*The graphic design is inspired by Kyoorius Designyatra 2018
“The Nomad” is a fortnightly published series where I talk to expat PR and Comms professionals, then delve into the insights which inform and help other people to live or to do business in an intercultural world. If you or someone you know would be happy to share their perspective, please get in touch! I’d love to hear from you.
“It’s that communication starts to work inside the organisation at a much higher level, that communication teams now also need to bring in the audience’s angles to change the internal practices before they communicate it.”
As part of my series about how we can learn from intercultural insights to embed them into PR and Comms practices and help create positive social impacts, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Kristian Hoareau Foged, founder of Simply Thought, a communications strategy consultancy specialising in data analytics and human insight.
He previously worked at Archetype for nearly six years and was part of the team that founded the agency’s insights and analytics practice. Kristian is a PRWeek 30 Under 30 alumni and also a member of BME PR Pros’ Blueprint Advisory Board.
We talked about his experience and the transition from law, military to PR and comms where Kristian explained his passion for the industry.
Sharing his insights on how to measure and align measurement metrics with business’ objectives, he stressed the importance of understanding what the numbers mean and what they indicate. “To me actually, quite often, we are better suited at understanding what those numbers mean, in a communications or marketing context than, for example, hardcore data scientists.”
Hi Kristian, how are you doing? What has been keeping you busy lately?
I mean, that [kitchen renovation] has been keeping me busy but thankfully, we’re nearly there. Now we have a functioning kitchen, it just needs a lick of paint. We should be almost – famous last words – but almost there with the kitchen.
In terms of work, there’s a couple of really exciting projects that we’ve been working on at Simply Thought, particularly some really interesting analytics and positioning strategy, or brand messaging development for a couple of start-ups – one is in the language learning space and the other big one is in the electric vehicle charging point market. It is going to be more of a scale of a start-up at this stage, which is a really exciting project.
Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path in PR and comms?
Well, PR and comms were, to be entirely frank, a bit of where I landed. I originally did a degree in Law at Southampton University. After I’d done my degree there, I came back to Denmark – we have to do military service for half a year. It’d kind of always been this tunnel vision, focus on doing law; that was the career for me and I was meant to be a lawyer – the question was just what area of law. I did military service then I had this surprising thing where I enjoyed it. I had a great time in the army. It was a great positive experience for me. I applied to be a language officer and preferred to continue in the army onwards. I sadly didn’t get the language officer position but it did open me up to having different experiences to this [question] of who’s to say a lawyer is the only thing or what I should do, or do I know if that’s what I really want to do. So I took these blinders off. Then I applied for a bunch of different jobs all over the place, and different graduate positions in different places. I thought I’d do something else for a couple of years for career awareness and then I’d come back into law in a couple of years and that’d be it. Then I got this job offer – then at the time of what then was Text100, now Archetype – on their graduate scheme. I thought, you know, summer Fridays, away days, and bar, that sounds like a great place to start as a first job. Here we are some eight years later and still doing this [PR and comms] in the industry and have never gone back to law.
That transition from law and military to PR and comms is interesting. If you get a chance in the future, would you come back to law?
I don’t think law is going to be where I ever go back to, but I think doing what we’ve done in PR and comms, particularly strategy, is only a way to open up different opportunities in the private sector. I think I’d love to do some comms for a law firm or a barristers’ chambers at some point. I think that’d be an interesting way to combine those two backgrounds but no, I’ve really enjoyed the opportunities that I’ve had in this sector and opportunities to move in different ways and try different things. On the one hand, it feels it’s been one industry, but on the other hand, it feels like I’ve had two or three different jobs and careers already – moving from traditional PR to social and content and then analytics and strategy.
“You need to have a good story; there needs to be something to make you stand out; there needs to be a reason to attach to the brand. However, the specifics of what matters and the context in which we communicate change and it’s always nice to have that local approach, local connections and relationships, and also understanding of what happens in that space.”
You worked in the UK for eight years after you had graduated and now you’re back to Denmark to work. Are there any differences between the two countries?
I think there are always – especially when you’re talking about PR – differences. I think that even in the UK, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that you can’t just be so London-centric. There are also regional differences and local matters that matter to people. There are certain fundamentals that always carry through that: you need to have a good story; there needs to be something to make you stand out; there needs to be a reason to attach to the brand. However, the specifics of what matters and the context in which we communicate change and it’s always nice to have that local approach, local connections and relationships, and also understanding of what happens in that space.
Then there are some more practical differences, like the channel selection and the type of media that you go for the change. Podcasts have been a big deal in Denmark for a while, or radio programmes, which are quite common to pitch as well. Other channels like Twitter or social media are rarely part of a piece of work or the brief, or at least it’s not the central social media channel. So those things shift and change according to where it is that your audiences exist and what they care about.
You mentioned the practical differences, connections and relationships. When you first came back to Denmark, did you face any challenges to build your network, when you already had that in the UK?
Certainly, but I’ve been in a very lucky position, to be honest with you. I had a couple of lucky situations – this is, again, the importance of network and the importance of people that you meet [throughout] your career, or even before your career, because the people that have actually helped me establish myself in Denmark have been random connections. If I think back on my Danish PR network, the only thing that I had in Denmark was that my previous agency used to have a Danish office. The MD [Managing Director] of the Danish office – whenever he was in London – we used to chat and got along great. He’s obviously still working in the Danish PR space and is a big deal here, so he was a huge help. It was great to know him, be able to connect with him and talk a bit. He also recommended some people and sent my way some projects that weren’t big enough for his agency. On the other side, one of the biggest pieces of work I did last year was helping launch a consultancy, and the hook – a companion hook so to speak – to this consultancy, was through a personal connection who is one of my really good high school friends from way back in the day. We’ve stayed friends, and then something came up that was relevant and she pushed me forward for it. Of course, I still had to pitch and win that business, but that foot in the door was from those personal connections that you have no idea are going to be your professional networks. Literally 15 years down the line.
If you have any advice for any graduate or practitioners who want to make the most of networking in PR and comms, what would your advice be?
Get active within the different communities that are there. Get on Twitter, and connect with people, reach out and ask them. I’ve had several calls and conversations and more CVs than I can count, from people who have done exactly that. What impresses more than anything is not necessarily just what you say or what you do, but it’s that you are willing to do it and that you are interested enough in this space to go out and do it. Make sure you have a couple of good stories to tell, to tell at a cocktail party or wherever it is.
I feel like if we don’t use Twitter, we’ll miss a huge part of the industry. Thank you for the good tips! We touched on the differences between the PR and comms landscapes in Denmark and the UK. How have the intercultural insights helped you during your career?
On the one hand, coming back to Denmark, we spoke about the importance of networks before. But the other interesting thing is that most of the Danish clients that I get now are ones who are exactly interested in the international experience. They see that I [not only] worked in England, but I also worked for Europe-wide and EMEA-wide clients, and led hub programs or helped manage Comms across the continents. There’s some time when Denmark isn’t always the hub – unless it’s a company headquartered in Denmark – which becomes a huge advantage for those who get that international experience and understanding of the management and the ability to scale a message and where to localise or scale. That’s been hugely beneficial for me and for Simply Thought to be able to tap into that.
On the other hand, the UK, as you know, is still the majority of my work – most of our partner agencies are UK-based. That’s been a continuation of understanding that market, a continuation of understanding the needs and specific points. I think that cross-cultural understanding is really important. Being able to take any message and understand how to translate it locally, is really important. That’s not to say that I understand every single location and can understand it locally, but it’s being able to know when it is that our brand needs to be consistent. What are the messages that we need to tell consistently and be able to have the overarching ones? When is it that we need to localise and go specifically? That’s not just at a national level, but also at a regional level. As we discussed in the UK, this becomes huge differences in who you should pitch or how you should talk to in the North of the UK versus London. If we keep challenging our preconceptions and actually asking the audience that we need to reach in each of those places, that’s when we start doing great work and we start doing work that connects at every level.
“The amount of things that they’re called out for greenwashing or corporate reputation washing these days is exactly the point of why communication can’t just be an external item; it needs to be an internal pressure point that we should only be communicating when we’ve either committed to or done the work that needs to be changed or communicated about.”
What is the role of PR in the future, considering all that is going on: Diversity and inclusion, ESG, gender equality or gender pay gap?
I think what’s been really great in this space is, to be frank, the introduction of things like Twitter – I’ll name call Twitter in this regard, which gives a lot of voice to shaming brands that are saying one thing and acting another way. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that you can’t because there are too many eyes because it’s now easy to research these things – we have research, we have previous statements at hand. That’s not to say that a business can’t change – we are far more easily able to call out when a brand is just acting, or saying something and doing something completely different. What that means is it’s not that communication becomes irrelevant, it’s actually the opposite. It’s that communication starts to work inside the organisation at a much higher level, that communication teams now also need to bring in the audience’s angles to change the internal practices before they communicate it. We can’t stick lipstick on a pig anymore. That’s not what we’re going to get away with as brands and we shouldn’t either. That’s not the way we should be behaving. The amount of things that they’re called out for greenwashing or corporate reputation washing these days is exactly the point of why communication can’t just be an external item; it needs to be an internal pressure point that we should only be communicating when we’ve either committed to or done the work that needs to be changed or communicated about.
“Understanding most of the numbers in PR that we use and that is useful is not the maths that’s complicated; it’s understanding what the numbers mean, and what they indicate.”
You are an expert at data, insights and analytics. Your agency Simply Thoughts also focuses on making sense of data to build strategies. There seems to be almost a fear of data and numeracy in some corners of PR and comms. How big is that problem? Is the industry competent enough at data analytics?
A dangerous question you’re asking me there, Son, but a fair one! I think it’s still a big problem, but it’s also getting smaller. At some level, it’s fair. What attracts people to the PR and comms industry isn’t the thought of doing mathematics, right? That’s not what we’re known for. It’s what we think. I think there’s also an element that – especially as you get more senior within the space – you need to understand. This is business consulting at some level. You’re not just here to communicate all the time and to make big creative campaigns. They also need to make business sense. Your campaigns need to link to something and they need to be grounded in a sense of audience, in the understanding of the channels or what’s going to connect with people, what’s going to be spread, what’s going to be shared and what’s going to be worthy of earned attention. By no means I don’t sit and do complicated mathematical formulas with a bunch of variables and algebra functions, or do data modelling graphs, necessarily. That’s not what every communication professional needs to be able to do in my opinion. We don’t need to have a master’s in mathematics to do this job, or to bring data and research into it. All we need to do is to be good at understanding tools and to be better at understanding logical processes and flows in mathematics and data.
We need to be better at not being scared of these numbers. Understanding most of the numbers in PR that we use and that is useful is not the maths that’s complicated; it’s understanding what the numbers mean, and what they indicate. So it’s the analysis that we really need to be great at. The tools will give us a lot of numbers, a lot of research that is relatively simple formulas. We can get good enough at maths to calculate averages, right? It’s not an insurmountable challenge. Where it comes in is then beginning to understand what these numbers mean. To me actually, quite often, we are better suited at understanding what those numbers mean, in a communications or marketing context than, for example, hardcore data scientists.
A little birdie told me that one of the jokes you often tell clients is that you’re really good at your job because you have no idea who they are trying to reach. Can you elaborate on that, please?
It’s a joke that I probably only get away with because I’m just great at my bad jokes. I tried to make them lovely. But the point here is, I think it’s really important that as communicators marketers, we don’t assume too much; we don’t base everything on what we know from ten years ago, and also not on what we think we know about a certain audience. We need to understand that we live in a different world than many people that we’re trying to reach. You mentioned this idea as well when we talk about cross-cultural and backgrounds and being the nomads in this industry and in other countries. As you may know, my background is anything but England in many regards. I only came to England really to live the first time when I went to university. So my background is very different in that regard. What I bring to it is not an understanding of British people that is better than anyone else. When I moved to the UK, I didn’t come there knowing British culture. I had to spend a good three weeks watching every episode of The Inbetweeners when I arrived at university so that I could be part of the conversations that were happening there after the season finale. In that regard, the strength is actually that we have to work harder to understand these audiences. We don’t come with our preconceived conceptions and assumptions; we actually go out to try to find out and learn this every single time.
We do live in a community that reflects largely our own views and our own thoughts, different politics with political polarisation. Not only do we not agree with other people, but often we don’t even understand why we wouldn’t. If you are a communications practitioner who can’t at least try to sit in someone else’s shoes, to understand why they make a decision that they do that, then how are you going to understand how to make them buy products, to change their opinions and their behaviours?
One of the Barcelona Principles is that we should measure outcomes, rather than simply counting outputs, and AVE is a dirty word. What metrics should be measured in PR to convince the C-suite and how does that help to contribute to the bottom line of the business ie. generating sales or changing behaviour or preference?
So, you’re going to love my answer! It’s going to be a very non-answer, and it’s going to be measurement matters to your business.
No, the core of it is that you need to measure and align your measurement metrics with what the business is actually trying to do. This is what I mean by PR being firmly linked to business objectives and business strategy or organisational. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the goal is to sell more pop tarts or to sell more chips. The point is, you need to understand what is the problem that you are there to solve because the reason that you’re being brought in as a PR consultant is to solve some sort of problem or to improve something.
You need to understand what the problem is before you can start applying fixes to it and creating a strategy that links it. What we need to measure needs to start right at the start of the process. It needs to be linked to objectives. We need to set objectives against the areas that we have benchmarked when we have figured out our problems. If you’re a startup, it’s completely legitimate to say awareness is our objective. If you are a completely new business, then awareness should be part of it. Awareness is a completely legitimate metric and objective for a brand-new business that has no awareness. That’s, in fact, your primary goal. If you know that the business issue is purchase consideration: people know of our brand, we have 90% 80% awareness, but people don’t think that we’re the right product for them, then your challenge isn’t shifting or creating a bunch of awareness, your challenge is a specific message that makes people think that their product is for them. If it’s, for example, purchase consideration, then maybe it’s linking to a specific metric that indicates an action. So rather than how much awareness we got, or what was the potential reach, we’d talk about how many people visited the website after the campaign. What is uptake in website traffic? What is the amount of URL clicks on tracked posts?
We’re going to the final question already. I went to Denmark once and I want to go there again. Can you recommend one place I should go to or one dish I have to try?
Absolutely. So one dish. I could say Noma – the number one restaurant in the world, but I haven’t made my way down there. Well, rather I haven’t found the money to pay for dinner for my girlfriend and me there just yet. Maybe one day when I pop the question and propose to her, but it’s only not a candle bag [laugh]. When I actually recommend to everyone, so there are two things that I always and this is not just one of those recommendations I don’t follow myself. When I used to live abroad, there were two things I had to have every time I visited Denmark. I needed to have hotdogs. It’s Ristet hotdogs. The best thing is you can just find any hotdog stands – they’re all over the place and the main kind of traffic areas. I don’t like pickles in any other context, but it is the perfect accompaniment on a Ristet hotdog. Then the other thing that you need to eat is of course pastry. If you don’t like Danish pastries abroad, it’s because they’re not the right pastries. Don’t eat those pastries anywhere else in the world. That is terrible stuff. I’m sorry, it’s just terrible. Go to a Danish bakery and get some fresh-baked pastry.
*You can connect with Kristian via Twitter at @Kristian_Foged.
