RELOAD: How Design Thinking Helped an Olympic Athlete Create Breakthrough Performance with John Coyle

Hi, this is Tiffany Bova. Welcome to a reload of the What's Next podcast. This is one of my favorite episodes, and I always like to bring those ones back that had a huge impact, not only on myself, but I got a lot of feedback from listeners just like you. I hope you enjoy this week's reload of the What's Next podcast. Hi! This is Tiffany Bova. Welcome to the What's Next podcast where I have the pleasure of welcoming Doug Stephens to join us today. He is a Canadian, a futurist, a keynote speaker, and an author and business advisor on the future of retailing and consumerism. Following a 20-year career in retail including the leadership of New York's iconic Janovich store chain, Stevens founded Retail Profit, a consultancy specializing in the forecasting and articulation of future trends in retailing and consumer behavior. He is the author of 2 books: one, The Retail Revival, and 2, a new international bestseller, Reengineering Retail, both of which are a read— must-read if you are in the retail space. So with that, welcome to Doug to the podcast.

Thanks so much, Tiffany.

And this is the first time we've ever spoken. We have had this Twitter relationship for a number of years, all things retail, but I'm so thrilled to get an opportunity to actually speak with you today.

Yeah, thanks. Likewise.

So I'm going to begin with a listener favorite, something I call bullish and bearish, and it's not too painful. Bullish, you are for it. Bearish, you are against it. And hopefully it will just be a way for us to ease into our conversation.

Sure.

Are you ready?

I'm ready.

All right. The first one, robots for customer service in retail.

I'm going to have to go down the middle on that. I know that that sounds like a cop-out, but I'm going to have to go down the middle. I think it depends on your market positioning. And the way I look at the market is basically that there are 2 fundamental positions that work today. One is what I call a high-fidelity position. The other is a high-utility position. Depending on where you are in that spectrum as a retailer, if you're on the high-fidelity side, I'm a believer that that's where real genuine human contact comes into play. I think that that's a space where brands can really build relationships with consumers. And I truly believe that humans are the best builders of relationships. If, however, you're on the other side of the spectrum and it's all about utility and convenience and, you know, sort of expediting a very frictionless customer experience, then maybe technology including robots and artificial intelligence is the way you should go. So, I don't come down hard on either side of that. I think it really depends on your positioning and your, you know, where you see yourself as a brand.

All right. Fair enough. All right. So, the first one, we're down the middle. All right, the next 2, we're gonna, we're gonna go for bullish or bearish. Ready?

I'm ready.

Drones for delivery.

Yeah, so, so I'm, uh, I'm bullish.

All right.

I'm bullish on drones. Yeah, absolutely.

All righty, that's good.

You know, um, yeah, no, I, I, I think that that, um, uh, makes perfect sense. Now we also have to, you know, sort of Be careful about how we're defining drone. We tend to think of the flying thing when we say the word drone, but drone can simply mean any sort of autonomous vehicle. And we know that companies like Starship Technologies right now are testing 6-wheeled drones on the campuses of universities in the US, making deliveries 24/7. So no, I'm all for it.

All right, now the last one is timely. Bullish or bearish, Golden State Warriors?

Oh yeah, so, um, you know, I, I think, I think what I'm just gonna say, I, I empathize. I, I empathize.

Spoken like a true Canadian. Spoken like— I couldn't, I couldn't let it go, right? I mean, I think it's—

They fought, they fought valiantly. And, you know, fortunately, our guys were able to dig deep when they had to. But no, really a wonderful championship.

All right. So fair enough. I knew that I would, you know, that would be a sort of a softball. But, and, you know, just to mix it up a little bit. But, you know, I think that you and I have been crossing paths on this topic of kind of the future of retail. And before we kind of go into that because I think there's so many things to unpack. You know, one of the things I love doing is sort of giving kind of this historical perspective of maybe what got us here, you know? So, you know, retail's been around forever, you know, whether it was, you know, trading vegetables for meat way back when, right? I mean, there's always been this barter and exchange for things. But if you, if you think just back, you know, from 2000s to today. What do you think that when we entered 2000, what did retail look like? And then sort of where are we today?

Yeah, so, you know, I mean, I'd sort of even go back maybe a little bit further to the idea that at a certain point in time, retail began industrializing, right? I mean, Really, for most of history, the people that made things were also the people that sold those things. The craftsman, artisan was the same person that was selling to the end consumer. And that's basically the way commerce worked for centuries. And then we hit the Industrial Revolution. People moved out of agrarian life and into cities. Cities scaled. It became more and more difficult for manufacturers to reach consumers at scale And so retail as we know it today became a necessity. Leading up to your question, what kind of changed post-2000? Well, I think that if we go back to 2000, it was still basically a time when retailers and brands controlled the whole equation. They controlled pricing. They controlled distribution. They controlled— Mm-hmm. All of the information associated with their products. Anything that you— any information you got about a brand or a product, you got from the brand or the retailer. And consumers pretty much lived in a vacuum. And clearly, a lot of that changed very, very significantly. I mean, the internet certainly changed it to some extent. But I think the advent of and the ubiquity of mobile really changed it entirely because now we really and truly had all of the information that we needed as consumers right at our fingertips. And information indeed is power. And so, the power shifted immediately over to consumers. And that is the place now that retailers and brands find themselves in is that they no longer call all the shots. They no longer have all of the power. And And they are now responding to consumers rather than consumers just responding to brands and retailers. So, that's the big shift that I see.

Yeah, and I couldn't agree more. I look at it from just the pure act of selling and I say the same thing. Like, 3 things I know for sure. One, technology is significantly different. 2, the consumer, customer, business buyer, whatever you want to call that person, is different for many of the reasons you just outlined. But I also see that the act of going to market or selling has not always kept pace. And so, I'm going to guess that therein lies the rub.

Yeah, I mean, one thing that I would add to that too and one thing I would add to my earlier comment is that in a weird way, we've sort of come full circle. We've come back to a time now where brands are awakening to the idea that they don't need retail distribution in a lot of cases. If you look at the move that Mark Parker made in 2017, for example, where he looked at a universe of 30,000 retail partners worldwide across 110,000 distribution points and basically said, we're going to stick with 40 of you, and the rest of you, thanks for coming out. We don't need you anymore. We, the manufacturer, now have the capability to scale relationships with consumers on a one-to-one basis. And we're only going to partner with the brands that we feel can actually give credibility and value to our brand in the marketplace and actually carry off what we consider to be the Nike experience. So, in a weird way, I started by saying that 1,000 years ago, the people that made things were the people that sell them. And here we are again, we're back to that point. And it feels weird. It feels like an aberration to the norm. But in fact, it is the norm. The industrialization of retail and the labyrinthic retail infrastructure that we have today, that was the aberration.

Yeah. And I feel like, do you think, you know, this fact that it feels so normal, I often say that when you look at what retailers are doing, and I use that term broadly, right? That sort of storefront, that catalog, that mail order, whatever it might be. Much of what they do started in the late 1800s with someone like a Sears. And it's just now the digital version of what was done then, right? And some brands have been able to— well, first, do you agree with that statement, I guess? before I go whipping by that comment.

Yeah, I do. I agree completely. I think Amazon— and I've made that comparison myself. With all due respect to Jeff Bezos and the team at Amazon, Amazon is essentially a digital catalog shopping experience. You know, it's somewhat more interactive, but not a heck of a lot. And I think that's part of the reason that Amazon right now is ripe for disruption.

Yeah. And what's interesting about that, and I often say this, is that when you look at what they're doing, everyone's racing. Everyone's saying retail is dead, yet Amazon's opening retail stores. That it was always going to be— going back to what you said a few minutes ago, when I said robots and retail, you're like, there's still the human experience that's needed, this face-to-face.

Mm-hmm.

statistics and in some research, some of it may have even originated with you, is this: I'm going to buy online and pick up in a brick-and-mortar store. So it's not one or the other. It remains this and play. And I think in different verticals and industries and regions and markets, that and is a different balance. Yes?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I agree with that. And I, you know, one of the things that I've been talking an awful lot about over the last 10 years or so, sort of beginning as kind of a lone voice in the wilderness to some extent, and something that I think is gathering sort of a collective belief now, is that to just say retail is omnichannel, to say that it's all one channel, it's all one frictionless experience that the consumer just glides across and gets whatever they want whenever they want it, I think that actually sort of dumbs down the complexity of what is really happening. And one of my And one of the things that I've been talking about and one of my theses for some time now has been that what's actually happening is that media is becoming the store. In the consumer's mind now, when you have a situation as we do where 66% of American consumers, when they decide they need something, go immediately to Amazon and plug that product into the search bar on Amazon, and if they know exactly what they want, it's even worse. Then to my mind, media has, in the consumer's mind, become the store. The consumer is no longer turning to brick and mortar as the first stop. They're turning to media. Whether it's their smartphone, their smart TV, or their laptop, it matters not. Media has become the store. But the interesting thing, and to your point, is that on the flip side, stores are becoming media channels. And I've argued for a long time that they're not just a media channel, But they are quite likely the most powerful and measurable media channel that a brand actually has at its disposal. But we're just not used to thinking about brick-and-mortar stores as media. We think of them as distribution vehicles. But I think that's changing.

Well, and I think this doom and gloom message of retail, it does the entire sort of industry a disservice because I know you've been doing a ton of work. And I'd love for you to sort of share with our listeners around this valuation for the productivity of physical stores that, you know, stores are opening. A new store opens somewhere every day, like probably every minute, who knows, across the country if you add them all up, if not multiple per minute. But, you know, it, it seems like the only thing we hear is that retail is just going away. And, and why do you think there is this disconnection between the reality of what's happening in retail and this doom and gloom that it's just What do you think about that argument that retail is completely being obliterated?

Well, you know what? Look, I mean, we have to— I think that there's an honest argument on both sides of the equation. And to discount one side in favour of the other, I think really, you know, does a disservice to the whole conversation. So let's look at it frankly. globally grew by 22%. Now, I don't know many other things, frankly, that grew by 22% in 2018. What I do know is that physical retail, or the retail industry in general, globally doesn't usually grow beyond 6% a year. In the US, when we hit 4% or 5% growth in the retail market, everybody's popping champagne. And meanwhile, Amazon is growing in the high double digits. You know, 80% now of all incremental dollars being spent online are going directly to Amazon's bank account. And, you know, the retail industry is scrambling to pick up whatever is left in that. Alibaba is blowing off numbers that people can't even believe, like, you know, $10 billion in the first hour of Singles' Day on November 11th, 2018. That's $167 million a minute.

Wow.

for every minute of the first hour. You know, so I mean, we can't discount that. This is happening, right? And will there be victims in that? Well, of course there will. There's only so big a pie. And so if you have internet companies growing their share of that pie much, much, much faster than brick-and-mortar incumbents, there are gonna be winners and losers in this equation. Now, having said all that, does that mean that this is the end of retail as we know it?

No.

It's certainly not the end of retail. It may be the end of retail as we have known it. And I do believe that there is a transformation happening whereby the purpose and role and value. And in particular, I'll emphasize that word value of physical stores is being reinvented. The problem is we're not measuring that value right now.

Right.

And so you have a situation where if you're Macy's, for example, every year you look at your portfolio of stores and, oh, guess what? Some of them are underperforming. And so what do you do? You lop them off, right? You just take them completely out of the equation, close them, and carry on. My argument is that that might be a colossal mistake because each of those stores has a media value that we are not currently measuring.

I agree. And you're also looking at it one-sided. Like, is the usage of the square footage correct? Is it if it's just a sales store versus a pickup store? Is it an experience store or just, you know what I'm saying? Like, there's so many other ways you could slice it. I mean, I think that we have a square footage problem in the US where there's just so much square footage of retail, which then—

We may.

Yeah, maybe.

We may. But we Do you think we're going to see more retail closures?

We may.

We may not.

See, this is the thing.

I don't necessarily think that, you know, we can just say, oh, there's too much square footage in retail. I think the problem is we're not using the square footage that we have in a way that is compelling to consumers. We are still coming at this very much from the standpoint of the merchant mentality, that every square foot of space needs to be filled with product and every single one of those products needs to turn at an optimal rate. Optimal rate, and if it doesn't, then you know we have to get a new product in, right? Rather than doing something different. But but here's sort of my my thinking: I believe that every store is an is an experience store, whether you like it or not, whether whether a brand appreciates or will is willing to acknowledge it or not. Every single store is an experience store. Why? Because customers have experiences in them. And so I'll give you an example of this notion of the media value of a store. I was talking with one of my clients who is a beauty brand, one of the largest beauty brands, in fact. And I asked their chief marketing officer how many consumers a week go through their various branded storefronts around the world. And he estimated that that number was in the millions. It was something like 10 million. to 12 million consumers a week. And so I said, so tell me this, if you were to go to a Madison Avenue advertising agency and you were to ask them to put together a campaign that allowed you to reach 10 to 12 million consumers a week, but not with a 30-second Facebook video ad, not with a quarter-page ad in a magazine, but I mean like a 20-minute immersive experience where they could really get to understand your brand, your products, your corporate culture, and really start to feel a part of that culture. How much do you figure that would cost? And he stopped and he thought about it for a second. And he looked at me and he said, that would be incalculable. It would be so astronomical you couldn't even do it. And he's absolutely right, of course. But here's the thing, they are doing it. They are reaching 10 to 12 million consumers with a branded media experience, and it's taking place in their stores. The problem is they're not considering it to be a media experience, and they're not valuing it as a media experience. My argument is that those stores that those consumers are going into should be looked at as media properties and a value attributed to all of those consumer impressions, assuming they're positive, right? But even if they're negative, then the store should be impacted by that as well. But as long as we're just looking at stores by sales per square foot, sales per hour, sales per associate, gross margin, return on investment, we are going to continue to close stores and brands are going to go out of existence. And I believe for erroneous reasons.

Well, what's interesting is if you unpack a little bit of what you just said and, and, you know, Measuring and managing metrics like the ones you just rattled off, I'm gonna say are easy. And I don't mean easy to hit those numbers. I mean easy to track. That's what I mean by easy. Okay?

Mm-hmm.

And some of the things that consumers, customers, buyers now value are soft things. I'm gonna call it that for a second. And I'd love your opinion, right? Is that kind of that experience I have when I'm in that retail store, which— so, someone who's running that business or running that division, even if you have just a donut shop, it doesn't need to be a nationwide brand or a national brand or a well-known brand, right? It could just be an individual store that you may say, okay, how many people came in today? How much did we sell? What's the average sale per customer? Like those stats that you'd It's division and mathematics, right? It's math.

Sure.

But you may miss the, you know, what's the recency they come in? You know, how happy are they? And maybe some stats like net promoter scores or customer satisfaction scores or churn rates or whatever the case might be. Do you think that it's some of those soft metrics that are harder to measure that because they're not being measured that you get that false negative like you were just saying, like close the store because According to the metrics we've used for the last, I don't know, 50 or 75 years to measure whether our retail store is successful or not, hasn't changed against the things you just said, this industrial revolution and then this mobility and the web and the commerce changing and the power shifting and all those things. Wouldn't the metrics have to keep pace?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, this is exactly the point, right? I mean, we're still using, to put it bluntly, we're using metrics to measure store productivity that were devised prior to the advent of the internet.

Right.

Right. So, any logical person is going to look at that and say, well, you have to change the metrics post-internet. I mean, my God, people are buying all kinds of stuff online. So, you're absolutely right. We are accustomed to, we are trained to use these old industrial metrics to measure a post-digital retail landscape. And things like Net Promoter Score are integral to measuring the value of a store. So my argument is that the true productivity of a retail store is measured by taking its sales, yes, on both a 4-wall basis and whatever attributable sales you can apportion to that store based on online sales from its market area. That makes sense, sure. But you also have to add in a media value. So what is the media value? Well, this is where it takes some work. Number one, we know what we pay for certain pieces of media. I mean, I know what a cost per click is on Facebook. I know what a quarter-page ad costs me in the New York Times. So As an executive group, I think retailers need to sit down within their organizations and say, okay, what is a positive in-store impression worth? What can we at least as an executive team agree upon? Is it worth 5 times a Facebook impression? Is it worth 10 times an Instagram impression? We know the cost of those things. So let's just ballpark at least for our own edification. What the value of one consumer impression is in our stores. Then, we know how many consumers go through our stores. If nothing else, we are measuring footfall. Fantastic. And the other final component is, are those impressions positive or negative? And that's a pretty easy number to get at if you're measuring Net Promoter Score. So, if you come to the end of the year and you say, guess what, we had 5 million consumers go through our stores, We've we've agreed that the value of each of those impressions is two dollars, so that's ten million dollars worth of impressions. Assuming that they were positive, if if your stores are shitty and you're delivering horrible experiences and your net promoter score is negative, then guess what? You just took ten million dollars worth of value out of that store. You know what I mean?

So.

Until we start measuring that, we're going to continue to close the wrong stores because I've been in small stores that brands operate that have delivered phenomenal experiences. And they are great brand ambassadors for the brand. I've also been in flagships on the Champs-Élysées, on Fifth Avenue, and they are crap. They deliver lousy experiences. But if all you're looking at is sales within the 4 walls. You're going to keep that flagship store open and you're going to close that fantastic little store that deserves to stay open.

And, and I, I love everything you just said. And so how do you, how do you advise, uh, you know, an individual retailer? Like, I'm just gonna pick, like, you know, my little local coffee shop Yeah. You know, donuts and like croissants and coffee. It literally is 2 doors down from a Starbucks. And they were there, you know, they've been there forever and Starbucks showed up. But there's still a line out the door for the coffee shop. And there's a line out the door for Starbucks. So, you know, did one pull from the other? Does one help the other? I don't know. Right. But they've been able to coexist literally 2 doors down from each other. And I was talking to the owner one day and I said, look, it's like I come in on Sundays, but wouldn't it be great if I had an office to go to and I had a staff meeting, let's say on Wednesdays, that you got me to come in on Wednesdays to buy something to take to the office? If you could get everybody to come in just one more day, that would potentially double your sales. You don't need to take everything away. And we had this conversation and it was about the experience that You know, how could you get someone to say, I want to come in one day more into your little donut shop? So, what I always worry about is the things we're talking about from a scale perspective, from a, I have one store, I have 2 stores, I want to— I have one store, I want to have 5 stores, or I have 5 stores, I want to have 20 stores, versus just the big guys that have very different problems. So, do you give different advice based on, you know, I have one, you know, like let's say I have less than, you know, 3 locations. Is there a big difference when they get to 4 or 5 locations? Is there something that, you know, it really changes significantly?

The difference, the only difference to be quite honest with you is in the ability to execute. And I'll tell you why I say that because we dispense the same prescription from a strategic standpoint for virtually every single client that we deal with. And that doesn't matter whether they're a retailer, a manufacturer, a bank, an insurance company, or a chain of convenience stores. What we have found through research, and when I was writing Reengineering Retail, I was really intrigued by this disconnect between the industry, the retail industry, which has been talking nonstop for the last decade about customer experiences and the irrefutable fact that we as consumers just simply do not have a lot of really remarkable customer experiences. So, I thought, how can the industry be talking about this nonstop but we as consumers don't— we're not seeing these experiences turn up in the marketplace? And so, what I started to try and dive into is what is a remarkable customer experience? We use that term a lot, but what does it really mean? And so, I looked at companies that are widely regarded across various categories as being the purveyors of remarkable experiences, whether it was hospitality, food and beverage, retail, entertainment, you name it. And what I came down to after loads of research is that there are basically 5 common attributes in any remarkable experience. And it goes something like this. There is usually an element of surprise involved. There's something about the experience that we as the customer did not expect to encounter that is pleasant, that is pleasurable. The next element is there's something unique about it, that that coffee shop tends to do things a little differently than the coffee shop down the street. And that's why I like going to them because it's unique, it's different. The next piece is there's a personalization factor. It's that they know me there or they customize my product or they give me personal service, but there's something personalized about it. The 4th element was engagement. Brands that deliver great remarkable experiences tend to just engage consumers more deeply from an emotional, a cognitive, a sensory standpoint, but the consumer is more vested in the experience somehow. And then the last element is the repeatability. It's the ability of the brand, use Ritz-Carlton as a great example, the ability of a brand to take that that experiential structure and execute it perfectly time and time and time again across all of their various properties. So, in essence, what I'm saying, I guess, Tiffany, is that the first 4 elements are things that would apply to any business regardless of whether you're the coffee shop down the street or whether you're Macy's. Those 4 elements of remarkable customer experience are ironclad. And when we think back to great experiences that we've had, we'll usually find that those pillars were in place. The one that is kind of the wild card and really can become more difficult with scale is the repeatability factor. If you're a small one-shop independent shop on Main Street and you're the owner and you spend 60 hours a week in that store, well, you know what? It's going to be— your experience will probably be executed pretty well. But if you grow that to 10 stores, now all of a sudden, the owner can only be in one store every other couple of days. Then, that experience tends to get watered down. It becomes much, much more difficult to execute perfectly. So, that's the challenge. It's not the experience design. It's the execution across scale.

Yeah. And I think you nailed it. I think that's a great way to frame it up. You know, one question I got literally the other day, which made me stop and pause for a second before I answered. And so, I'm going to ask you because I'd love to hear what you would say is, you know, as people race towards this customer experience, quote unquote, being this new battleground and everyone's talking about it, you know, made the nomenclature, the C-suite cares. There's all these stats and research about how much it will help you grow, grow faster, more profitably, more loyalty, da da da da. Right? Lots of reasons why it's important. But if you say, let's go back to those 5, that what happens when it starts to become the experience, quote unquote, starts to become a commodity, meaning like, wow, like everyone stepped up their experience game. I'm not saying it's going to happen. Let's just— but we're playing this out. If everybody, you know, if it started to become more commonplace, what would be the differentiation at that point? Right? Because if it's not price, if it's not quality of product, if it's not experience and you say, wow, I could argue that between Starbucks and 2 doors down my little local coffee shop, they nail on all 4 of those. Let's say they nail on all 5 of them. And sometimes when I walk up, it could just be whose line is shorter. Like, you know what I mean? Like it could be something that easy, that basic. Right.

We make decisions on practical Yeah.

And so, put that aside. But do you think that customer experience will ever become commonplace in those 4 elements? Forget the 5th scale one, right? Because that is definitely unique, of course.

Sure. You know, I think the simple answer is no. And the reason I say that is this. I mean, you could make the same argument for manufacturing. You could say, well, there was a time when having a really great product was important, but we've reached a point now where every product is great. And so, there's nowhere to go from here. Everything is awesome. Well, but that's not true because there is always a new idea. There is always a new innovation. There is always a new technology that moves the ball forward. and moves the experience of a product forward. So, in the same sense, I think that to believe that we're going to hit this point where, oh my gosh, every experience is perfect and it's awesome, and so there's no way I can compete anymore on experience because all my competitors are great too, is basically saying the— it's basically calling the end of creativity, right? Because as long as we remain creative entities, beings, there will always be someone with an idea that takes it further, with an idea that transforms the experience, with something that we didn't expect, right? Magic, right? And that really is the magic of human innovation and invention. And to be honest with you, I don't think that we went— I don't think that experience is all of a sudden important to us as consumers. I think experience has always been important to us. I just think we went through a pretty ugly period of time in the growth of our economy where the consumption, the sheer unbridled consumption of goods became more important than the experience. And I think that, you know, ironically, I think we've hit a point where the reason that we're all focusing on experience now is because, A, consumers have far more choices than they've ever had before in the history of mankind. And, B, I think we've also hit a point where, at least in the Western world, where consumers are saying, you know what, I just don't need as much shit. You know, I want to live light. I want to be able to move if I have to move for my job. Baby boomers are sort of, you know, empty nesting and getting rid of stuff. And so, you know, I think consumers are changing. Brands are now having to step it up and they're having to get back into the experience game.

Well, this has been fantastic. I so appreciate, you know, all this great insight and, you know, the unique perspective considering, you know, you spend all your time watching and thinking about retail, the future of retail and how experience plays and how brands compete. So, it's absolutely been a pleasure having you on. I'd love to ask you one last question. Which I've started to ask my guests recently, and that is, if you could go to dinner with anybody dead or alive, or a group of people, who would it be?

Oh my goodness. If I could go to dinner with anyone dead or alive, who would it be? My goodness. You know, Well, you know, one thing I never knew, I never knew my grandfather on my mother's side, and I never knew him. And so that's, that's someone that I wouldn't mind going to dinner with and just getting to know.

There you go. It's so— it stumps everyone, you know, because, you know, we do a lot of podcasts, you get interviewed a lot, you know, people ask you kind of the same set of questions, but that one gets you to think for just a second. So thank you so much for that. I'm sure your grandfather would enjoy it. And so how can people keep in touch with you, Doug?

What's the best way to So, as a starting point, if listeners want to go to retailprofit.com, that's sort of the mothership. You can, from there, follow on Twitter @RetailProfit or on Instagram as well. We're pretty active. Podcast. We have a web series called The World in Store where we sort of capitalize on all of our various travels around the world to talk about retail. And show you great retail from all corners of the planet. And then, of course, on LinkedIn as well.

Well, great. Well, thank you so much, Doug, for spending some time with us. I appreciate it. And I hope everybody, all the listeners enjoyed it and you will follow Doug. And thank you for spending a little time with us, Doug.

Thanks for having me, Tiffany. I appreciate it.

Well, that was one of those podcasts and interviews and conversations that I I wish could have continued to go. So often when I'm traveling around the world, I get asked about the death of retail and how experience plays into the decisions that consumers make every day about the brands they choose to conduct business with and engage with. More importantly, actually become fans of and more loyal towards. And so this was just really great to spend some time with someone who is fully immersed in what's going on With retail. Doug Stephens is a great guy to follow. Both his books and his philosophy I really enjoy. So I hope you had a great time listening to our conversation today on the What's Next podcast. Please don't forget to subscribe, tell your friends, leave a review. I appreciate you spending your time with me here today.

Thank you.