CEO Summit 2021 - Massimo Basei, General Manager SEMEA Pandora

Thank you, good evening. So today in the first roundtable of the Italian Summit you spoke about leadership, how markets have changed in the last two years due to COVID-19, how corporate governance dynamics have shifted. So the first question I'd like to ask you is: what are the strategies and changes that you personally have had to face in order to manage and establish good governance in your company despite the crisis and difficulties that arose?

I believe the main driving factor of these two years has been the large-scale use of remote work, which especially for office staff implied a revision of work organization, necessarily more focused on projects rather than as it was previously. This different organization then also required a different exercise of leadership, which I could perhaps simply summarize as greater use of trust, which in my opinion is a very important enabling factor in the exercise of leadership. We saw colleagues respond in 99.9% of cases with a greater sense of responsibility.

We accelerated decisions that were already made and investments already allocated to develop the technological infrastructure that allows you to move from a structure where you think in terms of channels to a structure where the customer is at the center, coming into contact with the company through multiple touchpoints — not necessarily just in stores, but we can also talk about social media and other platforms. However, here too, the enabling factor is not exclusively technology, but rather the cultural factor. It is necessary, hand in hand, to start a cultural transformation so that the company thinks not about the physical or virtual place where the transaction happens, but about the customer at the center of all initiatives. That means starting to think more about getting to know the customer, collecting data, cross-departmental collaboration, and a thousand other things that we all deal with every day, as do all my colleagues active in retail and beyond.

I believe that multinational companies present in multiple markets must find the right balance between tasks and decisions made at headquarters and the markets, which necessarily need to be strengthened on the decision-making side regarding everything that concerns the customer. Decision-making speed with respect to the customer is crucial, especially at this moment when we find ourselves with purchasing habits that have changed — I believe definitively — compared to two years ago. All of this, however, always with the goal of customer satisfaction.

Thank you. We are certainly committed. Our product is hand-finished — I say hand-finished, but the general part of the process is truly done by hand, and we are very proud of this. It is a product that tells a story of emotion. Jewelry is always associated with an emotion, so there's the entire storytelling aspect that even during the pandemic, customers did not give up on. And this told us a lot, because that aspect remains. What has changed, however, are expectations regarding service. Now I want to order my product wherever I decide, and then I want to exchange it if the size is wrong, wherever I decide. I don't care that I bought it online and that's the channel — I want to go change the size wherever Pandora is, regardless of the channel. Overcoming all these barriers implies those technological and cultural efforts I mentioned earlier. At a cultural level, for example, you need to explain to store teams why they should accept a return that comes from another channel when it may impact their KPIs or even their compensation. You need to be collaborative.

Thank you.