Marketing for eCommerce Businesses Done Right

Also with attribution issues, you know, iOS, 14, GDPR, Google, of course, moving everything to first party cookies, it makes it a lot harder to track those conversions, especially if they're coming through word of mouth or other channels, which also makes the apparent cost of conversion go up. For a direct consumer, this is still very difficult, very challenging. But it's nearly impossible for B2B, especially in E comm, because that adds an extra level of referral. Because when you work with referral partners, let's say like the sock company Hoop Swag, who does the personalized socks for people's faces that they were doing mostly D2C, their relationships are now driven with brands that like the Humane Society or the MBA or other partnerships where they're doing things in tandem. That's much harder to track the conversion efforts of working with partners and the same is true with affiliates. So the blessing of direct to consumer, being able to boost the posts of your top customers creates a huge, huge opportunity, but it's also a tracking nightmare. And I think it's more difficult for the big brands because they have a lot of internal sort of bureaucratic inertia.

Stanley. So hello everyone and welcome.

Hello. And my face is, you see my face really big here too, for some reason.

Yes, yes. I think it has to do with the camera. I think what we can do is to play around with, with this. I'll, I'll be the Vijay today because Floyd is on vacation. He's actually playing at some festival. He's a musician as well, Our, our video guy. So, yeah, good stuff today. So, Dean, why don't you tell us a bit about how you've got into the e commerce space at the very beginning.

Yeah. So, so just first of all, thank you, thank you for having me on and great to, great to meet you both. Valentin and Dennis. So my name is Dean McElwee. I'm currently the director for International e Commerce Strategy for the Stanley Black and Decker Company. I started off my career. Wow. It's really, really long ago. I think I started back in the old school days. I don't know if any of you remember coding in Turbo Pascal years and years and years ago. I started doing that when I was at school, so always had an affinity for computers. And then my sort of career has wound its way through the early days of online shopping back in my home country of South Africa, really about the turn of the century. I was involved in quite a bit of stuff on home shopping there, went into analytics and then spent quite a bit of time building a Commercial career really with companies like Nestle and Coca Cola. I also spent a brief stint with MasterCard which really was really about analytics. And then couple of years ago I made the move to Europe. I wanted to be a bit more central. So then I came through and joined the Kellogg company to lead their commercial e commerce operations in Europe. So spent some time with them and then the opportunity came up about a year and a half ago to join the Stanley, Black and Decker company to head up their international e commerce strategy team.

Good stuff. So you had quite an adventure and you had a variety of experiences so far. So one question that I want to address to both of you is how do you see the current e commerce landscape? So from your perspective, what's exciting and what's, let's say frightening if you look at the market right now.

Yeah. Shall I jump in first here? So as, as a big brand for us, I think what is, what is, what we are seeing at the moment is we've just come off a very good Prime Day. We've had some of the best numbers that we had on, on our, on our prime day that we believe is driven by a lot more price sensitive customers. So I think with the cost of living rising, a lot of shoppers are taking the opportunity to spend on Prime Day and that because it really offers great deals. What's concerning us a bit at the moment and it's probably less concern but just adjusting is as a business we have an omnichannel business which is big and then we have our pure play e commerce businesses. And I think for us, I think there's two quite different dynamics going on. So in our omnichannel business, the contribution from E. Com is reducing versus last year. So it's really about messaging to the broader business that this is normal, this is just adjustment as people go back to stores. And then for our e commerce business, it continues to grow. We're seeing very positive growth out of the likes of Amazon. And what we're reviewing as we go forward is how deep we're into D2C. And really you guys will know as well as I do some of the costs of acquisition have climbed quite a lot over the last sort of 12 to 18 months. So for us it's about looking at that and saying for our categories, the cost of acquisition and what that P and L looks like, we've got to be quite judicious about rolling out. You know, it's going to cost us quite a lot to acquire those shoppers. And especially for a business like ours in our category, you don't wake up on Friday morning today and suddenly decide, oh, I need a new drill. It takes you a good lot, lots of research to do that. So for us that, that life cycle of acquiring that customer and converting them is quite a bit longer than other categories. So we need to spend quite a bit on, on always on marketing and customer acquisition before we actually make a sale.

So what I'm hearing is that this is basically a recurring theme. It's around the customer acquisition cost going up and competition in this landscape. Dennis, what about yourself? So what's exciting and what's frightening you if you look at the current market conditions?

I agree with everything Dean's saying. Bigger brands, what's exciting is that there's new channels that they can leverage their existing brand awareness to do really well in. Like Tick Tock. Right? I have the number one best selling book on social media. It happens to be on Tick Tock and it's ugc. Everything we see the shift, which is exciting and scary is that ugc, which is really just another word for word of mouth or referrals or reviews or customers that already love you, if they already know about Black and Decker, then we can leverage Instagram, TikTok, these other social media channels. But the key is it's not the creative that is made by the brand itself, it's UGC but harnessed at scale and turned into ads. For example, the number one thing working on TikTok right now is Spark ads, which is literally boosting someone else's post. We look at Escape Fitness, which is a global manufacturer of equipment and they were making traditional brochure driven like brand PR agency, ad agency driven content. And instead they're working with influencers, people who are very well known in the fitness community in different areas or Olympic weightlifters, gold medalists and leveraging their content so that they can leverage their the audiences of those particular people. That's a challenge because you have the. Like that there's. It's much more difficult for big brands to, to be able to work with a larger group of people doing the creatives because they don't have the infrastructure to typically or the way they don't really think about content in this way. Right. Because the brand police will say this is not how we create content or they don't know how to work with influencers. And there's also, as Dean said, the cost of traffic is going up also with attribution issues. IOS, 14, GDPR, Google of course moving everything to first party cookies. It makes It a lot harder to track those conversions, especially if they're coming through word of mouth or other channels, which also makes the apparent cost of conversion go up. For a direct consumer, this is still very difficult, very challenging. But it's nearly impossible for B2B, especially in E. Com, because that adds an extra level of referral. Because when you work with referral partners, let's say like the sock company Hoop Swag, who does the personalized socks for people's faces that they were doing mostly D2C, their relationships are now driven with brands that like the Humane Society or the MBA or other partnerships where they're doing things in tandem. That's much harder to track the conversion efforts of working with partners and the same is true with affiliates. So the blessing of direct to consumer being able to boost the posts of your top customers creates a huge, huge opportunity. But it's also a tracking nightmare. And, and I think it's more difficult for the big brands because they have a lot of internal sort of bureaucratic inertia. So I think it's something that the smaller brands are taking advantage of, which is what we typically see when there's a shift in marketing. But I'm curious to see what happens next.

Yeah, Dennis, I think you make an interesting point. We've sort of done, it's quite interesting. We've done some great work with Naver in Korea, really on live streaming, live shopping, it's, it's such a great format when you have somebody can authentically. We used an influencer there just who can authentically talk about your brand. Especially in our categories, being able to do. Get more authentic content is, is so much more valuable because you can imagine drills, chainsaws, you know, sort of equipment that you'd use, use to do your diy. It makes a lot more sense when there's somebody there who has actually got an existing stream of, of. Of content there. So absolutely second the authentic content, but also second the second the comments about big brand brand guidelines. When you're pushing out as much content as we do, we're focused on a lot of the quantity. So doing these smaller things comparatively is a lot harder for brands to get their head around.

Sorry, go ahead.

No, no, no, please. I was about to tackle the issue of organizational inertia. It's a topic that, it's very dear to me. Not that I'm happy about it, but I wanted to ask Dean about this. You've mentioned it, Denis. And I'm also interested about the agility factor and how the things are moving within your organization. And how do you see this challenge moving forward as right now the whole arena is changing really, really fast and you need to adapt to new channels. Like Denny said about TikTok, allocating budgets in a more agile way.

Yeah, I find it challenging because we've worked with folks like Nike and Starbucks and the Golden State warriors and other bigger brands typically have tight brand control because they have an internal PR agency, they have a bunch of agencies that are working together, they have an AOR and often the big brands, they're organized by function. So there's, you know, SEO and PPC and all these different silos and, and they're not organized by customer niche. And what happens when you have a lot of influencers and a lot of people that are micro famous in their particular communities is you have niche driven content. So that requires organizing around the customer as opposed to organizing around email and SEO and landing pages and that kind of thing. So I think that's what's creating the challenge.

How do you see it?

Yeah, I think Dennis has hit the nail on the head there, hasn't he? We have an in house content studio, so we produce some of our own, most of our own video. We produce a lot of our own content, but it is really focused on functional rather than customer specific. I think a lot of businesses like ours are really geared for selling a large number of products to a small group of customers and so focusing on individual niches is really a lot harder for us. But part of our job as E commerce team leaders is to get the business to think more customer centric, get more really ingrained in what the customer wants. Because pushing out content is a process, but personalizing it is really what counts. If you look at our business, we've got two really diverse brands. We've got the Black and Decker brand, which is really our DIY brand. And that really, when you're doing content, you're doing, you know, I like to categorize it as information, education and inspiration. You're trying to get people to do DIY in their home. You contrast that with a brand like DeWalt, which is really a professional tradesperson brand. The content has to be very, very different. There it's education and information, but it's also there a lot of demonstration. You've got to demonstrate exactly what this product does for the people to buy it. So, you know, organizing around consumers and the sort of end users of your product intrinsically makes sense. It's a bit harder to do at scale and it's a journey for teams to get there.

I can ask you something because you've raised this to my interest. So you've said about making people, making the company more customer centric. And for me it's important. What are the metrics, how the company is actually measuring, let's say the level of customer centricity because it's becoming so clear that customer centricity would be. It's a topic which is hot. Let's say it's becoming a buzzword. However, when it comes to how you measure it, you see a lot of misalignment between the departments. You see that the KPIs are basically, I don't know, one silo has their own KPIs, one silo has another KPI. And at the end of the day the company journey is like this while the customer journey is being neglect. So I wanted to address this topic with you over here.

Yeah, so I think it's a journey, it's not a sprint. So what I mean by that is often what I say when I describe E commerce is I say that E commerce really shines a light on any processes or things in your business that you haven't really got a great handle on. So if you don't have a clear Persona for each and every brand and each and every shopper that you're going after, it's quite hard to therefore measure that because you're not sure exactly what you're measuring and why you're measuring and what the outcome is you're looking for. So I think what we're doing is we're tightening up on things like what our Personas, who are we actually talking to, who is our target customer that we really want to do? And then what we're doing is we're looking at various metrics and starting, you know, just really look at it from a sequencing type approach. So we're focusing very much on traffic on our websites and some of our socials, just ready to make sure that are we getting the right traffic in and the right sort of qualified traffic. And then what we're looking to develop is a sort of proxy customer lifetime value ready because that helps us focus the business and focus the resources. You know, if you think of the DIY type of business, it's a great business. We all think about things like doing a bit of diy, but the reality is you're only going to buy a drill once every three years or when it breaks, you know, they, they really. The shopping, the shopping lifetime journey there is quite long and it's more about getting people into a repertoire. And you know, the tradesperson has, he has lots of jobs to do and he's got a build construction site, he's got to work on the construction site and really go after that. So there we're looking at the customer lifetime value because the cost of acquisition may be extremely high for the tradesperson, but the spend, you know, the spend for a, for, for a trades person that they can spend €700 to €1,000 on a drill and they will stick with your draw because of the battery being unique to the drill, they will stick to that drill for four or five years. They may buy five, six drills in, in, in, in five years. So the cost of acquisition or that could be 100, €150 might be well worth it. And I think Julian just piped up there. Great comment. People want solutions and that's very much what we're also trying to move the business to is not for the drills, but for the holes and for the solutions. The broader solution is really what everybody's looking for. So is it software, is it hardware or is it content? And it's moving towards being a combination of all of those.

Yeah. I also wanted to add something because I'm completely obsessed about the customer lifetime value. As you might know, we launched a whole CVO academy. Also have Dennis there as an instructor and a lot of book authors and heavy hitters in this space. I wanted to ask you something regarding the, the customer segmentation. Are you using RFM by any chance? Or what kind of type of segments are you. Are you using when you want to measure?

Good question. Primarily rfm. But I think we also. One of the challenges for us is that if you think about our business and our product range and the usage of products, there are niche specific tools. So there's certain brands we have for auto manufacturers, there's certain brands that we have for people who do carpentry and sometimes those overlap. So there's a big, what we call demand architecture that we're sitting, then we're building behind that to stitch together all of this across the, across these brands through the CDP to actually make sure that we know what's going on. But really our RFM would be the primary method we're using. But you need to do it across the multiple brands because you'll have somebody registering on one of our sites, but they'll register across any one of the 20 brands we have.

That's right, yeah. And I also wanted to add something regarding the RFM we've been seeing lately that as the ROIs is going down. We, we made a few experiments by leveraging RFM to build lookalike audiences. I don't know if you've played around with this. I had multiple conversations with Dennis around the leveraging other ways to target to be besides the creative beside the offer and the message. It's, it's about the target itself. And I don't know if you've, if you have been playing with this type of lookalike audiences built on top of RFM se that you generate better customers.

Yeah, well, that's effectively what we have to do. If you think about our type of portfolio and the length of time that it takes between purchase occasions, lookalike audience is one of the best ways to do it. We've also got a very good idea of sequencing as well because in a brand like ours, if you've bought a drill, you're not going to buy it again, but what else are you going to buy that's adjacent to it? So we're trying to look at that behavior as well.

Dennis, what's your take on this direction on leveraging lookalike audiences? Have you seen this? Do you think this is going to become a norm in the future? Because highly. And let me put you on the screen. I'm playing a bit. Yeah. Right. So here we are. I was asking you, Dennis, if you think in the future the norm would be to have this type of bi directional approach on segmentation. On one end you have the customer behavior, on the other end you have the product assortment like what he bought and when is the highest propensity to buy again.

Yeah. There's a mistake that people are making with lookalike audiences or rfm. RFM first is based on the transactions that customers have. So of course you want to get more customers who are spending more money more frequently with you. But if you look at the nature of creating content, especially like how to content, you know, Black and Decker will maybe for their, for the consumer brand they're looking at, you know, here's, here's a contractor or here's somebody in their garage working on something. Of course you, you're going to model to find other people that are like that and create content that are like that and then shout like we talked about. But the bigger piece is word of mouth. So when you create a great brand, other people talk about that and you can't necessarily track that. You know, a lookalike audience is to say find other people that have taken this kind of action that are similar. Find other people that are similar to these other people who are in these particular RFM clusters. Right? Maybe there's like for Escape Fitness there are where they sell the fitness equipment, there are hotels and there are universities that buy bulk equipment. Right? They buy lots and lots of dumbbells opposed to one consumer that is buying just for their gym. A lookalike audience will say find other people that are also in that kind of situation, they're building a new facility. But that misses the point of the referral power that is not going to be captured with lookalikes. A lookalike audience is nothing more than the same. It's, it's the exact, the algorithm behind lookalikes is the exact same behind, you know, Amazon on people who bought this also bought that. It's the Same algorithm on TikTok where people who watch this silly video are also going to see this kind of video. It's the Same1 on YouTube where they have recommended videos. It's the same thing on Google now with paa, right? People who search for this are also searching for this kind of thing. So lookalikes are not only ad driven. Targeting look alikes are the same filter. It's the same algorithm of if there's more content than you could ever possibly consume, how do I show on Facebook on the newsfeed what's going to be next? So lookalike audiences are already inherently built into social media and built into any algorithm driven network where it's free to participate, but it's ad supported by folks like us. And so it is true RFM has been around since even before the days of direct mail. But I think using RFM and relying upon lookalikes and lookalikes are already there. So it's not like we have to leverage them. Even if you do broad targeting, for example, on Facebook it has lookalikes already built in. So I think the issue is further, not how are lookalikes and RFM built together, but how do I leverage building a brand that tracks engagement and has engagement that leads to a sale. Right? And that in RFM is all based on a particular user. That same user. I'm trying to track their clickstream, I'm trying to track their email, their, you know, first party data, their text messages, all the way through to a sale. But what happens if that user is working in their garage on some new, you know, cabinet or whatever it is and then they tell their other friends and those friends participate? That's not captured in rfm, is it? The referral power is actually more valuable, I would argue in most cases than that direct consumer journey, most companies will treat that as brand messaging and the power of the brand and reputation and you know, net promoter score and those are great. But there's, there's E Comm mostly which is around, you know, direct transactional sales, and then there's big brand, you know, super bowl ads, big TV commercials. But in the middle there's a huge gap where there's knowledge, where they're sharing how to do something, where there's working with influencers. And I think that's the biggest gap, right, connecting these brand people that are measured on how many impressions they have or how many followers they have or you know, general sentiment versus down here individual transactions. There's a big gap in the middle and I don't think general RFM or look alikes are going to tackle that.

It's also about the creative, right? I mean it's having compelling messages according to the data that you have at your disposal. Because right now, without being relevant, it doesn't matter how many times you push a message in front of a person on social media. So despite the channel, I think relevance, it trumps everything. Is this of interest to me? If it's not, then screw that, I'm gonna scroll down.

It always is a creative issue, but that doesn't really address the real question because when you look at the cape, back to the original question, the KPIs, the creative teams or video teams or what or PR teams have is quantity driven. How many posts? Right. You look at the social media we have. I want to know how about the quality of the post and does it lead to a sale? Does it like we, we set up the social analytics for red bull across 90 countries and originally it was like how many posts and the marketing managers, their compensation was based on the relative scoring against all the other countries on, you know, events. They had how many likes, how many comments. We had this weighted engagement score where comments are worth more than likes and you know, video views on YouTube versus likes on Facebook versus whatever it was. And that was a great first step. But how do you tie that into direct sales? How do you tie that into. There's a difference between having a million people each engage with you one time versus 10,000 people each engage with you 100 times. Right. The, the depth of the relationship. I'd rather have fewer people who are engaging more, who are like more hardcore customers than just like millions of views. Right. How do you measure that? Most content teams don't know how to do that.

Yeah, and this is, you Know, this is the interesting thing, certainly with our business, Dennis, is really, that's why we focus quite a bit on that professional customer, because it's a lot easier to track them, although it's harder on the acquisition side. But the value of them, you can get a few of them and they will spend 20, $30,000 a year in tools. You just can't match that with the DIY customer. It just takes a much longer time and you need to spend a lot more money to get there overall on a couple of different channels.

And that means you have to segment them besides based on rfm, based on the type of product that they are buying. And also I think an important parameter over here, it's the untapped potential. So basically it's the, the share of wallet, what, how much you could have, you could have generated from a customer from this cluster, basically that's, that's setting targets, let's say. Yeah, for, for, for this type of.

Yeah. So one of the sort of breaks for us, Valentine, is that we sort of go, how, how often do you use your tools? Do you use them X many hours a year or X many hours per week? Because that helps us differentiate from a segmentation point of view what type of customer you are and the value that you are to the business. But then it is about finding all those specific niches because you want the person to buy across the brand and buy across the range. And we'll have many, many different SKUs for specific jobs. So getting people to understand what that specific tool is and what it does and how it adds value to them is critically important to increase their value to us.

Talking about the value here, I wanted to ask you something regarding the mentality around the customer lifetime value, because we are talking about customer lifetime value optimization, which, which of course it's a process. You have to be aware about the three pillars of customer value optimization, which means what you sell, the products, what you say, the marketing and what you do, the customer experience. But I wanted to ask you, how are you making sure that the customer gets the value? Because without checking if you're actually using the tools that you're selling and if you're satisfied about them and there's no repeat purchase from that person, there's no amplification, no referral, no nothing. Because if you're pissed off because, yeah, I bought this and I don't even know how to use it or whatever, then you can't expect retention from such a customer experience, right?

No, no, no, you can't. And I think Yeah. I think this is once again about a journey, journey for us as a business. When you talk to businesses about things like customer lifetime value, especially the, especially from a financial perspective, it can seem quite abstract because people are looking at this from the point of view of a short term sale and a short term sort of transactional lens rather than a lifetime value lens. And I think it's a real journey for businesses like ours to start saying this customer is really valuable. Let's focus on these, these customers who offer a lot more to us. We're not there yet. We're trying to move towards that with a combination of both tech and various insights parts of it. But it really is a journey to get the business to reorientate around that because you're chasing numbers and you're chasing targets and Wall Street's beckoning. And when you talk about customer lifetime value and in our business, customer lifetime value can stretch quite a long time. Some of those trades guys have got tools from 20 years ago that they still have at home. So it's quite a challenge for businesses like us to move on that.

Yeah. And to also monitor it properly. Right. So where you break, where you put the threshold. I have a question for you, Dennis, regarding the changing gears a bit and moving away from the customer centricity and customer lifetime value. What do you think, where do you think the market is going when it, when it comes to acquisition? So we've been, we've been seeing that TikTok is getting it right. We've been seeing that TikTok wanted to go even more in depth in e commerce in the UK and then they, they decided, okay, scrap that. How do you see customer acquisition in E commerce in the future? And I have the same question for, for you, Dean.

Well, I'm hoping Dennis has got a crystal ball because I'm doing budgets for next year and it's quite hard.

Look, I have been surprised in the last year when TikTok became the number one visited website on the planet ahead of Google. That took me by surprise. And then in the last couple weeks in younger demographics, we've seen research that shows that more young adults, when they are searching, they're searching more on TikTok than they are in Google. And what that says to me is that the education of the consumer is what precedes the, the sale, which we've always known. And those of us that are in E comm and we rely upon our brand search terms, rely upon a lot of high intent terms, are now realizing that those are drying up not because the cost of traffic necessarily is going up or Google is making our ads go up or something like that, but because the consumers are. They're buying based on what their friends are doing and they're doing searches within the social networks. That's something that we never saw on Facebook. I remember having meetings with Facebook, the head of growth and other folks where we said that search box at the top, there were no searches ever occurring there because it was purely navigational. You type in a friend's name, you type in a location. You wouldn't type in, you know, best power drill into that search box, but you would do that on TikTok. So what that means is that discovery and acquisition actually can occur farther upstream. So most brands, they don't have the in. They're not producing informational how to, like YouTube channels, you know, going behind the scenes and like, you know, the, the reality TV kinds of things, or like podcasts, Escape Fitness, the example I referenced earlier, they're doing that. So instead of their team trying to cover every single niche, they're interviewing these other people. They're getting on podcasts, they're speaking at these other conferences and reaching out and building relationships with professional football teams, with people that are designing a new gym. And how often does that happen? Someone opens a new gym and they need to buy equipment. They're going to buy a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment. But there's not a lot of data in RFM to be able to determine when that event happens. But when someone makes that purchase, that's a lot of money, right? Just like someone buying a house, that's a lot of money. So the acquisition is contingent more upon making sure that your content is in the consideration set when people are making that decision. Even when you don't have survey data, you don't have their email address and phone number yet you can't rely upon the luxury of having this kind of data to make acquisition. And that's made very difficult for the bigger brands. And especially the higher the ticket is, the higher value the customer is, often the less data you have. So why we can talk theoretically about, you know, what kinds of things we might do on what they've told us. In a lot of these cases, there's not data to determine that. So what are you going to do? The only way to, I guess, make data is to build content with other people who already have those existing communities. That's why I love looking at Escape Fitness, where their CEO, instead of just relying upon brochures, and here's you know, every year here's our new product line coming out and relying upon suppliers and partners that are buy, you know, here's hotels or here's geographical partners. They're actually working with the top, I hate to say influencers, I guess the new word is creator. But they're working with these people who then they know their community, they know the content, they're producing stuff that is, that has grown, you know, they're based to 100,000 1 million followers and leveraging all of these partner relationships. So I think acquisition now is shifting towards how do you co create content that's so good? It doesn't look like an advertisement but it still causes people to say, you know, I'm willing to pay a 3x premium for Escape Fitness versus something I might buy on Amazon because I trust that person who runs the community who's co created content in a non sponsored way. Right, because everyone can tell it's an infomercial when it's sponsored content, but it's actually genuine legitimate content. We did this for the Golden State warriors which is the basketball team that just won the championship. And we did stuff with like Buffalo Wild Wings or not Buffalo Wild Wings, which chicken wing chain was it? We did it with. And originally every year they would give us creatives that were obviously commercials and then we had to run those in the stadium. We ran that in our email, we ran it on social, we ran it on all these different places. It didn't work, it didn't engage because it didn't feel like it was co created content. Then we started creating videos with the cheerleaders, with the announcers, with some of the players asking them, you know, what their favorite flavor was or things that was, it was obviously co created and the, the retail sales that we had, the store visits, all of those things went up and we did that with the other direct consumer, even E Com related brands that were typically sponsors or partners with the sports team and co created content. So now we have to create content at scale but together with these other partners. So it doesn't look like an ad. The whole shift to acquisition is creating content that doesn't look like ads. So what is the exact opposite of an ad? It's not obviously promotional, it has informational content. It's not filmed in what's obviously a commercial. It's filmed selfie style mobile, which most brands won't do. The brand police will say no, we can't do that. It's using other people that aren't famous.

That's great.

Production, yeah, most brands won't do that.

So what I'm hearing from you, Dennis, because that was a lot to get in the direction is mainly around migrating to content production. So outsourcing your content to creators that will make you make your content not look like an app, not your content, not even that.

Outsourcing is like, okay, instead of just paying a couple agencies, outsourcing in the.

Sense of not not producing in your company, making people produce the content in an organic, natural way so, so that you can promote stories which are there.

It's co creating content that's the key. Otherwise you might as well just pay a whole bunch of influencers to make obviously promotional content, which is what's happening right now. So the top brands on TikTok and Ecom that are making money, they are paying other influencers to make testimonial like or, you know, nature's wild berry. Right? You take this berry and anything you eat, you eat a lemon after that, it tastes sweet. Everything for the next 30 minutes tastes sweet. And they've grown through TikTok and through Instagram because they've co created content, they've shipped out free samples, whatever, everything they can do to leverage that community as opposed to trying to create their own ads or trying to create their own e commerce store. Their business is all entirely off of referral. And most brands don't know ironically how to create referral based marketing because they have to co create content, not just sponsor content. Co creating means you're creating it together with them. So a podcast is an example of co created content. Your operations has to be tied together with your marketing team. And most brands don't have the agility to be able to do that. They have a customer, care people, they have, you know, support people, they have people on social media, but none of those people are usually empowered to be able to co create content and take care of that customer.

Yeah, I'd just be fascinated, Dennis. Yeah, I often go and see how many of those hashtags TikTok made me buy it. It would be fascinating to see how much e commerce sales and general sales came off that sort of hashtag.

We can't track that yet, by the way. Attribution, it's worse than ever. Right. So mainly about attribution. We can't put our finger on it. Dean, I wanted to also ask you about the direction where E commerce is going from, from your perspective, not having the crystal ball that Dennis had as well. Yeah.

So I think, I think certainly for us, we talked about earlier in the show about the marketplaces and D2C. And certainly for us those will continue to be focuses. I think there are a couple of different platforms and specifically on marketplaces, what you're seeing around the world is a focus on some of the newer marketplaces being all about 3P fulfillment. So for brands like ours, it's building out the capability to do fulfillment on those marketplaces that we can't sell wholesale to. So that's really one of the focuses for us. And I think there's going to be a lot more of that and a lot more of that across the different parts of the business. I think some of the other things that we're seeing is a real explosion in retail media networks. So any and all of our Omnichannel retailers who can set up retail media network are doing so and spending substantially to do that, as well as quite a few of our Omnichannel customers setting up their own marketplaces on their site to offer more assortments. I think one of the more interesting things that we're seeing, and it's probably more internal, is, is a shift towards digitizing our enterprise a bit more from the B2B perspective. So there, there's some interesting things. We've been, we've been re platforming a couple of B2B platforms that, that we have. And one of the ones that we've just talked just done in India is we've just launched live streaming on B2B. So I think what, what you are seeing with B2B is sort of a, it's, it's really merging with the B2C type environment. You may say, dean, well, why, why something like live streaming or live commerce in, in a B2B environment. But for us, it really makes a ton of sense. We launch new products. We've got to communicate that to our distributors. And if you think a country like India, we've got over a thousand distributors, they're in different parts of the country, we can't bring them all together. What better way to do that in platform where they can make a purchase on the platform, they can ask questions in the chat from the person who's normally one of our staff. And then we can do incentives to place orders and drive the distribution down a lot quicker into those things. So I think that's certainly one of the things for me in the next next year or two, I think you're gonna, you're gonna see that speeding up of B2B and B2C type technologies. I think people always did see them a lot, a lot further apart than they are. And then all the other ways to drive more demand on that are also going to sort of merge together.

Agree, I second that. And I think it's this type of rigid approach that the brands used to have in a B2B perspective, it's going to become a thing of the past because it's at the end of the day it's human to human. It's not business to business or business to consumer.

Exactly. And I think, you know, one of the ones that we're working on, that which is a sort of B2B approach is we have a really high end brand based in France called Facone which supplies tools to Airbus. So one of the things about sort of interactive and direct engagement there is we're looking at ways of how can we make that brand more engaging from a digital perspective. You can imagine somebody being able to schedule a call or ask a call in real time when he's sitting in the middle of an Airbus engine and saying how do I use this tool to tighten this bolt or that bolt properly or doing the right thing? You know, that offers huge potential for a brand to drive more direct engagement and loyalty to, towards a brand. So, you know, that's just an interesting use case of how do you use the technology to, to drive a more consumer centric business model.

Really consumer centric. It's, it's clear that is one of the directions. So what I' what I've heard from these sessions for whom I'm grateful that I had you today with us, Dean and Dennis, Customer centricity co creating content, looking at the future and blending the direction between B2B and B2C. What's one question that I haven't been so inspired to ask you today, Dean or Dennis, if you have one of these, I'm sure that we have plenty of this for sure.

I have one question. Why aren't more brands on YouTube and what's preventing them from being on YouTube? Because if we, if we have, you know, SEO and PPC as a major channel and bidding on keywords and those are working really well. YouTube is the second largest social network and I don't, I see a lot of sales occurring. I saw the, see a lot of ecom. But what is, is it because brands don't want to create the content they see it's too much of a barrier or for the same reason they don't want to do podcasts or they don't want to do on TikTok. But I think YouTube is the sleeper channel for E Comm. But the barrier is you have to produce this kind of content.

Yeah. As a brand. Dennis, I'll answer that. I think it's about perspective really. I think brands and it's once again it's a movement that brands need to move from. It's a from to really which is brands have got to move from an event based activity. So I produce a TV commercial for the super bowl to always on marketing which may be a combination of the event based activities but then there is that stream of constant creation because a lot of the, these brands are sort of sit there and you know, in previous roles that I've worked in, we'd be working on sort of content for next year, December in terms of packaging and all of those kind of things. So it tends the brands tend to have quite a long outlook focused on primarily events but they need to merge to a sort of events. Plus always on type approach.

Yeah, it's the adoption, it's, it is not there yet. But I, I, I guess YouTube, I've seen a lot of channels making it happen and they, they came and they go. But I think YouTube was an, let's say it's a, it's a black horse which indeed has this entry barrier which means being, getting more creative. And I think creativity is, is the key for, for, for future growth as the attention span is going down, as the expectations are going up. So you can get, so, I don't know, you can have so much fun by scrolling down right now and basically are competing with all these, all these creators which are many. There are more than ever. You have so many creators over there.

I think Valentin also, I think a lot of the really big brands and Dennis will know this. Quite a lot of them sort of outsource some of this content creation and I think what you'll see is you'll see a move towards more internal content creation. Having your own studio. I was in our Towson head office a couple of months ago and we are building a live set there. So we build up the bricks there when we build up the drywalls and then we can continue to keep on filming them from different angles and break them down and build them up. So having that capability live there is about, yes, it's about cost optimization but in of itself that becomes an opportunity for us because it means that we've always got the studio there, we've always got something to drill into and that flexibility then can start building the capability to do more sort of regular stuff that you need for YouTube and various other Channels. So I think as big brands sort of get to the point of saying content creation comes in house, I think it becomes a huge opportunity, opportunity for brands to do that. Because often, you know, going back to the event based thing, I will give it to the, the big gray advertising or the whatever advertising agency, they've got a set brief or a set campaign, that's how they work. Whereas this is just, you know, just ready always on.

Yeah, it's like media production. Dennis, we have a question from Julian straight at you. What are the most effective ways you've seen co creation happen and with what brands?

I like Roland, which is a music company and I happen to meet their CEO who's, who's so well known. There's a cardboard cutout that people like to take pictures of. And Roland, of course they sell through all different channels, through distributors, they self directed consumer, you can get it on Amazon. But in their studios in la, their headquarters, they have an actual music studio and they invite musicians to come jam out. I remember there I was over Christmas and they brought one of the most famous Christmas music musicians and we got to hang out with this guy Jim, I forgot his last name, he was from Cleveland. But the ability of Roland to work with musicians and other artists and be a part of the community and you know, they'll live stream and they'll give things away and they'll do those typical social media kind of things. But seeing their executives embrace social media, not because they want to be on social media, but because they want to honor their top customers and honor maybe, you know, amateur musicians that they're not trying to become, you know, a platinum recording artist. I think that's absolutely fantastic. And more brands just like what Dean's talking about, they can live stream, they can have a podcast, they can make their executives more approachable. Look at John Legere of T Mobile, right, when he was a CEO for the last few years, look at how accessible he was. He had a weekly cooking show, he would show that he was making things in his backyard. And he, and I think he was the number one reason why the brand grew so much in the last few years is they had executives that were accessible. And when the executive approves it, then you don't have all the bureaucracy of the brand police and the PR agency and the media company that says this is exactly where we're going to spend our money according to these channel allocations. You can still do that for brand created content, but we have to have co created content and also honor our top customers. And that's something that it falls between the cracks of operations and customer care and community management and the media marketing sorts of teams. It's not really directly owned by any of those. So it falls through the cracks.

Fantastic. Thanks a lot, Dennis. I like the high like how Brand Police sounds and yeah, I can second that. With that being said, we are about to wrap up. Dean, if people want to continue the conversation with you and if they want to reach out to you where they.

Can find you, LinkedIn's the best place to find me, I think from one of your posts and they'll find me there. More than happy to chat, I think. I don't have Dennis's sort of book yet. I think I'm gonna go off and go and go and buy it there because I think I spend a lot of time on TikTok, probably way too much. I need to understand the commercial side of it rather than the fun side of it.

Perfection. So I'm not gonna finish this without promoting a bit Our best event. So basically we are going to organize the largest online event around Customer Lifetime value. We have a lot of speakers over there. So mainly if you want to get yourself better at optimizing customer Lifetime Value, you're invited to register is going to be on the 22nd and 23rd of September. With that that being said, thanks a lot Dennis and Dean and may you have a fantastic weekend and all the best from Bucharest to everyone.

Thank you Dean. Thank you Valentine.