For this comundo conversation, we sat down in the backseat with Anne Clara Laugesen, CMO of Viggo, a Danish-born tech company with a focus on sustainable mobility that is now the third largest taxi company in Denmark. Not bad at all.

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If you’re based in Copenhagen, you’ve probably seen their vehicles at the airport or gliding through the city’s cobbled streets. They might look like any other taxi company, but pop the hood and it’s clear they most certainly are not. 

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Enough driving metaphors. Let’s get this show on the road (sorry). 

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Could you tell us a bit about who you are and what you do?

My name is Anne Clara, and I’m in charge of all our marketing and communications in Viggo. I also recently took on the responsibility of all our sustainability initiatives and communications. I’ve been a part of Viggo since we launched in 2019, so I’ve watched us go from zero to 300,000 users and 300 cars on the platform. It’s been quite a ride!

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What makes Viggo different from other taxi companies?

There’s a lot that makes us different! Viggo was founded in 2019 on the backbone of an increasing demand in the Danish market for a mobility product that was user-friendly, and one that provided a great level of service. 

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The taxi industry in Denmark had a reputation for consistently delivering a bad user experience, only a few friendly drivers and no guarantee of a clean car.  Also, almost no taxis at the time were electric, and our founders saw a great EV (electric vehicle) shift coming up, so we thought if we’re addressing all of that and wrapping it in a great user-friendly platform, why not make it more sustainable too? So sustainability was part of our DNA from the very beginning – we’ve only ever had EVs on the platform. 

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Back then, of course, there weren’t that many EVs and the infrastructure didn’t really exist so the other taxi companies were looking at us thinking we were crazy. Which we took as encouraging, but also there was some truth to the infrastructure lacking for EV fleets.

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And then, of course, COVID hit! But we tried to make the best of that situation and took the time to examine the infrastructure side. After all, if we’re running an electric vehicle business we need to be able to charge the cars, and back then there weren’t that many charging spots around in urban areas - most fast charging sites were along highways and not in the cities. So we ended up branching out into ultra-fast EV charging too. 

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Today, that part of our business has actually grown to be an equal size to the mobility side of the business. We have 31 charging points, all available for public use, and it’s an area we’ll keep expanding. 

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What drew you to this role?

I’ve always been working with marketing communications within tech and startups, primarily within the platform economy space, but I’ve always wanted to do more with sustainability and that’s what really interested me with this role. It would allow me to keep working with marketing and tech while helping advance the climate agenda by swapping out fossil cars for EVs.

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The ESG side of my role is still relatively new. While we were always a greentech company we didn’t have a dedicated role for it. But we began to realise we needed to use sustainability as a strategic tool, so when I got back from maternity leave last year, I took ownership of the area. 

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Our company values are sustainability, technology, fairness and service. I’m pretty sure that if you wake up any of our employees in the middle of the night and ask them what our values are, they might not be able to say all of them, but they will always say sustainability. A lot of my colleagues work here because of that but in their day-to-day work, they might not always think about how they can make that particular task or project more sustainable. And that’s probably because we’re already a more sustainable company compared to the benchmark within our industry. 

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But that’s going to change. Within a few years, all of our competitors will be using EVs, which is great, and amazing for us because we’ve led that transition, but we need to ask ourselves how can we go further? We need to think about how we can be more sustainable. How are the cars on our platform produced? When do they charge at our chargers? What materials are used for our chargers? Can we increase the level of safety in our cars? It’s not just climate but also social sustainability we need to consider.

Is the sustainability side of Viggo a big driver in getting new customers?

There has been something of an uptick in the last couple of years. With sustainability playing a bigger role in the corporate world thanks to legislation and general awareness, companies are keen to do what they can, where they can to signal that they are doing the right thing. 

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Through the ViggoBusiness platform, companies can track exactly how much CO2 they’ve emitted and saved with their trips compared to traditional, fossil-fulled cars. They need this information for their ESG reporting, so the easier it is for them to reduce emissions and save time compiling reports, the more of a no-brainer it becomes for them to use  Viggo. There’s no need to save receipts or do any kind of calculations – it’s all there.

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That said, it’s still our service that is the main driver of new customers. Not only does that say a lot about the other taxi companies out there, but it also shows how the hook for our platform is something else. They want something that makes their lives easier or saves them money, but the stickiness of it is the sustainability part.

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We can see this in the ads we run too. The sustainability angle doesn’t get much traction, but ads focusing on our fixed prices do. The combination of our service and pricing brings in customers – the sustainability features get them to stay. 

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What do you think is the trickiest part of your role?

I had to think about this one! It’s probably to make sure we align our communication with the truth – and to understand what the truth is. 

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We want to make sure we communicate authentically and make sure we communicate something that resonates with our audience but we don’t want to say something that isn’t true. You don’t want to greenwash, but you don’t want to greenhush either. It’s probably one of the most challenging things within this space. 

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We can’t say that Viggo is a sustainable solution – it’s more sustainable than fossil-fuelled cars, yes, but there are still more sustainable mobility options available. You could take the train, walk or cycle. So it’s a balance between owning what we are doing in terms of sustainability and not putting us in danger of a greenwashing situation, while simultaneously making our offering attractive to new customers.

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Where do you see the role of sustainability in the future?

In the immediate future, I see data as the main driver which makes complete sense. There’s a lot of focus on reporting, understanding data points, and legislation like CSRD and CS3D. We’ll see this all being implemented over the next few years, which means we’ll see a real financial mindset being pulled down over ESG managers due to everything being so data-orientated. 

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I hope that in the future, as we become accustomed to the legislation and reporting that is required, we’ll see a more creative mindset emerging and a progression that will take the sustainability field from being very data-driven and reporting-focused to a space where data and creativity can work together simultaneously. 

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