22 Oct Belgian Marketing Awards – Marketing Leader(ship) of the Year: Yannick de Bièvre

The CMO of one of the country’s largest advertisers is by definition a leader, right? Yannick de Bièvre also combined that with the role of transformer for the past two years. Meet one of the three nominees for Marketing Leader(ship) of the Year.

“Transformation & leadership. From the mountains to marketing.” That was the intriguing title of the presentation with which Yannick de Bièvre defended his nomination for the Belgian Marketing Awards to the jury.

It immediately summed up the essence of his career, which thus did not begin in marketing. “The first years after I graduated, I worked as a ski guide, did mountain expeditions and guided canyoning trips. I was at the peak of my physical ability and no challenge was too great for me.”

From digital nerd to marketing all-rounder

Yet the blood ran where it couldn’t go (Yannick de Bièvre had both a degree in PR and studies at Vlerick on his record of achievements) and he started in marketing, more specifically digital marketing. “After pushing my physical limits, I wanted to do the same mentally,” he says. “At Smartphoto, I entered the early days of e-commerce. Then I gained experience at a startup and in the meantime retailers had finally started to see online as an additional sales channel.”

Yannick de Bièvre ended up at MediaMarkt, where he quickly grew from his digital knowledge to Head of Marketing in Belgium and then added responsibility for the Netherlands as Marketing Director BeNeLux. In November 2022, he moved to Carrefour, where he is Director of Marketing, Customer Services & Analytics.

Icarus moment?

But first, back to the mountains for a moment. After all, the knowledge he gained there still helps him to this day. “In my opinion, there are three things you learn in the mountains that you also desperately need in marketing: adaptability, resilience and cooperation. They are traits that I still try to have and strengthen every day and also try to convey to my team. In whatever role in my career that may be.”

However, he does not owe his nomination to his years at Smartphoto or MediaMarkt, but rather to the past two years as CMO of Carrefour. Yannick de Bièvre: “Adaptability, resilience and cooperation have helped me for many years, but when I joined Carrefour, I had an Icarus moment… More than 700 stores, more than 11,000 employees… It was a scale I was not used to. Wasn’t I flying too close to the sun?”

Anything for you haaaaa

After two years, the answer to the question is clearly no. But this required a thorough transformation process internally. The marketing teams lacked a real mission to make the brand recognizable and clear. Added to that was Yannick’s mission to become more centralized and more internationally driven. “And that while in retail the anchoring is just very local,” he adds.

So Carrefour needed an internal and an external switch, and the teams found it in the new brand essence “Everything for your haaaaa. “Making our customers’ lives easier, that’s our mission,” sums up Yannick de Bièvre. As so often, that’s the visceral part of a lot of work that happened in the shadows. “We started building a Customer Data Platform (CDP) where we pooled all the market and customer insights. We worked very hard on the accessibility of our stores. And we re-launched our Act for Food program,” the Carrefour CMO gives three examples.

Both hard and soft KPIs are improving

In addition to brand equity, Yannick de Bièvre sees three more accelerators to excel within marketing: your team, innovation and data monitization. “The latter of course includes retail media. That was already a big trend when I worked for MediaMarkt in the Netherlands. Marketing is too often seen as a cost, this is how you show that it can also be a revenue source, including the new business models that come with it.”

As a result, Carrefour is on the rise as a brand and as a retailer. By 2023, the French group’s market share was up 0.4%, a fine performance in a hyper-competitive market. Customer satisfaction rose 3.9% to its highest ever score. And franchisees provided an NPS that was 6% higher than a year earlier. Finally, internal satisfaction within the marketing team also increased by 20%.

So these are all impressive KPIs. Time for the final question: what are the biggest challenges Yannick de Bièvre still faces? “There are two,” he says. “First of all, the cultural shift internally still needs to be pushed further. Internal belief can and must be even higher. And next, I want a focus on consistency. We launched our new brand essence this year. We must now continue and expand it. The success of marketing comes largely from your consistency.”

Cédric Cauderlier on Yannick De Bièvre

“Yannick’s profile is not what you would call a classic marketing profile. His background allows him to take on the marketing and technological challenges facing Carrefour today with fresh eyes and an effective approach. That’s probably what attracted us to his application.”

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