During the Nepa Breakfast Session on 29 January 2026, one of the most compelling perspectives came from Cecilia Lutz, Nordic Media Lead at Nordnet. While much of the industry discussion around marketing effectiveness focuses on tools, models and attribution frameworks, Nordnet’s story offered a different lens: what actually happens when a highly performance-driven organisation decides to invest seriously in brand.

Nordnet’s journey illustrates a challenge many digital-first companies are now facing. After years of strong growth powered by sharp performance marketing, the company realised that business success had outpaced brand clarity. The result was a strategic shift – from optimising short-term acquisition to building a stronger, more distinctive brand that could support sustainable growth across the Nordics.

Watch a clip from the breakfast event

Repositioning from a purely performance‑driven approach

Nordnet, the leading digital platform for savings and investments in the Nordics, shared how they are repositioning from a purely performance‑driven approach to a more balanced, brand‑ and insight‑led strategy.

For years, Nordnet had what many digital players aspire to: strong growth, a clear product and a very sharp performance‑marketing machine. But when the company took a step back and looked at the brand itself, the picture was less clear. Internal and external research in 2022–2023 showed that Nordnet’s brand was not as sharp as its business performance: employees and consumers held many different – and sometimes non‑existent – perceptions of what the brand stood for. For many people outside the customer base, the most common answer to “what does Nordnet represent?” was, simply, “nothing”.

That became the starting point for a multi‑year journey:

  • Clarify the desired brand position (2023): turn the vague collection of perceptions into a clear promise and role in the category.
  • Increase marketing investment (2024): put more weight behind the brand, not just performance, and commit to building memory structures at scale.
  • Build a measurement framework: ensure new investments could be tracked, compared and defended, not just “felt” to be important.
  • Launch a new creative platform across the Nordics (late 2024–2025): make the brand position visible and distinctive in all four markets.

Rather than dwelling on tools, Cecilia Lutz focused on the mindset shifts behind Nordnet’s work.

The mindset shifts behind Nordnet’s work.

First, accepting that brand building takes time, especially in a complex, low‑frequency category like financial services.
People do not change their savings habits overnight; brand effects accumulate slowly, and it can feel frustratingly quiet in the early phases of a repositioning. In an organisation used to fast feedback from performance channels, that requires a different kind of patience.

Second, being consistent with creative and brand assets, even when internal teams have grown tired of them. Inside the company, people see the same film, headline and jingle many times a day. Outside, the average person may have seen it once – or not at all. Changing too quickly satisfies internal boredom but robs the brand of the repetition it needs in the market.

Third, using evidence to stay the course. When you move from a pure performance model to full‑funnel marketing, much of your historical internal data reflects a different strategy. It cannot, on its own, tell you what to expect from a brand‑led approach. Nordnet therefore leaned on both internal data and external benchmarks – including evidence on the multiplier effect of brand on performance – to calibrate expectations and keep stakeholders confident during the transition.

Major learnings for Nordnet

A major learning for Nordnet has been the importance of data foundations and ownership. On paper, the company already had a lot of data. In practice, building a Nordic‑wide view that could feed robust Marketing Mix Modelling and other analyses meant unifying:

  • Different reporting formats across markets
  • Different time units (daily, weekly, monthly)
  • Spend coming from several buying routes: centrally, locally, and via in‑house teams
  • Several years of historical media and business data

Harmonising this into a clean, comparable, multi‑year dataset was hard work – but it was also non‑negotiable. Without that foundation, models would be fragile and Finance would be right to question the outputs.

Crucially, Nordnet chose not to treat this as a side project. They appointed a clear internal owner for the measurement work, responsible for driving the data clean‑up, coordinating with partners and ensuring that learnings did not get lost between campaigns. That role became a focal point for the whole journey.

A second, equally important alignment was around “one version of the truth” for KPIs. For example: should MMM be modelled on “new customers” or “new active customers”? Which brand metrics matter most? Which definitions does Finance rely on? Unless everyone works to the same definitions, even the best analysis risks fuelling new arguments instead of resolving old ones.

To become data‑driven tomorrow, you must start today

As Lutz summarised it during the session, “To become data‑driven tomorrow, you must start today – even if the data you have is imperfect.” That early, imperfect start is what allowed Nordnet to:

  • Later build more advanced models without starting from scratch
  • Link brand and performance more clearly to business outcomes
  • Separate stock‑market effects from the contribution of marketing
  • And sit at the budget table with stronger evidence when it really mattered

The result is that Nordnet’s marketing team is no longer just optimising clicks in silos. They are managing a brand‑led growth system, where creative, media and measurement work together – and where patience, structure and ownership are just as important as any individual channel or campaign.