The marketing director for Aspiegel SE is on a mission to help people and businesses live their best digital life. By focusing on key values such as ‘customer centricity’ and ‘privacy by design’, Brodigan shares the vision for HUAWEI Mobile Services and explains how AppGallery has grown into third largest global app marketplace today with over for 580 million monthly active customers and over 5.4 million registered developers.
Not many marketers get to work in both B2B and B2C simultaneously. Few get to build propositions that combine both hardware and software. Even fewer get to build a new digital ecosystem combining all of these elements – and to do so largely from scratch.
Aoife Brodigan, as marketing director for Aspiegel SE, explains why this is a unique opportunity she enjoys.
“We’re not just creating innovative products and services,” she says. “We’re building an entirely new ecosystem within the mobile industry. There are a lot of opportunities and challenges that come with that. Fundamentally, it’s really exciting to look at the hardware side of Huawei and see how it can be combined with our software and cloud capabilities, to create innovative opportunities for our partners and immersive experiences for consumers”.
Brodigan is part of Aspiegel SE management team, a subsidiary of Huawei Technologies, headquartered in Dublin and responsible for building digital infrastructure for all Huawei Mobile Services across Europe, the UK, the US and Australia. In addition to AppGallery, the Aspiegel team have supported the release of innovative new products such as Petal Maps, Petal Search and Huawei Ads platform. That puts Brodigan at the heart of an initiative to connect developers and commercial partners with the fast-changing needs of mobile users.
Combining B2C and B2B marketing needs to create new HMS ecosystem
As a consumer marketer, Brodigan tracks rapidly changing digital technologies and consumer needs to build marketing campaigns that inspire HMS customers to live their best digital life. As a B2B marketer, she supports developers, marketers and business partners to leverage the power of the HMS ecosystem to find new audiences and engage customers in interesting new ways. One recent example of this was the launch of the Huawei Ads platform, which Brodigan says “gives agencies and app developers exciting opportunities to reach customers with seamless advertising formats directly on devices, as well as innovative ad placements across AppGallery, HMS apps and other third party sources”.
As far as she’s concerned, both roles have one crucial feature in common – they depend on marketing bringing the voice of the customer into the room.
“I think that’s the most important role that any marketing team can play,” says Brodigan. “Be the voice of the customer when they’re not in the room. Our goal is to provide real-world insights, and customer feedback that help product teams to design applications and features that really stand out and inspire audiences. We bring value to the table by highlighting the trends and behaviors we’re seeing people shifting towards.”
Those shifts have been taking place at an accelerating rate over the last two years – and when you’re building a mobile ecosystem across a diverse continent, it’s vital to stay in touch with conditions and experiences on the ground.
“During the pandemic, we saw consumer behaviour shifting, as people spent more time at home and away from loved ones. They relied on apps and services to be a lifeline back to the community. As a digital service provider we explored ways we could help make people’s lives easier during this time. For example, as people spent holiday seasons apart, the demand for sharing video messages and photos increased,” explains Brodigan, “so we offered discounts on our mobile cloud services to help people manage all of the extra video content that was being recorded and sent around. We also provided packages with easy access to Huawei Video and Huawei Music to fill some of the gaps and need for entertainment. On AppGallery, our main consumer portal for our services, we’ve worked to ramp up our gaming offering, as we saw an increase in demand for games as a way for people to unwind and maintain some social connections.”
Building out the gaming side of the platform plays to Brodigan’s experience. Before joining Aspiegel, she spent five years in gaming marketing roles for Facebook. She knows the potential of this form of content – and she knows all about the role of partnerships in bringing its potential to life.
“Our role in marketing is to grow that side of the ecosystem by helping partners and developers understand what’s possible,” she says. “Onboarding a partner is just the start. We want an ongoing journey where we can really inspire them about the resources available and help them to build a community.”
Building a digital lifestyle for everyone to enjoy
Brodigan is clear that the strength of the communities within any ecosystem depends on a diversity of thinking at the heart of it. She’s made this a priority when it comes to building out her marketing team.
“If you don't have a diverse team, then you won’t get a diverse perspective, and that can ultimately impact your ability to build diverse products for a diverse ecosystem,” she says. “I’m always looking to add value by ensuring we’re bringing different voices, cultures and backgrounds into the team. It’s important to remember that diversity isn’t just about gender and race – there are other dimensions too. Removing all forms of bias from the hiring process is key to getting the right voices in the room when you’re designing products and marketing campaigns.”
When it comes to the mobile experiences that Aspiegel and Huawei build, the role of marketing is to act as the empathy engine – staying on top of emerging ‘digital lifestyle’ needs and connecting those needs to device capabilities, product ideas and innovative partners who are motivated to help meet them.
“There are lots of opportunities for marketing to add value to the business, and lots of activities that we can do to drive growth and revenue,” Brodigan says. “However, the first and most important concept is always customer-centricity and data-driven marketing. By understanding the rapidly changing economic, social and cultural needs of our customers, we can create engaging marketing campaigns that inspire audiences to come on this digital journey with us and drive lasting change.”
Every ecosystem starts with a vision that the whole network depends on. Brodigan knows that for this ‘digital life’ vision to succeed, the end-customer will be the most important stakeholder of all.
For more insights from visionary Marketing Leaders check out LinkedIn’s CMO Corner.
