Five agencies are coming together under the Comprend brand in a new, integrated offering by the digital marketing and communications agency. Comprend CEO, Martin Petersson, discusses what this means for tech-enabled comms.

How does technology help bridge the gap between marketing and communications, and why is this important? 

Marketing and communications are in many cases separated in larger companies. They operate in silos although they both carry the company voice, have several common touchpoints and focus on all audiences. The reason for the separation is organisational and process-driven, measured in a linear matter, i.e. based on internal reasons.

With the rapid development of technology, new challenges have emerged. How do you, as a brand manager, ensure on-brand experience without stifling creativity or ability to adapt to market conditions or culture? How do you, as a CMO, increase awareness and drive growth when the audience is increasingly caring about sustainability and what the company stands for?

Technology allows us to scale fast and give our internal organisation capabilities to act fast, to make the right decisions based on insights and data, measure the results and build trust by being consistent, transparent and honest in our communication. Speed and consistency are the key words here.

What does successfully bridging the gap between marketing and communications look like, and what challenges does Comprend face in achieving this?

Tech-enabled marketing and communication is largely a new and unoccupied industry category so, with anything new, there will be challenges. But we believe that by integrating our offering in this way, we can solve more client complex needs with a wider team of expertise and specialists.

Technology is the enabler, which we use to address brand, sustainability communications, corporate communications and employer branding in a better way. We use practices from the growth-oriented marketing side, with data and insight-driven solutions, experimentation and understanding how to scale the execution of these across content, search, websites, digital reporting and the organisation, to build trust with audiences. Trust is an enabler for growth. If you don’t trust a company, you will not buy from it, which is true for any type of business. Understanding this and incorporating the long-term perspective and trust into marketing makes it significantly more effective. And that drives sustainable growth. Both sides of this are essential and crucial and by combining them we deliver better value for our clients.

What does Comprend’s new offering bring to corporate communications?

Corporate communications remains a core competency and we have always had the expertise and track record to build trust and inspire the people that matter most to public companies and brands. Now we can bring both skills and practices from the marketing side into corporate communications, making it faster and more data-driven which creates better value. Our overall objective in this is to drive measurable improvements in building trust for our clients.

We also see that the roles of head of communications and CMO are rapidly changing and overlapping. Head of communications supports transformation to agile, multi-disciplinary insights-driven communications and integrates marketing, communication and corporate responsibility into branding. With our new extended offering, we act as a catalyst and partner in that change.

How will Comprend help to drive sustainable growth and long-term trust for clients?

We have a long history of driving sustainable growth and long-term trust, but operating as one agency means that we connect insights, best practice, and approaches – drawing on all areas of expertise to drive transformative impact.

This means that we open our performance and analytics toolbox to solve a brand challenge or borrow insights from corporate communication to inform marketing services. It is within these unique combinations that we solve even the most complex of challenges.

What kind of tools will Comprend be using?

We use the same platforms and technologies that many others use, from the largest suppliers such as Google, Optimizely, Umbraco, OpenAI, Hubspot etc. The difference is how we use them, and how we help our clients use them. Our approach is bringing it all together and using the entire tech stack to its fullest and combining it with how you operate in a large, complex company. This is not easy, simply because large organisations are complex with many cultures, processes and structures to deal with. This is where we thrive and where we help our clients to accelerate and get the most from their organisation and tech stack in a sustainable way.

How important will data and analytics be to Comprend’s work?

It is absolutely vital to us. Data and analytics have always underpinned everything we do to navigate business and opportunities. We have made our own audience research since 1997 focusing on corporate audiences and their expectations. As the new Comprend we have increased our capabilities extensively and have performance and analytics as key service offerings to turn insights into action. Not just for marketing, but also for corporate communications. Data is also crucial to us to understand the impact of our advice and what we deliver to our clients. Using data, insight and experimentation is the only way to be sure that we do the right thing and deliver the right impact.