Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Future Commerce
Plongez dans la liste complète des épisodes de Future Commerce. Chaque épisode est catalogué accompagné de descriptions détaillées, ce qui facilite la recherche et l'exploration de sujets spécifiques. Suivez tous les épisodes de votre podcast préféré et ne manquez aucun contenu pertinent.
Rows per page:
50
1–50 of 600
Titre
Date
Durée
Predictions 2025: The Rise of Gen X & Americana
03 Jan 2025
02:26:41
In our biggest episode of the year, we explore seismic shifts coming in 2025: from the return of Gen X leadership to a new wave of American counterculture. We revisit our eerily accurate 2024 predictions while laying out bold forecasts for retail consolidation, AI evolution, and the changing media landscape. Plus, we dive deep into why Google might be poised for a massive comeback and how Walmart is transforming into a media empire.
On Taste & Truth (13:12) - "I believe that taste is the unique ability to recognize objective truth in situations where subjectivity reigns supreme." - Brian
The Future of Retail (34:50) - "In the retail sector, we will see larger holdcos start to downsize by breaking off individual pieces into smaller entities so they can reorganize and pass regulatory muster when selling divisions later." - Phillip
Hardware Renaissance (54:41) - "The excitement around content actually represents a deeper desire within people for well-designed, bespoke hardware technology." - Brian
Urban Transport Evolution (1:39:14) - "eVTOL will be a huge tech winner in 2025, creating a paradigm shift in urban transport - starting as the luxury option Uber envisioned in 2017." - Phillip
Political Realignment (1:59:00) - "There's something latent here around realignment in how people think about the political spectrum post-second Trump presidency. Many political orphans, both right and left, don't know where they fit." - Brian
The Innovation Paradox (2:18:43) - "When solving problems, we inevitably miss the new problems our solutions will create. It's easy to walk into dystopia thinking you're walking into utopia." - Brian
Associated Links:
Heading to NRF? Come celebrate the launch of our 2025 print journal, LORE with us on Tuesday, January 14! Register here.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Year-End Roundup: Best of 2024
27 Dec 2024
01:23:46
This year was a great one for the Future Commerce podcast. We vision-casted with fellow futurists at exclusive events across the nation, launched podcast specials like Spooky Commerce and FC Radio Theater, and were joined on the podcast by many of our industry muses, including Kickstarter’s Yancey Strickler and Walmart’s Justin Breton.
We’ve rounded up our 2024 highlight reel in one year-end finale episode. All featured episodes linked below.
The Good, the Spooky, and the VisionaryFeatured Episodes:
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
[STEP BY STEP] Going Global With Data-Backed Confidence
20 Nov 2024
00:33:16
We sit down with Brandon Kuipers, Co-founder and CMO of Zox, to discuss how a family arts-and-crafts project evolved into a globally recognized e-commerce brand. Hear how Zox grew from a family project to an international success by leveraging data-driven marketing, and how emerging tools like Triple Whale's Sonar have unlocked global markets.
From Kitchen Table to Global BrandKey takeaways:
Leveraging the right data tools, like Sonar, significantly improved Zox's data visibility, enabling them to optimize ad performance in international markets.
Localized strategies, like creating region-specific products such as language-adapted designs, can help deepen market engagement.
[00:06:32] “Building a business is about innovating, even when you feel like you have it figured out.” — Brandon
[00:17:54] Once Sonar was set up, our data accuracy went from tracking almost none of our conversions to tracking just about every conversion." — Brandon
[00:20:30] “Sonar has been the missing link, reopening markets we thought had closed down.” — Brandon
[00:25:18] “Even if an ad flops in the U.S., it can still perform well in other regions. Nothing is wasted.” — Brandon
[00:28:30] “This level of visibility is enabling full-on product pivots to better address new markets.” — Brian
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Constraints and Limitations
20 Oct 2023
00:42:53
Phillip and Brian discuss current events and news in the eCommerce space, Phillip reveals how he likes long walks with ChatGPT, and what if Brian was right all along about AI Butlers?
What limitations will be needed as products like Rewind become more adopted? What constraints to context will these types of technologies overcome? And how much should brands strive to meet the moment? Listen now for all of this and more!
FaceTiming with ScarJo
{00:11:42} - “We talked a lot about body data early on and even for many years and those biometric markers and things like that. I see our collection of data about ourselves, our specific bodies being the next frontier for how we're going to interact with technology. But along with that, we're also going to be collecting data on our minds.” - Brian
{00:23:03} - “Algorithmic segmentation is only constrained to that known person who picked up a cookie and is browsing around the internet, but it doesn't have context of everything else happening in their life. Maybe Rewind and other products in the future, like Meta's live streaming technology, will give eCommerce context and be able to adapt the experience to what your present moment is, not what it presumes it to be, or someone else's behavior.” - Phillip
{00:26:56} - “An additional layer of context may be that these ambient devices, this ambient computing is happening, and that's where I think there is an opportunity for commerce because the thing that was promised to us with Alexa that never really happened was it's all there, we already have ambient devices, we're just not using them because they're not literally on our person.” - Phillip
{00:33:37} - “Really what's happening right now is the wave of nostalgia is meeting at the same time that millennials really, really are hitting peak Costco membership years. And Costco has done an incredible job of continuing to make that membership worth its money with the types of products that they're putting in their store.” - Brian
{00:45:33} - “Brands and people who constantly try to change just to meet the moment often lose something along the way. And brands that don't change at all can miss out on opportunities. But sometimes that authenticity comes back around.” - Brian
Associated Links:
Get in on our Muses Mail and join us at Art Basel in December
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Maximizing Competitive Intelligence
13 Oct 2023
00:46:00
This week we dive into competitive intelligence: what are your rivals up to, and how does it affect you as a brand leader? Josh Wilson, CEO of Particl, reveals how observing competitors and smartly leveraging that data can distinguish you from the rest. PLUS: A brand review of Popsmith, and we rehash the concept of DISloyalty. Listen now!
Biggest Month Ever
{00:14:38} - “{Competitive intelligence} is harder and easier in multiple ways now. Your next competitor can come from anywhere. Where I feel like historically there were capital requirements and technology kind of barriers of entry that prevented that. But then on the flip side, the shift to online gives you kind of a great pulse on signals and what everyone else is doing. It's great for brands just to be thinking about and to have a strategy around.” - Josh
{00:17:26} - “It's essentially impossible to block bots without blocking customers unless you put everything through a lock behind kind of a login portal. I would focus more on how can you use it to your benefit.” - Josh
{00:25:20} - “What we'll do is we ingest our customer's data and we will look at the products they're selling and the product types. And with that, we've been able to guide customers towards product types that we feel better overlap with their business, make more sense for their customers to buy, and kind of a natural progression of the business.” - Josh
{00:28:40} - “We saw pink start selling like crazy. And then we had brands that were kind of the major capturers of that, like a SKIMS, for example. They basically took all the pink products, put them in a collection for Barbie, and those products sold off the shelves. Now, the thing is, those products actually hadn't been selling very well before. It was a very clever way to use existing inventory, package it slightly differently, and sell it.” - Josh
{00:32:11} - “Like my Co-Founder says, "The opportunity of a lifetime comes once a month." So it's important to stay current and up to date. It's important to not read yesterday's newspaper. That's why we think you need data for what's going on right now, not a week ago or whatever. By that point, it's too old.” - Josh
{00:34:45} - “Brands can move the needle with very small changes, as well as they can ensure that they're not just discounting and lighting good money on fire, good margin. It's actually less about vertically looking at the brand down and from a data and correlation perspective, it's actually more about looking sideways at the product type because the customers are comparing your leggings to someone else's leggings to someone else's leggings. They're not comparing your product to your t-shirt or your leggings to your t-shirt to etcetera.” - Josh
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Commerce is Counterculture? The Rise of the Critic Class
08 Oct 2023
00:42:17
This season on VISIONS will explore the content of VISIONS: Volume IV by Future Commerce. VISIONS is an audio-visual Annual Trends report that examines the changes in culture and commerce and their impacts on the technology industry that serves them. VISIONS: Volume IV took place over three months, from April to June 2023, bookended by two events.
Today we go live to the first of those events at the Celeste Bartos Theater at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where we'll speak with a panel of modern culture reporters, foresight analysts, and media creators and ask them the question, “Where is the counterculture?”
Trends are Change
{00:04:11} “What we have right now is a lot of interesting niche subcommunities with their own cultures and then countercultures to those. And I think the result of that is it's very hard to know what's trending because trends really exist within these sort of niche subcultures and microspheres. And then by the time they exit, they're no longer a trend, they're more like a trend discourse.” - Daisy Alioto
{00:06:47} “You can't really talk about counterculture without talking about the capitalization of it all. You can capitalize on these weird trends, whether it's something like Dimes Square, and then you see a year later, the entire Marc Jacobs campaign for a massive fashion brand is these characters. So is that really counterculture if that's cool now?” - Emily Sundberg
{00:09:00} “Sometimes I do get bummed about the lack of existence of new things, and that's why we're going so hard on fashion history because everything feels really referential. But also there's something fun about new combinations and seeing a couch where there's a guy from the White Lotus on it, but there's also a girl that you saw at a party last week.” - Alexi Alario
{00:11:26} “Is there counterculture or subculture or monoculture? It's completely dependent upon the sample size in which we're looking at. And for the most part, I think it behooves us to really broaden our aperture of really understanding what's most important to the most amount of people, because if we have to select too small of a sample size, we're just speaking to ourselves and really ignoring the masses.” - Matt Klein
{00:16:14} “When we're talking about nostalgia and memory as some of the strongest mechanisms for marketing and the relationship that nostalgia and memory have to certain mediums, like the type of film or camera you were using when you first encountered something or the type of car you were driving when you first encountered something, it's very hard to package that in an authentic way, but if you can, that becomes the brand moat. And that's the thing that allows you to excel past all of your competitors.” - Daisy Alioto
{00:24:02} “The thing about de-influencing is, yes, there's a little bit of stoicism of screw it, don't buy this thing, but it's still a form of influencing.” - Matt Klein
{00:28:42} “Daisy Alioto: it's also important to remember that, for every counterculture movement, the response to it will be part of the cycle of the next culture, even if it's happening in this very fragmented way now.” - Daisy Alioto
{00:35:34} “Nothing gets better without criticism. So I feel like it's okay that everyone is a critic as long as I think it creates a heightened awareness. And especially with algorithms. If you're not a critic, you're just going to let them like run over you.” - Alexi Alario
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
"I Do Not Consent to Your Livestream" - Rapid AI Adoption and Its Effects on Commerce
06 Oct 2023
00:42:04
With AI-generated content becoming so prevalent, it’s sometimes harder to tell what is real and what is fake. How does this change the way people invest in search, and what kind of ramifications does it have on Google, for example? Also gadgets are cool, but the commerce implication is not just that you have to buy it, it's that they provide a new platform for customer shopping modality. Listen now for this and more future forecasting with Phillip and Brian.
Fooled in the Present
{00:06:22} - “Maybe there is this idea that we need to continue to constantly index the Internet and have increasingly less relevant results because it continues to index AI-generated content, not human-generated content. Maybe there is a future where that becomes less of a problem because we don't need to do as much indexing anymore for most of the types of search activity you'd be looking for.” - Phillip
{00:11:41} - “At this moment, we are primed to be skeptical and to notice and to look for disinformation in areas of politics, in areas of religion, maybe even celebrity news, things that are sensationalized or weaponized to make you think a certain way or feel a certain thing. Where we are not prepared for it is in the area of commerce where you are not prepared for disinformation. You are more likely to be persuaded.” - Phillip
{00:20:34} - “People are hoarding content that was the originally created content because it is getting removed and pulled out and things are being edited and changed. We've talked about this a lot, but it's just another example. I guarantee you there are a whole host of content hoarders right now that are making sure that they have the original Star Wars.” - Brian
{00:34:48} - “That's a far-future idea. But the {retailers} that start to think about how to collaborate with technology companies to release bespoke gadgets to assist with their ecosystems might find a competitive edge. That's probably a 5 to 10 year out thing. But I really believe if you're really a far-thinking leader in commerce right now, you should be thinking about how these gadgets are going to roll out and what that means for your ecosystem.” - Brian
{00:37:03} - “Apple Vision Pro, I think will change everything. I really believe that. I'm starting to really believe that. I think it will change a lot of things. It will change the nature of some types of work. I think it'll change the nature of remote work because having physical hardware devices will be very different as an experience in ten years than it is today.” - Phillip
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
The Lover’s Drive
04 Oct 2023
00:20:05
The Lover is brave enough to go against convention, driven by the need to connect with another. They are positive and courageous, bringing out the best in others and seeing love as a universal force. The Lover creates meaning, passion, and connection.
Frownies has been building this way for over 130 years, and the Fifth-Generation Female Owner and Face of Frownies, Helen Morrison, gifted us with some incredible insight into what it looks like to be a Lover in the world of commerce.
Real Connection
{00:03:43} “Jumping on board and getting involved with Frownies, what I wanted to do most of all was just connect with people. I love this version of business so much because it is so connected. It's all about just creating those relationships and reaching out to people and caring for people and supporting people on this skincare journey.” - Helen
{00:10:23} “When you build that human connection and you create a culture of we connect with each other, we take care of each other, we support each other, then yes, the customers are doing that in the comments together for each other.” - Helen
{00:13:16} “I think you see that or you see people, you see before and after photos or ads for people with skincare. And it's like, oh, come on, you did not achieve that with moisturizer, and I get that. And because I feel that way, I have leaned so far in the opposite direction when it comes to our content and what comes to the honesty surrounding Frownies. Now, I'll tell you, you can't take this approach if you don't have a good product. Frownies is a great product. It's been around for over 130 years.” - Helen
{00:15:23} “We just want to say, "Here is this product and this is what it can do. And before you buy it, I'm going to set the expectation of all the weird things about it, of all the reasons you might not like it, so that when you start using it, your expectation is realistic and then you see the results and you're blown out of the water and it's like, "Wow, this is worth it.'" - Helen
{00:18:28} “The way you handle that delicately is part of why people feel so connected to you. This through line of connection, connection, connection is really what is such an imperative part of The Lover archetype and why we need The Lover archetype in the landscape of commerce and in our lives.” - Kristen
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
[DECODED] Great Products Begin with Customer Service: Redefining CX Across Industries
03 Oct 2023
00:51:31
This season on "Decoded," presented by BigCommerce, we'll delve into the intricate processes behind successful brands. Discover how they conceptualize and debut new products, set their objectives, make pivotal decisions, and foster seamless collaboration across their teams to breathe life into a new product.
Ever wondered how customer service evolved from merely addressing post-purchase issues to shaping the broader, more influential customer experience? How has this shift transformed our interactions and relationships with customers? And how is customer experience becoming more proactive rather than just reactive? Dive in to uncover these insights and more. Tune in now!
“You can’t spell retail without AI.”
{00:08:42} - “Ultimately we want those shops who we heavily rely on to sell our bikes to have that same passion, that same understanding about our bikes. And also to know, this is why the price point is where it's at too. They need to understand that.” - Matt
{00:16:03} - “All these different manufacturers were rushing to get this e-bike out on the market because they wanted to capture that right off the bat. We took five years to develop that e-bike. Five years, 25 custom molds. And then we also created six different prototypes or mules, what we call them, in order to ride them, test them, try to blow them up, and see what we can do with them. And then ultimately we started racing them to see how they work and perform on the racetrack.” - Matt
{00:22:06} - “How do we get people to buy something in the midst of replacing a product? That's what the AI-driven solution is for SaaS in your customer experience team. But it's not going to make your support team fanatical about the product.” - Phillip
{00:26:01} - “The website is the gateway, whether it be chats, whether it be calls, whether it be emails. As recently as when I started 8 to 10 years ago at Industry West, we were still taking faxes, and so it is multichannel, but it all starts and ends with the website.” - Ian
{00:32:28} - “Marketing is not any longer where you're just figuring out who your target demographic is and how you're going to communicate to them and then which media you're going to use. Marketing now is every single touchpoint that the consumer has. All of that needs to live under the marketing function.” - Ingrid
{00:42:00} - “Customer experience directly is probably not involved until we are in the prototyping stage. But I say that because everything we prototype is built with the customer service team in mind.” - Kabeer
{00:49:42} - “Maybe the age of AI does help you create this media with the team you already have and the insights you already have into your relationship with your customer.” - Phillip
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
"An Editor-in-Chief" for Commerce"
29 Sep 2023
00:45:13
What happens when your personal fulfillment is overshadowed by tech advancements and rapid business growth? Thomas McCutchen shares his journey of finding purpose in the realm of commerce as an elder millennial while pushing strategy and vision forward for clients in DTC and eCom. From the early days of bootstrapping his passion project to the organic yet intentional growth that led to an Inc 5000 designation, Thomas's story is a testament to the power of authenticity, resilience, and the human touch in a digital age. Listen now!
“It Left Me Wanting More”
{00:06:08} - “Software on these thick apps where the people using the app are employees that are paid, the user experience leaves a lot to be desired. That bothered me. I wanted to make intuitive systems. I wanted to make systems that were easy to use, that were delightful, that actually the user experience itself was the very thing everyone was talking about.” - Thomas
{00:13:57} - “What's baked into subscribers is they are your most loyal customers. They already are by leaps and bounds, so there should be rewards for those. So the ecosystem grew dramatically. And with that, so did agencies, and the tech space got pretty crowded, too. It's still an absolutely great business model and there are still better ways to implement it than others.” - Thomas
{00:17:05} - “I didn't found an agency focused on Inc 5000. Really, I became passionate about commerce and eComm. I had an experience building the in-store apps and it left me wanting more. This didn't feel like the promise of technology that I signed up for. I wanted something better.” - Thomas
{00:21:09} - “You have to be resilient and that means you have to be dedicated to the problem space. I think that's where a lot of agency owners struggle is they let the happenstance of the customers that walk through the door dictate the directionality of the business as opposed to them being obsessed with a particular problem and trying to solve it.” - Phillip
{00:34:16} - “Will AI replace us all? I don't know. But for the time being, it can very much help us do our jobs. So it's important that we embrace these things and figure out ways to leverage them for value and then look at the overall market trends as well.” - Thomas
{00:42:23} - “We're continuing to see value in tying content and commerce. Not only do we want to be subject matter experts, but we want our clients to be subject matter experts. So no longer just offering a product, but kind of owning the domain of knowledge around that product.” - Thomas
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Frequent Flier Free-Agency
22 Sep 2023
00:47:55
Phillip and Brian look at loyalty programs including Delta’s, which may turn Brian into a United or an Alaska guy, recap some compelling highlights from the All-In Summit that Phillip went to, and remind us why commerce really matters and can bring about powerful change as we work to shape it.
“A Giant Pain Fest”
{00:09:02} - “Loyalty is a form of arbitrage. Customers have always figured out how to game rewards programs, but loyalty programs in particular are a short-term play.” - Phillip
{00:14:03} - “The world does revolve around this value extraction and trying to maximize the benefit that you get through spending through a charge card. So in reality, the loyalty-free agency era is going to be defined by those who do status matching across programs and invite those people who are running away from Delta in with open arms.” - Phillip
{00:26:05} - “If you can touch commerce, you can touch the world. If you can make an effect in the people who make decisions in commerce every day, you can affect the outcome of the way that people engage in human interaction because we all have to engage in commerce.” - Phillip
{00:36:42} - “The technology question is a big question. It could go in a lot of different directions. And I think that that's how a lot of this is going to change what people actually accept and take hold of and think about how to apply creatively. The implications of the Internet are still vast. Vast. We are still not applying current technology in ways that are truly transformative.” - Brian
{00:43:10} - “With fusion power and quantum processing maybe we'll be able to do it all. Until that day, I think we're going to be butting up against the limits.” - Brian
{00:45:32} - “Commerce has followed a lot of parallels that replace the role that spirituality and community have had in people's lives. And what if we realize that those things just don't fulfill and we need to find within us something that gives us hope? Buying more things, shopping like a billionaire on Temu does not give us hope. But finding community and people of like mindedness and trying to tap into something greater than yourself can give you hope that defies the inevitability of certain demise.” - Phillip
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
The Daring Creator
20 Sep 2023
00:19:06
The Creator naturally tears down and rebuilds, moving toward positive change. A tenacious visionary and a dreamer who pursues their goals with unwavering dedication, confidence, and willingness to take risks. The Creator has a strong sense of vision, sometimes restructuring traditional forms.
When it comes to brands that exhibit this archetype, Só Dança is an easy choice. Helena Hines, Chief Operating Officer at Só Dança, shares what it's like to be a Creator in a space that's needed some restructuring for a very long time.
A Vision That Delivers
{00:04:32} “There was one sentence here in the definition, which is "a strong sense of vision and an ability to take ideas from nothing into reality." And I love to do that. Whenever an idea is dead, whenever a concept is dead or people consider it gone, I like to bring it back and say, "But is it? Can we challenge that? How can we bring it back?’" - Helena
{00:06:58} “Really understanding the tools you have to work with and who's in the room is something that maybe comes naturally to a Creator, to see what I have to work with here to make something.” - Kristen
{00:09:15} “From the beginning, we were innovators and we were creating things that made sense for the brand and made sense for the dance world, even if the dance world didn't even know it yet.” - Helena
{00:12:10} “{During the pandemic} I thought, "Is this the right move for us to continue to bet on ourselves?" because we don't know how long this will take. We don't know how long this will be. The whole time everybody in leadership said, "We move forward. We don't stop. We don't halt because we believe in our people and we believe in this company. And we know we need to be reliable. We need to invest in ourselves because when the consumer needs it, we need to be able to deliver.’" - Helena
{00:14:46} “It's about following through with who you say you are. Staying true to the message that you're sending out there for your internal team and external as well. Are you going to deliver what you said you're going to deliver through the good times, but most importantly through the hard times? And that takes vision.” - Helena
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
[DECODED] You Get What You Measure
19 Sep 2023
00:31:31
This season on Decoded, brought to you by BigCommerce, we're going to break down the ways that winning brands build and launch new products, how decisions are made, how goals are set, and how an entire organization collaborates effectively to bring a new product to life.
We've all heard the idioms before. "You are what you eat." "You get what you pay for." Or "You reap what you sow." But when it comes to eCommerce, the idiom of choice might just be "You get what you measure." As eCommerce has grown, the world of analytics has become much more fragmented. Aside from measurement, the analysis of customer behavior has fallen into multiple camps of solutions, from attribution to segmentation and even intuition. In this episode, hear from industry experts Ingrid Milman Cordy, Sean Larkin, and Ian Leslie as they share their insights on this and more.
Context, Confidence, & Conviction
{00:01:56} - “Context is important when a brand is launching a new product or a new subbrand because it can be dangerous to not have a context and a goal when you're doing something new with your business.” - Aaron
{00:03:42} - “You need to be very careful about what you choose to measure because that changes the reality of your perception of your business and may change your product strategy depending on what you're measuring.” - Aaron
{00:08:28} - “There are always the big goals and then the smaller goals, those tend to be really clear and people understand them. It's the goals in the middle, the departmental goals that I think don't get as much air time as as needed.” - Ingrid
{00:15:17} - “The problem is merchants aren't collecting the data and they don't actually know how to operationalize it, and so as soon as I can pivot the conversation there with merchants, that's when things get exciting.” - Sean
{00:24:14} - “We're typically launching product for both sides of the company and then the few times that we are maybe a little bit more granular in where we think we're going with the product, it ends up being maybe even more popular on the other side anyway.” - Ian
{00:25:37} - “Having confidence in your plan requires a lot of conviction. And especially in the modern analytics and attribution software ecosystem, that's really all you have is confidence in attribution.” - Phillip
{00:29:06} - “If you are going to launch a product, assuming that there's going to be failure, budgeting it out to begin with so that you can test and experiment logically.” - Sean
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
[STEP BY STEP] The Secret to Smarter Meta Ad Spend: Guess Less With A Winning Mega Data Platform
19 Nov 2024
00:45:52
You want an optimized performance marketing stack, we have the expert insight. In season 14 of Step-By-Step, we’ve partnered with Triple Whale and Meta to help you maximize RoAS with higher-quality data.
In this episode, you’ll learn why first-party data is critical in a privacy-conscious eCommerce ecosystem, how domain-specific AI can revolutionize eCommerce analytics, and what the shift from self-hosted IT organizations to cloud-based solutions means for your business.
Your data quality is key. Understanding where your marketing dollars are most effectively spent will unlock better RoAS.
Feeding Meta better data through server-side connections transforms ad spend into ad gains.
AI’s Promise and Paradox: Can we teach machines context? We debate whether AI can replicate the intuitive decision-making of a savvy e-commerce operator.
Simplifying complex workflows might mean less visibility, but greater efficiency and creative freedom.
[00:09:17] "Garbage in, garbage out. Clean data is the alpha and omega of decision-making." – Brian
[00:19:39] "The internet used to be the Wild West—now it’s a privacy-conscious frontier." – Kellet
[00:31:42] "If AI were a junior resource, it’s the one you’d micromanage." – Phillip
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Pizza Commerce for a Pizza World
15 Sep 2023
00:44:18
The nature of the digital consumer and reaching them in their region and in their context where they are is not just taking something for granted as if all you have to do is put it out into the world and then people adopt it. You have to adapt it to market.
How can pizza shops and restaurants maximize the data collected by Slice to stay ahead of trends and competitors and build community where they are? We’re glad you asked. Matthew Kobach, CMO at Slice, gives us a glimpse into the ways Slice is using data to turn up the heat in the pizza industry and beyond.
Slice has Verticalized the Tech Stack for Pizza Commerce
{00:09:12} - “What you want to do is build a team that is optimized for the industry that you're in… One of the things that I'm currently doing right now is filling that cupboard with people who understand the space, either from the consumer side or the pizza shop side because they understand the pain points.” - Matthew
{00:10:07} - “I'm so big on messaging. It's one of those things that like ten Xs an ad. Once you can succinctly explain what you do or what your value prop is and it immediately sticks in someone's head, that's how you make an ad more impactful and how you make all your marketing more impactful.” - Matthew
{00:12:27} - “It's really interesting to think about how context impacts what your message is, even if you're selling the same product.” - Matthew
{00:15:35} - “I got your attention, and I understand I have only got it for half of a moment. What is the key information you need to remember there? You've got to figure out that way to stand out and deliver your message quickly.” - Matthew
{00:23:40} - “You can just manipulate data so easily to tell the story that you want. The people who are really, really good at looking at data are the ones who tell you there's no right or wrong way to look at data because they understand that anyone who says there's a right way, they have an agenda.” - Matthew
{00:31:52} - “There are foundational things you need to do in order to be successful, and then 50% of it, you've got to use your instinct or your gut or realize that your past experience, even if it's not 1 to 1, on how you're going to market this either specific product or to this specific cohort.” - Matthew
{00:42:08} “It's more about owning the data. It's this idea that you have all this data and you are throwing it away. And so to me, the future of commerce is shops that have not yet harnessed the power of data to do something really special with it and to figure out how to maximize the value of their customers.” - Matthew
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Follow the Muse
13 Sep 2023
00:42:03
How do you listen to the customer and make decisions about the customer without making decisions for the customer? How do we talk to customers better? And how, in the midst of storytelling as a brand, do we remember that our customers are human?
Daniel Hoffman, Creative Director at Five Below, shares that sees his customer as a muse and how following the muse helps Five Below create new and better things in different channels. Of course, digital creation and digital creative direction today really depend a lot on creator partnerships. Given his background and time at other prestigious brands, Daniel has incredible insights to share. Listen now!
The Brand Conversation
{00:10:25} - “When you have a healthy conversation about what's not being done and look elsewhere to what could be done then that's when companies can really innovate and hopefully stick out in the crowd and maybe solve problems for your customers, too.” - Daniel
{00:15:06} - “When I was a young designer, my directors would say, "Here are your guardrails. Play within that space." And I try to do that for my team. That way I know what they're doing is on brand and also they get to express their voice. They get to try things out and learn and grow and make mistakes and learn from them and do new things.” - Daniel
{00:21:51} - “The benefit of having a growing team is that there's always a new voice with a new perspective and life experience, and that's one of the benefits of having a diverse team as well. If you don't have a diversity of life experience, then you're going to miss something on the marketing side because your customers are likely a diverse group.” - Daniel
{00:25:38} - “We started in the early 2000s. At that point, the audience was one thing, but now a lot of those customers, if we did our job right, are still with us, and that audience looks different today.” - Daniel
{00:26:36} - “The way that brand becomes apparent is through a long-term relationship and established repeated opportunities to develop trust. That just takes time.” - Phillip
{00:27:25} - “There's a popular term of "brand storytelling," and I really prefer "brand conversation" because that then implies that on the brand side, we're listening to the customer, we're in dialog with them.” - Daniel
{00:32:45} “Does {AI} impact our customer? And if it's a positive impact, it's worth exploration. As a manager, I have to think about job satisfaction with my team. Is {implenting AI} a satisfying day-to-day for them? So I need to consider that.” - Daniel
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Consumer Muses & Strategic Innovation
08 Sep 2023
00:48:30
Phillip and Brian, AKA Clarks stan, are joined live at eTail in Boston with the Chief Marketing and Digital Officer at Clarks, Tara McRae, as she shares about what she believes the future of commerce is, what makes innovation truly meaningful, and how a company can stay relevant after 200 years.
And before that, the guys review a review of The Multiplayer Brand, complete with a couple of compelling pull quotes.
Bubbling Up
{00:12:46} - “For a brand that's been around for nearly 200 years, we're an extremely diverse brand and we serve a very diverse audience. So for us, that can get scattered if we're not consumer-centric, if we don't have very clear consumer muses and who we're going after and how we reach those consumers.” - Tara
{00:17:42} - “What's amazing about our brand is we do pull more than we push within these communities, which is exciting.” - Tara
{00:21:50} - “Our number one goal isn't to try to force people to be omnichannel because a lifetime value is higher. It is to deliver the best brand experience that we possibly can, no matter what channel they want to come through, and really service them that way.” - Tara
{00:28:57} - “We're really, really focused on how do we strategically embed innovation in everybody's life. It's the same thing I talk about with diversity, equity, and inclusion. You're not going to just give it to a department and go focus on that. It's baked into everybody's job description. That's how I look at innovation.” - Tara
{00:32:35} - “You're actually stepping into media and having a moment in a way that doesn't make sense to the millennial. Our shoe moments are in the office or some movie, but their media moments are in Roblox and they're in Fortnite.” - Brian
{00:33:53} - “I wonder sometimes if we abandon opportunities or we neglect opportunities that are inherently less measurable because the current crop of talent is so trained on focusing and doubling down on things that are measurable. But the future is not measurable because it doesn't exist yet. We can't quantify it yet.” - Phillip
{00:46:39} “You need to be in the market touching and feeling it, chatting with consumers, and seeing trends. So market travel is extremely important to us.” - Tara
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
The Relatable Everyman
07 Sep 2023
00:18:28
Everyman brands may have amazing stories, great products, and incredible people behind them, but they aren't trendy. We do tend to forget how important they are and how different life would be without them. The Everyman is always within reach, always there for us. But this wasn't everyone's favorite result when taking the Archetypes quiz.
Jesse Lazarus, Orchid Bertelsen, and Kris Gösser explain why their initial reaction to the Archetypes quiz result of “The Everyman” left them less than impressed and what they’ve come to think of themselves and brands in The Everyman category since then.
Not Just Ordinary
{00:04:18} “To find out that you are "ordinary," if you think about it in our society, it is frowned upon to be basic, but I think what it negates is the fact that there are some things that are so universally loved and useful that of course everybody gravitates towards it. It is the fabric on which communities are woven.” - Orchid
{00:06:19} “The Everyman can relate in some respect to everyone in the most basic human sense of what it means to be human, the basic necessities that we need to live, but also the basic things that we need in order to start to become more of ourselves in order to flourish.” - Orchid
{00:07:50} “Brands that want to scale, that want to have longevity, that want to address a large audience or a varying marketplace, the core of that build has to be from the largest applicable perspective, and that is going to be The Everyman concept. There's a time for trendiness, for innovation, for pushing the envelope, but at a certain point when you are proving to enough of a varied audience, that has to be one tool in the kit, not the only tool.” - Jesse
{00:10:32} “I've actually started to now think even more aggressively than I was prior about who are the actual people behind the brands that are building these things. And I think Archetypes overall has been interesting and helpful in that way. I've actually started to see more businesses that I think are The Everyman.” - Kris
{00:14:06} “Going to Safeway or the grocery store every week is essentially my weekly Everyman journey. And you can always depend on the prices. You can depend on the products, you can depend on them solving a need for you without ever really kind of grandstanding about it.” - Kris
{00:15:40} “One, if your name is synonymous with the category, that's a good indicator of an Everyman brand. And second, anything that you have on subscription because you simply cannot live without.” - Orchid
{00:17:23} “In the end, you couldn't do it only as an Everyman. You have to have a mix of all of those attitudes and approaches, and brands that can effectively inhabit a majority of those things I think are the most successful that are in the market.” - Jesse
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
[DECODED] The Key Roles of Product Development
06 Sep 2023
01:57:13
This season on Decoded, brought to you by BigCommerce, we're going to break down the ways that winning brands build and launch new products, how decisions are made, how goals are set, and how an entire organization collaborates effectively to bring a new product to life.
In this episode, Phillip and Aaron talk with Penny Porterfield and Kabeer Chopra about this idea of concept to cart and bringing a new product, a physical product, to life. The website, the eCommerce site, that channel is a product, too. That product is in constant management, constant revision, and constant evolution. How does a brand strike the balance of experimentation while also meeting goals for profitability and customer retention? Listen now for this and much more!
Progress Over Perfection
{00:05:48} - “One of the amazing privileges of having that perspective is seeing fads come and go and having seen things that become truth over long periods of time and the truisms that remain.” - Phillip
{00:08:05} - “You can spend a lot of money making mistakes. So if you're working with an expert, an agency, they have a lot of experience they bring to the table and can allow you to not only get the biggest value for your money but also do it properly.” - Penny
{00:24:29} - “If you are taking into account and regularly looking at your site and how it's performing and adjusting to how your customers are behaving, that's how you really build up the functionality, and then your costs are kind of contained a little bit and they're spread out over time and it allows you to kind of lean in hard, identify the critical stuff, but then grow over time as you see how customers are responding.” - Penny
{01:04:47} - “Timing is so important when it comes to launching products, especially when you're a young company. One of the best pieces of advice we received early on is if you are not embarrassed of the first product that you've put in the market, you're too late.” - Kabeer
{01:23:59} - “The payoff period may not be what you're expecting. Conditions in the market might be different. So one thing we've been very careful about is working with the right manufacturers whom we can place purchase orders with that allow us to take less risk, giving ourselves more breathing room and not investing everything into that one launch and hoping for success.” - Kabeer
{01:28:15} - “Obviously at a certain scale, it makes sense to have a central visualization tool which we do, but more of the investment is keeping on going into more ways of looking at the data from a pure slice and dice perspective or enriching it as opposed to fancier ways of looking at it visually.” - Kabeer
{01:32:26} - “The route we optimize often for removing the buyer friction, the end consumer friction for point of purchase. It's a conversion tactic. There's also removing the friction in making business decisions.” - Aaron
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
HalloThanksMas is Upon Us
01 Sep 2023
00:51:09
The holidays are upon us. Or are they? Well, the holiday merch is on display already in August. How has Black Friday/Cyber Monday evolved and what do vendors and merchants do to keep up and meet consumers where they are? The world has changed and so has the shopper experience and what they expect to experience. Listen now to hear Meghan Stabler, Senior Vice President of Marketing at BigCommerce, share key insights to how to navigate these changes and set up your brand for a winning strategy for this coming holiday season.
Tickle Me Elmo
{00:04:30} - “The world has changed. The shopper experience has changed. That linear thing that you talked about from an experience perspective has changed. That journey that customers go on has changed. The way that they interface, they search, they click, they like, they turn you into a buyer immediately has changed. So merchants have to change too. So now is the time, if you haven't already thought about is what is your strategy?” - Meghan
{00:15:24} - “eCommerce nowadays is the mentality of all of these things coming together: the infrastructure, the platform capabilities, and then what you want to do as an eCommerce brand manager that has to be seamless to capture me in that very emotional moment of buying.” - Meghan
{00:22:07} - “One of the things that I think is super important and it's not discussed too much in typical holiday shopping prep is you actually need to prep for other types of shoppers that you wouldn't normally deal with when you're typically running your promotional promos or your marketing or messaging campaigns. The type of buyer might be someone who's way outside of your ICP, but they're buying it for someone that they know is in your ICP.” - Brian
{00:41:47} - “Merchants have to think global at local as well and when they think about this is just a Thanksgiving Day sale, yeah, it may be but Thanksgiving is not celebrated overseas. But at the same time, your sales are celebrated and people are going to your site to think about things.” - Meghan
{00:44:08} - “Some retailers definitely have to lean more into promotion to have a clear out and to make room for inventory. And others are leaving money on the table. That's where you don't ever really get the demand curve perfectly. What I think we've seen most recently is that there were some missed forecasts and demand that have led to the industry having to lean more into promotion over the last 18 months.” - Phillip
{00:47:44} - “The future of commerce is where AI is going to lead us from where I sort of surrounded it on the data side and analytics and then getting into predictive analytics and then getting into predictive changes and then making individualized journey changes.” - Meghan
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Dating, Dupes, and “Delulu:” Lovers and Outlaws
25 Aug 2023
00:32:16
LARPing
{00:04:06} - “The first time I published a zine was in 2015 and I was at a point of my editorial life where I really wanted to have ownership over my work, and I wanted to publish articles that were long-form and a little bit more thought-provoking.” - Melissa
{00:06:21} - “Your way out of algo chasing was to do something on your own and do it printed. Physical format is the way to free yourself from the algo because no algo beats handing out your zine to people.” - Brian
{00:12:52} - “Lovers and Outlaws really explores how our relationship status is and how we buy things, consume things, and choose products are interconnected and really it gets into modern marketing and also the five stages of consumerism, which are need for recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and post-purchase evaluation.” - Melissa
{00:14:26} - “There are a lot of parallels between the way that we're shopping for products and how that informs the way that we shop for relationships today because they both come through the same device. And so the way you buy and the way that you consider purchases is very physically adjacent and maybe even mentally adjacent to the same device that you use to shop for and pursue a love interest as well.” - Phillip
{00:23:09} - “They say build products that you want to use and also build products that actually solve a problem. So being a writer for over ten years, I knew that there were outdated content management systems, there were outdated payment systems, and also outdated data storage. And I know that for a lot of writers, it's really hard to build a community, especially if you're freelancing and you don't really have the means to maybe start a newsletter list or continue to get recognition over your work. So I wanted to build a product that was totally decentralized for me as a writer.” - Melissa
{00:29:31} - “What I think we do differently at Future Commerce is we're reporting on our view of the world, and we have a lot of principles around that. I think that what you buy and where you buy it is shaped by who you are and who you're around. And I think you're exploring a totally different aspect of that through this concept of love, sex, dating.” - Phillip
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
The Lighthearted Jester
23 Aug 2023
00:10:51
Brands that act as The Jester appeal not to the reason and logic center of our brains, but to the emotional center of our gut. In our personal lives and in business, we often need the reminder to not take things too seriously.
Denise Foley, Vice President of eCommerce and Direct to Consumer at The Bollman Hat Company, gives us her thoughts on the role of the Jester and why we could all use more of the levity the Jester brings.
Finding the Funny
{00:03:36 “Just because you're in the corporate world or have an important job, we spend way too much time working to not have fun. There needs to be some sense of levity and fun in the business and the work and it just makes it better, makes it easier to kind of see the humor in things and not take yourself so seriously.” - Denise
{00:05:29} “We're a manufacturer, so Bollman in and of itself, while we have a brand line under that is really the manufacturer and the umbrella brand. And we've been around for 155 years. Part of the levity we said was this was our second pandemic that we've gone through and survived and thrived through.” - Denise
{00:07:42} - “There's a lot of great history, not just about Bollman the brand and the company, but the people that have built it.” - Denise
{00:09:47} “One of the misconceptions I would hope that people would break from around The Jester is that having a sense of humor around the work you do or your brand doesn't mean that you're not serious about making it a success.” - Denise
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
[DECODED] The Secret to Successful Product Development: From Data-Driven Decision Making to Intuition
22 Aug 2023
01:01:19
This season on Decoded, brought to you by BigCommerce, we're going to break down the ways that winning brands build and launch new products, how decisions are made, how goals are set, and how an entire organization collaborates effectively to bring a new product to life.
Could a retailer be their own competition, and not necessarily in a good way, in the sense of chasing their own past a little bit and maybe not innovating and simply lightly iterating on something that worked for them maybe in a past season, in the past year or even a past decade? Join the conversation as Phillip and Aaron Sheehan sit down with Loretta Soffe, SVP of Global Retail at Assemble, to discuss this and more. Listen now!
Proactive Versus Reactive
{00:01:52} - “The products that we click on, on a website, the things that we add to our cart are really just the tip of a very, very large iceberg of thought and care and work and design that goes into getting it into a place where not only we as consumers want to buy it, but that we even knew about the product in the first place.” - Aaron
{00:06:38} - “If you're only listening to your existing customers, you're only listening to your existing fans, you can become actually fairly stale. And I think any kind of business that wants to evolve and grow is always looking to challenge.” - Aaron
{00:14:02} - “When you start anchored in the customer, your decisions are going to have a little bit more longevity instead of trying to keep chasing the competition. The competition is going to be moving around like crazy, but if you put it through the filter of a customer and their wants, desires, expectations and how can you kind of continue to delight them, I think you're going to be much better served.” - Loretta Soffe
{00:24:21} - “It's not enough to simply have good ideas or be able to articulate the good if you cannot convince and persuade and adapt it to the needs of the business and the stakeholders.” - Aaron
{00:29:20} - “If they haven't really dug in and detailed out customer desire, behavior, life stage, and priorities, and if they're not really able to articulate that, the rest of the whole thing is going to be garbage. If you're not able to develop that level or have that level of knowledge, your product isn't going to be good enough because you don't even understand what you're going up against.” - Loretta Soffe
{00:40:34} - “Traditional retail has been very intuition driven and not a lot of data. And eCommerce, I think suffers from the other problem. A successful retailer has to be able to blend both the data and the intuition.” - Aaron
{00:49:15} - “If you're a brand introducing new products, you want to get a bigger share of wallet. So be conscious about not cannibalizing your own business, but adding on. And I think of it as a bigger share of wallet or a bigger piece of the closet.” - Loretta Soffe
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Culture is the Future of Commerce
18 Aug 2023
00:57:51
To understand the future, you must understand culture. That’s the focus of today’s syndicated episode with our friends from eCommerce Fuel. Andrew Youderian sits down with Phillip to discuss the Future Commerce perspective on how cultures adopt commerce as a means of belonging, and how those behaviors are shaping our vision of the future. Listen now!
Real Brands Take Time to Build. We’re in too much of a hurry.
Branding is not just about aesthetics; it's about endurance and persistence.
Physical media provides a grounding experience amidst the digital world.
Nostalgia and nostalgic content serve as an antidote to our fast-paced, digital lives.
The enduring brands are the ones that persist despite all odds.
Attention spans are decreasing, highlighting the need for authentic, tangible experiences.
{00:08:08} - “When you're looking at what differentiates a successful brand or a generational brand or what you might call a cultural brand from another is their awareness and insight of what is happening in the world and where they belong in it and what their voice or tone or tenor is when speaking to that element of culture.” - Phillip
{00:13:49} - “You're never going to wrangle in your consumption, and we're never going to solve some of the problems in this world around sustainability, or climate change if we don't wrangle in some of the worst of us in our human nature. How can we come to a shared understanding of the challenges that we face both in business and in our personal lives?” - Phillip
{00:16:17} - “Commerce entrepreneurship is one of the greatest, most powerful, most incredible ways to instigate change in the world because creating new ways of engaging with people that have to engage in commerce and doing so with a mindset from the get-go that you have a purpose and a place in this world and you're trying to will something into being, I think it's a very powerful force for change.” - Phillip
{00:21:20} - “This renaissance and this nostalgia for physical media is also powering brand trends and design trends that harken back to the eras in which those pieces of media were created. These things help us to understand not just that the trend exists, but why the trend exists. And if we could think about those two things in tandem, maybe we can forecast where the next trend is going.” - Phillip
{00:37:27} - “If you are not plugged into TikTok three hours a day and you're able to actually be able to keep that muscle of long-term concentration, it seems like that's going to be a huge competitive advantage for building entrepreneurship and for just life in general.” - Andrew
{00:45:06} - “Real brands take time. We're in such a hurry. We're in an unbelievable hurry. If you want to have a brand that endures, you have to endure. And so you just have to keep surviving.” - Phillip
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Outsmart the Black Friday Email Frenzy
15 Nov 2024
00:41:36
“Email’s stability in a changing digital world makes it one of the few reliable channels left for brands, even after ten years.” Seasoned eCommerce and email marketing expert Greg Zakowicz joins Brian and Phillip to unpack the holiday inbox squeeze.
The Tried and True, Yet Hackable, Email CampaignKey takeaways:
[00:01:41] “Email’s stability in a changing digital world makes it one of the few reliable channels left for brands, even after ten years.” – Greg
[00:05:46] “Honing in on your unique value, especially if you’re a small brand competing with giants, is more critical than ever.” – Greg
[00:08:23] “Strategic timing, like sending a campaign around a product’s peak usage time, can make a huge difference in engagement.” – Phillip
[00:25:23] “People want creative, engaging content even if it’s transactional; small touches can make emails stand out in crowded inboxes.” – Greg
[00:30:08] “Just because everyone’s doing 25% off doesn’t mean it’s the only thing that works; there’s room for creativity in how you present offers.” – Greg
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
"The Balenciaga Pope"
11 Aug 2023
00:55:35
Consumers hold more power than ever before, brands are at the center of a moment, and generative AI is creating an opportunity for people to make bigger cultural critiques. How far can you control how your images are being used? How much does your own literacy of culture and media enlighten your understanding of the nuances of the subtext? Why does this all really matter in commerce, art, and culture?
Eating its Own Tail
{00:03:43} - “We've become known at Future Commerce for hosting salons, and now we have this new Future Commerce learning offering. If you are an agency operator or you're building high-performance teams in a brand, if you're a brand operator side, if you're wanting to go deeper down the rabbit hole as a brand operator on the topics of retention or new customer acquisition and learn more about things like loyalty, this is for you.” - Phillip
{00:11:46} - “You see this happen in the founder ecosystem all the time. The founder actually is the brand. The founder is the product. And the things that the founder creates may or may not be good, but that's not the product. That's not why people are bandwagoning. They're bandwagoning on the founder themselves.” - Brian
{00:22:17} - “Consumers hold more power than ever before. Consumers have an unprecedented amount of power in the way that brands market to them, shape the products and their offerings for the customer.” - Phillip
{00:24:56} - “Hyperstition is happening in the world of commerce by people now taking a brand and making it part of their own story and fashioning it in their own liking. And when people do that in concert together, they're actually a more powerful driver of that narrative than you as a brand are on your own and can actually manifest where your brand heads as a result of this collective power through these tools and through these ways of electronic communication. “ - Brian
{00:34:26} - “We're moving to this idea of the discourse being not, hey, look at what generative AI can do, but we're juxtaposing your literacy of a number of things having to... You have to be caught up in the discourse to understand the subtext.” - Phillip
{00:41:49} - “All of these companies like Reddit and Quora want to prevent companies like OpenAI from training on their data because they have an unbelievable amount of human knowledge in their walled gardens, so why would they not want to capitalize on that for themselves?” - Phillip
{00:49:14} - “You had cultures that would create things in the realms of science, art, literature, and mathematics. Classics that were simultaneously all occurring at the same time independent of each other. Today, that's happening in fashion and in cultural discourse and in brand.” - Phillip
{00:52:00} - “We're going to use AI for the critique. We're going to use it to do a bunch of grunt work that no one wants to do. But for original art creation, we're still the center of that. Humanity has to be the one to bring the new ideas to the table.” - Brian
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
The Steadfast Hero
09 Aug 2023
00:14:43
The Hero is the aspirational archetype that inspires and motivates with optimism and strength. Heroes are there for us, offering security and a reason to be better tomorrow than we are today.
We've looked at the Hero before in this season of Archetypes, but not all Heroes are alike. Listen now as Ian Leslie, CMO at Industry West, shares his take on what it means to be the Hero as a person and as a brand, including some of the pressures, the positives, the negatives, and why it all matters in the scope of the broader story.
Standing in the Gap
{00:04:14} “There's a lot of pressure that comes with like, "I need to fix it now. It needs to be right now. It needs to work right now." I think understanding and always kind of going back to what am I solving for, and can I solve for it?” - Ian
{00:06:03} “Batman is representative of something, and oftentimes he can't be in two places at once. And so he has to, just by his presence, empower Gotham to stand up for itself. That's really, I think, probably the most important part of the Hero archetype.” - Ian
{00:08:22} “I joke that a brand that doesn't come with a side order of world change is kind of looked down upon these days. But I think that's important, as the Hero brand that we are, that our side order of World Change is just accessibility and availability.” - Ian
{00:12:40} “I coach varsity soccer and that's something that is passed along to my soccer players and just truly when I instruct them, it's just like, "Hey, guys, this isn't because I don't trust you. It's because I'm trying to stand in the gap between you and a decision that could really change the trajectory of your life.’" - Ian
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
"Blimp Commerce"
04 Aug 2023
00:52:36
What is the often-overlooked marker of body data?
{00:08:55} - “The culture of commerce right now is participatory and people right now are building on each other's ideas so rapidly and in real time that they can manifest things that it used to be only a luxury brand could pull something like that off.” - Phillip
{00:11:45} - “It's context collapse. This is effectively deepfaking the world, resetting how people think about things. It's artificial context.” - Brian
{00:13:51} - “The strategy is literally nothing more than getting in a room with your marketing team and even with your brand team and sitting down and just doing a whiteboarding session with a million Post-its that say, "What is happening in the discourse right now?’” - Phillip
{00:19:53} - “When you're going to build a system to fix a problem that you created that involves differentiating between whether someone's a human or a robot, don't build an orb for people to line up and get signed up. But you have to look evil to get press.” - Brian
{00:32:04} - “Increasingly customers outside of retail are coming to us and saying they want their B2B experience to be as elegant as possible because they recognize as people that that makes their end buyers happier, probably more likely to convert and ultimately, hopefully, save them money and drive up their actual revenue.” - Michael
{00:36:38} - “The really interesting change over the last 12 months alone is that we're just seeing new buyers come to the table, especially in non-retail industries, who at the executive level have needs that when you reduce them down, are just like you said, it's about helping a buyer convert and actually exchange that value with the company.” - Michael
{00:43:24} - “When money is more expensive, folks are going to tighten the screws down. And what we have also seen is the brands that are doing the best are the ones who have been leaning into their loyalty offerings because, as you and I know, a loyal customer is a happy customer.” - Michael
{00:50:51} - “We believe AI truly is the future and moving beyond a world of just predictive recommendations to truly a generative future that really will change the shape of the experience for both buyers and merchants.” - Michael
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Bandwagon Bandwidth: Should Every Company Be a Media Company?
28 Jul 2023
00:52:22
"In the future, every company is a media company." That’s hogwash, according to Tommy Walker. Tommy is all too familiar with this ideology and the pitfalls in the business of creating media and aggregating attention.
Listen in to hear this insightful discussion and join the conversation.
“Committed to the Bit”
{00:05:03} - “Understanding the cost structure and what it takes to hire talent and all of that, without that sort of knowledge, if you don't have that currently right now, then no, not every company needs to be a media company. You're better off spending your money in ads or some other type of growth lever.” - Tommy
{00:10:34} - “With my own personal brand, I wanted to do a podcast, but I didn't have the bandwidth to do it. But I would become a Serial podcast guest. If you have an infrastructure in place, then let me just be a part of that infrastructure, show up as part of that conversation, do what I do, do what I do well, and then bounce and go do my thing that's independent of all that.” - Tommy
{00:14:41} - “What I had to do at that time was just a ton of research. This is it. This is the complete unsexy answer to the entire thing. It was a ton of research…constantly looking at what everybody was saying in this DTC space…” - Tommy
{00:23:46} - “There are unspoken expectations that people have that they don't even know they have until you meet them and what you're doing is setting a higher bar for production and engagement that feels much more like a consumer-type experience.” - Phillip
{00:28:50} - “Are you establishing those true fans? When you start to get an executive team that is looking for a quick return or has quarterly results they have to answer to that it gets way harder to say, "The long-term success of our business depends on creating things that people actually care about.’" - Brian
{00:32:24} - “If we live in a participatory economy and we have multiplayer brands, brands look more like bands in the future. And that's why you have these marketers that are so good at what they do. People like Bobby Hundreds who come from local scenes. They come from a scene, and a scene fuses fashion, art, culture, entertainment, and music. It's a state of being.” - Phillip
{00:40:54} - “What makes a compelling media play is when you can continue to reinvent {the reason to exist} so that you yourself stay interested in it.” - Phillip
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
The Sage's Wisdom
26 Jul 2023
00:14:25
The Sage brings wisdom to those who inquire and mentors those who seek guidance in a kind, calm, and steady manner. They have accumulated knowledge and experience over time and are a valuable resource for others. A brand that acts as a wise Sage can help us open our minds to wisdom and create a more equitable world.
What if, as a merchant, you could go to that one place and get the support and guidance you need? What if that one place has so much experience that you can learn from them and know they are on your side? That is the layer of value Adobe adds. Listen in as Nitu Walker represents Adobe as The Sage.
For The Heros and The Outlaws Alike
{00:04:41} “Adobe has always been known to have very strategic partnerships. We have a huge partner ecosystem, but what we really wanted to do is provide a holistic commerce experience. And by doing so, utilizing our partnerships to create value-added integrations.” - Nitu
{00:07:20} “You've built an entire ecosystem that can meet each merchant where they're at because there are different needs that different merchants have.” - Brian
{00:11:01} “The Sage meets the Hero on their journey to give them advice and equip them either through knowledge or wisdom or by helping them bring other people around them for the next part of their journey. And that's kind of what you do.” - Phillip
{00:13:08} “What really resonated with me about Archetypes, especially, which was why I was really excited to do this, was that we have to look at our base, our ecosystem, not as a linear one type of merchant or one type of partner or one type of provider, but that there are so many different ways that we interact with them and that everyone has their own archetype and their own way of how they think, feel, and do things.” - Nitu
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Barbenheimer: Nostalgia, Retail, Recall, and Relevance
21 Jul 2023
00:49:49
Unless you’ve been under a rock somewhere, you probably are aware of the Barbie marketing machine ahead of the major motion picture release. What does this signify as a moment in our culture and the ways culture and commerce intersect? Barbie brought some major shifts when she first showed up in our world. What will this highly-marketed film bring with it?
Alicia Esposito joins Phillip for an in-depth look at Barbie: the doll, the brand, the film. All brands can learn something from this moment in time, but if we aren’t careful, we’ll learn the wrong lessons and chase some rabbit holes that just don’t make sense. There’s a lot to talk about, so get your popcorn and have a listen!
Nostalgia is Power
{00:04:12} - “There's cultural acceptance of certain types of media and popular media that shapes the way that we perceive the world.” - Phillip
{00:05:11} - “A brand is not a logo or fonts or colors. A brand is a marker of trust of a corporation that was able to endure despite all odds, and that means that you have to remain culturally relevant. Brands pass away when the culture doesn't accept them.” - Phillip
{00:06:25} - “If people see the outline of the little flippy ponytail, they're like, "Oh, yeah, Barbie." That's association, but relevance and true brand loyalty tie to a brand's ability to keep the core of what people initially love about a brand or a person, but also be able to adapt to some of the new realities of the consumer, and also accept some of the pitfalls or problematic nature of the past of the brand.” - Alicia
{00:16:25} - “{Airbnb} is a really great example of a brand that doesn't necessarily have ties to the commercial product world, but really turns it into a commercial product moment through great collaborations.” - Alicia
{00:27:17} - “Having this brand recall and this nostalgia does create a new vehicle for filmmakers like Greta Gerwig to kind of tap into the mainstream market and tell a really powerful story. But then it kind of goes down this rabbit hole of but if all of the funds are going towards these things and these big corporations that have all the IP already and selling all of the products, what does that leave for new stories?” - Alicia
{00:29:44} - “Barbie represented a shift of the idea of children's playthings in culture, but it also represented a new monolith, a new way to see and perceive the world through this artifice of fashion, desirability, and idealistic standards.” - Phillip
{00:40:12} - “We have to {see explicit brand tie-ins in the film} only because a lot of the Barbie dolls of the past did have product tie-ins. There were always some subtle or direct brand partnerships there. I’m curious to see.” - Alicia
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Looking for Love and Meaning in All the Wrong Places
14 Jul 2023
00:59:22
Orchid Bertelsen has lived many lives in her journey from innovation to business ops. Ever heard of Nestlé’s digital human Cookie Coach, Ruth? Hint: She was heavily involved in the making of Ruth and its success in bridging the gap between technology and human connection. Be sure to stay tuned until the end to hear about the shifting dynamics between consumers and corporations in the digital age, the loving nature of critique, how Facebook never really died in the land of Suburbia, and in true Orchid fashion: a Scandoval reference.
Threadaverse
{00:12:12} - “At the heart of {the Virtual Human Cookie Coach} was how can we serve more customers through a connected and consistent experience while utilizing technology and obviously using all of that information to make the product better, to make the experience better.” - Orchid
{00:14:45} - “Microsoft is so far ahead of everything and they always fail as a result. That's the problem.” - Brian
{00:16:52} - “If you use technology you can infinitely have more relationships and connectivity and serve more customers than your human constraints of the nature of having one person having one conversation at a time.” - Orchid
{00:23:29} - “There is an opportunity and also a watch out that a lot of those fake relationships can take up more mental space than the real relationships that you're creating.” - Orchid
{00:31:03} - “Because there's a deficiency in the services that the government is providing or a frustration around that, people are looking to the private sector, and so all of those things between the rise of social media, between just asking more of corporations, I think that's where people want to engage. And that's why there is critique because there is a higher expectation of how brands and companies conduct their business.” - Orchid
{00:33:20} - “Customers and fans have an unbelievable amount of power that outweighs the collective bargaining capabilities of the workforce. And I wonder if that's a fundamentally modern problem that we've never really said out loud, but we all sense to be true.” - Phillip
{00:40:43} - “They had to find something novel that they were uniquely positioned to deliver on and so that's why you had the pivot from a lot of talk about the Metaverse to all of a sudden they have released a product. And I would say one of the most successful product releases in modern history. But now they've released a product that is not shiny, it is not new, it is not innovative, but it works and it works for the people in this time.” - Orchid
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
The Way of the Outlaw
12 Jul 2023
00:15:59
The Outlaw defies, disrupts, and brings change by paving their own way. They challenge established ways of thinking, by pioneering and innovating fearlessly. The Outlaw represents the world of possibility that comes when coloring outside the lines. Meet our Outlaw, TUSHY Founder Miki Agarwal, and hear how she is taking the world by [sh*t]storm and will not apologize for it.
No Butts About It
{00:04:52} “The more you talk about something, the less taboo it becomes, the more normalized it becomes. And that's actually the whole point is to make this be something where people aren't saying, "Did they take it too far?" - Miki
{00:07:20} “I've heard you say throughout the course of this chat, "The things that we do aren't just for the sake of them. It's to open up a broader conversation.” It's not just about the thing itself. It's about what it inspires afterward.” - Brian
{00:09:11} “When we show humanity, which includes humor, levity, fun, and authentic people sharing who they are through the brand, I think that has given a lot of affinity for us.” - Miki
{00:10:17} “A lot of our industry, especially in trade, eCommerce trade, and digital retail trade media, try to do is they try to convince you of the validity of their argument with data and logical explanation. And very few are trying to connect with an emotional response through art and demonstration.” - Phillip
{00:12:25} “The second part is can this product seemingly be an opening, a gateway to questioning everything else in our life? Can we question, "Why am I doing this in my life?" "Why am I using dry paper?" That's crazy. “What else am I doing in my life that's not actually true for me, but I'm just following the pack.’” - Miki
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Our Sh*tty Robot Future
07 Jul 2023
00:54:33
In this episode, we are bringing to you a new old piece of content that is more relevant today than it has ever been as we just celebrated our 2023 edition of Visions, our annual Audio-Visual Trends report, first with a launch in Chicago at our Visions Summit at the Retail Innovation Conference and then with the launch of our multiplayer experience and our new zine, the Multiplayer Brand. Visions Volume 4 is the biggest, baddest piece of content that we have ever produced, but that makes the content we did last year that much more relevant because from the vantage point of 2023, we can see how predictions and anxieties that we had in 2022 came true or were put to rest.
It’s a great interview with Michael Miraflor, an incredibly prolific thinker and the Chief Brand Officer at Hannah Grey VC, and the then CEO and now President of Trade Coffee, Mike Lackman, to talk about the changing nature of work, how our roles in society are altered and our perspectives are altered by algorithmic timelines and how automation and AI are redefining all of the above. Listen now!
“Google, how do I speak to a human?”
“It's creating some dynamics where a much smaller number of people can drive outcomes with a much larger number of dollars. If we're not really effective at promoting financial literacy and asking some big questions about what's different looking 20 years ahead from what the last 20 years were like, then there's going to be some collateral damage in the system that I think is really bad for everybody involved.” - Mike Lackman
“You can automate things to make them more efficient, but you have to know how to do it well in the first place with a certain level of agency and authority and getting your hands dirty with it.” - Michael Miraflor
“Just blatantly throwing software at problems to solve problems, thinking that it's the software that overcomes the deficiencies of an impractical product or business, I think is itself inherently a challenge that we're all facing in our industry.” - Phillip Jackson
“One of the most frustrating things about customer service is when you end up on the phone with a system that is trying to replicate that of a human voice, human interaction, or human way of answering questions... You don't have to try to trick me to think that you're a person because you're just not. I would rather hit a series of numbers…to get you to answer versus me interacting with this AI as if you were human.” - Michael Miraflor
“You have to get a gauge on what young people are thinking as expressed by what they're wearing and what they're doing. If you can't really get a sense of that, because the dominant form of social media is encouraging the proliferation of micro trends that really aren't a reflection, but they send a smoke signal, then you might have something that's a bit problematic on your hands.” - Michael Miraflor
“The interesting piece here is that when we talk about this dystopian sort of like, well, this AI future, we're all going to get pushed around this and that. The alternative to that has to be an institution with enough trust and credibility that we're willing to let them become tastemakers, editors of newspapers, curators of fashion, pairers of coffee, those kinds of things.” - Mike Lackman
“There was a dark side to those things that we do see as unifying, which is they tend to have some sort of pretty strong editorial, perhaps even tyrannical authority associated with them to be able to set those standards in place. And I guess my point of jousting with you on that when we think about AI, the counterpoint to letting the system just run the algorithm unchecked is that someone has to put guardrails on that.” - Mike Lackman
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
AI Should Empower Your Workforce, Not Replace Them
30 Jun 2023
02:20:19
Brian Lange sat down with visionary Brian Roemmele this week, and luckily we get to listen in on a couple of hours of their conversation! Are you an AI user in the workplace? If so, Brian Roemmele challenges you to look at AI as a tool for creativity and empowerment, rather than replacement.
Don’t Throw the Baby out with the Bathwater
{00:03:30} “We're not designed to be in safety literally our entire life. We should always be a little unbalanced and a little challenged. So the same is true with AI. And that challenge forces creativity.” - Brian Roemmele
{00:16:40} “I also challenge you to accept the fact that you no longer have a cemented position on anything. That does not mean that you just don't have a position. It means the tree is flexible so the wind doesn't break the tree.” - Brian Roemmele
{00:21:24} “They'll tell me, “Brian, you're crazy. You're a charlatan. It's just math.” I go, "That's interesting. Now, we're dealing with human language. We're dealing with the psychology of humans that created the math. That's what you're seeing here.’" - Brian Roemmele
{00:30:06} “You're now going to become seven times more powerful because you're going to know how to use this technology in a way that's going to empower you to be stronger. It is not a replacement. It's a tool. The spreadsheet didn't fire the accountant. It made the accountant more powerful.” - Brian Roemmele
{00:37:23} “How do you train an AI system to understand good unless it knows bad? Now you can train good and bad, but the bad has got to be in there as a reference point because it needs a contextual way to identify.” - Brian Roemmele
{00:41:56} “We build a persona. We build a personality. Because that creates engagement. If you're just going to put out robotic statements and go to freaking a Google search or Wikipedia, it's not engaging. So if I'm going to have a customer-facing interface, that interface better be useful and engaging.” - Brian Roemmele
{01:28:11} “That machine is actually going to be able to have a bank and understand more of how I relate to the things that I find resonance with and find wisdom in. And it's actually going to be able to relate those things back to who I am and use an even more full understanding of the things that I find to be inspiring or the things that reflect me to interact with other people and other people's extended versions of themselves, i.e. their AI component. - Brian Lange
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Communicating Context Across Cultures
01 Nov 2024
00:46:33
Phoebe Yu loves jumping down rabbit holes with the audience of her curiosity-driven channel on YouTube that focuses on research, human psychology, and culture, specifically within the tech sector. But if something interesting finds its way into the comment section, she’ll deep dive into that too. Listen now to Phoebe Yu’s conversation with Phillip and Brian!
Looking Back to Look Forward
Key Takeaways:
[00:10:39] “Research is always iterating just like design. So I really want to keep that active research going, including participation from the audience.” - Phoebe
[00:13:06] “Japan has been living in the year 2000 since 1980.” - Phoebe
[00:29:09] “In a low context culture, people tend to communicate more directly, more explicitly, and in a high context culture, people would communicate in a more nuanced, more implicit kind of way.” - Phoebe
[00:32:24] “It is always good to reduce user friction no matter what. We have to look at things contextually and see how that friction serves how that user feels about a certain service, a certain platform.” - Phoebe
[00:42:47] “There is an inherent sense of curiosity when it comes to how different cultures operate because we, us, personally, we grew up in a specific culture, and it's easy to think that that is just how things are done across the board. But then when you realize there are different people doing things in a different way, that it might shatter your existing notions about certain things, and that raises a lot of questions of how things can be done.” - Phoebe
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
The Magician's Power
28 Jun 2023
00:15:45
When a brand discovers the needs of their consumers and then provides them with that well, that is magic. For Keely Copeland, Founder of Second Chance Initiative, building a brand was about solving a problem that was bigger than her. She saw a need, she dreamed of a different way to meet that need, and then she began to build a brand that would bring hope to not just consumers, but also the women involved with the creation of their products. Listen now to this episode of Archetypes!
Empty Vessel
{00:04:27} “It was about how can we use commerce as a vehicle to create safe and secure jobs for women in recovery who are reentering the workforce so that they can come work in a healthy, secure environment for a few months, up to a year while they get back on their feet and then they can go back to either the career they used to have or something new altogether.” - Keely
{00:07:48} “There's a tug of war of power between the brand and the consumer. And in this tug of war of power brands believe that they wield some power in the organization. In fact, what we're realizing is that consumers wield unlimited power over all of us. We are at their mercy and we adapt our businesses to their desires, not the other way around. You can't shape their needs. You can only find or discover the thing that they want from you.” - Phillip
{00:10:08} “After Covid, there's a lot more alignment of priorities based on values that actually matter. I think for a long time we were trapped in junk values as a society, and when the world stopped for a few years, we got back to remembering what matters.” - Keely
{00:14:39} “For every creator, I have come to believe that the emptying out is just as important as the taking in because there's no room for the new idea if your mind's already full, if you're thinking about what you have to do tomorrow and the paragraph that you want to write next or the podcast that you want to record next. And so an empty vessel is, in my mind, exclusively possibility. And it doesn't get much more optimistic than that.” - Keely
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
[INFINITE SHELF] Succession IRL
23 Jun 2023
00:37:15
Have you checked out our other podcast Infinite Shelf yet? Here is a taste of our latest episode: Succession IRL. Listen in with hosts Ingrid Milman Cordy and Orchid Bertelsen and don't forget to subscribe!
There comes a time when every DTC company hits the pause button and asks, “What’s next?” Cue the Patrick Bateman and Kendall Roy mergers and acquisitions quotes. If acquisition does end up being an option, when you cede power as a founder, will you be happy with what the new parent company decides to do? Will your legacy live on?
Secret Sauce
{00:11:11} “When we're talking about multinational corporations or larger corporations, usually you got to make sure that you've got a healthy business that you can just put your resources against in order to grow.” - Orchid
{00:16:28} “There's a reason why acquisitions don't have the most fantastic reputation for succeeding post-acquisition. A lot of that is because too much emphasis is put on the acquirer to solve those problems after the fact. My advice is to have the founder or have the people who are running that DTC business think about what is that secret sauce of the company.” - Ingrid
{00:17:53} “If you're a founder and you're selling, what you also have to be emotionally ready for is if the parent company starts to make strategic decisions about how to use the brand that you wouldn't necessarily agree with because it's not yours anymore. Post-acquisition is not yours anymore. That's why they paid you the money.” - Orchid
{00:25:44} “With growth comes mass, more mass opportunities. You have to be more approachable, you have to be more accessible, unless you are a true luxury good.” - Orchid
{00:32:03} “The people that you hire to help you be acquired, is another huge, important decision. They have to know your business and see the vision and see the purpose and be your champion just as much as the founders.” - Ingrid
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Winner Sells All
20 Jun 2023
00:52:09
Just in time for the release of his new book, Jason Del Rey sits down with Phillip and Brian and talks about his research in the histories of Walmart and Amazon, what he learned that matters to consumers today, and what he’d like to see in the future of commerce. His book, Winner Sells All: Amazon, Walmart, and the Battle for Our Wallets is being called “A riveting investigation of the no-holds-barred battle between Amazon and Walmart to become the king of commerce.” It’s a must read, and it’s out TODAY, June 20th! Listen now to hear more and get your own copy of the book everywhere books are sold!
Tug of War
{00:04:02} “I'm a sports fan, and rivalries are something that I grew up on. And this was just sort of an epic one: Amazon and Walmart. And I really wanted to just go inside and explain to readers both in and outside the industry what these companies' ambitions are, how they look at each other, and hopefully, you get some takeaways on why that matters for you, too.” - Jason
{00:09:29} “Maybe the innovator's dilemma is becoming the imitator's dilemma and that this competition in the marketplace is beginning to create challenges for both companies in having to imitate each other and potentially to wind up chasing red herrings.” - Phillip
{00:17:40} “What's gone on in physical retail for {Amazon} is a good reminder that your DNA is your DNA as it was for Walmart. And it's really hard to execute well and have the right vision that isn't all about using the new channel or new business to just strengthen your historical business.” - Jason
{00:24:26} “The way that this new generation of shoppers, especially a Gen Z and Gen Alpha shoppers, who could be the most prolific purchasing power generation of all time, what they think about those physical in-store experiences matters more than what I think about it.” - Phillip
{00:46:01} “I have a chapter about Doug {McMillon} in the book because I do think he's sort of under cover for how important of a position he holds.” - Jason
{00:49:20} “ I'd like to think a piece of future of commerce is also really figuring out a way that this industry is not such a drag on the environment. I think physical retail actually can play a big role in solving at least some of the short term issues there.” - Jason
Associated Links:
Find out more about Jason Del Rey and get his new book, Winner Sells All, out today!
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
The Brand Beyond the Box
16 Jun 2023
00:40:51
What happens when a company is quick to make decisions based on real customer insight within a culture that celebrates collaboration between marketing and product development? You get a brand like ButcherBox that is building not only a great business but a subscription service that is providing transformation in the way families do dinner. Listen in and hear how Lesley Mottla and Kiran Smith are building teams that are continuing to build a passionate brand for their members! Lesley and Kiran will be sharing more of their strategies for building the ButcherBox brand live at eTail Boston this August. Future Commerce will also be there to bring you more great conversations from the show – come join us!
Data as Enabler
{00:05:24} “Like many companies, the company made technical decisions, and grew out of those technical decisions. You definitely come to a point where you have to really take a hard look at things and figure out what's the platform or pieces that are going to get you to the next level.” - Lesley
{00:08:51} “Our job is really in that first 90 days. How do you make someone really see the value of having the subscription? The value that they see in the inspiration is more than just the protein. It is about the solutions that you offer around it. Our goal is to create confident cooks.” - Kiran
{00:13:14} “I would be the happiest person if we could stop spending anything on marketing because our members do all the work for us. That's where we need to continue to head towards in terms of evangelism. That's the purest form of marketing because people believe their friends.” - Kiran
{00:15:33} “What Kiran and I have really worked on is at the executive level, we're working together on the strategy for the company and the strategy for the members. What's great is we both have a really good understanding that these things don't operate separately.” - Lesley
{00:19:17} “I love that the company won't dismiss the customer insights because they know it's coming from really good validated data that was intelligently taken. And then as they present the problems, they're going towards solutions.” - Kiran
{00:22:39} “We don't need perfect data to make a decision because otherwise we'll just be paralyzed. We’ll figure it out as we go.” - Kiran
{00:34:52} “Decision-making becomes a lot easier when a company is truly mission-driven.” - Kiran
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
The [True] Cost of Convenience
09 Jun 2023
00:55:22
Welcome to the membership revolution where suddenly airlines are the talk of the town. With a flat fee comes compromise, but are you willing to give up convenience for a cheaper price? Also, if you haven’t yet, take a look at your Shop Pay app and check your wallet out. You may have some cash to burn sitting in the account courtesy of the annual “Shop Pay Shop Day,” which totally existed before this year…right? Tune in now to hear the rest.
Loyalty is a Two-Way Street
{00:13:14} “The loyalty in the ERP space, and what your business actually runs on that has a lot of bearing on how you choose your eCommerce stack in enterprise.” - Phillip
{00:20:16} “What I've always realized, especially when being budget conscious, there's always a cost associated. It's either your time, your patience, or your dollars. And sometimes paying more means that you get a little bit more of your time and you save a little bit of patience.” - Phillip
{00:25:08} “We're becoming much more isolated from each other, so naturally, the workplace has become the place that has to help compensate for this because you have to have a community of people that you work with in the workplace. And that's why we have the rise of these social groups and mandated social groups within the workplace, not just for entertainment and for bringing your whole self to work, but there's also an element of just trying to find people and connect with people who have similar life experiences.” - Phillip
{00:33:00} “During economic downturns and uncertainty, brands tend to look at memberships or loyalty, maybe a subscription program, as the thing that makes up the difference. It is a lever for the business and not a benefit for the customer.” - Phillip
{00:38:06} “I've bought into things before where I'm like, "Man if I just bought stuff piecemeal a la carte, this would have been better." Why did I go for the bundle or the membership? And I now have paid way more than I would have otherwise.” - Brian
{00:50:55} “Getting people to the Shop app, it's adoption has a lot of opportunity. There are still a lot of legs, and there's still so much growth opportunity for that, as far as people using it for shopping experiences that Shopify hasn't even touched that yet.” - Brian
{00:51:51} “There is a wealth of new channel growth for tomorrow. There's something brand new happening right in front of our eyes. You want to talk about loyalty and how irrational it is, to capitalize on that, you kind of have to be thinking about the future, and you have to see this through.” - Phillip
{00:53:08} “This new channel, new platform growth that is being set up in front of us could come from somewhere else in the world and I think it would probably be open source because I think that that's how you tend to see things like this play out in international contexts is through open source projects.” - Brian
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
The Caregiver's Mission
07 Jun 2023
00:12:03
For a customer to have a seamless experience while dealing with grief and trauma requires exceptional service and unbelievable logistics infrastructure. They need care. For the three founders at Titan Casket, Scott Ginsberg, Joshua Siegel, and Liz Siegel, this is core to their story as a brand. Listen now to this episode of Archetypes!
Direct to Exhumer
{00:01:38} The Caregiver continually supports others, making sacrifices on their behalf. They are honorable, selfless, and loyal. The Caregiver offers unconditional love and has a strong sense of responsibility for others to protect and provide a safe place where others can feel nurtured and cared for.
{00:05:36} “You may have seen us talk about being the Warby Parker of Caskets and that's not because we're direct to consumer. It's because what Warby saw was there was one manufacturer that controlled all the supply and they also owned the channels of distribution. And so they thought there was a better way of working outside of that. And it's the same thing in caskets.” - Josh
{00:09:56} “These are families right in the middle of it. They want to talk about their loved one. And so we hire very carefully, and the team we put in place has no limitations around how long they can spend with clients.” - Josh
{00:10:53} “We have a business. We make money, but at the same time, too, the client is saving 50% or more of what they would ordinarily spend at a funeral home. And we get to help every day.” - Scott
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
[STEP BY STEP] What Frameworks Should I use to Qualify Good Software for my Business?
02 Jun 2023
00:40:31
This season on Step by Step, we are asking what does “seamless” mean to my eCommerce business and how do I demystify that in a way that helps me select the right solutions and softwares that make a seamless experience come to life? Just like the suiting and the apparel that KASHIYAMA provides to its customer, there is no one size fits all solution in eCommerce today. Selecting software correctly and well in your organization requires a lot of orchestration and effort and sometimes some frameworks and tips and tricks on how to do that well. BJ McCahill knows all about this and has incredible insights to share. Listen now!
In this episode:
{0:10:19} - “We calculated at one point there were over 10 million combinations of types of products that you can order. So just looking at the platform where we were going to house our website, that was a huge consideration. Even though initial order volume wasn't going to be that high, we knew the data complexity needed something that was robust and something that could support that.” - BJ
{0:15:13} - “Obviously all of these software companies are trying to sell you something. And so maybe they're putting their best foot forward. So you may need to dig a little bit deeper with recommendations from people in the industry, recommendations from agencies that you're working with to make sure that what they're explaining to you is how it works in reality as well.” - BJ
{0:19:05} - “Budget plays a huge role obviously in any business decision, but specifically in terms of software selection, you hear the term Total Cost of Ownership, and that is really, really key to think about. The number that you're seeing presented by this software or this agency is not maybe the total number that you're going to end up paying.” - BJ
{0:30:08} - “We needed to be able to offer a seamless experience between in-store and online and not every software was going to support that, but it was something that we learned was going to be key to our customer experience that we were offering to be able to really deliver that omnichannel experience for the customers.” - BJ
{0:31:59} - “One of the nuances in modern commerce is that you get to this stage of growth where the choices that you make severely feed back into the mindset of how you build your business and they become sort of sympathetic to each other. Having flexibility and being able to build quickly are underappreciated parts of having a software stack.” - Phillip
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
[STEP BY STEP] What is the Importance of Consolidating my Technology?
01 Jun 2023
00:26:37
This season on Step by Step, we are asking what does “seamless” mean to my eCommerce business and how do I demystify that in a way that helps me select the right solutions and softwares that make a seamless experience come to life? Join us as we hear from Michael Chen, Director of eCommerce Operations at Sugarfina, to break down the term “single handshake” and look more closely at consolidation of operations in your eCommerce business. Listen now!
In this episode:
{0:08:20} - “From the backend side, there are a lot of softwares we have to use to eliminate all the friction points from the time {consumers} find the website and go on the website to check out and pay. That should be really, really smooth.” - Michael
{0:14:32} - “Right now everything is in Magento. We have Adobe Live Search, we have Product Recommendations, and everything is working in one place. So I don't have to go to different places, which save a lot of time and headache.” - Michael
{0:16:01} - “Saving money is an important thing, but I would look at it as is the software actually better. If you're going to consolidate, is it actually better for the business? There are a lot of factors, so I wouldn't say saving money is the most important thing. There's a lot of research you have to do.” - Michael
{0:18:32} - “To extract the most amount of value from any piece of software requires an intimate understanding and time spent in using the software, and the hard things become easy over time. So you grow into these capabilities. You don't just turn it on on day one.” - Phillip
{0:23:51} - “You have to be focused on forward progress and continual improvement because your competitors are, and if they're doing it, you have to be more efficient and more optimized.” - Michael
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
[STEP BY STEP] What Does “Fully-Integrated” Mean in the DXP Era?
31 May 2023
00:53:55
This season on Step by Step, we are asking what does “seamless” mean to my eCommerce business and how do I demystify that in a way that helps me select the right solutions and softwares that make a seamless experience come to life? Joining us on the podcast in this episode is Rebecca Hall, Director of Digital Solutions Consulting at Blue Acorn ICI, and Doug Hatcher, her counterpart on the sales side of the business, a solutions consultant. And they're going to answer this question, "What does fully-integrated mean in the DXP era?” Listen now!
In this episode:
{0:11:32} - “DXPs provide: a very good way to visualize and analyze how people are interacting with the brand so you can customize it and better personalize the experience people are getting to it.” - Doug
{0:14:46} - “The beauty of composable architecture and personalization is that you're really hitting those specific customers, really hitting those specific audiences, and you're serving up a unique experience almost per person. So it's not just per brand, it's per customer as well that we can really dig in and create a unique experience.” - Rebecca
{0:24:57} - “The team and the tool have to be mutually aligned. it becomes much more impactful when you're making software decisions because all of them are interdependent. Future-proofing to some degree is just buying more durable software that's capable of doing more and growing over time without you having to completely rip and replace.” - Phillip
{0:28:55} - “We're able to deliver, like immediately deliver, relevant experiences to your customers that may help them find what they're looking for and reduce some of the noise, as well as help you target immediately somebody who is actually looking for something specific.” - Rebecca
{0:37:51} - “There are things that these platforms can't necessarily predict or just have a capability for out of the box. So there's always going to be a need to do custom development. More and more though, the customization that we're doing isn't on the front end, isn't trying to build the customer experience in a new and unique way. We try to focus that on a custom configurator piece or one thing that we can compose into the broader solution.” - Doug
{0:44:47} - “ If we know what we have, we're able to use that data better and we can actually make better suggestions as we go along as well. It's all about data.” - Rebecca
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
[STEP BY STEP] Mastering Omnichannel Integration for Seamless Shopping
30 May 2023
00:40:05
This season on Step by Step, we are asking what does “seamless” mean to my eCommerce business and how do I demystify that in a way that helps me select the right solutions and softwares that make a seamless experience come to life? In this episode, we are talking to Keith Menezes, who's the Director of Commercialization at Walmart, the world's largest retailer. We're going to talk about how we master omnichannel integration and provide for a seamless experience not just for customers, but also for employees and some of the decisions that are made in making the technology that Walmart has built to create incredible omnichannel experiences available for the rest of the world. Listen now!
In this episode:
{0:06:28} - “A vibrant retail ecosystem where we're all really serving other merchants and customers, I think helps all of us.” - Keith
{0:10:32} - “It's not just about the technology, it's about the system, and then it's also about the change management. If you deploy a piece of technology and it just doesn't make sense in context of how the employee is doing their job and the UI and the experience itself is just complicated or hard to understand, adoption will plummet, but most importantly, customers aren't going to get what they're looking for, which then will ultimately impact their perception of your brand, and then loyalty, which is going to lead to churn.” - Keith
{0:14:49} - “What has happened in the market is you've seen the growth of outsourced fulfillment, other providers out there that maybe exist as marketplaces where customers may go, they'll place an order, and then this third party will go into the store, pick the items for you and deliver it for you. And brands have loved that because they've gotten the growth. But now two years later, post-pandemic, what they're evaluating is what did we give up to get that?” - Keith
{0:21:41} - “Fulfillment, even though it's invisible, it is an expression of your brand and you really have to get items to customers in the way that the customer is expecting them.” - Keith
{0:26:416} - “Retail companies are in the business to sell products to customers. And the evolution has been really slow. And I don't know if people have picked up on it, but we are now buying software that's purpose built to be transactional software because it's built by the people who have to power their own businesses on it. And that is a fundamental shift away from, "You need software. We build software. Here's your software.’" - Phillip
{0:33:45} - “Through Store Assist, we're giving you the capability to create these white label kind of fulfillment experiences. It's all your brand. We're existing in the background and then all the data that's coming back really is yours. You understand how customers are interacting with you and then empowering you to make decisions on what you ultimately serve up to your customers.” - Keith
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
*TEASER* Oh, Sorry, TWO MICHELIN STARS
31 Oct 2024
00:01:54
Get ad-free episodes and bonus content, including the full recording of this podcast, by joining Future Commerce+ at futurecommerce.com/plus
Save 20% on Future Commerce print journals and merch
Private GPT access with Alani™ from BundleIQ
Exclusive invites to physical events, dinners, and priority invites to industry events (SXSW, Art Basel, VISIONS)
Ad-free episodes and bonus content!
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
[STEP BY STEP] What Does “Seamless” Mean in my eCommerce Operations?
29 May 2023
00:47:16
This season on Step by Step, we are asking what does “seamless” mean to my eCommerce business and how do I demystify that in a way that helps me select the right solutions and softwares that make a seamless experience come to life? To start this season off, we welcome the CEO of Whisker, Jacob Zuppke, to share about his incredible amount of experience in building a technology company that today is omnichannel, selling in retailers, selling via an app, and making your life a better place by making your pets' lives better. Listen now!
In this episode:
{0:07:19} - “As you grow up from a company from small to big pretty quickly, I think you end up making a lot of decisions because you don't have a person for everything. We've evolved, but not drastically. I still want my department leaders selecting software. I don't want a central IT hub making those decisions on behalf of each department because I think that's a siloed approach that doesn't get each user what they want. ” - Jacob
{0:12:39} - “Having different perspectives is probably the most important thing. Somebody that represents different areas of the business and what their needs may or may not be at a later time. And then thinking through, can we get at least two years out of that?” - Jacob
{0:24:39 } - “Software decisions drive our hiring decisions. Moving from Google Cloud, when we were on it with Firebase and its suite of products, to AWS in 2017 or 18, has driven thee entirety of our decision-making process since then.” - Jacob
{0:32:05} - “You're working in a software every day. You're training your entire people around how to use it. If those people aren't part of the decision-making and then also future planning around what is next and how you intend to get there and at least being mindful of that, I think that you're making a decision in a vacuum, and I don't think that that's going to benefit any organization.” - Jacob
{0:32:36} - “You have to grow up at some point and big kid software makes you make decisions. You have to grow up and having juvenile platforms that make a bunch of decisions for you has its strengths. But it also may limit your ability to make decisions and grow an org and have informed decisions and perspectives from people who have had to solve a number of challenges, not just the software part.” - Phillip
{0:37:08} - “When you're oftentimes changing those decisions frequently you lose the trust in a team. Going back a few years, I think we were pivoting too frequently. And I think now that we've got a better way of approaching software decisions, we're making less frequent decisions that are more sound and more aligned with where the business is going for the next couple of years.” - Jaob
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Mockup Madness: The Gamification of the Checkout Experience
26 May 2023
00:47:41
Mockup Culture is everywhere these days. We have seen things from Wes Anderson Star Wars to Gucci Spring lookbooks created in MidJourney, the possibilities are truly endless. Join Phillip and Brian as they explore the notion that we now live in a time where any dream can be transformed into reality, no matter how bizarre or outlandish. They explore how prominent brands like Telfar are embracing the concept, utilizing gamified pricing strategies to captivate consumers. As they dissect these phenomena, they unravel the concepts of "hyperstition" and "metamodernism" and examine their implications for the modern consumer. Stay tuned for some content teasers from Phillip and Brian, as they hint at what's to come at our Visions Summit in Chicago.
Tonal Shift
{00:09:42} “Why does Dollar Shave Club or Glossier choose a Shopify? There's an operational cost associated with selling online and it gets more expensive every day, especially the more custom software you have and the more esoteric your business model is online. By choosing a platform that imposes a constraint on you, theoretically, you can drive the cost down.” - Phillip
{00:16:09} “The things that create inherently shareable content and the things that are truly remarkable and worthy of talking about are things that are building so close to the edge of possibility that it requires a tremendous amount of investment.” - Phillip
{00:17:18} “What we're seeing, and you wrote a whole article on this recently on mockup culture, is this idea that actually customers and fans and audiences are now having real influence on the greater brand.” - Brian
{00:26:02} “Metamodernism is when a piece of content or something is created that's both critique and embrace of something. Some of these mockups are super interesting because they are commentary, they are ironic and sarcastic, but they're also good ideas.” - Brian
{00:31:01} “This multifaceted way of engaging in media and art has a direct bearing on commerce because commerce powers it all.” - Phillip
{00:40:55} “What algorithmic timelines do and what generative AI allows for people to create through hyperstition is that my idea of Hermes or Gucci or Nike is no longer fundamentally the same as yours.” - Phillip
{00:43:41} “It's not personalization so much as your brand is going to hit differently for different people. You need to hit the notes that say the things that you're wanting to say to that person that maybe achieve the same outcome for a different person, but it's done differently.” - Brian
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
A Hero's Journey
24 May 2023
00:14:31
What does it take to build a brand that stands out as a Hero? How does the Hero’s story inspire us and bring about positive impact in the world around us? Listen now as Ju Rhyu shares with Phillip some of her Hero’s journey in building Hero Cosmetics!
Standout Success
{00:02:47} Ju knew that acne care is an emotional and sensitive area of the market, and she wanted the name of the product and of the brand to be positive and connect emotionally with consumers who needed the solution the product would provide
{00:05:25} “When we started, even though we started on Amazon, I always knew this business would be an omnichannel business because when you have a pimple emergency, two day free shipping is great, but nothing sometimes is as good as being able to walk into a store and pick up a product that same day.” - Ju
{00:06:00} Hero’s first in-store launch went so well that it went nationwide pretty quickly, and then two years later was in Target where one SKU became a mulit-million dollar SKU within one year
{00:11:00} “I definitely have the philosophy that I'll always do what's right for the business. And if I'm no longer the right person, then I will gladly step aside and make room for a real professional.” - Ju
{00:13:34} “I’m constantly amazed at people who are at the highest levels of success or fame or however we hold them, when asked about who their heroes are, they pull out a Tom Rinks or a Scott Norton who has never been mentioned on Twitter, not once. I think that that's really interesting.” - Phillip