Bénédicte Lobelle first worked for more than 20 years in media circles, at Mediahuis, and then at Sanoma. At the end of 2013 she left Sanoma to work on a very interesting project at VUB Iminds SMIT regarding media economics. In 2015, she joined the National Lottery where she works today as Marketing Director.
She always loved variety and change and likes to combine the typical marketing aspects such as positioning, branding, market strategy, creative strategy with technology, digital platforms and data.
In the early 2000’s everything about digital media was quite new: a variety of new value propositions were being launched, networked platforms took over customer relations, user generated content was the new Walhalla, and it was the dawn of new upcoming international companies bringing completely new solutions to consumers. It was all very fast-paced, and this generated a lot of questions for long established media companies who had been doing things the same way for years.
What was exciting about that, was the combination of strategic thinking and learning on the fly, the velocity, and the pressure to understand new trends and to come up with new ideas.
Also now she is operating in a market that has a very long history, the core value proposition still stands, but the context is changing: new competitors are entering the market, we have to adapt the way of talking to the consumer, the way that they can interact with us and buy our products. The solutions change, we combine branding and demand in the same team, we broaden the distribution footprint and grow our digital direct sales, we try to implement a smooth experience for the customer. And so teams have to understand each other’s very different talents, storytellers have to understand figures and data crunchers have to understand the world of the storytellers to put it bluntly. These changes again, now in a more mature digital marketing environment, make it quite interesting. Combine the thinking and the doing remains the name of the game.
At the National Lottery, the brick-and-mortar consumer experience and the digital consumer experience are equally valuable, slightly different but not entirely. And if you really want to make consumer centricity a reality, this presents very big challenges and equally big projects. It needs to continuously evolve!