'Touch, tell, selling and care': Thule on creating an authentic brand experience

Since today's consumers care more about authenticity, brands need to build a stronger relationship with them by showing empathy and understanding of their needs in the moment, says Swedish outdoor products brand Thule.

A study by Forrester found that 71% of consumers say they relate better to authentic brands and want to support them with loyalty.

Thule is taking a four-step approach to creating authenticity when communicating with consumers. The brand calls it “touch, tell, selling and care” because it believes this strategy meets the consumer at every stage of their journey.

On a panel at Sitecore Symposium 2022, Mats Gylldorff, global director of marketing at Thule, explained how Thule wants the 'touch' phase for consumers involves brand awareness, but also simply inspires consumers to be more active and go hiking.

“We have the tell phase, which is more about educating people on finding the best product that allows them to go out and bring their gear. The selling part is where they have decided on what kind of products they need, and we need to make it super easy for them to buy the product,” Gylldorff told Paige O’Neill, chief marketing officer of Sitecore.

“The care part is more about converting Thule users into our fans. We have ambassadors that will give tips to users who want to go biking on the hidden gems, the best bike paths, how to ski more sustainably or how to pick out the best recipes to go outdoors and cook outdoor meats.”

To build the brand’s trust with consumers, Gylldorff said safety is the key to its products, and therefore Thule's extensive testing plays an important role. The brand refers people to its test centre for reassurance on product quality.

“This is also where our ambassadors come into play because they are the best when it comes to their field, which might be biking or snowboarding or whatever it might be. They tell their story via what we believe is building trust and having this touchdown sell care,” he said.

“Our ambassadors help us create authentic experiences and the right content at the right time for the most relevant target audience.”

Thule has also changed its communications focus towards using resellers to create a direct connection with its customers.  To do this, Gylldorff said Thule is educating its people internally. 

The role of technology in CRM

Meanwhile, Thule pointed to the important role their front-and-back-end changes are playing to reinforce stronger relations with consumers via resellers, which taps Sitecore technology to host everything in one place.

“Connectivity between the site for the programme is helping Thule to be an agile and effective organisation. For example, our website is in 81 markets with 24 different languages, and we also have our subsidiary Caselogic, whose website is in 35 markets,” Gylldorff explained.

“All the content is done by two people in our content management system. In addition, we also get consumer insight and knowledge about our consumers and how we can create the most engaging content.”

Gylldorff said Thule is at an “exciting” stage because the brand is in an extensive UX and UI design project to remake its website and connect to new product categories with an app. 

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This week, Campaign's media and technology editor Shawn Lim is reporting from the Sitecore Symposium 2022 conference in Chicago.