stay “as is” having proven its strength during the pandemic.

What are the major disrupters and accelerators of competition and brand growth on your horizon?

The number one question is what our world will look like post-COVID. COVID has triggered fundamental changes to the ways all of us live, work, and shop, travel. Which of these trends are here to stay, and which are only temporary? Let me highlight a couple of key trends: COVID has seen a surge in business-to-consumer eCommerce globally. Our transport volumes have grown significantly, putting our global network to the ultimate test. We believe that this fundamental change is there to stay but we expect we will see normalizing growth pattern in eCommerce.

A second trend is ESG. Again, this is something on which we as a company have taken a pioneering role. Allow me to draw attention to our fleet of StreetScooters, fully electric vehicles that we were first to market. Our well-established GoPrograms provide educational opportunities (GoTeach) in partnership with Teach for America and our disaster relief efforts (GoHelp). We see a lot of media interest in this topic, and it sometimes blurs the line between what companies claim to do and what they actually do. Our focus is on delivering on our commitments.

All of this supports building and growing our brands, as we want to maintain and expand our market share in this environment and offer relevant and value-added products and services to increase the resilience and profitability of our two biggest assets, Deutsche Post and DHL.