At day 2 of GQ Heroes at Soho Farmhouse, leaders from three tech titans took to the stage to discuss growing your online business – Tom Connaughton, the Managing Director at Spotify, Calm co-founder Michael Acton Smith, and Klarna's Social Commerce Lead, Adam Levene. In conversation with radio presenter Nihal Arthanayake, they went deep on how to build an online community and keep them engaged, plus they shared some golden bits of advice about how they reached the tops of their respective fields. Here are the key takeaways you missed out on…
Engagement is about listening to your audience
Tom Connaughton, Managing Director at Spotify
"That’s something that’s core to Spotify as a platform: we are always listening. It’s about the audience first. It’s not a top-down thing. Once a year we do a big campaign called Wrapped – we give the Spotify audience the tools to shout about their passions and what they’ve loved throughout the year, and that’s incredibly successful for us. We’ve got 400 million listeners around the world and over a third of them engage in that Wrapped platform each year.”
Meaningful celebrity endorsements create genuine engagement
Michael Acton Smith, co-founder at Calm
“We think of this business in hundreds of years: how can we build something that stands the test of time? Our mission is to make everyone happier and healthier, and to solve the global mental health crisis. So, we generate loyalty by building an amazing product and having it change and transform people's lives.
"When we were getting going, meditation and mindfulness and mental health weren’t talked about, they were so stigmatised. And we thought a celebrity could use their platform to talk about it and make having these conversations cool, and for years we were knocking on the door and no one wanted to step forward. Eventually, Matthew McConaughey was the first we worked with. And once he came on board that opened the floodgates.
"But it’s easy to work with celebrities if you write a big cheque. We wanted something much more authentic. So we created the acronym ICE. We want celebrities to, first of all, invest – to put their own money in Calm and take shares. C is for content; we want them to create exclusive content that you can’t get anywhere else. The E is engagement. We want them to be actually using the product. Lebron James uses calm every day to help him sleep. Matthew McConaughey gives Calm to his kids charities in Texas. And with that, you can almost throw the contract out the window, they talk so passionately about it. That was a key component of the growth of the business."
Do one thing, and do it well
Adam Levene, Social commerce lead at Klarna
"Consumers are fickle. You have to keep innovating. Our goal is to bring a human touch to online commerce. Constant innovation is the way to keep delivering those magic moments, making people’s lives easier, they’ll reward you with loyalty.
"Apple Pay coming into the space will be a positive thing, it’ll really validate what we’re doing. When Apple do anything they do it very well. But when it comes to software, they don’t always have a monopoly. When you do one thing incredibly well you can really win and it's felt by the consumer and the 400,000 merchants we work with."
