Charlotte Ottesen-Hansen - Building Sustainable brand Growth Through Curiosity And Focus

DVJ Research Group

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Across more than two decades, Charlotte Ottesen-Hansen has helped build, nurture and transform some of the world’s most recognised brands. Her career has taken her from Dior and L’Oréal’s luxury division to Pandora, Georg Jensen and, most recently, Flügger, spanning beauty, jewellery, home interiors and home improvement. Although the categories differ, Charlotte sees a common foundation behind sustainable brand growth. It does not begin with a campaign or a new product, but with understanding people, translating that understanding into clear choices and mobilising the organisation around delivering meaningful value.

Turning Customer Understanding into Action

For Charlotte, the ability to attract new customers is one of the clearest indicators of a brand’s future health. Retention, market share, awareness, revenue and profitability also matter, but the right combination of KPIs depends on the brand’s maturity, market position and strategy. “If you stop attracting new customers, you’re in trouble in the future,” she says. “But you also need to look at whether you continue to bring value to the customers you already have.”

That starts with understanding who those customers are, what motivates them and what creates friction in their lives. Yet possessing information is not enough. Many businesses already have large volumes of consumer data. The real challenge is deciding what it means and what should change as a result. “You can know a huge amount about your customers, but if you are not able to translate that into priorities and actions, it won’t bring you very far.”

Insight must therefore be converted into strategy, choices and action. It also needs to influence far more than marketing. Product development, commercial teams, retail, finance and local markets all shape the customer experience. “The best performance happens when the whole organisation is aligned around creating value for customers. It is not only about campaigns or tactics. You need to mobilise the entire organisation.”

Marketing’s role is to bring the customer’s perspective into the business, while also understanding how value is created commercially. “Growth is always created across multiple functions. You can never build it in silos.”

“You can know a huge amount about your customers, but if you are not able to translate that into priorities and actions, it won’t bring you very far.”

Evolving without Losing the Brand

Charlotte has spent much of her career working with heritage brands. Their history and cultural meaning provide an enormous advantage, but they can also become a constraint when organisations become too protective of the past.

The challenge is not to choose between consistency and change. It is to identify what should remain constant and what must evolve. “What worked yesterday will not necessarily work tomorrow. But if you try to adapt constantly, you also risk losing your identity.”

For Charlotte, the stable core consists of the brand’s values, purpose and distinctive DNA. Around that core, products, experiences and communication can continue to change. This allows a brand to remain relevant without becoming unrecognisable. “Have the courage to evolve, but stay true to your identity. It is not about adapting to everything that comes your way. It is about evolving in a way that remains authentic to the brand.”

That balance becomes especially important when heritage brands need to attract younger customers without alienating those who have supported them for decades. It also requires consistency under pressure. Businesses can be pragmatic in the short term, but should avoid undermining the foundations of future growth. “You can invest more in the short term when you need results now, but don’t stop investing in the long term.”

“What worked yesterday will not necessarily work tomorrow. But if you try to adapt constantly, you also risk losing your identity.”

Sometimes Growth Requires doing Less

One of Charlotte’s most important career experiences came from a brand that was growing rapidly in revenue but struggling to generate profit. The brand was well known and had a strong image, yet its distribution footprint and product portfolio had become too complex.

Together with the wider organisation, her team examined the profitability and strategic role of individual stores, categories and products. Some were commercially weak but important to the brand’s identity. Others contributed neither enough profit nor enough brand value to justify their place. “If we had only looked at which products were profitable and which were not, we would have risked killing part of the essence of the brand.”

The business reduced the portfolio, optimised distribution and concentrated investment behind a major launch. The process required difficult decisions and close cooperation between finance, commercial teams, training, stores and retail partners. The first results appeared within a year. In the second year, profitability returned to double-digit levels.

The experience reinforced an important lesson: more products, stores or initiatives do not automatically create more growth. Growth is often the result of making better choices, not simply doing more. “You need to dig into the numbers, the products and the financials. But the solution also needs to protect what makes the brand special.”

“If we had only looked at which products were profitable and which were not, we would have risked killing part of the essence of the brand.”

Innovation is about Creating Value

When asked to identify the biggest opportunity for further brand growth, Charlotte chooses innovation, but defines it much more broadly than launching new products. Innovation can be a service, an experience, a business model or a new way of solving a customer problem. What matters is whether it creates meaningful value. “Innovation is where customer understanding becomes tangible. It is about constantly reevaluating how you can create value for people.”

Technology is accelerating what organisations can develop and deliver. Personalisation is becoming easier, ideas can be visualised more quickly and concepts can be tested earlier. At the same time, Charlotte sees a growing desire for authenticity and human connection.

“The challenge is to use all the possibilities technology gives you while still bringing something human to the customer.”

AI will change where Marketers add Value

Charlotte sees considerable potential for AI across creative development, research, content production and media execution. Ideas that once took significant time and money to visualise can now be prototyped at an early stage. “You can create and visualise many more ideas much faster. That gives creative teams more time to refine the strongest concepts.”

AI can also accelerate testing and produce more content adaptations. Yet Charlotte does not believe this removes the need for marketers. Instead, it changes where their value lies. As execution becomes faster and more automated, empathy, curiosity and judgement become more important “One thing is seeing behaviour in the data. Another is understanding the human insight behind it and whether something will resonate emotionally.”

As consumers increasingly use AI to search, compare and evaluate options, brands will also need to think about how they remain visible and relevant in AI-assisted journeys. AI is becoming another layer between brands and consumers. Great marketers will need to combine technological capabilities with an understanding of culture, emotion and human behaviour.

“You can create and visualise many more ideas much faster. That gives creative teams more time to refine the strongest concepts.”

The Brands that stay Curious keep Growing

Across every category Charlotte has worked in, her most consistent source of inspiration has remained the customer. That understanding can come from formal research, panels, surveys and social listening, but also from customer service, website feedback, retail teams and employees who have lived with the brand for many years.

When Charlotte enters a new organisation, she spends her first months understanding not only the numbers, but also what the brand means internally. “Talk to people who have worked with the brand for a long time. Ask why they are proud of it, what they believe it stands for and what value it brings.”

From there, the business must decide who it is truly trying to serve. Brands cannot be equally relevant to everyone, and trying to be so often leads to diluted choices. “You need to accept that you are not there for everybody. Have the courage to decide who you want to connect with and then become genuinely relevant to those people.”

Charlotte’s advice for future-proofing brand growth is therefore simple: remain curious. Challenge assumptions, keep learning and do not become too attached to what worked in the past. “One thing is knowing, but the most important thing is learning. You only learn when you remain curious and open.”

For Charlotte, that is the enduring balance behind brand growth: curiosity without distraction, change without losing identity, and commercial discipline without losing sight of the people the brand exists to serve.