We have found Einride’s next CMO! My reflections on our success and the path forward

For seven years, I have held the position of CMO at Einride, the company I founded together with Robert Falck and Filip Lilja back in 2016. Amidst pitching the company to investors and making the first sketches of our offering, we quickly realized that we would need a strong brand to make people curious about what we were doing, to incite them to spend time and learn about this new field of technology.

The knowledge gap in the industry seven years ago was far behind where we are today. Electric trucks were seen as improbable or a vehicle only fit to transport chips, at most. Autonomous was something very few had ever heard about. Pitching these new technologies or why shippers would need a platform and operating system to take care of it efficiently left people wondering what the heck we were doing.

It wasn’t an easy sell convincing Robert to spend the cash we needed back in 2016 to support the foundation for the Einride brand. But it would turn out to be one of the best decisions we made.

We started by formulating the vision, mission and category. We created an identity (which we have updated since then) that we could all rally around. Quickly, we realized how brand and culture must go hand in hand. The people working at Einride were our first brand ambassadors. It would not be possible to build a strong brand without them.

To learn from the best brands in the world, we used Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why” concept – a framework I have adopted multiple times over the years. We focused on the why while setting up milestones that would take us in the direction of our goals. The milestones then became our messaging pillars – they were perfect for pitching to the media, and PR proved to be a cost-effective way to build brand awareness. In 2019, we became the first company to put an autonomous electric vehicle on a public road. It was a major milestone for us as a company, but it was also a world’s first. We repeated the feat a few years later with the first autonomous vehicle without a driver on board to successfully complete a pilot on a US public road. In 2020, we wanted to accomplish speed, so we set out to make the speed record at the Top Gear track in the United Kingdom, another milestone that became a world’s first.

Building a brand is very much like building a company. You will need trust. You will have to make sure that the people in the company, stakeholders and customers in your field trust and like you. However, if you want to build a superbrand, you need to go beyond that. The people who are not in your field must acknowledge your relevance, drawn by all the cool and amazing things your company does. And that’s what we have achieved with eight market launches, in-house campaigns and over 24,000 news articles. The public has witnessed the Einride name and logo displayed on the iconic billboards in Times Square and on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

All of this has been possible by bringing together Design, Marketing and Communications under one cohesive and creative group, the Market & Customer Experience team. The group has grown and exponentially reached milestones, several of which I’ve mentioned above. Now is the time for their next step. As the Einride brand continues to evolve and the company prepares for its new phase, I am thrilled and excited to welcome Corinne Aaron as our new Chief Marketing Officer, the position I have so proudly held since the start.

With over 15 years of global marketing experience leading brands such as Lynk & Co, Tesla, Reebok and Hyatt, Corinne brings a track record set to continue driving the Einride brand forward. Vigorous growth and a dynamic and innovative work culture is no stranger to Corinne. At Tesla, she led the team through an expansion into six new markets while structuring and scaling a fast-growing team across 18 countries – coming from a solid digital approach with engaging storytelling, her team significantly contributed to making Tesla the EV market leader in Europe in 2018 and 2019.

We see an opportunity to become one of the biggest players in the industry, and I can’t think of a better successor to guide the Einride brand and keep pushing the boundaries of our industry. As I continue on my roles as Deputy CEO and Executive Member of our Board with the responsibility of cultivating relationships with key external stakeholders, from clients to investors and shareholders, I’ll be able to focus on strengthening Einride’s growth trajectory and setting the right structures in place to push the company to meet its goals.

I hope all of our clients, shareholders, supporters and friends will join me in welcoming Corinne to the CMO role and wishing her the very best of luck as she takes the reins.

Einride has many exciting roads we plan to take in the months and years ahead. We hope you’ll join us for the ride.

All the best,

Linnéa

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