The Nordics were advertised as one market - until my research proved it shouldn't
Despite record-high sales numbers in Denmark, Signify had secured only a fragment of the market share in the rest of the Nordic countries. After years of marketing attempts, the numbers still didn't go higher. I was tasked with competitor research across the four countries, and ended up changing how advertising investment was split between brands.
The Nordics were planned as one market
The Nordics had always been planned as one market. Same positioning, same brand priorities, roughly the same campaigns in four countries that sit next to each other on a map. And there hadn't been a proper competitor analysis since the brands launched here, so when someone asked why Sweden behaved nothing like Denmark, there wasn't really an answer.
I started in Denmark, with no research agency and no budget for one. Desk research, retail visits, and publicly available data.
So I stopped comparing brands and started comparing ecosystems
I stopped grouping competitors by brand and started grouping them by ecosystem architecture — Tuya-based private labels, gateway systems, and WiFi/Bluetooth systems. That's what people are actually committing to when they buy their first smart bulb, and it turned out to explain far more than brand comparison did.
From there I compared the four markets on product, price, distribution and communication, looking for where the differences were coming from.
Four countries, four different reasons to buy
The four countries weren't just performing differently. They were buying for different reasons.
Finland: Price (Tuya private labels set the ceiling)
Finland came down to price. Tuya-based private labels had set what people expected to pay for a smart bulb, and anything above that line was a hard sell.
Denmark: Ecosystem (buying a system, not a bulb)
Denmark was the opposite. People there were building a system rather than buying a bulb. They cared about what worked with what, and how far they could take the setup later.
Sweden: Locked in (Plejd is installed behind the wall switch)
Sweden was the difficult one. Plejd had the market, and Plejd isn't something you swap out, it's a module an electrician installs behind your wall switch. Once it's in, it's in. We weren't losing on features there. We were asking people to undo an installation.
Norway: Efficiency (energy and environmental impact)
Norway cared about energy use and environmental impact. It was the only market where we should have been leading with efficiency.
So Denmark wasn't ahead because the marketing was better there. It was the only country where what we were saying matched what people were already doing.
The advertising split changed
Advertising investment was re-split per market. Finland moved a larger share behind WiZ and Philips Smart LED, the cheaper brands, once price was confirmed as the driver rather than assumed. I recommended country-specific strategies for the other three markets on the same logic.
I presented the findings to the sales, branding and marketing teams across the Nordics, and kept a monthly read going for the marketing team as new tracking data came in.
The tracker is still running
Competitor research goes out of date within a quarter, which was my main concern with a project this size. So I built a system that estimates brand growth from publicly available smart lighting app download data, segmented into the same three ecosystem categories and flagged by major competitor.
It gave the marketing team a way to watch adoption shift and spot new players without commissioning anything new. It's still used as a reference.
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©2026 Judit Farkas
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