Olli-Pekka Pohjanmäki

Olli-Pekka has built customer strategies, and the operating models that follow from them, together with his clients for more than 35 years. More than 40 of Finland’s 100 largest companies have drawn on his expertise. He has founded and built consultancies, led them and also sat on the client’s side of the table, so his perspective comes from both sides.

In the 1990s Olli-Pekka helped launch Aspectum, which he led for about ten years. The goal was to become Finland’s number one in customer relationship management, and that goal was reached. Much of the language and the concepts still used for customer relationships in Finland were born during the Aspectum years. Customer thinking was not just a new way to talk about marketing. It was an attempt to change the logic of how a whole business is run, and that work is still not finished.

In between, Olli-Pekka spent some four years on the Group Executive Committee of LähiTapiola. He was responsible for developing personal, corporate and farm customer relationships, online business, sustainability, communications, marketing and analytics, all tied together by customer relationship management. It was also a test of how fine strategies bend into practice when they meet an organisation’s everyday life, established ways of working and business realities.

Olli-Pekka is also a familiar figure in university executive education. He has coached in the JOKO programme of Aalto University Executive Education (AEE) since 2001, with 49 groups behind him in an unbroken series. He has also taught in, among others, the University of Jyväskylä’s Avance programme and the MBA programmes of the University of Eastern Finland.

Olli-Pekka is at his best where people are ready to challenge established thinking and look for concrete solutions to problems in customer relationship management. He values theory, but not theory for its own sake. Solutions that stand up in daylight need a foundation in thinking, not just buzzwords, consultant slides and the next management fad.

He is particularly interested in why customer-centricity is talked about everywhere, yet the real logic of customer relationship management is still understood in so few companies.