In the series of interviews Inspired people & brands, in combination with a publication in FoodPersonality.work, this time we talk to Theo van Uffelen, European Marketing Manager of Yakult Europe. About how a career goes differently than you can imagine beforehand, the added value of a trip to another industry, the future of marketing and much more….

Has your career so far gone as you “planned” and what have you learned along the way?

You could say that my career is made up of coincidences. My first job interview started on a Friday afternoon in a traffic jam from Eindhoven to Den Bosch. I ran into my then internship boss, who lowered his window. He asked, “Theo, do you already have a job? You see, we are looking for a marketing assistant, I’ll call you on Monday!” I was planning to travel around America after graduation but I couldn’t pass up this opportunity. I went to work for WC Duck at Verwet. There I learned three important things:

1. The street fighter mentality. You have to do smart things when you’re not the greatest.
2. The power of a USP. WC-Eend had a very clear USP, namely the only product you could spray under the rim. This changed all at once all the rules of play in a market that had been “stuck” until then
3. The power of advertising. We still know the advertising campaign made then: “We from the toilet duck”. There I learned how fast it can go with humorous and also USP underlining communication.

After 4 years I transferred to de Ruijter. I had actually applied at Redband Venco but an internal candidate came there. They asked if I was interested in another marketing job, but at de Ruijter. Within two weeks I was hired there at a marketing job that I hadn’t actually envisioned but really liked. So that was the second coincidence. For me, De Ruijter was a wonderful company where I worked for 10 years. From Product manager bread spread to Commercial Director. My first professional love is marketing and everything that goes with it. Here I also got to know my second professional love, namely organizational development. Understanding how to make an organization effective is actually applying marketing lessons inwardly. It is also about creating a a vision, strategizing and persevering.

Then came the third coincidence. De Ruijter was bought by Heinz (together with Honig and Hak). At the time, I was on the board of De Ruijter which automatically went with it and that’s how I ended up at Heinz. There I learned what it is like to work in a completely different culture. An American culture is really quite different. My responsibilities there included change management with the goal of turning four companies into one company and culture; Heinz, De Ruijter, Hak and Honig became one Heinz Europe. This involved, among other things, setting out a clear vision, what you want to stand for as a company. It was also important to present Heinz as an inspiring company, both internally and externally. They gave me that role. It was about managing that internal change as well as bringing that conscious positioning to the outside world.

Then they needed a marketing director for Honig and I wanted that. Real hardcore marketing again. In the process of putting Honig back on the map as a brand, I came in contact with Branddoctors. They asked if I wanted to join them and I was curious to see what it would be like on the other side of the table. I learned two things from that.

1. I like marketing everywhere. It doesn’t matter for which client, for a food specialist or a bike shop.
2. The second lesson was that I don’t get sustained energy from consulting. It is great fun, but for me the satisfaction is more in getting the whole job done too, with a team. In my experience, the biggest difference in a consulting project is not made for those making the report but by the client doing something good with it, or not….

So together we soon came to the conclusion that I needed to pursue my own path. I did a coaching job for Branddoctors at Unilever. Then I was asked for an interim job at Becel which eventually turned into a 1.5 year period. After that I left LU for a while (placed by WerfSelect) and then I got another call from Unilever, in between there was also an assignment at Friesland Campina.

Coca Cola called me to ask if I knew people at Unilever who wanted to work at Coke. This seemed like fun to me and so we started talking somewhat by accident. So I got the job and did it for over 3 years, also in an international role. Until I realized that I was a bit bored with airplanes and hotels. So I started looking around again.

I was advised by a headhunter to take a look at Aegon. There I was inspired by the new possibilities of marketing. I thought, I can make another right angle turn in my career, then I should do it now and not in 5 or 6 years. Consciously went there, even though this was way out of my comfort zone. At Aegon, I ended up being responsible for all marketing for 5.5 years. Then Aegon downsized to separate marketing departments so my role was eliminated. Then I spent a year doing board work at bvA and other fun temporary jobs. Eventually Yakult came along, through WerfSelect.

You call your current job at Yakult the very best. Why?

For a number of reasons. Yakult reminds me of the two companies where I had the most fun. It reminds me of De Ruijter, a small company with its own production, a lot of fanaticism, an animated culture of people who want to make a difference. In the case of Yakult really on health and for De Ruijter this was “fun at the table. But also because there are still a lot of great things to do, there is a lot to build on. And then also within a beautiful, enriching culture. In addition, Unilever is of course a very science-based company. Unilever puts a lot of time, money and effort into fundamental research into how the human body works and which nutrients can play a role in this. I was responsible for Becel and Unilever did a lot of research into plant sterols, omega fats, which amino acids do what in your body etc. Yakult also does this but from a bacterial perspective. Yakult is the global pioneer in understanding what good bacteria can do in your body and how you can apply that to help your organs stay healthy and function well The founder of Yakult lived in 1935 in an area where there was a lot of (childhood) disease, he was a microbiologist but also wanted to play an active role in preventing disease. He deliberately set out to find how, as a microbiologist, he could find something that would help people do that.

Have you become a believer in Yakult?

Yes, at first I didn’t know this very well. I didn’t know that Yakult was so enormously strong in that scientific background. In Asia, everyone wants to work at Yakult. Because there’s a lot of research and a big focus on vitality. I am genuinely impressed by the depth and commitment of Yakult’s knowledge to understanding science-based mechanisms in a body. Europe, unfortunately, is the only region in the world where those claims are not currently granted. With the success of Yakult and a few competitors, “cowboys” have also entered the market with claims that are not well substantiated. Then the European commission intervened by making everyone work again on dossiers, unfortunately including Yakult.

I have come to know Yakult as an inspired brand with the mission to bring health. How do you experience that?

In Japanese culture, it’s okay to wait until you have a payback period. Really a long-term vision. Even to the point of saying, we’re not leaving this country because we think we can really contribute something to society here. I experience Yakult as a patient and courageous company. We persevere, even in the face of setbacks and headwinds, because we believe in the end goal. “Having a purpose and understanding that a purpose needs a business model”. Our goal is to bring that health, and we understand that there is a commercial aspect to that. Profit is like breathing: you don’t get out of bed in the morning “especially to take a big breath,” but if you don’t get a breath, you can’t live and contribute.

Is it important to you that you stand behind a product?

Yes, but more importantly you can get behind the intention, the mission of a company. For example, at de Ruijter, sprinkles was a product manifestation of the mission “we are going to bring joy to people’s tables. You are not doing marketing for sprinkles but for a company that wants to change something in the world.

For Yakult, the mission is to contribute to the health of society and then not only physical health but also mental health. At Unilever, it was: we are making a contribution to vitality. That’s why these three companies were the most fun to have worked for.

Can you talk a little more about the mission you are working on now?

At its core, this is about helping take Yakult to a new phase of success. There are fortunately many people within Yakult who are motivated to do things differently and better. The beauty of the culture at Yakult or Asian culture in general is that it is much more about substance. There is much more room for rest and reflection, what is it really about? A small step is also a step. This is about the long term.

At the same time, you are now more ambitious than ever. What does it take to make a marketing team even more successful?

• The will to get better every day. The drive to be continuously positively dissatisfied. By this I don’t mean to be continuously grumblingly dissatisfied, but rather to feel this positively. It is not good enough now … so how cool that together we can make it better tomorrow. A kind of passion to get the best out of yourself, others and work. If you don’t like that then I guess I’m not a fun boss either. We are mainly looking for improvement, how can things be done better? Not everyone likes that. I once experienced at Aegon that a team member came up to me and said, “I really had a hard time with you in the beginning, but I’ve never learned so much so I think it’s great.” To me that is one of the very best compliments you can get.
• Really wanting to work together. Giving each other space and things. Very nice to give credit to other people. Also I can do that easier now than I could 10/20 years ago.

Do you think the marketplace looks too one-sidedly at people over 50?

Yes sometimes, but of course I have a colored opinion about it. I have sometimes felt powerless when I applied for a job as a 55-year-old and had to “compete” with people who were 15 years younger, but also very senior. You have to be able to indicate what added value those 15 extra years of experience bring and prove that you are still “fresh” in your thinking and actions. Not every headhunter is willing to take the trouble to see that or to ask. But I am sure that even in the past 10 years I have really become a better marketer. Partly by simply having more peace and self-confidence, and less personal assertiveness, which allows you to let others grow more. .

What do you see transformation as we look at digital within marketing?

When I entered Aegon, the profession was at the height of “digital marketing is everything and classic marketing is dead”. But you should not think in “there are digital and classic marketers” but in: “there are good and bad marketers”. Good marketers who understand that digital is an indispensable and important part of the business as it is today, and bad marketers think they can ignore digital or they think digital is the only thing. TV is still important if you want to reach a target audience in large numbers. Strategy still comes before tactics. Digital, by definition, is a tactical tool. It’s a way to sell. It’s not for nothing that Coolblue just made physical stores at one point. The digital marketers I’m looking for are those people who understand that and are willing to learn much more than just digital.

One of the mistakes I see digital marketers make in other companies is thinking, “there’s a lot of data, so we need to start capturing and reporting all of that.” Only then do they start thinking about what to do with it. We reverse the mindset. What is the business decision we need to make, what information is needed for that and what data is going to provide that information. I hope by then we’ll be a little further along the maturity curve of digital marketing, those are also the people I’m looking for, who are willing to look up that curve.

Yakult is in the supermarket and we don’t have an e- shop. That means that as a digital marketer on the European team, you have to understand that your journey doesn’t start or end at Facebook. Your journey must end at a purchase or loyalty behavior. Ideally, a marketer understands the various channels and behaviors and ties them together. For example, that you as a consumer buy something in the store, scan the receipt, that goes into your own customer database, based on that the customer might have a chance to win a prize, and you as a marketer can start approaching this customer individually and ideally “nurture” them into a more loyal customer. That’s a mature journey. We are now developing that kind of thinking and rolling it out in some of the EU countries.

We are going to work more and more integrated between marketing and PR, between marketing and science. The trick is to unlock the knowledge and bring it to storytelling that allows you to inspire clients. A culture where everyone understands we are a team together, everyone has their own place and we can only win together.

The marketing world is changing incredibly fast. How do you anticipate that?

In my Aegon days, we very deliberately built a competence house with the team leads. At Yakult, in a certain sense, we are also working on that in the profiles we draw up for new positions. The starting point is: “skills can be learned, attitude is hard to unlearn or teach”. Those attitudes are much more important to us: genuine curiosity, liking to puzzle things out and find a solution, being self-starting, genuinely wanting to work together (not a loner). Attitude is much more important than skill. Realize that you always need each other. A commando team is a very strong team. You all have specialists with their own expertise who together are an unstoppable force with one goal.

The Food industry seems to be catching up on digital marketing?

Retailers are now increasingly ahead of manufacturers in terms of digital capabilities and capabilities. After all, they have the customer data and that is becoming the big pivot point between retailers and brands. But I think retailers and manufacturers need each other to be able to convert that data together into better propositions, for example.

A lot has changed because of Corona in the past year. How do you view that?

I hope we do go back to giving hands, high fives and hugs. Those are really basic human needs I think. But I do hope that from the current realization that we can’t take anything for granted, we will start looking more at what we do have and how we can make that better, rather than frantically trying to hold on to how it was.

Thank you Theo for sharing your knowledge and insights. Best of luck with the wonderful mission you are on!

By Annelies Ruis, owner WerfSelect

NOTES. Part of this interview is included in a publication in FoodPersonality.work, March 2021 edition