Lego’s Cecilia Weckstrom on risk-taking in marketing and overcoming fear of failure

I was born in Helsinki, Finland. And I guess my career really began with my work for Unicef and Unesco. I was just out of high school and I got an amazing opportunity to work on a global initiative to empower young people to drive positive change in their communities.

That opportunity included various trips around the world – including to the UN in New York – and brought me to the UK. Seeing all of that potential on a global scale was the most amazing kind of ‘brain explosion’ you can have when you’re in your late teens and early 20s.

My passion for design is what led me to pursue a career in product design, and it informed my choice of degree at Central Saint Martins, London, in the early ‘00s. I joined The Lego Group as a front-end product designer. If you had to pick one, I still believe that one of the best jobs in the world is to design toys.

What was fascinating was that Lego was going through a ‘turnaround’. I had the opportunity to work with our CEO at the time on redefining the Lego brand framework and company values. And this experience sparked my interest in organizational dynamics and change management and made me curious to explore a career beyond product design.

That led to me setting up the experience design discipline. This was all about enhancing how we bring the Lego brand to life at every customer touchpoint. It wasn’t enough to only focus on the product – we also needed to consider all of the other places consumers meet us. Next, I headed up the global insights team, running lego.com, delving deeper into content marketing, and driving the digital transformation there.

I also had the opportunity to launch our first sustainable Lego bricks made from sugarcane, and then going on to establish our diversity and inclusion initiatives. I think these kinds of varied initiatives coupled with doing an executive MBA meant that I was invited to lead our company-wide marketing transformation program.

Now I head up marketing innovation: I’m really focused on adapting to our changing consumer needs through large-scale experimentation. It is a role that involves uncovering new building tactics, which we then scale across markets and into global as well as explore strategic insights into emerging technologies and platforms. All these learnings go into shaping the future marketing strategies at the Lego Group.

The Lego Campus in Billund, Denmark

I recently interviewed Zoe Scaman, whose specialism is ‘The New Fandom’. She says that the new communities of fans are not typically on Facebook, and the like – they’re going to Discord and other alternatives. There are communities and super-fans that are already creating future products for brands using the latest technology platforms. Lego is very much seen as embracing this ‘new fandom,’ especially with your Lego Insiders program, and it seems to me are very much in touch with a world where fans can contribute towards future Lego creations. Can you tell us more about that?

Fans have been an integral part of our product innovation ever since the early 2000s. It is often argued that Lego were pioneers in leveraging ‘lead users’ to shape things like our Lego robotics platform, which also led to fan collaborations and platforms like Lego Ideas, which is an open innovation sourcing platform where people can visually suggest what they think would be a fantastic new Lego product, and then get the world to vote on those ideas. That way we can evaluate and pick out the winners.

The platform has seen an amazing explosion of astonishing products that we wouldn’t have thought of launching ourselves. This proves that there are huge groups of fans out there that would love to see these things brought to life. Listening to them has given us great insight and we’ve discovered whole fandom communities, far beyond the ones we were already aware of.

Lego Insiders is really the next step and the evolution of various different initiatives that we have launched – each has been about connecting people who love Lego for what Lego is. At the Lego Group, we are driven to provide an ever more coherent experience: we want to make it as easy as possible for fans to explore our whole ecosystem. Thus our customer experiences evolve, based on the unique interests of our fans.

We strive to bring the world of Lego to our fans – as opposed to making our fans spend time trying to find a world that complements their interests in different pockets of the internet. This includes always trying to inspire people with all of the creative possibilities that Lego building has.

The Lego Radio Retro

I was marveling just before this interview at the Lego radio you recently launched. It looked really cool, and I know that you’re quite into sound creation (more of that later). Is there any danger of a Lego synthesizer at some point?

We have actually experimented with a number of products that incorporate sound and music, but it's a tricky space. And I don’t think we have got it right yet. We may have to call on our amazing fans who helped us create the Lego Fender electric guitar! There is a really wonderful grand piano made out of Lego bricks. But a true synthesizer, with its own complete personality that I know music aficionados would love… I’m not sure we are quite there.

Maybe maybe we start with a Lego ‘classic dub siren kit’ and build from there? Hours of fun. With your innovation marketing innovation hat on, what’s coming up for you and your team at Lego 2024-25?

Of course there’s loads I can’t discuss – because it is under wraps. But speaking more generally about marketing, we’re really digging into experimentation at scale: we still have some way to go to balance the two sides of this equation more effectively.

On the one hand, we continue to push for exciting experiments that we can learn from and whose insights may propel the business forward. We do this by working closely with our ecosystem partners, platform owners and new technology pioneers, to co-create and run experiments that prove the opportunities and potential and give us insights into how we best balance what works and how we improve it.

Our compelling marketing strategies build on the strength of what our brand is, and how we can uniquely resonate with audiences. But on the other side is ‘the people side’ of the experience. We have addressed the fear of failure and instead have embedded an experimentation mindset into the company. The experimentation mindset is critical as a way to counter the fear of failure, which only gets stronger the more successful we are as a company.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, I’ve learned that the more wins you have, the more risk-averse people become. From a leadership and organizational development standpoint, we have to ring-fence and protect that spirit of experimentation and ensure that its part of the program remains robust.

We need to take risks, evolve and become more data-driven in our decision-making – but also nurture that pioneering creative spirit to ensure that we stay at the forefront of change. We need to always push forward and overcome the fear of failure that plagues so many organizations – including ours.

The Lego Ideas Fender Stratocaster

You have strong belief in the power of innovation within a business. What are the key areas that you have identified where you believe innovation has really pushed things forward?

I can’t think of an area in business that innovation will not improve. However, it should be noted that for many innovation is often only seen as the end result – when we acknowledge something that’s new, unique, surprising and valuable and see that it is implemented.

The real question is: how do you systematically, and in a timely way, create an environment that fosters innovation? How can we nurture that curious mindset, encourage bravery, and challenge the established way of doing things, while maintaining the focus that’s needed to make innovation happen and excel?

An example might be, referencing the new fandom we discussed earlier, how do we bring customers and fans close to the company and increase the contact surface between employees and our customers – the people we serve? How can we stay rooted in their world and in what delights people? What’s exciting is that it is in this space that marketing can play a crucial role.

Innovation requires participation from everyone. Take the Lego Group’s journey on sustainability, for example. It has been like a true team sport, where we have material science innovation, working together with operations and distribution, as well as designers and marketers, to turn all of this information and insight into a product.

Innovation and sustainability cannot succeed in silos. If you tried to tackle using marketing alone, you just get ‘greenwashing’. Any kind of meaningful real change that people expect from loved brands will involve the whole company – it won’t just be a campaign with a start and end date. To make real change, you have to think bigger.

Detail of the Lego Campus building

Is there a process when you begin to innovate? Is there a methodology that you use? How do you swerve innovation disasters?

There’s numerous ways to innovate. And there are nuances, of course, depending on where you are most focused: be that products, marketing, new materials, people or processes.

My design background kind of has ingrained certain principles that I rely on. A crucial first step is always the idea of immersing yourself in the world of your audience, understanding their pain points, and hopes and dreams – really trying to get to the bottom of what are the criteria that a good opportunity must meet.

After that, you develop prototypes: minimum viable products that you can test and validate with both high affinity and low affinity audiences. This gives you a sense of the potential reach of your idea: whether it’s just for hardcore fans, or maybe it’s something that everyone’s interested in.

If you can gauge that in advance, then you can build your strategy and business plan and keep iterating. You also need to avoid falling in love with your ideas. Instead, you need to try to be as externally focused as possible. You should be guided by objective criteria and test frequently. If you do this with diligence and rigor, then both qualitative and quantitative data are your friend and will help you to tear through and past potential disasters.

Some senior marketers find the abundance of new technology can be a hindrance rather than a help. There are just so many options – and some of them come with considerable costs. Making the wrong choice when deciding to use a new technology platform or a new sort of marketing technology can be a disaster. With such a plethora of technology solutions to choose from, how do you ensure that you make the right selection and don't drown in a sea of choice?

It can be challenging. Zeroing in on the problem that you’re trying to solve is a key first step. You also need to consider where things are likely to get a pushback. Often this is to do with timing, or concerns about scope, scale or risk – or all of the aforementioned.

Also, ‘pushback’ is not necessarily a negative. If you have a new solution in mind, you should figure out how you can start small, with an iterative approach, and then learn progressively so that you can then be fairly sure that it will work. As Carl von Clausewitz famously said: ‘No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy’.

To make the best choices, you need to apply a process to understand the problem that you’re trying to solve. First you must establish the criteria that a good solution has to meet and then find a way to prototype and test what the technology can do for you. Will it deliver on its promise – or will it end up being a little niche solution that you can never really scale?

The next step is understanding what it will take your organization to adopt it. How hard will it be for people to wrap their head around? How will they need to change their ways of working to fully leverage the power of this new solution? Often that gets ignored and we forget about the upscaling or the capability building that comes hand-in-hand with adopting anything new.

You mentioned the possibility of pushback, and I wanted to dig into that for a second. When you’re selling in innovation to the boardroom or the C-suite, sometimes, as you know, it can be seen as a threat. Do you have any advice to marketers when they meet or experience that pushback? Or how they could best avoid it?

I would say: be curious. Whatever the pushback is, it is, in essence, a data point that should kind of inform and refine your approach. Try to get to the bottom of it. Is it the scale? Is it the scope? What is causing concern? Any solution you are tabling has got to be able to answer those questions. If you have those answers you’ll be prepared.

If that is not possible, try to turn the pushback situation into a dialogue. Try to understand where people are coming from: then you’re in a better position to deliver your solution and more likely to get approval.

Surrounded by Lego creations at Lego HQ

How do you get the best out of your team at Lego?

In environments that can, at times, be both demanding and fast-paced, what most affects teams is stress. The two key factors that contribute to stress more than anything else are a lack of autonomy and predictability.

I focus on defining the context of what we are aiming to achieve: I try to help with predictability and advanced planning, which may sound a tad boring but are absolutely crucial when avoiding last-minute panics and unnecessary stress.

If there is a lot of work, and you know what it is, you can plan and it becomes more manageable than being an unknown entity that will surprise you every morning when you open your email inbox.

A lesson I learned from my early career as a young designer was the importance of understanding ‘the why’ behind the task. I used to have a design manager who would often direct me to make different changes, but without explaining the reasoning. I found that really frustrating, because I would follow the orders, but found myself always puzzled about why I had been asked to make these changes.

That taught me as a leader that it is vital to help people understand why something is important. If you take the time to explain, it creates a foundation for autonomy. You allow people to think independently and hold themselves to a higher standard because they understand what matters and why.

Time spent on this upfront ultimately helps you later on as you are more likely to get the best out of people working around you. In turn those people are learning more from working with you and are more empowered.

The Lego Atari 2600

Could you talk us through some successful marketing innovations that you’ve overseen during your 20+ years at Lego. If you had to pick one, what would it be?

The one I would pick is the one that I believe helped us lay the foundations for change as a company and that also enabled subsequent progress and innovation: the Lego brand framework. It articulates our vision, mission, values and spirit. As a key part of our turnaround we wanted to really understand what are we here to do as a company.

Unlike many companies, we put that into our DNA and also our decision-making processes. Having that level of clarity and commitment to our brand has been crucial to our growth because we are now 10 times bigger than when I started in the company. When you have such rapid growth, it’s easy to lose your way. Having a brand framework keeps us grounded. I’ve been lucky to be involved in a number of Lego initiatives – but if I had to choose one, it is that.

In marketing, I have noticed a return to people looking more seriously at the discipline’s core building blocks, ie research, strategy, tactics, in that order – and not jumping straight to tactics. My question to you is: what advice might you have to marketers reading this article that are tempted to rush straight to tactics?

‘Not so fast’. I think jumping straight to tactics without a solid foundation in research and strategy is just a recipe for short-sighted decisions. It’s like when you get stuck in urgent tasks, but you ignore all the important ones: you’re busy, but you're not actually getting to the root of what’s making you busy. It’s kind of a vicious circle.

To achieve an internal locus of control as a brand and company, it’s essential that you balance short-term sales activations with long-term brand building. Investing in your brand has a kind of compounding effect. Done right, it generates the long-term benefit that will support your sales activation efforts year after year. It gives you a nice tailwind that will allow you to capitalize on short-term opportunities more effectively.

It’s very hard to do those big brand-building and longer-term initiatives if you don’t understand what you’re trying to do in the first place. It must be informed by research so that you’re not completely shooting in the wind. And if your brand work is validated and considered, the chances are that you will make something great – which plays beautifully into your point about how important it is to understand what you’re trying to do before you do it.

Lego Mindstorms encourages children to invent their own robot

What advice would you give a young Cecilia just beginning her career in marketing? What should she do more of and what might you avoid?

At its best marketing deeply connects brands with the world they operate in, and the people they serve. The more you understand about the world and its people, the better marketer you will be. My advice would be to avoid narrowing your focus too quickly. Be curious, and feed your creativity by exploring a wide spectrum of interests and cultures.

When we get older, our curiosity tends to naturally narrow – so you have to fight this with vigor. Curiosity fuels creativity, which is essential for continuous learning and reinvention. The world is constantly changing, and curiosity will help you keep pace. So don’t kill it off!

When you’re not leading the charge with strategy and innovation at the Lego Group, I’d like to know what you do in your downtime because as I’m talking to you now I’m looking at a synthesizer to your left, and since my background is in the music industry, I recognize that you are seated in a sound-treated room…

One of my passions is road cycling – that’s for the physical side. And for the creative spirit and soul, a deep passion of mine is producing my own music. It’s something I’ve always done ever since I was little. These days there are many more tools to help me make music and this is my studio. For me making music is truly a joy – being creative in the studio is like having a holiday for my head. It also flexes completely different mental muscles than the ones I use in my day job.

(You’ve been too modest to mention but I can share with readers that your drum’n’bass alias is Oxime and can be found on all good streaming services). Final question: please complete the sentence. ‘If there’s one thing I know about marketing, it is…?’

It’s not what you think it is. Marketing can get very boring when you only focus on tactics. Obviously, tactics are key. But of much greater value is really understanding what the business is there to achieve, and how different factors drive the business forward: seeing marketing more as an engine for change – and not just the surface-level marketing tactics our customers experience.

Marketing isn’t just something that you layer on top of existing activities. In product design, there’s always this tension between styling – making something look pretty – and functionality – creating something that actually works.

A great example is the iPod. It wasn’t first off the block in the world of mp3 players, but Apple were the first to really think it all through and say: “Let’s put 1000 songs in your pocket. Let’s make this device really easy to use. And here’s an online store where you can also easily buy the sounds that you want to listen to.” That complete and highly-considered ecosystem summarizes for me the genius of marketing. Marketing is way more that just a snazzy campaign.

You might die tomorrow so make it worth your while. Worth Your While is an independent creative agency helping brands do spectacular stuff people like to talk about. wyw.agency.

Little Grey Cells is Tim Healey, founder and curator of Little Grey Cells Club, the UK’s premier senior marketer meet-up.