Seven opportunities with DPP from a marketer’s perspective

When branding and marketing experts start looking at DPP, there is generally universal excitement. It’s something of an ‘a-ha moment.’ For them, a new branding and marketing channel is emerging before their eyes due to EU regulations. Every product will soon have its own digital presence. And with that, is the opportunity to engage directly with an already loyal customer. The question for marketers is who will make most use of DPP’s and how.

• Is it the sales guys who want to generate even more sales and use the DPP to take consumers to their webshop?
• Is it more sales/marketing teams rewarding you for just scanning the QR-code and getting loyalty points, discounts or other rewards.
• Is it the branding team who can use the channel to help tell the brand story in a compelling way

Will DPP be used as a way to create a new D2C (direct to consumer) channel for brands that have been struggling to make contact with their loyal fans? Now, they have a direct link to the customer and bypass the retailer. They can even measure who’s been scanning and where they are looking and whether the digital product passport led them to the homepage or other campaign pages.

To get into the head of sales, marketing and branding teams, we interviewed six leading heavyweights within marketing, with long and impressive CVs from ad agency owners and creative directors to brand and communications managers. Most of them had never heard of DPP before but all of them saw direct opportunities. This is what they came up with:

01. Direct connection with the customer via DPP

“This feels like an open invitation to the company’s knowledge bank,” says Mats Rönne, a marketing and media director of several large multinational companies over the past 30 years including Electrolux, Ericsson and Skanska.

“Partly, this can be used to describe raw materials and carbon footprint but even more to talk about the company and the people that have made it happen. There are so many stories that could be told here; the developers or designers thoughts, tips on how to make the most of the product, opportunities to develop it further, access to spare parts and even offer perks, discounts and rewards to customers.”

If you’ve got a brand’s product in your hand and you scan the QR-code, you’re probably a loyal customer already. Branding teams will want to capitalise on that loyalty and strengthen it further.

02. Digital product passports bring credibility through transparency

Henrik Almqvist, Creative Director at ad agency M&C Saatchi believes that there won’t necessarily need to be inspiring brand-loyalty content on these sites. Simply providing useful information will be enough for customers to like the product and brand even more.

“This can be a great educational channel packed with all that information that I really just need,” he says. “On top of sustainability information, there is plenty of other useful information that consumers need like user manuals, instructions, guidelines and spare parts.”

Linda Segerblom, a marketing and communications manager with a focus on sustainability agrees. “I think the big opportunity with DPP will be transparency,”

“There is so much information that needs to be presented to consumers and there is clearly an interest from consumers to get this information in a transparent way. This is a smart solution for that.”

03. Capitalise on being sustainable

“The big opportunity is for all of those players that are already telling a strong ‘sustainability’ story,” says Mattias Håkansson, the former Nordic Marketing Director of electronics retail giant Elkjöp.

“Now, they have a real chance to build on that and both inform and inspire on the same page. Not only do they have a story to tell but they are already gathering the kind of data required and creating a circular business. They have the opportunity to shine here.”

Linda Segerblom sees DPP in a similar vein. “If the brand is a sustainable one, then there is a great opportunity to strengthen it further with DPP and other sustainability-related stories. It goes back to that transparency that consumers are really asking for.”

“I personally love the idea of DPP as it gives you an opportunity to tell the story of the company,” says David Gray, Managing Partner at Grow agency. “I have a lovely Houdini jacket and I’ve had it for years and on the inside of the coat on the back is a little story about Houdini and the philosophy of the company. This is really nice and I’d love to see a QR-code taking me to a microsite that could give me more and help tell an even richer story.”

04. Conversion from your digital product passport

The point of digital product passports is not to increase consumption but this is exactly how some marketers see it. “The DPP examples today look too much like a report,” says Isabelle Dahlborg Lidström, Head of Design and Creative Director at Grow Agency in Stockholm.

“We need to make these pages ‘sexy.’ I want to be inspired. I want storytelling. I want inspiration. I want it to be cool. We should be seeing lifestyle images from the start and a cool video maybe. If you’re a sustainable brand then this becomes much easier but either way, you need to present this information in a really enticing way so that you can create a ‘tribe’ of followers.

Dahlborg Lidström’s view, after many years in the fashion industry, is that the competition is so fierce that every touchpoint needs to bring the audience in. Every brand should focus on making their DPP’s attractive first and after that, get the sustainability information across. For her, DPP’s will be used by marketing teams to convert viewers into sales.

“It’s about getting the audience in there, keeping them interested so that they decide to make another purchase. It’s a golden opportunity if you do this well.”

Mats Rönne also saw several conversion oppor- tunities immediately. “You could offer a discount on your next purchase for scanning a QR-code for example, or another offer in their customer loyalty club.”

There’s clearly a division in thought here. Some see DPP opening up a new sales channel. Others believe that inspirational and sales-related material already exists and these microsites can link to that material but should possess pure information to keep the communication clear between channels.

05. The D2C market and DPP

In the marketing world, there has been shifting trends when it comes to D2C (direct to consumer) sales. Big B2C (business to consumer) brands rely on large chains to sell their products. At the same time, they want to speak directly to the customer and even sell to them, without annoying the big retailers.

“There’s always a challenge selling via retailers. The producer doesn’t have direct contact with the user. Producers usually try to create incentives to establish that contact by providing consumables, spare parts or service. DPP is now a natural invitiation to establish that connection,” says Mats Rönne. ”The purpose of DPP may be to provide transparent sustainability information but the biggest winners may be customer service and marketing teams. They could really get a lot out of this and increase D2C sales,” says Rönne.

In 2024, more than a quarter of Nike’s business came from selling directly to the consumer. Other brands are also ramping up their D2C channels. The introduction of digital product passports could speed this up by giving brands a natural and direction connection with consumers.

Henrik Almqvist of M&C Saatchi agrees, to an extent. “If it’s a product that you tend to buy once a year only, then you usually forget where you bought it and this could help.”

“It’s about providing a service to consumers and making it easy for them to get the information they need, including purchasing a new product or spare part. I think there would be a great consumer value in that.”

06. Big data is back baby Every time someone scans a code, the brand will know about it. They’ll also know what the consumer has scanned and what pages they have visited and where they have gone after looking at the microsite.

This opens up a new way of measuring interest and behaviour. GDPR and other regulations have made it much trickier for brands to create direct communications with their customer and to track their movements. DPP’s could open the way to change this.

“After all the limitations with cookies, it’s much harder to track your audience now and engage with them,” says Mattias Håkansson. “It’s hard to get access to your audience now, so the CRM (client relationship management) guys will be delighted. They will have greater influence internally in organisations and won’t get stripped of their budgets. Clearly, understanding this kind of scanning behaviour will be valuable to brands in terms of knowing what is popular and how people behave when they scan a QR-code.”

07. DPP leads to a ’next-level’ second-hand market When every product has transparent data attached to it, consumers in the second-hand market will get a whole new idea as to what it is they are buying.

Ad agency veteran David Gray was quick to see the opportunity while looking at a clothing retailers DPP. “This is like the blockchain of fashion,” he exclaimed. “It’s a ledger of the entire product and its history. That’s kind of cool in itself.”

Gray believes it can open the way for second-hand sales of high-quality goods in particular. “Now you have this opportunity to find second-hand products with a digital story attached and the whole history of the product and what’s happened with it so far.”

In addition, second-hand buyers will now be able to see if they are buying the real deal or a fake. The digital passport provides authenticity that is lacking today. Mattias Håkansson agrees and believes it could be the catalyst to changing people’s scanning behaviour.

“It will be like buying a second-hand car and looking at the ‘service-book’ except for everything. You’ll know all about the amount of times it was fixed and repaired, how many owners it’s had. You’re going to have that on all capital goods which makes the second-hand market really interesting. Could this be a catalyst to create a booming second-hand industry?”

Start your journey

There are undoubtedly challenges in gathering and tracing data on every product sold in the EU, but there are clearly opportunities available also. When marketing and branding executives look at digital product passports for the first time, they see immediate benefits for brand loyalty, customer convenience and transparency. The reasons why they love it and how it will develop vary but there is an overriding interest in creating a strong and direct communications channel to the consumer. Implementing digital passports that are engaging and provide consumers with the right information at the right time will bring about significant customer benefits and also allow brands to build loyalty.

Kolla today offers a platform for the automatic production of digital product passports. Read more about how we do it, or how you should get started if you’re starting to look into this.