“When you have a question – the brand you consult should have the answer with ‘one click’. Better customer experience is the ultimate goal for every brand. If you have the best customer experience in your market, you will win.”
SÖREN STAMER, CEO, COREMEDIA
Sören Stamer, CEO CoreMedia, walks LCG Founder Tim Healey through the genesis of his cross-platform content solution business up to the present day; he explains why CoreMedia has such a highly respected culture and continues to be the “go to” CMS solution for brands that want to optimize customer experience.
LGC: You’ve got over 20 years experience as a CEO in the software business, having co-founded CoreMedia with your college Professors, you’ve led the company with flair through startup growth and global expansion. CoreMedia is a leading provider of web content management software for organisations demanding engaging context-driven online experiences for their customers, regardless of their channel or touch point. You’ve won a string of awards, you’ve been Germany’s most innovative SMB, you’ve won awards for innovation. You were in the Deloitte ‘German fast 50’ in 2005. CoreMedia has also won: ‘Best Place to Work’ (European Commission 2003). All very impressive – but the question I ask everyone when I start interviewing them is: please tell us about your journey from college, through launching the company to where you are now.
SS: I was one of four children, growing up on a family farm in Germany. By age eight or nine, I’d figured out that my older brother would get the farm. I began to wonder if there was anything else. We got this computer early on – a Commodore 64. And I started programming. From a young age, I was drawn to theoretical physics, with dreams of a basement with a particle accelerator. My other passion was computer science, but I realized that I wanted to be an entrepreneur and make money as well. In the end, I studied Business Administration and Computer Science.
I met the Professors, with whom I started the company, in the College Computer Science department: they had some amazing technology for the time. It was 1995. They had made a breakthrough: you could write a software program on a Windows-based machine, and when you told the program, “Hey, move over to that Macintosh” – Windows disappeared. The program itself, with all the data, moved over to the Mac, and ran perfectly – looking just as it did on the Windows machine.
We had software that could move through the internet and run wherever we wanted: PC, Mac, Linux. This was before languages like the universally executable Java code had become the standard – so for 1995 this cross-platform ability was considered ‘mind-blowing’. We went to SAP and asked if they wanted our invention. They said, “No, thank you, we don’t need it.”
We decided to prove that there was a need for this function and started a company: CoreMedia. A year later, we realised that Java offered similar capabilities for free. Doing our own basic research to compete with Java made little sense. So we ‘killed our baby’. We moved over to Java. However, through our first iteration, we had learned a lot from some of the biggest publishers: our first customer was Deutsche Presse Agentur, the leading German press agency.
Through the process of launching CoreMedia, we learned a lot about content, about multimedia publishing in real-time, about control and governance of all these things. We grew. We bootstrapped the business with minimal investment – and then in April 2000, we ran our first financing round. If I remember it correctly, we got 30 times the projected revenue of the next fiscal year as a valuation without any strings attached. Those were wild times. We could have shut down the company the next day and kept 90% of the money – but of course we didn’t.
The second round of financing was in 2001. We had great numbers: we were growing at a rate north of 100% per year. One of our customers Deutsche Telekom invested. At one point we were the global market leader for mobile rights management – working with Softbank in Japan, Vodafone, Nokia – various telecom and telephony businesses were using our platform. But that moment came and went quickly. We learned the hard way that you can become really big, really quickly – but we didn’t have the $100million investment we needed to sustain this level of growth.
It was a moment of realization: we had to find a different way to succeed. We started to see clearly that on the internet, you can sell anything – even luxury items. People were buying items up to $2 million on their mobile phone with one click. For them the customer experience need to be flawless. But then, you could sell whatever you want on the internet – even cars – with just one click.
At the time this was not a commonly believed thing. We were the first ones who partnered with E-commerce platforms like IBM and SAP and ensured that their customer experience was great. We won LVMH group as clients, and others like Net-a-Porter and Farfetch. We became the go-to partner for the most ambitious brands in the world. We won work with the German Government who run many of the essential government websites on our platform. We won work with healthcare companies, the German Stock Exchange, ABC in Australia – a large variety of businesses and different applications.
I had promised myself at 25 that I would take a year off when I reached 35. I reached 35 – it didn’t happen. Then I turned 36 and I handed over the CEO role, took a trip around the world with my wife and moved to the US. For a while, I was not working for CoreMedia but I remained as an advisor. After seven years in Silicon Valley, I moved back to Germany, and became CoreMedia’s CEO for the second time.
In my 7 years away, I was worked on some startups and did some non-profit work. I was president of the Pre-school for my children. I have four children with my wife, and I had the great pleasure to be a stay at home dad for two years. I was taking care of three kids – then the fourth arrived. And my wife and I switched roles again as I resumed my role in the business.
LGC: For the benefit of our readers can you define CoreMedia’s offer?
SS: It’s my strong belief that customers in the b2c or b2b world, live in a world that is very complicated, hard to understand and very fast moving. Things change all the time. This complex fast-paced world is a challenge – because we don’t have much time. Most customers are overwhelmed with options.
Our goal is to solve that problem for the big brands of the world. We help them unburden their customers. These big brands need their customers to be entertained. Customers need everything to be easier – and relevant. Customers don’t want to be spammed with stuff that it’s not relevant to them. Ideally an online interaction with a brand enables the brand to figure out what the customer’s problem might be – and then provide a perfectly matching solution at speed.
When you have a question – the brand you consult should have the answer with ‘one click’. Better customer experience is the ultimate goal for every brand. If you have the best customer experience in your market, you will win. CoreMedia enables you to get there.
We do this in multiple ways. What you see when you interact with a brand, is something that is should be designed for you – highly personalized, based on your unique context. There has to be an algorithm that takes the customer’s contact information, what they are looking for, and who they are and bring all that together to give customers a highly personalized experience.
For efficiency, this content must be more like more like LEGO bricks, that can be quickly rearranged to build exactly what each customer needs. This way it is very flexible. It can be done on a mobile phone, but also in a gigantic wall display in a store. All of these content options need to be managed in a way that is super-fluid. It should be easy for Marketers to bring content to new touch points or interactions.
The second part is that you have data. And you have the ability to use the data to personalise a customer’s experience. The third part goes beyond the website, app or mobile. What if you could do this level of customization with Chatbots? Or even talking to a human? What if you have the ability on the website, when you have a question, to click a button – and a person on the brand side says: “Hey, can I help you with that?” And what if they can take over the browsing? And then they solve the problem, configure everything, and then you’re done. In doing so they solve your problem in the moment with more than one channel and with multiple touchpoints. Everything is nicely synchronized and seamless.
LGC: I was speaking to Barbara Eigner, your CMO based in Germany. She was saying that CoreMedia have some exciting new research about the importance of human interaction.
SS: Yes we do. People perceive that the ability to talk to someone is often the thing that makes a big difference. It is what people want. There are certainly situations when you don’t want to talk to someone. But there are some when only a human will do. Let’s say you have an airline ticket. There’s this problem with it. It can be so frustrating that you talking to one person – if you can get hold of them – and then you have to call someone else and explain everything again.
And yet it could be with one click: bam. “Can we help you? Oh, yes. I see you’ve tried to do this. Here’s the solution. I’ve done it for you.” It is possible. But the brands have to want it. There’s a lot more automation coming. There’s a ton of things we could do automatically. If you buy something, there should be a follow up: “are you happy with what you bought last week?” And if you say yes, then you can interact with the customer – maybe you have a special offer for them. Maybe you could ask ”would you mind writing us a review?” Or “by the way you get $50 extra if you invite a friend because you are a happy customer”
Or if the customer says that they are not happy – then what? The brand makes sure that they call them the next day. And in that call back and someone fixes the problem. Then again, brands can ask: “Are you happy now?” and the customer says: “Yes, absolutely.”
That kind of stuff will all be automated. It’s a makes huge difference in a world where you have these long-term customer relationships. If you spent a load of marketing money to win a customer – why would you not maintain them and keep them happy? A happy customer, after all, is more likely to buy more.
LGC: Marketing boils down to research, strategy and tactics. As a business that supports marketers. How do you feel your business relates to those disciplines?
SS: We have brands that want to roll out campaigns at a global scale. That means for someone like your favorite luxury brand, they need to manage 40 languages and 100 countries. If you think about that, how many pieces of content and different variants have to be created and maintained?
And then factor in the need to change a detail across all of these pieces of content – perhaps the legal team says: “oh no – we can’t say that” – this creates a problem. You have hundreds and hundreds of different content pieces and now you have to figure out which ones need changing.
CoreMedia removes that stress. For example, where many languages are needed, the system automatically manages all the translations and sends them to a translation agency, it gets them back and updates the website. It will also identify the dependencies, all the things that must be re-translated.
The opportunity for operational efficiency here is huge – you can massively reduce the time and cost implications. For in store experiences, if you are a luxury retailer and you have this very important customer coming in from Japan to visit your store in Paris, and you want to program all the in-store display imagery to be Japanese – we can do that too. Your store displays can be dynamic like your website.
In the future, thanks to our recent acquisitions, we now have a lot more customer behavioural data. This gives us the ability to analyze – to figure out what is working, what is not working. Our mission is to shorten the feedback cycle – to learn faster, discuss hypotheses customers and test adverts and products.
LGC: I’ve heard you speak about the disruptive power of ideas, and also about the power of Europe versus Silicon Valley for those ideas. Are you able to elaborate on that?
SS: I came back from Silicon Valley eight years ago. I was asked ‘how we can make Europe more like Silicon Valley?’. My feeling was that Europe will never be able to ‘be’ Silicon Valley. But there are some things that Europe has that they should double down on. There’s lots of stuff that Europe could learn from Silicon Valley, like this open mindedness for ideas: you have to try out ideas – to throw stuff on the wall and see what sticks.
Europe could do with more future-facing open mindedness – running more experiments. In its own way the whole era of COVID was a kind experiment. Who could have guessed that we could all work via video conferencing – with so much less air travel – and it worked. We’ve closed massive deals via an online meeting. Now that is possible, nobody wants to go back to the old world. In the old world you would have to fly to New York for a 1 hour meeting – looking back that seems insane. And it’s not happening anymore.
I believe we need more crazy experimentation in Europe and slightly less fear of the consequences. The idea of GDPR is great – the idea that data about me belongs to me. It’s the right thing that we should aim for, but the implementation was not perfect.
I was thinking about the fact that there will be more legislation like this coming in the future. There might be legislation against dominant market forces – so that the more dominant you are, the higher the cliff is for you – the more you might get taxed. This route would create level playing field for all and avoid these massive monopolies that we see.
Europe could indeed play that role. China already played that role. They said, “Well, you know, what, we don’t want Google here. We don’t want Amazon here. We have our own solutions”, and boom, their own industries were created. Europe could do the same. We could say: “We have some standards that you need to meet – if you comply with the standards, you can do business here.” Europe could change the dynamic.
The richest people in Europe, are owner of brands, like the LVMH group. This is an industry that isn’t built on technology – instead they have a house of strong brands – I call them symbols. These brands are symbols. And what I see in the world is that the internet ensures that some symbols are massively influential. On the negative side, politicians like Donald Trump play this game very well, ensuring he is front-of-mind every day. But there are positive symbols too.
The Black Lives Matter movement was an interesting one – because it’s not that racism was new, but suddenly that issue became very visible. We are living in an ear where there are quite a few positive examples – like the positive steps around gay rights. Things can change really quickly. I remember Obama saying in 2008 that he believed marriage is ‘the union between a man and a woman’. He had to say that – there was no way of him getting elected if he said something else.
Eight years later, as a Democrat, you could not get elected if you didn’t support gay rights. This was fascinating for me to see. Europe has a lot of history and old culture – like the older brands. These older brands are doing really well in this day and age with the internet – because the bigger the symbol the more power you have.
LGC: I did a mini MBA and brand management. And of course, in lesson one, we talk about Apple as the poster child of amazing brand management. They reckon the Apple brand is worth around $250 billion. I’ve heard you speak about “iconic experiences”. As an example you talked about Louis Vuitton and how they collaborated with the streetwear brand Supreme. Can you share your thinking on collaborations like this?
SS: I was talking about the power of brand symbols. The Supreme story was a great way of explaining how hyped brands create demand – and sometimes this goes viral – like when Supreme released their red brick. This was an example of a brand entertaining customers with crazy products – and customers being so passionate that they queue round the block to get one.
Banksy did a similar thing – having one of his art works auctioned, and then once sold, the artwork shredded itself. This was a wonderful and very powerful symbol – especially as for the owner, the artwork was worth more for being destroyed! It’s brilliant.
When brands can create that level of attention, they are in a different league. The Kardashians are in effect their own symbols. And now they have created businesses on top of their personal brands: “Okay – here are my lipsticks. Here is my eyeliner.” It’s not that their eyeliners are so much better or different, or like this new invention everyone needs… it’s the fact that Kylie Jenner has put her name to it that makes it a business.
When brands create something that is easy to communicate – it’s economically huge. You can spend less on marketing and still get great traction. If you have this iconic status, then you have beaten all of the other brands that are not as iconic. And that means that the business case grows exponentially.
LGC: I read an article in Vanity Fair: an interview with Apple’s Tim Cook. And it was talking about some time ago he’d seen the prototype for the Apple Vision Pro – apparently there was a secret bunker in the old Apple headquarters and only very few people have clearance to go in. Of course Tim Cook was allowed in and he clearly remembers the day he walked in to see what was going on. The team suggested he try the prototype. At the time it was huge and cumbersome – it went over your head and had a myriad of cables coming out of it. Tim Cook tried it on and said: “Yeah, this is a thing – you know that we’ve got it”.
SS: I remember years and years ago, Tim Cook was speaking about augmented reality way ahead of the curve – he must have been in their bunker then too. This was not someone saying “yeah, in principle, we got this technology – here are some PowerPoints”. Here was someone who has tried it out.
LGC: working with a massive brand in the luxury space, can you tell us something perhaps that your business learned when you were working with them?
With one of our luxury customers we had these online meetings where we discussed and shared our view of the maturity of the customer experience. I asked them where they see themselves. The team was very open and included senior and junior team members assessing their own maturity. They said “on a scale of one-to-five, we may be a two, we hope to be at a three soon”.
They were very open about that, and reflected on their own customer experience, what they had – what they didn’t have. They weren’t saying: “we are perfect”. There was no taboo in this group: instead there was open discussion about what could be better, what could be different, what should be different. When we asked them: “where do you want your customer experience to be?” They came back with: “five, for sure”.
They were very honest about where they are and what they want to do next which I was impressed by.
LGC: You spoke earlier of taking a two year parental leave while your wife continued to work full time. I’d love to know which was the hardest job: stay-at-home-dad or launching and running a company of CoreMedia’s stature?
The truth is, I loved to stay at home. Its definitely tricky juggling stay-at-home-dad and business. If you want to do two things at the same point in time, you will fail miserably. I had to find a way everyday to keep my kids entertained – but also allow me time for myself. When you start the day with: “Hey, guys, let’s make a plan together. What do you want to do today to make this a perfect day?” And then you write it down on this flip chart. And then you ask them: Come on 10 things is too many. What are your favourite three things form that list. You agree on those three things – and get buy in! “So if we did these three things – we’re happy? Yeah. Okay. I need your help to make this happen: I need you all to get dressed” and so on… It really works. Especially if you review at the end of the day and say: “Did we do the three things you asked for? And did we do an extra one? Yes?” Then they are super-happy.
This way you can also be in the moment with them. It’s fantastic. If you try to do something else, and cheat them out of their time, it’s a disaster. That was my learning. Being a team with kids – I love that. It was really fantastic. I don’t want to miss it.
LGC: I’m reading a lot of stuff at the moment about how b2b marketing needs to play by the same rules as b2c. People give the excuse “oh, we don’t need to do marketing like this, because we’re b2b, it’s different”. I have certainly experienced this approach working with some clients. I feel strongly that the core principles of marketing are the same and are industry agnostic. Do you have any experience of this? Speaking broadly, is there a need for b2b marketers to ‘get their house in order’ a bit more?
SS: I agree that this needs to change. We hear this a lot in b2b customer service. We get the push back: “Our customers are used to things being this way”. Believe me all customers – whether b2c or b2b would also appreciate convenience – a service that is easy and simple to use.
If a business makes it hard to be a customer, that customer will eventually go elsewhere. Same with marketing. As a brand, you need to ensure that you have better storytelling and more entertainment: never treat your customers as stupid. You must ensure that every interaction is relevant to them – and never ‘spammy’.
Some b2b companies who do it really well – like John Deere – put in a lot of effort. They make you feel excited – right down to the baseball caps that they give you. It’s something people really identify with the brand. They’ve clearly spent time try to figure out how they can improve all interactions with John Deere – because in some cases their customers have spent like a $1million on a Combine Harvester. Why shouldn’t they make the whole customer experience attractive so that you are more likely to buy from them?
You can even see it with their tractor design: they look like racing cars. They are more and more sleek, and they look powerful. They’re not doing this just for the company, it’s because they understand their customers and they know that their customers people want products like this – which is great to see.
LGC: imagine you’re able to travel back in time and give a young 21-year-old Sören advice on his career. What might you suggest you did more of? And what perhaps should you avoid?
One of my regrets is that as a student, I didn’t travel and spend time abroad. I was full steam ahead: ‘let’s get this done’ – and then start a business. I guess I did my “time out” later on, in my 7 years away from the business in San Francisco. I think it is best to travel around the world and see places when you are younger – especially when you don’t have many obligations – when there’s no loan, there’s no kids – you’re free. At this stage in your life, you should try things out: travel on a cheap budget and backpack. I didn’t do that. Instead, I started a company thinking I would do ‘the travel thing’ later on. So, my advice to myself would be: go travelling or living abroad – the earlier the better.
LGC: CoreMedia continue to win awards for being a great place to work. Many people stay at CoreMedia for 10+ years. Do you have any insight into what it is about the culture of your business that keeps people there?
I think the start of our workplace culture emerged at University. And we had this team of students and PhD students that worked together for years, creating something genuinely great. We would all like to work with people who have great abilities, great talents and who do great work – because we want to learn from them.
That was our starting point and CoreMedia has never lost sight of that. I like to think we have a deep respect for each other and how we communicate. The atmosphere is positive. Get the balance right and it works. A considerable percentage of the people working in CoreMedia left the business for some time and then returned – like me.
What’s really interesting is that second time round, both sides know exactly what they’re getting into – you don’t fool someone twice. And that’s a good sign. CoreMedia is a place where you feel respected. A place where you are able to speak up. There’s not this ‘top down, you can’t say something’ atmosphere – quite the opposite.
If you have a different opinion, you can say so. I really appreciate that. When people come up with their own ideas or have different ideas we recognize that as a chance. We have open space workshops and invite our customers and partners to talk about whatever they want to discuss. There have even been meetings where the management team has been critiqued. And we’ve learned from that.
I think this openness and this idea of us all learning is very special. We very believe that people have a lot more potential than we might be aware of in their daily role. Open space workshops brought in a whole new level of evolution for the business. Some meetings have led to new career trajectories. We recognized skills and abilities in people and their confidence grew as a result. Those individuals evolved. They changed their perceptions of themselves for the better.
We have had team members move to a different role within the business because they realised something about themselves and then built on that. I really believe CoreMedia is a place where individuals can grow – and I think that is an attractive proposition.
LGC: When you’re not leading CoreMedia, how do you unwind?
SS: Most of my downtime is family time. Alongside my own family, I have a large extended family. I have three siblings as well. They all live close by with their kids. I go running and walking. My wife and I walk every morning. We walk our youngest to school, and then take a longer walk around the forest. Outside of that, I like to read a lot of books, spend time with good friends – and I like to travel.
LGC: One would think with your business achievements, you read a lot of business books – or perhaps you don’t? What kind of books do you read?
SS: It’s a mixture. I started to read some of the classics. I re-read ‘The Dune Trilogy’. Now I am reading Asimov’s ‘I Robot’. Very relevant and fascinating. I also read Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ series… and they blend at the end. What Isaac Asimov saw – playing around with this idea of a machine that can think – and then imagining the issues that this creates. These are really great stories.
Recently, I have returned to physical paper books again. I want to read a real book next to my bed. Sure it’s a little bit more cumbersome – but importantly – it is not on my phone.
LGC: CoreMedia 2024, 2025 and beyond: What can we expect? What can you tell us?
SS: Our business made some ground-breaking acquisitions last year. These acquisitions will enable us to do so much more for the brands that we work with. Our goal for our partner brands is something extraordinary – a completely new level of customer experience. One that is seamless across multiple and different touch points. We want customers to feel that brands understand what they want, so that brands solve their customers’ problems.
There will be a load more automation – for example – AI can identify consistent problems and break them into smaller steps. It can find out find out how many support requests there were last week; which topics came up. These topics can be summarised. Landing pages for those topics can be created – all of this is powering more efficient ways of getting customers the information they need: effortlessly and at speed.
Our focus for the future will be all about removing the cumbersome. My daughter asked me. “Why does the fridge not talk? It beeps when the door is left open!” Of course she has a very good point: your fridge should probably speak to you. For children today, talking to technology is completely normal – with Alexa and Siri and OpenAI. They use their voice to operate lights, music and other things too. Interaction with machines will only improve, and CoreMedia will be playing its part.
For all enquiries about CoreMedia contact: Steve Russell: steve.russell@coremedia.com
