The HoC's May Chronicles: The Best Brands Awards! #4

Serviceplan and GfK share a common passion: Building Best Brands. At the Best Brands Awards on March 21st, 2024, we proudly unveiled the 21 winners of the 2024 edition, selected through a survey of 4,500 Belgian consumers. In our latest House of Communication Chronicles, delve into insights from these winners regarding their outstanding performance! This edition features exclusive interviews with Arne Van Verdegem, Growth Director of Coolblue (Best Retail Hi-Fi, Electro Brand), Aline Lemaire, Marketing Director at Coca-Cola (Best Soft & Fruit Drinks Brand), and Steven Van Pee, Marketing and Sales Manager at HP (Best IT Brand).

#1 Coolblue is Best Retail (Hi-Fi, Electro) Brand 2024!

Explore an exclusive interview with Arne Van Verdegem, Growth Director at Coolblue, and discover his valuable advice!

How do you measure customer satisfaction and emotional engagement with your brand, and how do you use this data to guide your actions?

At Coolblue, we’re obsessed with customer satisfaction. We measure this based on the Net Promoter Score (NPS). We do this for our different departments and services, such as our customer service, our stores, and our delivery and installation services. We use that data to get a little bit better every day in every way.

What are your priorities in marketing and communication to maintain your status as a favorite brand in Belgium in the long term?

We promote our brand consistently on all channels in our typical Coolblue style. This creates recognizability and trust with our customers.

How do you foster creativity within your marketing and communication team to develop memorable campaigns that resonate with the Belgian audience?

Our internal marketing department works as our own marketing agency. Our own Coolbluers work on and are the face of our campaigns. They embody our brand and create content that truly suits us.

Want to know more about how to become or remain a Best Brand? Then get in touch with the Best Brands team at [email protected]

#2 Coca-Cola is Best Soft & Fruit Drinks Brand 2024!

Find out how Coca-Cola became a best brand in an interview with Aline Lemaire, Marketing Director at Coca-Cola.

How do you incorporate local values and concerns into your marketing strategy to better align with the expectations of Belgians?

Coca-Cola is active in Belgium for over 95 years. Together with our bottler, we employ over 2.000 people in Belgium and Luxembourg and 83% of the drinks distributed in Belgium are locally produced, thanks to our bottler’s sites in Chaudfontaine, Ghent and Antwerp. We have a big heart for Belgium, and we are proud of our local anchoring. In terms of marketing, our relevance is founded on supporting universal values like togetherness, positivity, diversity and inclusion on the one hand, and activating passion points like music, sports and meals, all fully relevant for the Belgian population, on the other hand. With passionate and dedicated local marketing teams, we make sure these passion points are incorporated in the local context and culture. To close the loop, we use the right media mix, local influencers, and local events to further activate our campaigns on the Belgian market. This is our secret recipe to building brand love and equity. ;)

How do you plan to continue evolving as a brand while remaining emotionally connected to your consumers?

Our brands carry strong values which are universal and timeless. At the same time, we are aware that our consumers and the world they live in are changing at a rapid pace. It is key for us to keep evolving with them, to keep capturing new trends, new technology and new media, while remaining consistent and true to our consumers. Influencer marketing and social media campaigns for example play a big role in building and maintaining authentic interactions and meaningful relationships with our consumers. We have also embedded a ‘test-and-learn' culture in our company, not only when it comes to marketing, but also regarding product innovations: we want to keep surprising our consumers with new products in new categories.

How do you manage environmental and social sustainability within your industry, and how does this influence the preference of Belgians for your brand?

As a leading beverage company, we want to take responsibility to help drive a positive change. Our company’s motto and ambition isto “refresh the world and make a difference”, which you can really see reflected in our day-to-day business and local operations.

Starting off with environmental sustainability, we are aware that climate change is a global issue, which demands urgent action, and we want to be part of the solution. Regarding packaging, for example, we aim to collect and recycle as many cans and bottles as we bring into the market by 2030, which requires a strong focus on reducing, reusing or recycling in all our packaging initiatives. Making packaging more sustainable is also crucial for our carbon reduction efforts, as it’s a big part of our footprint. Coca-Cola aims to reduce 30% CO2-emissions across its value chain by 2030 and has the clear ambition to become CO2-neutral by 2040. To achieve that target, sustainability needs to be top of mind in everything we do today, tomorrow and every day beyond that.

We have several proof points showing we are moving into the right direction, and even lead the change, such as:

-??????? Close to all of our bottles in Belgium are made of 100% recycled plastic (rPET) (with the exception of the cap and label, and Aquarius 1.5 L, Tropico 1.5 L and Minute Maid 33 cl).

-??????? We're committed to removing all unnecessary and hard-to-recycle plastic from our supply chain. A concrete example: in our bottler’s Ghent factory, the plastic wrap around our 25 cl cans of Coke have been replaced with cardboard. The same goes for our cans of Fuze Tea.

-??????? In 2022, our Chaudfontaine’s mineral water bottling plant has been certified as fully CO2-neutral*, one year sooner than planned.

When it comes to social sustainability, we believe that as a local organization we are connected to the local communities around us. That’s why we give our employees two paid working days to volunteer at a local organization each year, where we also offer them to opportunity to volunteer with our partners such as Special Olympics and Natuurpunt. Besides that, we support initiatives focused around the professional development of young people. We are one of four founding partners of CAPITAL, an organisation that supports youth in the heart of Brussels, and we created a unique Coca-Cola VR-experience at JOBX, their phygital job fair that shows youngster all the options they have on the job market. Lastly, we walk the talk when it comes to sharing our values of togetherness. Our iconic Christmas campaigns always include a special partnership with a local charity organization, where in 2023 we supported the Belgian Food Banks with 27,000 Christmas meals.

How do you plan to further utilize artificial intelligence in the future to anticipate the needs and preferences of Belgian consumers and strengthen your brand's position as a favorite??

AI is an incredible tool offering so many new perspectives and opportunities. I’m convinced that the combination of artificial intelligence and human intelligence can lead to wonders. Just look at the launch of our latest Coca-Cola Creations: Coca-Cola Creations 3000, a limited-edition flavor that gives a glimpse of what the future tastes and feels like, thanks to AI and human intelligence. AI will definitely help us to be more agile, more personalized, and more relevant. And it will allow us to put our energy in what matters the most: our consumers.

?* Lloyd's Register Quality Assurance certification according to PAS2060 and validated Carbon Neutral Declaration by Lloyd, which is available to the public upon request. The PAS 2060 certification only applies to the production activities of the mineral water bottling plant in Chaudfontaine - specifically their Scope 1, Scope 2 emissions and the Scope 3 emissions related to employee commuting. The brands produced at the site are not yet carbon neutral.

Want to know more about how to become or remain a Best Brand? Then get in touch with the Best Brands team at [email protected]

#3 HP is Best IT Brand 2024!

Discover how HP earned its Best Brand with insights from an interview featuring Steven Van Pee, Marketing and Sales Manager at HP.

How has your brand approached the issue of differentiation from your competitors in your industry?

People think of HP as a brand with a strong reputation on reliability and quality. In recent years, HP has invested into building equally strong but separate brands towards specific consumer segments. As a result, we are evolving more and more towards a ‘house of brands’. In the Gaming segment, we lead our marketing messaging with our OMEN brand. All players in this market are mainly focusing on professional e-sports events and offering the best hardware to compete in online matches. We believe that gamers just want to have fun, which is why we use a more playful tone with a funny twist. We talk about Hardcore Fun instead of Hardcore Competition and organize events like our OMEN Cyber Café where people can play arcade games against each other with just one objective: just have a good time with friends.

In our product development, we are building in more and more synergies between our OMEN PCs and our gaming accessories brand HyperX. Headsets, keyboards and mice from HyperX are best-in-class for all gamers on both PC and consoles. But when combined with an OMEN device, they will gain additional benefits and provide even more benefits to the user. You will see more campaigns on this ‘better together’ marriage in the next years.

Can you share examples of innovative marketing strategies you have implemented to enhance the emotional perception of your brand?

In collaboration with Living Tomorrow, we are demonstrating HP products and innovations in their newly opened campus in Vilvoorde. Between 2024 and 2028, we are jointly planning to welcome 1 million visitors. Both consumers and business professionals will be inspired by the way we will live and work in the year 2030. For HP, this is a unique opportunity to differentiate our brand and to combine our stories towards consumers and businesses into one inspiring look into the future.

How do you foster creativity within your marketing and communication team to develop memorable campaigns that resonate with the Belgian audience?

Our multidisciplinary teams work very closely together. For every campaign, we include people from the local Belgian organization as well as international marketing experts in their field. Both stakeholders interact in tandem with our marketing agencies so we can challenge and strengthen each other’s ideas. We bring all the marketing experts in Belgium & Netherlands regularly together, often with an external speaker on innovative technologies or emerging trends.

Want to know more about how to become or remain a Best Brand? Then get in touch with the Best Brands team at [email protected]