Antonia Dedekind - Pandora

For Antonia Dedekind, innovation is not about launching the next exciting product for the sake of technical feasibility or novelty. Based on her experience across consumer insights and innovation, sustainable brand growth starts much earlier: with a deep understanding of consumers, culture and the human truths a brand can credibly own. When Antonia joined Pandora seven years ago, she started in Consumer Insights before moving into Innovation, where she now leads the company’s global innovation team.

Over the past years, she has seen a shift towards more consumer-centric decision-making, where consumer understanding is embedded more systematically into shaping products, communication and experiences. In this interview, Antonia explains how that shift has influenced her view of growth: why penetration and relevance are central to growth, why innovation needs to create incremental impact rather than just activity, and why AI will fundamentally change the way innovation is developed.

From Gut Feel to Consumer-centric Growth

Looking back, she identifies one pattern that consistently underpins successful brand growth: developing a much deeper understanding of consumers and culture and translating that understanding into sharper, more distinctive brand relevance.

Many years ago, one of the central challenges for Pandora was rebuilding brand relevance and clarity and true consumer understanding was an important foundation for the shift. “Successful brands that live over time strike a human truth. In our case, there is a human truth that people want to express themselves, celebrate moments and mark what matters. When you understand that and execute it well in communication and product, you can rebuild relevance,” she says.

Rather than relying primarily on intuition, over the years Pandora has developed clearer ways of bringing consumer understanding into decision-making across product development, innovation and communication, matching art with science.

But for Antonia, the shift is not simply about adding more research or data. It is about making consumer understanding an active strategic capability: something that helps the organisation make better choices, not just validate choices already made. Gut feel and intuition still play an important role, but they become far more powerful when shaped by a shared understanding of consumers and the drivers of relevance.

“Successful brands that live over time strike a human truth. In our case, there is a human truth that people want to express themselves, celebrate moments and mark what matters. When you understand that and execute it well in communication and product, you can rebuild relevance.”

Innovation should drive Penetration, not just Activity

For Antonia, revenue growth and increased market share are the clearest indicators of a brand’s success. But these outcomes are ultimately driven by penetration: the ability to make more people think of the brand and buy it. This is where innovation plays a critical role. Done well, innovation creates new sources of relevance, desire and accessibility, giving more consumers more reasons to enter the brand and buy into it.

Sustainable long-term growth therefore depends on three things working together: genuinely relevant products, strong brand desire and broad reach. All three need to work together to create long-term success.

That belief shapes her view of innovation. The danger is rarely a lack of ideas: most organisations have plenty of those. The danger is confusing activity with initiatives that drive growth. “Innovation isn't about coming up with really cool small initiatives that are fun and exciting but don't have a substantial impact,” Antonia says.

The common mistake is treating innovation as a pipeline of launches rather than a mechanism for expanding the brand’s relevance, reach and ability to attract more customers.

“Innovation isn't about coming up with really cool small initiatives that are fun and exciting but don't have a substantial impact.”

Innovation needs an Ecosystem, not a Silo

Innovation, according to Antonia, succeeds when different disciplines work together around shared objectives, clear roles and strong governance, so that ideas can move from strategic opportunity to commercial impact. “You have someone with a strong capability in strategy, R&D, design, sourcing, insights. You need to bring all of them to the same table.”

In her experience, innovation often works best as an ecosystem rather than as one centralised function where everything is grouped together. Teams across design, strategy, R&D, consumer insights, supply and other functions need to come together around the work, not operate as a separate hub developing ideas in isolation and then trying to convince the rest of the organization to adopt them.

This though means that clear governance models are essential. Thereby, for Antonia, cooperation and collaboration are not the same thing but both essential for the innovation ecosystem. Cooperation meaning each team brings its expertise and remains accountable for its own workstream; collaboration meaning teams work together across boundaries e.g. to shape the opportunity and make trade-offs together. Innovation needs to some degree both: clear ownership of expertise and workstreams, combined with a shared commitment to the bigger strategic ambition.

“You have someone with a strong capability in strategy, R&D, design, sourcing, insights. You need to bring all of them to the same table.”

Consumer Understanding should inspire Creativity, not Constraint it

Consumer-centricity sits at the centre of the innovation ecosystem. “It starts with the consumer before it can end up again on a consumer’s wrist,” she says. Staying close to the consumer means deeply understanding culture, behaviours, pain points and barriers - not to dictate the creative answer, but to give teams a richer foundation from which to imagine it. Used well, data sharpens judgement, but used too rigidly, it can push ideas towards the safest and most predictable answer.

For Antonia, consumer understanding plays different roles across the innovation funnel from inspiration to optimisation and validation. Early on, it should be exploratory, helping to uncover emerging tensions, behaviours and opportunities, e.g. through cultural signals, social listening and qualitative insight. Later, it becomes more evaluative, helping teams to improve and stress-test concepts, shape communication, assess commercial potential and build confidence in the direction.

AI will Accelerate Innovation, but not Replace Human Judgement

Looking ahead, Antonia expects artificial intelligence to reshape nearly every aspect of innovation. She sees particular potential in using AI to make innovation faster, more agile and more responsive, supporting everything from project management to ideation, qualitative insight synthesis, consumer testing, faster iteration of ideas and actual product development.

I think speed is so important. Research typically takes long, while the world around us shifts more quickly and innovation is required to move faster. If AI can speed up the process without reducing depth or quality, that is a really big opportunity.

But AI is only valuable if it is paired with a strong human point of view. If every brand uses the same AI tools in the same way, ideas and concepts risk becoming increasingly similar. For Antonia, AI can be a blessing for speed and scale, but it should sharpen human judgement and creative direction rather than replace them.

That is also why, for Antonia, future-proof growth is not only about using new tools to innovate faster, but about innovating relevance itself. Brands need to stay culturally connected while building a portfolio strong enough to grow without depending on constant reinvention.

“Don’t just innovate your products, innovate your relevance. The fight is really about creating desire - because without desire, growth becomes much harder to sustain.”

Views expressed are Antonia Dedekind’s own and not an official company position.