Attack is the best defense

The market leader Swisscom wants to make better use of synergies and the brand image is to be unified. Marketing and brand communication play a key role in this. In line with this strategy, the corresponding tasks were combined under one Head of Marketing for the first time at the beginning of 2013. Jürg Pauli has assumed this new overall responsibility. Tim Alexander was appointed Head of Marketing Communications in Berne on September 1. In addition to marketing communications for business and private customers, his responsibilities also include public relations and online communications.

Tim Alexander can look back on many years of experience in the telecom industry. He introduced the claim "Erleben was verbindet" ("Experience what connects") for Deutsche Telekom and won the Digital Brand Champion Award from Wirtschaftswoche in 2012 with the O2 brand. The current Head of Marketing Communications at Swisscom entered the world of advertising on a tip from his father. He worked in marketing himself and said, "Before you go to university, you should take a look at the industry. " So Tim Alexander started with an apprenticeship as an advertising salesman at Grey in Düsseldorf. "Because it was great," curiosity has turned into vocation and Alexander has been able to develop himself from the ground up. Even as a junior consultant, however, Tim Alexander also realized, "If I want to change things to my liking, I'll have to add a degree on top of that."

He decided on Pforzheim. The university there is considered a leader in Germany for the subject of marketing and communication. "Keeping an eye on the fundamentals of business administration and trying things out in practice" then became a recipe for success during the course of his studies that Alexander was to pick up again and again throughout his career. In addition to an internship at Springer & Jacoby in Hamburg, he was also able to expand his experience during a stay abroad at Merck in Thailand.

Founding an agency while still a student

Alexander financed his studies himself as a young entrepreneur. Together with his roommates, he founded the advertising agency "Werbeliebe". There, the students developed professional creations for small and medium-sized companies at the kitchen table. The "practice agency" later became a permanent institution at Pforzheim University, and Tim Alexander still serves on the supervisory board. He regularly follows what new ideas today's students are also developing in his "love of advertising" and thinks: "This is probably the most sustainable thing I have created so far. In any case, I am very proud of my youthful sin. "

Among the students who are now 15 years younger, Alexander, who now also works as a lecturer at technical colleges in Düsseldorf and Munich, can still detect the same curiosity "as we had back then. But the possibilities of technology have become so much different and more versatile today. "Today, much more is possible. For example, people tweet in parallel while developing. In a blog, interested parties can follow the development of a project. Professors and even we as alumni can give feedback through these channels. This means we can all work together in real time, share our experiences, and learn from each other," says Alexander, making the connection to his new job: "That's also the world in which Swisscom operates." To ensure that the promotion of young talent doesn't remain just theory, Alexander has repeatedly tried to help young talents from the "advertising love" get a start in larger companies in his subsequent stations. "Giving something back" is his motivation.

Experience on both sides of the front

In the course of his own career, a change between the agency and the client side stands out several times. Alexander, however, doesn't want to comment on this as a "change of front." "At the end of the day, the two spheres of activity belong together. We are all in the service industry - we serve brands. And you can only help brands succeed if you understand both sides properly." On the customer side, Alexander's first job was with Daimler for four years, where he worked on the launch of the Smart car. This phase also saw his first contacts with the Swiss agency scene. At that time, the Smart budget was handled by Weber, Hodel, Schmid. Later by Springer & Jacoby. At Daimler, Alexander learned "how a large corporation works and how to really push issues." The great thing about this client site
was also for him: "You are really responsible.

There are no excuses. You say yes or no." On the agency side, he says, the variety of tasks is interesting. "Understanding brands in depth and always finding answers to new questions, that's always been a lot of fun for me. " After his stint at Smart, Tim Alexander was brought back to Grey once again in 2005. At his old teacher, he now managed the budget of O2, among other things, as a professional. For this mobile brand from the Telefónica group, he managed the account. With success, because soon Saatchi & Saatchi asked him if he would like to do the same for Deutsche Telekom. "The change interested me: doing the advertising for Telekom on a European level was a new challenge."

Growing specialization

Finally, O2 was able to win him back once again at a higher hierarchical level. Tim Alexander became Head of Branding and then Vice President Brand Management at Telefónica Germany in 2008. "I was always kindly passed around ", he smiles about his increasingly concentrated experience in the telecommunications industry. The references he has accumulated have now also made him interesting for Swisscom. "A company that I have followed closely and admired from Germany for some time. It's fair to say that we at O2 have even copied a few ideas for marketing from Swisscom." As a specialist who has grown into the marketing of telecommunications in parallel with its growing importance, Tim Alexander now sees the highly diversified market in the consolidation phase. After eight years in this almost boiling-over industry, he knows the rules both from the provider side and on the advertising front. "With this background, I can contribute something to the further development of Swisscom. It's a challenge I'm very happy to take on. On top of that, I have the honor of representing a part of Switzerland with Swisscom."

The strategy of the market leader

Tim Alexander had very intensive discussions with his current boss Jürg Pauli before he joined Swisscom and realized that Swisscom must not only react, but act. "That means: as the market leader, we are actually in a defensive position. But here's the unique thing: defense is not the issue at Swisscom; we attack because that's the best defense." Swisscom also saw early on that it made sense to invest in the network, he said. "That's why Swisscom is in an excellent position. If you do the network comparison, for example, you can see: The money was invested in the right place for the future. The brand promises its customers: You can rely on it. It works!" To this end, he says, Swisscom offers all products from a single source. This is an advantage that marketing will have to "use and leverage" even more in the future. He was also attracted to Berne by the corporate culture. In the course of his industry contacts, Tim Alexander has been able to ascertain: "Swisscom not only puts the customer at the center, but also the employees. They are given space and there is a culture that is second to none. The trust in the brand is very high."

Understanding the levers of success

Since taking up his post in September 2013, the new Head of Marketing Communications has naturally also familiarized himself "very thoroughly" with the agencies. "The agencies Swisscom works with are all doing a good job, because the brand is in a good position. We don't have the problem of repositioning the brand and frantically turning the store upside down. It's about understanding the levers of success even better and then using them in a targeted way. Beyond that, we want to identify the things that we might still be missing. Then we can get that little bit better again. " One way to do that? "Activating customers even more and further sharpening the brand. That's the task at hand. I'm not going to twirl around. Brand is not a short haul, it's a long haul. It's our responsibility to make sure that the right marketing activities come to fruition. I feel a certain humility towards the brand. Swisscom is solid and big. We have enough time to analyze the situation carefully and then do the right thing. That's the approach we agreed on when I signed on."

Germany and modern Switzerland
The fact that the Swisscom advertising lead has now found its home in Berlin has also caused a stir in the industry in Germany, Alexander confirms. He can "better understand" the excitement from Bern today. On the other hand, "Heimat is simply one of the best agencies of our time" and delivers incredibly good work, for example for Hornbach and for the Volksbanken, Raiffeisenbanken. "Using that for us is a smart idea. I'm not responsible for that, but I'm very happy to live with it." Smoothing the waters, Alexander wants to specify that all productions as well as PR and online "are made in Switzerland ". But for new ideas, it sometimes helps to "have a fresh head." Specifically, inspiration and dynamism are two of the things Tim Alexander wants to dramatize more in marketing communications in the future. "That's certainly a task we want to take on, because the Swisscom brand embodies modern Switzerland."

Andreas Panzeri

The interview with Tim Alexander took place at Swisscom's "Brain Gym" at the Bollwerk in Bern. In this center for creativity, there is also a living room (photo above), whose furnishings are based on the living space of potential customers.