Mr. Scholz, what can you as a service provider do better than your own customers?

Marketing logistics is a highly complex task. Mastering this complexity on behalf of our customers is one of the core competencies of arvato services. And for this task, we have developed very specific processes and tools that enable us to design the marketing supply chain efficiently and effectively. Putting together such a comprehensive solution package would mean a very great deal of effort for an individual customer. That includes customers who already have a logistics chain: Many of our customers who formerly engaged in marketing logistics analogous to product logistics have decided to give it up because of the different nature of the processes.

How important is a comprehensive and integrated service offering?

Our philosophy is to offer each customer exactly the solution that fits that customer. It depends on what the customer needs. What are the customer’s very individual challenges and problems? To find that out, we do something very simple: We talk to our customers. Once we are familiar with their needs, we utilize our own individual value-added modules to implement “their” solutions. Our experience shows that an integrated, holistic solution can create value for customers, value that customers could not achieve on their own, because we can continuously re-use the know-how we gain from many successful customer solutions.

Do you find marketing logistics to be a creative activity or just monotonous fulfillment?

For many reasons, it never gets monotonous: Through our customer support teams, we act as the interface between the marketing departments of our customers, the associated creative and production agencies, the suppliers, and the sales channels. Each year, we support up to 30 market launches in the automotive area and provide marketing literature to 140 countries – that is a highly dynamic environment.

Each market launch is unique and requires all the creativity that the team can provide. However, we have copied the platform strategy from the automotive area: A wide variety of campaigns can be developed on the basis of a standard process. However, that is optimization – there’s nothing monotonous about it.

Finally, creativity is required even in the development of the respective customer solution. That naturally applies to more than just marketing logistics.

What makes you different from your competition?

First of all, I have to preface my remarks by saying that the competitive environment has become distinctly more professional.

However, there are important differences between arvato services and its competition, differences that I believe can be described as three criteria: continuity of service provision, innovation, and internationality of performance.

We are proud of our customer relationship, which has already existed for more than 40 years, and we are proud of the innovative power that has enabled – and continues to enable – our employees to implement solutions that meet general market requirements as well as the special wishes of our customers. Furthermore, our customers profit from the international capabilities offered to them by arvato services. We are active in 37 countries.

In the final analysis, however, it may be the manner in which we develop our solutions for customers. We do not go to a company with a promise to save it 20% without ever having spoken to the customer and learning about that customer’s specific challenges. This is unfortunately a trend we have encountered with increasing frequency in recent times. Naturally, that does not mean that we would not be able to successfully reach such goals together with the customer. However, the way we get there is quite different. We develop partnerships and individualized solution approaches; we don’t try to squeeze every customer into a prefabricated solution.