Q&A: String Furniture CMO on the Future of AI in Marketing

How do you balance efficiency with brand integrity? 

As AI makes it easier for marketing teams to create and design on a greater scale, many marketing leaders are concerned that misuse of the technology could create branding or reputational issues. 

According to Bo Hellberg, Chief Marketing Officer of String Furniture, successfully integrating AI requires marketing leaders to balance technological efficiency with authentic human strategy and a strong brand identity.

Ahead of his panel ‘The Future of AI in Marketing’ at the CXO Summit, Bo shares his insights into the way AI can meaningfully transform marketing workloads – and the areas he thinks are best left to people. 

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Please introduce yourself and your role. 

I'm Bo Hellberg, CMO for a group of Swedish legacy furniture brands, String Furniture being the largest one.  

My focus is on connecting our brand(s) with relevant audiences in 42 markets to grow our business – which means my role covers a lot of ground, since we buy all media ourselves, work out the marketing and creative strategy, PR comms, performance media and a tremendous amount of collaboration with retailers and dealers.

Where do you see AI making a difference in your brand strategy – and where does it not belong?

The opportunities lie in things like using LLMs to locate data sources that inform the strategy, sentiment tracking on different platforms, benchmarking, going through the  brand’s historical performance, doing synthetic testing of concepts for different audiences or scenarios.

It gets trickier when we get down to specifics: the brand context, legacy and even more so how we should respond to the consumers or customers. What we stand for as a brand and the choices we make when it comes down to positioning and values. That’s what the CMO or the brand strategist is actually for. 

I wouldn’t let an AI write the strategy, and I wouldn’t depend on AI to read, review or condense core data and information. It’s obviously very tempting, but writing is thinking, and what informs that thinking is the cognitive process of digesting core information. 

In design, visual identity and brand authenticity go hand-in-hand. How can marketing leaders in this industry navigate using generative AI tools in this context?

What’s great about all the LLMs capability is that the bar has dropped. If you can think it, you can make it, essentially.  But it all inevitably becomes a “sea of sameness”.  There is a gravitational pull to the middle and the bland, since generalist LLMs work on statistical probability, especially when it comes to “soft data” like design or language. 

As a marketing leader, you need to define and lock down your proprietary assets and data points and use them to train your own agents. Teach them who your customer is, based on your CRM or behavioural data, teach them the rules of your brand guidelines. 

Finally, you need to have people making the final decision about what goes out. People with good taste, who get the brand, the tone of voice, how it should look and feel.

What is one major AI trend in marketing you think leaders are heavily overestimating – or underestimating – right now?

I think marketing are overestimating to what extent AI will change or take over search. There is hyperbole going on where it sounds like we should produce even more content; previously it was content for humans, content for search engines – and now we should add the LLMs. 

If the LLMs are as clever as the platforms make them out to be, then it really shouldn’t be a problem to serve up relevant replies to queries or purchase signals.

What advice would you give marketing leaders who are struggling to fit AI into their workflows or marketing strategy?

You need buy-in from your team and won’t get it until people see it and try it. So, first off, get your hands dirty and lead from the front: spend a few hours on the weekend with Claude Cowork, build some skills. Share them with your team. 

Then set up a couple of “hackathons”, like the good old days, but get people to use Lovable, or get someone from the tech team to do some vibecoding and get to a POC (Proof of Concept) in an hour. Once your team is on board, they’ll see the fit, how to set up the workflows etc.

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