The Body Shop Indonesia promotes CDO Daniel Hagmeijer

The Body Shop Indonesia has appointed Daniel Hagmeijer (pictured) to the newly created role of chief customer officer. Hagmeijer, who joined the team in January this year as chief digital officer, told MARKETING-INTERACTIVE that the new role combines the roles of CDO and CMO. He will oversee the end-to-end customer growth strategy, including marketing, brand and communications strategy, PR and community, eCommerce, CRM, media, marketing technology, data analytics, and digital product development.

He explained that customers have been the main focus of The Body Shop since it entered Indonesia as a retailer almost 30 years ago. "The pandemic has driven many people online, and the exposure to a multitude of amazing (digital) experiences across all industries has set a high bar in terms of customer expectations. We've created this role to further centralise our efforts in creating a delightfully seamless customer journey across touchpoints, to create a customer orientation across everything we do, and continuously exceed customer expectations," Hagmeijer said.

Meanwhile, The Body Shop Indonesia's founder and chairwoman Suzy Hutomo has decided to assume the sole role of chairwoman beginning next year, after double hatting as CMO and chairwoman. 

Hagmeijer will report to CEO of The Body Shop Indonesia, Aryo Widiwardhono, and lead approximately 60 individuals. The team is still reviewing the roles required and recruiting where needed. Over the year, the brand has been on the search for digital marketing analytics talent, GM of product category, creative designer, and digital creative manager. 

"In this role, I aim to contribute to The Body Shop Indonesia's journey to be Indonesia’s most customer-centric beauty and personal care brand and to fight for a fairer and more beautiful world together with our customers," he said.

According to him, customer centricity means re-aligning The Body Shop Indonesia's marketing strategy to 2022 customer behaviour as well; market orientation, segmentation, positioning, targeting for an ever-evolving Indonesian personal and beauty care landscape. However, Hagmeijer said the brand cannot lose sight of business as well, so a large part of the role is to make sure to always find the overlap between what customers want and what its business needs.

For Hagmeijer, one of the most important lessons he learnt this year was out of sight, out of mind. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute shows mental availability as a key driver for growth. In 2020 and 2021, with store closures and reduced mall traffic, he said the brand got a lot less organic reach than before. And while people weren't coming to the malls as often, their shopping behaviour towards the category also changed significantly.

"So 2022 will be about doubling down on mental availability and thus driving reach and impressions for our overall brand. With mall traffic slowly coming back to 2019 levels, a combination of organic reach and paid media will help drive significant growth for the brand," he explained.

As the industry gears up to usher in the new year, Hagmeijer is really excited to see the further implementation of autonomous marketing. There have been huge strides in machine learning in the past few years, and the industry is now seeing machine learning being implemented across more and more marketing solutions, including a range of CDPs in the market.

"It's exciting because, in theory, it will allow us to serve the customers with the best experience, while at the same time getting maximum business results. Another trend, related to this, that I am excited about is the adoption of more creative automation solutions. Letting the machines do the resizing, recolouring, rewriting of assets, while we - the humans - focus on what we are really good at, creativity," Hagmeijer added.

Nonetheless, despite the shiny new toys available to marketers, Hagmeijer said it is also essential for companies to have a strong base in terms of marketing strategy. He added:

No matter how fancy the new solutions are unless they are in line with the customer (growth) strategy, they'll fall flat.

The Body Shop Indonesia's creative, social, and CRM duties are handled in-house while it works with m/SIX on the media front. As for PR, it is currently working with agencies on an ad-hoc basis. Hagmeijer said agencies add the most value on the strategic side of things. Within their specialised domain, he looks to them to feed the team with the latest development, opportunities, and ways of executing.

"When it comes to mass production of creative assets, for example, that's now easily outsourced to machines. But creativity and human ingenuity will be something that agencies can claim as the strongest value add," he said. 

Hagmeijer speaks from experience, having previously been MD of Wunderman Thompson Indonesia for a year after it merged with Mirum Indonesia in 2020. Before that, he spent more than six years with Mirum, last helming the role of MD overseeing a team of 115 professionals, according to his LinkedIn. He has also worked at TNS Indonesia, Exact, Philips Research, and TU Delft, according to his LinkedIn.

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