The Candid CMO: Ulrich Klenke, Chief Brand Officer, Deutsche Telekom

As marketers, we often talk about speed. The need to respond quickly, adapt to new technology and create new communications. For Deutsche Telekom’s Chief Brand Officer, however, the challenge is ensuring that communications match the reality behind them.

“That is a very valuable, and sometimes painful, lesson: marketing can set a great deal in motion. But every strong message creates an expectation – and in the end, what matters is whether you can deliver on it. Over the course of my career, I have learnt that great communication only works when it is aligned with the product, the service, the culture and the operational reality,” he says. “Otherwise, it becomes vulnerable. Not because the idea is weak, but because people today immediately test whether a company keeps the promises it makes.”

For Ulrich that realisation has transformed how he interacts with his colleagues. “The brand needs to be part of the discussion much earlier. It must help make decisions clearer: What do we want to improve for our customers? What should we avoid because we cannot prove it credibly? Where do we need to invest before we even talk about it?”

In short, a good film is no longer enough. “Attitude, infrastructure and behaviour all have to fit together,” he says. “For me, good leadership in marketing today means addressing contradictions early, rather than creatively concealing them.”

Training at House 9 in Stuttgart

Ulrich’s journey started as a university student at Mercedes, where he studied as part of a company training scheme. On completion he was meant to take a sales job – the traditional route to promotion at the company – but insisted on taking an advertising role in the brand’s famous House 9 in Stuttgart instead. His first marketing role was trade marketing for used commercial vehicles, learning his craft on brands like Vito and Sprinter.

“What fascinated me about marketing from the very beginning was that it has never been just about communication. It is about making clear what a company genuinely stands for. At Mercedes-Benz, I learnt early on that a brand is shaped by what a company does: its product, quality, service and attitude. Later, on the agency side, I saw how powerful a genuinely strong idea can be.”

But underpinning all this is the fact that a brand only works if it can stand up to reality – especially in the moments when people are not thinking about advertising, but about experience, reliability and trust.

“That appeals to me even more today than it did in the past. Marketing is now much closer to the business, to technology and to wider societal questions. At Deutsche Telekom, that means something very tangible: networks, access for everyone, security and the opportunity to participate in the digital world. Ultimately, that is the most exciting task in marketing for me: not to be louder, but to be more relevant. Not just to attract attention, but to earn trust.”

For today’s young talent, he says marketing is both more accessible and more demanding. “Getting started is easy; achieving excellence is hard. My advice to young talent is this: stay curious but also build substance. Understand how companies work. Do not just learn communication; learn impact. And seek real collaboration – good ideas rarely emerge alone.”

He’s also a firm advocate of people working together to build collaboration. “Exchange, feedback and working together does not only happen virtually. That is why it matters to me that teams also come together physically. We deliberately invest in the development of capabilities – not just in tools. Because tools are constantly changing. Judgement, taste and a sense of responsibility endure.”

Trust requires a strong brand

Working for a digital company puts the issue of trust front and centre. As AI creates technological opportunities, it also builds uncertainty around what is real and who can be trusted. Making brand more important than ever.

“AI helps us become faster, more relevant and more precise. But it does not replace attitude. The question is not only what we can do, but what we should do,” he says. “I believe the winners will be those who bring technology and trust together. Those who use efficiency without losing humanity. And those who understand that long-term brand building is not the opposite of performance, but its foundation.”

All of which brings into focus the classic question asked of CMOs: how do you connect with your CFO? Ulrich admits that marketing has not always made things easy for finance, preferring to talk about campaigns and reach rather than growth, customer value or efficiency.

Ultimately, he says, CMOs need a long-term conversation with finance that demonstrates how the brand works best over the long term and how it combines with finance. “The collaboration works best when it is no longer a discussion about marketing expenditure, but becomes a shared steering instrument for growth,” he says.

About WFA’s Candid CMO series

WFA wants to celebrate the world’s best marketers and explore the journeys they are on to deliver better marketing. This series helps distil some of the biggest learnings of our CMO members. As we are great believers in the power to learn from successes as well as missteps, we hope this will give our readers the opportunity to learn more about the things they are most proud of, but also about where they may have done things differently. More at https://wfanet.org/CandidCMO.

If you'd like to nominate someone with an interesting story to be interviewed for the Candid CMO series, get in touch with Charles Chaplin.