Suzy State Of Consumer Webinar 12 | The E-Shopping Revolution | With Special Guest PSFK
– Everyone this is Matt Britton, I am the CEO of Suzy. Thank you so much for joining our State of The Consumer webinar, our 12th edition called
The E-Shopping Revolution. I should be joined any second by our special guest for today, Scott Lachut from PSFK. And there he is, hey Scott. I think you’re on mute. There you go.
– Yeah. How are you? I am great and thanks for
having me, excited to be here.
– Of course, we love
all the work we’ve done with PSFK to date, a little
bit more on PSFK in a minute. But today we’re here to talk about the eCommerce
shopping revolution. Scott, even
before we get started, why don’t you just give a
little bit of background about PSFK for those who are
unfamiliar with you guys? – Yeah. So think of us as your
sort of research platform for qualitative insights
as it applies to retail, brand, and consumer experience innovation.
We’ve got our sort of membership platform where we’ve got a lot of great reports. We often partner with Suzy to
bring their data-led insights into those reports. We do custom publishing,
we host events ourselves, and we also have
a bespoke consultancy where we help out brands like
the Targets, the Samsungs, and the BMWs of the world. And if anyone is
interested in knowing more, drop me a note at scott@psfk, but otherwise, we’ll turn the attention back to the content today.
– Awesome.
And Scott, just as a side note, being in the consumer
insights, and consumer trend space, over the last six months it’s
been a wild ride (chuckles). Is there anything notable
that you can think of that’s been, I think the biggest surprise from all of these changes
amongst the consumer audience? – Yeah. I mean, I think, this is not news, but what we’re gonna be touching on today is that sort of digital acceleration of sort of the world at
this stage right now. A lot of that was already sort of in
the process of happening in various stages and levels of adoption.
But the way that I think about it is, when you have my parents,
who are in their 70s, suddenly downloading the Walmart
app to go shopping online, you know something dramatic has happened. They share an email address,
and a mobile phone (laughs), so that’s a big leap forward for them. And the world in general is just moving into
that sort of next phase. And I think for me it’s
really interesting to see how, particularly as we sort of move out of, in various ways, that sort of the shelter and home, and
businesses start to open back up, the interplay between
digital and physical, particularly in retail
is pretty fascinating.
– Absolutely, and we’re
I’m going to be talking about that a lot today. Yeah, my mother who’s also in her 70s. I was with her this past weekend, she was talking to a friend about Zoom. And just taking a step back to think that was just a niche business
brand not even that long ago, and now my mom’s talking about it like it’s a household brand, it just shows how far we’ve come in such a short period.
– Yeah, it’s pretty incredible. – So those of you who
don’t know what Suzy is or who Suzy is, we are a real-time
market research platform that works with some of
the world’s largest brands to help them make better, faster, more data-driven decisions. We have an always-on market research tool that allows brands to tap consumers, 24 hours a day for instant feedback. And we use our Suzy tool for some of the research we’re
gonna be talking about today. We conducted a study on August 27th with a sample size of 1,000 Americans. The samples are directionally
representative of US consumers working from home and
census-weighted across age, gender, ethnicity, and region. So with that, we’re gonna jump into our 12th edition of the State Of The Consumer webinar, The E-Shopping Revolution.
So according to IBM’s US retail index, the pandemic accelerated
our shift to eCommerce by five years. It did happen overnight. 76% increase in eCommerce sales in 2019. And online sales have now
grown to $ 73 billion. The Forbes 400 just came out yesterday, the 400 richest people in the world, and Jeff Bezos is
worth $50 billion more now than any human on the planet. And it’s no coincidence that
his wealth has increased the most on the 400 list because he is
focused on the eCommerce space. I love this graph from Bank of America that showed that during
eight weeks from March to April, there was a bigger jump
in e-commerce penetration as a percentage of overall retail sales than there were the 10 years before. So you could look back into the year 2009, and back in 2009, only 5.6% of
all retail sales were online. And it took 10 years ago from basically five and
a half percent to 16% and in just eight
weeks went from 16% to 27%. To me, the biggest surprise on this graph is the fact that we’re only at 27%, just over a quarter of all
retail sales are online, which means that nearly three-quarters of all retail sales are still offline.
So it shows we might not be
in the first inning anymore, but we’re just
leaving the first quarter if it was in a football game because the NFL starting tomorrow night, so I’ll use that analogy. But we are still so early on, and there’s still so much upside to be had for companies
in the eCommerce space. I thought this graph is really interesting from Bazaarvoice, which shows the year-over-year growth by category. And one thing we’ve seen
pop up during this pandemic, is consumers; A, trying to figure out
how to do things at home where services would
normally take the place of those things, but at the same time
leaning into online services to also help them bridge
the gap in their lifestyles.
And you could see that services
are up 216% as a category in terms of year-over-year
eCommerce growth. But then you have categories
like sporting goods up nearly 200%, vehicles and parts. You talk about major categories
that have been laggards in shifting to eCommerce, and the automotive space
has certainly been one. And we’re seeing a huge rush to the automotive space from consumers.
Consumers in general are
more interested in cars than they have been in quite some time because they’re more fearful
of public transportation, they’re not jumping on planes as much, and there’s a
renaissance in the auto industry. Scott, I don’t know if
you’ve seen anything either out of the auto industry or anything else pop out from this slide in terms of category. – Yeah, I mean we’re in the process of doing a bunch of research right now within the sort of auto-buying experience, particularly in the, US
it’s always been a challenge from a sort of digital
to the physical standpoint with the dealership always
having to play a role in that process, unless you’re Tesla.
But amazing to see how quickly
they’ve sort of adopted a new set of tools. Often the sort of dealer management tool is kind of bandied about. But a lot of those friction points that you typically have
to go into a dealer for, specifically around the financing, delivery of the vehicle, insurance, and all of those sorts of steps
that kind of made the process much less exciting are
now happening online in sort of record numbers, and you have a lot of people who are buying vehicles sight unseen, having them delivered to their homes, and then literally driving
away right at that stage. So it’s pretty amazing to
see how that is shifting what the physical dealer will look like sort of from here on out, and what role they’ll play
in the retail experience.
– Yep, not only are people
buying cars sight unseen being delivered to their homes, but they’re buying homes
themselves sight unseen, which shows how crazy things have gotten. Some other categories
that pop out to me here are toys and games. I think and we talked about this, during our last State Of The Consumer, about the home and how parents are looking increasingly for ways to get their kids off the screens and to engage with them. And there are several stories about people who start
their own puzzle company, or board game company, and
they can’t keep them in stock, because there’s such
demand for toys and games in the home to keep people entertained. We’ll go through many
of these other categories as we go through today’s presentation. So even brands that you wouldn’t think would gravitate towards eCommerce, are starting to do so now, because they see this wave happening in so many categories,
whether it’s automobile, especially in the food and beverage space, you have brands like Kit-Kat that are now, and a lot of companies
that are in the CPG, and food and beverage space, really just gravitate towards eCommerce, thinking that consumers
will purchase them directly.
Now some of these low
involvement categories might end up being a
little more challenging because is a consumer really
gonna go to 30 different sites to buy different things in each category, when they’re so predisposed to
going somewhere like Amazon. So, if the CPGs are
gonna get into the space if companies like Johnson &
Johnson, and Procter & Gamble, that are getting serious about their direct-to-consumer
eCommerce efforts, they’re gonna have to look
into some type of bundling to make it more convenient
for the consumer, and then there’s the whole issue
of Prime and free shipping, which we’re gonna get into. But we’re certainly seeing
brands in nearly every category started to look very seriously at the direct-to-consumer channels because some of these shifts
they don’t think are temporary, they think they’re gonna
be quite long-lasting.
We are starting to see in
certain categories and areas, this dramatic growth in eCommerce slowed down just a bit. For example, online grocery sales in June only increased 9% versus 37% in April. Part of that is that the
leap was so very large in March,
April, and even May, there wasn’t much
more growth to capture. But, make no mistake, the shift to online grocery
shopping is here to stay and we’re seeing it play
out with so many companies that are booming right now, by offering consumers the
ability to grocery shop from home without ever leaving their couch. Certain categories in the
food and beverage space have exploded and
come out of nowhere, alcohol being one of the most notable.
What’s interesting about
the beer and liquor and spirits category is, it’s a tale of two industries. You have the on-premise
business, bars, nightclubs, restaurants, which have been decimated, and that business in some months
has gone down near to zero. But at the same time,
the off-premise business, people consuming beer and
liquor in their homes has just skyrocketed. And not only has it skyrocketed, but it’s skyrocketed particularly, within the eCommerce space. A company called Drizly, for example, just recently raised $50 million based on recent growth for
alcohol eCommerce and delivery, that is a place where Amazon
has not played to date, so it creates a major opportunity. And we’re gonna see that really
as a theme throughout today, is a lot of the opportunities
that still exist in eCommerce are opportunities that Amazon
is yet to dominate, but obviously, those
categories are becoming few and far between as that
the company continues to scale.
So today we’re gonna
look at consumer habits, and product preferences to better understand
the future of eCommerce. And the presentation is gonna be in two different categories. First, habits, what are people doing? And second, products,
what are people buying? And before we go into our
first section on habits, for those of you who’ve
been on our most recent State Of Consumer webinars, you know we have a section
called Ask America, where we’ll let you, the audience, tell us what question you
want us to ask our audience, our panel, and we will have those answers at the end of today’s webinar. So the first questions for
you to vote on are as follows. Which question do you want
to see consumers answer most? One, what are the biggest challenges you’ve had with VR and AR brand experiences? That’s virtual reality
and augmented reality. Two, which brand do you miss
visiting in-store the most? Three, do you think you’ll
ever shop exclusively online? And four, for parents, do your kids, 18 and under, prefer to shop online or in-store? So for that last question, we would just ask parents of
kids that are 18 and under, so you can pick the question you most would like to
see answered by our panel.
And we will go into our first section. So, eCommerce and eShopping, one of the biggest benefits for consumers is really about endless choice. I mean, I can speak for myself in wanting to patronize stores, I live in Brooklyn, and
wanting to make sure because if anyone who’s
in a city right now, sees just the out-of-business or closing-soon signs just
rampant outside retail stores, just littering the city. And I, like many people, wanna
help these local businesses stay in business, and
the problem I often find is the things I wanna buy
aren’t there, and, with e-commerce companies, that’s a huge advantage they have against brick-and-mortar stores, is they don’t have the straps on them to limit
the inventory in their stores, so they could offer
limitless choice to consumers.
91% of online shoppers feel
they can find everything or most things online. So that issue of not being
able to find the product that you want most doesn’t exist with
shoppers when they’re online, and that’s something that I think, again, brick-and-mortar stores
have to grapple with. So we asked consumers and our panel, do you wish any brand was
more easily accessible online? And the answer that came
back first and foremost, was no specific brand.
So consumers believe that they can access any
product, any brand online. So availability, and the
issue of availability, kind of just gets knocked out as a concern for consumers so much so that now many consumers are
gravitating towards sites just to buy things that
they didn’t even know that they wanted. I thought this was interesting, on eBay, people can
purchase Cheetos that are shaped like a lobster claws.
So why would anybody
want to buy that, who knows? But you can
see that there’s bidding for the craziest things online. And many consumers who have time at home are looking for these novelty
or real specialty items. There was a baseball card that was sold by one of the best players in the game right now, Steve Trout, that went for over $3 million. So obviously not all of us
can buy that sort of stuff, I would probably just stick
to the lobster claw Cheeto, but the fact that many
consumers are home right now, they’re looking for things to buy, they’re looking for new hobbies, you’re finding this long tail of products that are being pursued by consumers. One huge beneficiary of
the shift has been Etsy.
Etsy has been a company whose stock has exploded since the pandemic. They were one of the
first online retailers to get into the mass space, the notion of selling
mass has been something that obviously would have
been foreign a year ago, now it’s a booming
multi-billion dollar industry and Etsy opened it up to its
network of product creators, and all of a sudden, sort
of had an endless inventory of mass in every type of design
and shape you can imagine, and that along with just
their very creative inventory has skyrocketed that company.
So I think the long tail in retail, the long tail in eCommerce, really has so many legs to it right now. Consumers want more
choices than ever before. If you look at the
In the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s, the retailers who did well were companies like The Gap. You’d go into The Gap and you could buy the blue
T-shirt, the gray T-shirt, and the red T-shirt, right? It was just more about value and quality, but it wasn’t about choice.
But now as consumers want to
build their brands and they want to buy products that best express themselves, they can do so. And that becomes a huge
opportunity in eCommerce, as Etsy has proved as of late. So, consumers have seen that
the traditional channels are limiting. Only 14% of shoppers believe they’ll shop online less post-crisis. So many shifts, many times when consumers have bought
products in a new category for the first time, they’ve
concluded that they’re never going back, and that is going to be problematic for so many retailers that are hoping that once the pandemic ends, they’re gonna be able to
open up their retail stores and go back to business as usual. In many categories, there just won’t be
any more business as usual. Will hardware stores be able to return? Will physical apparel
stores be able to return to the way they were prior? You look at the death
of specialty retailers, across the board, we’re
seeing one bankruptcy after the other occurs.
That may not just be a trend
that’s related to COVID, which may be a trend that was
happening for a very long time that’s now just being accelerated, and maybe the new way of
retailers having to go to market, where there’s just not gonna be that brick-and-mortar opportunity. Michaels has been another great story. I don’t know, Scott, I know
you’re a fan of Michaels, and what they’ve been doing recently, especially in the eCommerce space. – Yeah. And I mean, I think this
touches on one of the points that you made earlier
in the presentation is, A, they were uniquely
positioned to sort of pick up on all this time at home where suddenly people were
looking for things to do, had a lot of time on their hands, and had the, basically, to your point, endless selection of all
of the various, sorts of, creative projects and arts and crafts, things that you could want to do at home.
The thing that I think is that
they’re uniquely positioned to sort of capitalize on, along with any store that
sort of traditionally has operated brick-and-mortar, is that sort of inner
the connection between the two with the sort of
buy-online-pick-up-in-store option. Which again, will be something
that we touch on here, but thinking not exclusively as digital or physical sort of existing in a vacuum, but how the two sort of
work alongside one another to create a bigger,
better experience ultimately. And so I think, as we see sort of physical continue to sort of play a role, that sort of like curbside pick up is just gonna continue to be
a sort of new functionality, or just the sort of fulfillment from a store that’s gone critical as we
sort of continue forward. – Yeah, I mean we’ve seen
this popped up in our research, there’s a
term for it called BOPUIS, which is buy online pick up in store, that I learned through
one of our prior webinars, but the reason that some consumers gravitate towards the
omnichannel approach, again, a store like Michaels, obviously has the
physical store footprint, but also as evidenced by
their 300-plus percent increase in eCommerce, a
huge eCommerce presence consumers just have more
confidence in the supply chain, and their ability to get
the product delivered, and also in the event there are problems, and they wanna return, instead of just putting in the
box and shipping it back out, they know they can bring it to the store, and get that return or get that exchange.
So, that’s a benefit, and that’s why, Amazon went
and they bought Whole Foods, and that’s why I think
Amazon will continue to purchase physical
retailers for that footprint, especially in cities where consumers, again, want the
omni-channel-based approach. In terms of online shopping, we’re seeing browsing really
happened in two places. First of all, on the retail website, and that’s really what you’d expect. But second of all, on social media. Social media has become, which at first was just
a tool for engagement, and top-of-the-funnel activity, increasingly, especially as companies, like Facebook and Google, have more pressure from Wall Street to continue their growth, have become more down-funnel
tactics for brands to drive sales. Instagram, as of late, has been pushing its
eCommerce functionality, which allows consumers to see, an influencer or another
consumer posts a product, and just purchase
it’s right from their feed.
And I think you’re gonna continue to see a bigger shift occur, and this started
with content, right? Brands, for such a long time, invested so much money in their .com, and then what they started to realize is, that’s not where the eyeballs were, right? What they started to do was shift their content creation strategy to social media, so it could
reach consumers where they are. I see the same path happening right now with eCommerce where, right now, many brands are still
trying to drive consumers to their .com to drive commerce, when the reality is consumers
are spending their time on their phone, not only just
on the phone, in the feed, and when they’re in the feed, they’re looking at interesting things, and people that they care about, and that now has become the new eCommerce opportunity, which means that companies
like Facebook, Google, and even Twitter have huge upsides, and TikTok if it ever gets
out of the mess they’re in, in terms of being able to drive commerce and make brands rethink their online e-commerce
distribution strategy to be able to drive demand
based upon where consumers are.
Women are predisposed to exploring new products
on retailer sites, especially in certain
categories like apparel, which popped up in
a lot of our research. In some of the more low
involvement categories where maybe consumers are
making more quick decisions, that’s where eCommerce can play in, whether it’s accessories or products that are of a lower price point, social media becomes
much more of a powerful tactic with those categories, but we’re starting to
see it happen across the board. We know that Amazon really
is a thorn in the side of so many retailers, and has just taken out
one category by the next. One place that Amazon has
not penetrated yet has been apparel, especially on the luxury end, and now we’re starting to see
Amazon preparing to launch a luxury fashion platform. They bought a company called
ShopUp several years ago as kind of their first major foray into the fashion e-commerce space. I mean, Scott, do you think Amazon is gonna be able to enter
and dominate this category as they have so many other categories? – I mean, it’s a challenge, purely from a consumer point of view, I find the functionality
of shopping on Amazon to be a pretty terrible experience.
But despite that, obviously
given the sort of choice, price, and sort of convenience
of sort of doing so, it’s almost, in some ways
the default search engine for the way that people
will approach shopping in a lot of ways, and I
mean, this in some ways, goes back to what
you were talking about with social media, is how
distributed the sort of eCommerce sort of browsing and
shopping experiences is that you need to go
where people’s eyeballs are, and people’s eyeballs are
within the context of Amazon. I think in terms of, from what I understand
about this sort of foray, that they are giving a lot
more control over the brands in terms of how they can sort of set up the look and feel of the page, maintain a little bit more
of that sort of control over that experience, and so I think if it’s tightly curated, and easily sort of searchable or locatable within the context of the
bigger Amazon experience, then I think there’s a big
sort of role for them to play, and I guess they’re competing
against the NetApp Porters and the Farfetches, and the sort of those more
specialized sites of the world– – Like big haul, right, yeah.
Yeah, I agree, I mean,
so when you say, Amazon is not a great shopping experience, Do you, ’cause at the
same time you also said, it’s easy and there’s a lot of choice. I think what you mean is just like, it’s not a beautiful,
engaging user experience. It’s very totalitarian.
– And there’s a lot of, I mean, for me, I think they have gained the system in terms of even when you try to search for specific products,
what is returned in terms of the search results is often whatever the
Amazon algorithm chooses to sort of prioritize, whether through, I don’t wanna say people are, I don’t know, quote-unquote, if people are paying for those
sort of search results, but– – Well, they certainly are, I mean a lot is going on. I mean, Amazon’s media business is one of the fastest-growing
media businesses in the world. Amazon has also had some
antitrust rumblings lately, just about Amazon pushing consumers towards their private label products. They have hundreds of private label brands where they see a surfboard that’s selling on Amazon by
a third party manufacturer, And then they will create
that same surfboard with a slightly different design with a brand that Amazon owns, so they can keep the margins.
And that has become a big issue for the same long tails driving on Etsy, and that’s why we are seeing explosions in companies like Shopify. You look at the stock
of Shopify this year, and it’s astronomical, they’re
worth nearly $200 billion, ’cause what Shopify is doing is allowing merchants,
manufacturers, and small businesses to get off Amazon and create their .com, where they
can get up and running with their eCommerce store overnight. Again, the problem with that
is distribution and traffic. If you sell on Amazon, you have almost limitless distribution. If you open your store, yes, you can capture the customer data, yes, you can capture a bigger share of every dollar you sell, but how are you gonna get consumers there? And then that becomes a whole other issue, which is why you’re seeing brands now lean more into, Facebook.
That’s why when there was
that big boycott of big brands on Facebook, it didn’t
hurt Facebook, because they have such a long tail of small and medium
business-size advertisers, and a lot of those small and medium
Business-size advertisers are advertising to drive people
to their own Shopify site. So there’s a whole nother ecosystem that’s kind of building up. I agree with you on the luxury side. I think that, I think
it’s gonna be very hard. If I were Amazon, I actually, if I was creating a
luxury shopping platform, I wouldn’t call it Amazon, I would call it something else.
Because I think the luxury shopper still cares about where they buy things, and that’s why you don’t
see luxury stores in non-affluent areas. You see it in SoHo or the Champs Elysees, you see it in these places that matter. So I think it’s gonna be interesting to see how this, I think
it’s much more likely they create private label
brands that are slightly cheaper for more like luxury wanna-be shoppers versus the actual luxury fashion shoppers, but that I have to see, you can’t– – Yeah. And you never know to your point, as you know, so much of this is a data play for them too where it’s just like, they can build this, what people are clicking
around on, and then yeah, suck that into whatever sort
of product development aspect that they want to in many ways too.
So I think they approach
it from eCommerce, from a very business-centric
point-of-view, and I think obviously to differentiate you, one way is to think about it very much from the consumer point-of-view if you’re trying to compete with Amazon. – So yeah, the big
question I think, Scott, is going to be like, as
we go from 24% penetration to 50% penetration of eCommerce, how much of those next 26
points of market share, are gonna be Amazon, right? How much is it going to be on Shopify? How much is it going to be from new entrants or existing entrants? We’re going to talk about
Walmart in a second. Is Walmart going to finally
wake up and start to execute in this space relative to their power in brick-and-mortar retail,
or companies like Target? They’re great merchandisers
who have been run over by Amazon, and the question
is what does catching up mean? And, you know, I happen to think that the
one-click shopping Prime, you know, the limitless choices, that’s really what’s
driven Amazon’s success. I mean, I think, you know, you can’t underestimate the
power of Amazon Prime, right? And now what they’ve started
to do with building out an ecosystem where they
have the voice devices, the Echo, Alexa devices
that are in the home, they’re trying to become ubiquitous.
And now they’re getting into content, and they’re gonna start to
be able to drive commerce from their Amazon Prime streaming. So they are
surrounding the consumer, and I think other retailers are gonna have to innovate, partner acquire to really
be able to catch up talking about innovating, I mean I’ve always loved this company, and I love the founders. I know well of, Warby Parker, which is a company that
has come into a sleepy industry, the eyewear industry, and pushed out the 800-pound
gorilla, Luxottica, or not push them out, but it put pressure on them by really thinking consumer first, focusing on well-riced
high-quality products, and now really innovating
from an eCommerce standpoint, and this has proved
incredibly valuable to them amidst this pandemic. If you wear glasses and
If you haven’t tried out Warby Parker’s Online Tryout Tool, I would beg you to do so.
We hear a lot about augmented reality, and its future of it, and much of that has
been promised, and under-delivered, but in this case, that has been over-delivered to where you can actually
have a picture of your face, and try on any pair of glasses, and see exactly how they
would look and fit on you. I think this is the type
of innovation that new brands need to do if they’re really
I’m going to be able to break through, because, Scott, I agree with your point it’s such a mundane experience on Amazon, despite the convenience,
and speed they give you, but what Amazon isn’t
doing things like this, and it’s these types of
immersive experiences that drive brand love, and create loyalty, and advocacy amongst consumers. And I think more brands need
to invest in innovative ways to engage with
the consumers online. I don’t know, I see you’re
wearing glasses, Scott, are you a Warby Parker shopper,
have you ever tried this? – I asked, but I’ve
shifted my allegiances back to Sol Moscot, so I wear ’em.
And then, yeah, they’re old school, but to your point, you know, I think where Warby Parker from the get-go was really sort of thinking about how they could create
new experiences for customers. They now have the app that allows you to do your vision tests
through your mobile device, you know very early on in the process, they were doing the sort
of try-on-home meetings, which was great.
I did it once when we still had offices, and everyone sort of like came in and was trying on the various glasses. So it’s like things like that go a long way in terms of creating that sort of love for a brand, so yeah. – It’s funny, when you said, Scott, back in the day when we
used to have offices, it’s almost like last year, if I were to say to
somebody back in the day, when we used to use VCRs or fax machines. it does feel like so long ago, which is scary, and sad at the same time. This is interesting, nearly half of consumers
feel like texts from brands are helpful and they like them. Men find texts even less
intrusive than women. I would hate getting texts from brands, although now that I think about it, I bank with Bank of America and Chase, and I get texts from both of them, and I don’t necessarily
mind getting text from them, so I guess if providing utility and value, you know your credit card is due, or here’s an instant pop-up discount, I guess I can see how it breaks through, I mean, the one undeniable thing is that email marketing has
become less effective over time as so many, you know, companies that dove into
it and the breakthrough, direct messaging and text messaging have been one of the last
salvations for brands to try to reach out and
touch the consumers for sure.
So one popular opinion is that
mobile is king for eCommerce Shopping, but that’s not always the case. 63% of shoppers like to use
their desktop to browse. And even more, 68% of shoppers
like to use their desktop to buy. I am personally somebody
who’s always been comfortable with buying even like
expensive plane tickets on my mobile device,
but for many consumers, there’s still this psychological block where if they’re gonna spend
a certain amount of money, they feel it’s either less
secure or less substantive to do it on their phone, and would much rather do it on a desktop. Also to your point, Scott, it’s harder to create
those immersive experiences on a smaller screen, so I
think for both of those reasons, you know you still see the
importance of a desktop and there’s been just a
huge groundswell of interest in buying laptops and
desktop computers in our home as we’ve traveled less, you know, there was a
the time when we thought that we were going to have the
end of the laptop, right? But now everybody needs a laptop
for being on Zoom all day.
So I think it’s kind of
created a resurgence for brands after we look at their
desktop-based channels versus just focusing on mobile commerce, which we thought at one
the point before the pandemic was the all-all, and you know, there are analogies for
that with like podcasting where podcasting has seen
pressure in certain categories because people will listen to podcasts when they are commuting to
work, and now they’re not, they’re just commuting down
the steps, and as a result, there’s pressure on that. So these are all types of changes that have come out of all this. So we talked a little bit about Amazon, and what it takes to be
a winning eShopping brand, and there’s definitely
learnings coming out.
We talked about the ease and
the ubiquity of Amazon’s utilitarian, you know, no-nonsense-based approach. It gets you what you
want, exactly what you want, the quickest, cheapest way possible, it’s kind of what Amazon’s delivered, but that’s come at the expense of creating these immersive
experiences, which matter, especially if you talk
about a power, or a luxury, or automotive. Walmart, you know, and
this is a very, I think, critical announcement really
in the lifecycle of eCommerce. If you think about eCommerce
starting around the year, 1997, so about 20 years ago, a little more than 20 years ago, you had Amazon come up very
early in that life cycle, eBay was the first
big eCommerce winner and there have been so many other winners in many categories along the way, but Amazon has been the story
over the first 20 years. And we mentioned some of
the other big retailers, like Walmart, who have been
a dominant offline player, especially in Middle America, and other areas of the
country, not on the coast, and now finally, they’re
coming out with something called Walmart Plus, which
is taking on Amazon Prime with a $98 membership fee.
And I always thought Prime was
the biggest moat for Amazon. The fact that you don’t
have to pay for shipping meant that you just it’s one
less thing to think about, and so many people had Prime
that it just created such a competitive advantage. With Amazon entering the space, I think it will put pressure
on them because what, I mean, sorry, Walmart
entering this space, ’cause Walmart has so much buying power, and they have great merchandising, they have such a powerful
in-store footprint, and if we believe, Scott,
you and I both believe, that having an Omni-channel-based approach, having physical stores,
having an online presence, ultimately is what
consumers are looking for.
Well, then Walmart
really can lean into that as a competitive advantage,
layer on this Walmart Plus, and maybe they’ll finally
be able to put some pressure on Amazon, I mean, what do you think, do you think Walmart Plus has a chance? – Yeah. I mean, I don’t know that much about
the sort of nuts and bolts that are included in
that membership fee, but again, it’s that perception of value. You’re locking people in
around that membership fee, and to your point, there’s sort of one less step to take in terms of thinking
about making a purchase, you know, I mean, even in
the not-too-distant past before Amazon Prime
existed, it was always like, you’d hold things in your
cart until you had enough sort of get free shipping, and now it’s just like something
comes in, and you’re like, okay, I’m going to get that, boom, and then to your point, you know, I think the BOPUS opportunity
for Walmart or any retailer, is to think about what are
all the things that I can, you know, people have a
limited amount of time, and when you have the store
as a sort of gathering point, or draw for consumers, what can you get out of the
a way for them ahead of time, so that then what that 10, 15 minutes, whatever it is that they can
actually go into the store, and then, discover that thing that they weren’t thinking about, or try something on, there’s
just so much like added value that you can create within the
context of that experience.
You order a bunch of things
it’s there when you arrive at your Walmart, you try them on, and you decide there’s a couple
of things that you don’t want. And then the rest you take home, and that’s saving you the trip. It’s all sort of like
condensed into that one visit. And so I think for me, convenience is not always about speed. It’s about quality as
well, so the quality of time, and I think that’s a big
opportunity that Walmart has or anyone that’s sort of like leveraging that sort of offline
kind of sort of equation. – Yeah.
I was interested, and this happened back in November when Nike announced
to pull its products from Amazon. You know that is a
volume-versus-quality dilemma that they were faced with where yes, they were selling the volume
of their product on Nike. It’s funny, ’cause Apple
went the other way. Apple for a while was hesitant
to sell any of its products on Amazon because they wanted to create the brand experience. They started to get
pressure from Wall Street to drive more growth and more volume, and the place to get was
sort of a wave of the white flag in going to Amazon where Nike
kind of did the opposite. Nike is a lifestyle premium
brand that has long relied on their goalie to tap
into the culture of sports, athletes, and really,
pop culture in general.
And they saw their brand
being eroded and commoditized by being on the Amazon platform, and they decided we’re
pulling off from Amazon, we’re gonna sell direct to consumers. And now they’re doubling down, they’re continuing to
cut out retail partners. Scott, what are your thoughts on what Nike is doing in this arena? – I think they’re, I mean,
it’s a, you know, to your point, it’s a potential risk, but I think like they have a great sort of shopping product or retail product sort of already out in the marketplace. You know, one of the big pivots they made is they had sort of a
distributed app experience, they’ve all sort of tried to collapse that into one mobile experience, which adds a lot of value
as both a sort of owner of Nike products or a
fan of Nike products, as well as in the context
of that shopping experience. For them, mobile has
become sort of the gateway into the Nike universe in many ways.
So it’s both the sort of
funnel into the brand, they’ll serve you up content
and shopping recommendations based on the things that
you’ve sort of volunteered, and over time, your
interactions through the app, they now have store modes that interact with their physical retail locations enabling you to do a
lot of interesting things within the context of the store, and then it’s also a mobile
or a loyalty play as well. So your interactions within
the context of the app personalizes the experience even more, and then they reward you
with a lot of partnerships within the context of that.
They get a lot of amazing
data as a result of that, and then that allows them
to be smarter as a business, and so a lot of those digital interactions are being used to even sort of determine what local inventory is
available at certain stores, and things like that, which I think is pretty incredible. So it’ll be interesting to see, you know they’ve taken
their app technology, and even used it in the context
of one preferred partner right now, which is Footlocker. So they’re even sort of like, you know, almost putting up a walled
garden within the context of that multi-brand retailer as well, which I think is interesting too. – Yeah, if anyone has not
read the book, “Shoe Dog” yet, which is about the founding of Nike, and Phil Knight’s journey, I would highly recommend it, it’s one of the greatest
business books I’ve ever read, and couldn’t put it down,
so highly recommend it.
The other thing I’ll say about Nike is they long take
advantage of the long tail theory that we’re seeing play on Etsy right now. I mean, there are literally
hundreds of thousands of different types of Nike shoes, and now there’s a secondary
marketplaces like StockX, talk about growth in eCommerce,
peer-to-peer marketplaces, where you have 15, 16,
17-year-old kids, you know, making $100,000 a year by
selling and reselling sneakers, and Nike has put itself at the center of sneaker culture, which is the
crossroads of art, and design, and sport, and music,
all coming together, and for the Gen Z audience, it has been a huge
mover of products, and culture. So we’re gonna move into our
next section now, products, what people are buying.
But first, we’re gonna quickly go into our Ask America section once again, to see what question you want
us to ask our Suzy panel, which of these four questions
would you like answered by the end of the webinar? One, what are your favorite
types of products to buy online? Two, what are your least
favorite types of products to buy online? Three, which products do you purchase most frequently online? and four, what types of products do you wish there was a
subscription service for? Nike also recently got a
subscription service for kids, for those of you who have kids, you know their feet grow incredibly fast.
They launched in beta, a subscription service
where you pay a fixed amount of money every year, and as your kids’ little
feet continue to grow, you can just send the old ones
in, and get new ones back, and I think, you know, subscription is obviously
another huge opportunity for brands in the eCommerce space. So online right now, shoppers feel the most comfortable buying, and we talked about the
low-involvement categories, but you know, personal care products, and personal care products
have always been at the top of the list. Groceries now, it’s just
crazy how quickly groceries have become commonplace. for so long, we really
thought that consumers would be hesitant to buy groceries because they wanted to touch
and feel their produce, you know make sure they
were buying fresh stuff. They didn’t trust the quality, especially of fresh
foods getting delivered, but now this pandemic has forced consumers to purchase groceries online. They did so because they didn’t
want to risk their health by going to the supermarket
and areas where they could, they’ve quickly learned
that it is a great way to purchase groceries, and that plays right
into the hands of Amazon, who, as I mentioned, recently
purchased Whole Foods.
EShopping tactics for
replenishment are key, you know for consumable
products that you’re buying on an ongoing, regular basis. It creates a massive opportunity
for recurring revenue where these companies know that
you’re buying milk, eggs, or orange juice every three weeks, and over time, they’ll get
to know your shopping habits, make it easier for you. So whenever there’s something
that you’re replenishing, that becomes a huge eCommerce opportunity. One thing that consumers
replenish with right now, every single day for
many, including myself, it’s multiple times a day is coffee.
And now we’re starting to see
coffee subscription services pop up. I believe Starbucks will probably announce a subscription service soon, they’ve seen so much success
from their mobile ordering, they have so much first-party data, and they have such a habitual consumer, so why wouldn’t Starbucks get
into subscription games? So I think that’s something you
could probably expect to see and many other local coffee shops are starting to get
into subscription space as relates to coffee. What do you think about that, Scott? Would you subscribe to coffee? – Yeah, I mean, I think
the opportunity here, and I know you touched on it
a little bit at the beginning, when you sort of flipped
through the Kit Kat example, you have, in the case of coffee, it’s a little bit higher price point. And so you can sort of justify, you know, the shipping associated
with it, et cetera, but I think the thing that’s a subscription, in addition to that sort
of recurring revenue, is there’s an opportunity to
do a lot of interesting things around the sort of like
bundling and the unboxing of that experience.
I think a couple of
questions have popped up about what’s the emotional sort of play within the sort of eCommerce space. You know we’ve all
opened up an Amazon box, and it’s just a brown
box, and there it is, there’s your product
and a bunch of packaging that you have to throw away, but there’s so many opportunities
that are sort of present in that sort of unboxing experience.
I think there’s a whole untapped
kind of opportunity there, and a lot of brands are
thinking about sampling within the context of that
experience, adding content, you know the Nike example
you’ve just touched on, they add a lot of funds
sort of activities, they personalize that experience
a little bit for the kids as a part of that. So beyond the sort of utility
of like a recurring product coming, you know there’s so
much more added value that, it doesn’t cost a lot
for brands to sort of add to that experience as well.
– Absolutely. In terms of where shoppers feel the least comfortable buying, we see outdoor equipment
probably goes just the bulk, and you know, they can tend to be more
expensive, and apparel, and again, apparel is just all about fit.
If you look at what Warby Parker
did with the glasses space, they made sure that the consumer got the assurance that
they would get a product that would fit them,
and many consumers buying apparel, still don’t feel that they’re going to know
that whatever they buy is gonna look right, and even though yes, they can return it, it’s still a hassle. They’re still waiting to
get what they wanna wear, and I think that’s created opportunities in the apparel space,
which we’ll get into. You see this company, the
Black Tux, it says free home. Another company I thought I
threw a slide here about it, but maybe I didn’t is Rent the Runway. So is this Rent the Runway
right here, I think it is.
Yeah, it just got out of
order for some reason. But Rent the Runway is
a company that I think was well on its way to
reinventing the apparel space, especially among young
female professionals were basically for those
of you that don’t know what Rent the Runway is, it’s an apparel subscription platform where you pay anywhere
between 100 to $220 a month, and you could get three to
four garments at a time, accessories, bags, handbags
after you use them or wear them, you return them almost
like the old Netflix DVDs, and you would get new garments. If you drop off the garments
at a receptacle that they had in some of their biggest markets, you would get the
new garments the same day. Where I live in Brooklyn, the
receptacle inside of WeWork, in the mornings, had lines outside
the door of people returning, and I think this takes
away a lot of the angst that consumers have with
buying apparel online, because worst case
scenario, you get something, and it doesn’t
fit, you’re not buying it, you’re sending it back, especially in a world of
Instagram where many women think that once they’ve worn
something once or twice, and they put it on Instagram,
they can never wear it again, ’cause everyone has seen them wear it, it allowed them to play with their styles, and play that long
tail in the apparel space, and even though Rent
Retail also had a, Rent the Runway also had a retail presence that they just shut down because as a result of this, I think this company has a
lot of legs moving forward in the apparel space.
And it’s one way that I
think a company can innovate, and use subscription-based recurring revenue, in a new business model, it’s, again, Amazon-proof, their product in an industry that Amazon hasn’t entered yet. So it’ll certainly be
interesting to see where it goes. Electronics have seen a massive
boom during the pandemic, electronic hardware and
consumer electronics were on their way
to being commoditized before the pandemic. As we mentioned, most consumers
weren’t focusing on buying laptops, consumers that had
iPhones were just waiting for the new iPhone to come out, and then they would get a new one, but there wasn’t much, a lot of choice. Consumers that were on
the Android platform were buying Samsungs, they
would stick with the Galaxy. There weren’t many new entrants in the consumer
electronics hardware space, compared to let’s say 10, 15 years ago when flatscreens first became a thing. But now with work from home, we’re seeing shortages of laptops, we’re seeing companies like Logitech sell out of their webcams, we’re seeing luxury home
electronics brands, like Dyson, really explode and selling
things like hairdryers, and vacuum cleaners that
are stylish for their home, so it’s created a big resurgence in the consumer electronics space.
Companies like Sonos, more new age consumer
electronics companies have continued to grow, and hardware has made a resurgence as a result of people
investing more in the home, one way that consumers try
to upgrade their home is in the consumer electronics space. So that’s been
interesting that’s happened, and we’ve seen a lot of issues with the supply chains, not to mention the whole China trade issue that’s being driven on
a geopolitical basis, and it’ll be interesting
to see what happens in the consumer electronics
space moving forward. We talked about apparel and
also obviously the opportunity with companies like Rent the Runway. 49% of shoppers are buying
even more personal care online. Now, personal care
creates a massive opportunity, because it is largely a
lower price point product, although even luxury
personal care products are now moving off the shelves
in the eCommerce space. It is one of those repeat purchases where you’re replenishing. So it creates a big
opportunity in that space. It’s also a category, especially as you veer towards maybe the beauty side of personal care, where influencers and social
media have a huge input on the buyer’s journey, so it
creates a huge opportunity.
We have seen a massive
increase in purchasing of luxury personal care
items during the pandemic, many point to, and I
didn’t learn about this until preparing for this webinar, something called the Lipstick Effect where consumers will buy higher priced, more prestigious lipsticks. It says specifically Chanel that are used in public
versus lower price, less prestigious brands during
times of economic distress, and we saw that happen,
for example, after 9/11, and people think that maybe
it’s the Lipstick Effect combined with the Zoom Effect, but we’re seeing a resurgence in interest in luxury personal care
and luxury beauty items as a result of the pandemic. So it’s just interesting, thought you guys would
enjoy hearing about that. So direct-to-consumer personal care brands are now seizing on
consumer’s changing habits. So, you know the CPG space has long been dominated by the
big titans in the industry, whether it be a company like
L’Oreal, or Estee Lauder, or Johnson Johnson with
the Neutrogena brand, but what we’ve seen
through direct-to-consumer is a variety of new
lifestyle brands pop up, some on a subscription basis, some going direct-to-consumer
to take advantage of these changing habits
and build a company from the ground up that’s just
serving consumers directly.
So again, I think a lot of the big players in the personal care space have
their work cut out for them, but certainly see the opportunity in going direct-to-consumer. 47% of shoppers feel uncomfortable
buying furniture online without seeing it first. So the furniture is another
the area where you have that sort of fit aspect where consumers don’t
know if the furniture is gonna fit in their home, or if the couch they’re gonna
buy is gonna be comfortable. Also, these are more high-ticket items that consumers have to purchase. So this is another area where
there’s a big opportunity for innovation. You know, companies like
Ikea on the value side of the equation or companies
like William-Sonoma which owns West Elm or Pottery Barn, have big opportunities now
to enter the space. We’ve also seen companies
like Wayfair takes off more in the home and
accessories space, which again, where consumers have maybe
slightly fewer inhibitors purchase online, but furniture, obviously a huge booming item right now, again as consumers
invest more in the home, so it’ll be interesting to
see if the furniture space can make that shift to online shopping.
Wayfair, as we mentioned, exploded, their stock went up over
400% at one point this year, as consumers looked at
Wayfair is a great, easy, simple way to stylize,
personalize their home with accessories, and again, accessories are the perfect
product in this day and age, because while furniture may
give consumers hesitation to buy online, accessories in the home at that lower price point, but with the ability to
kind of upgrade your house, it’s no surprise that that
the company took off as a result of the pandemic. So now we’re gonna look ahead, we’re almost running out of time. So we talked about six trends in eShopping that we’ve kind of extracted, and then we’ll go to questions. First and foremost,
eCommerce is good for brands for the data, traditional
retail is very limiting, and what we mean by that
is that first-party data is gonna become more and more
valuable than ever before. Many of you have probably
read about the fact that third-party cookies and web targeting are slowly getting phased out of the web. You know, Apple recently
announced that they’ll no longer allow companies to
retarget based on usage of their mobile applications.
So it’s becoming harder and harder for you to target consumers online. When you engage in eCommerce, especially directly through
a platform like Shopify, you can get first-party
data, you can retarget, and build lifelong relationships
with consumers, and that’s a very big appeal
for eCommerce for brands. All-in-one is valuable
to consumers online. We’ve seen that with Amazon, give consumers value, but also give them a ton of choice, and make sure that what
they want, you have. Not mobile or desktop,
it’s 360 that’s king. Again, the pandemic has
forced many consumers to use their desktop-based devices, more so than the mobile
trend we were seeing prior, and you need to have
that presence both on mobile and desktop that are
immersive experiences and if you have a physical
retail presence, all the better. eShopping tactics for
replenishment are key. If your product of something
that is replenished, and bought on an ongoing basis, you have the opportunity
for recurring revenue that creates a big
opportunity for you to invest in this space. Buyer assurance is critical. So we’ve talked about apparel, and consumers not
feeling comfortable.
One thing Amazon has capitalized on is buyer assurance. Consumers know they can
always return things on Amazon with no problem. And now that has sort of become
the de facto expectation, lastly, disloyalty is a new normal, but it’s become a trend
that’s good for brands. Consumers are trying new things right now, so it creates an opportunity
for you to enter spaces that maybe before you were locked out of because consumers are trying new things. So we are gonna now turn it over to Abel, who’s gonna show us the answers from our Ask America segment, and then we’ll turn it over to questions. So, Abel, you wanna pop on? Abel’s one of our amazing,
hardworking people from the Suzy marketing team. So here he comes, Abel,
good to see you again. – Absolutely, the results of two
of the questions that we asked. So which brand do you miss
visiting in-store the most? So very interesting here, you know I think we talked about earlier, but apparel is still one of those things that a lot of people are
struggling with without trying.
So we saw Adidas and Nike
pop up a bunch there, and then for some other people, they miss going in-store
to Target, Walmart, and then we kind of see
clothing pop up there. – Potentially one point there. Sephora was very popular for allowing people to try
on their makeup in-store, and that was a big driver
of their in-store traffic and something that
they can’t offer right now. And then Victoria’s
Secret, I mean, you know, it just shows the dichotomy sometimes between market performance
and consumer demand, where this is a company
that has struggled from a stock perspective
and from a sales perspective, but at the same time consumers
are saying they miss it, and the nostalgia of
the Victoria’s Secret. So that’s something
that popped out to me. – Definitely, and I think here, you know, what types of products do you wish there was a subscription service for? So I think this is right in line, with what we were talking about earlier, which is there’s an increase
in people buying food, and cleaning supplies online.
We see the growth of online shopping. So interesting to see that, but also things like medicine
are starting to pop up. I know in New York City,
we have things like Capsule, which have made medicine
easy to deliver there, so interesting to see that pop up. Beverages, skin, so a lot of
things are kind of playing in that general vicinity there. – Absolutely, cool. Okay.
– Awesome, we can bump it over to Q&A, but before we do that, I’m just gonna do a quick plug here. So thank you guys all so much for joining, next week, we’re gonna
have a wonderful follow-up conversation with
Kraft Heinz, and PepsiCo, we’re gonna be diving
into how two of these brands are changing their
approach to consumer insights.
We’ll talk a little inside baseball, and kinda give you guys some view into just how some of the largest companies are dealing with things not
only like direct-to-consumer, but also the ever-shifting
nature of consumers. So check that out next week, and it should be pretty awesome. But you know, the first question
here, people are asking, so how do we get that
tactile feel from eCommerce very often consumers like
to see and feel the product before they purchase it? – Scott, any thoughts there? – I think one of the things
that we’ve sort of danced around a little bit today is I think there’s a lot of
interesting things happening with the remote use of video, either in the context of
sort of live streaming sort of push, obviously something that’s been
a little bit more widespread in the China marketplace for a while now, but something we’re
seeing happen a lot more in terms of the US market, and sort of other
markets around the world.
And then that’s a little
bit more of a one-to-many kind of contact where it’s
a little bit more social, a little bit more sort of
like a newer version of QVC. But then I think there’s
a lot of opportunities there with sort of one-on-ones in
terms of a brand representative or retailer giving these
sort of like almost remote sort of in-store service
through the context of a live stream, or
sort of in-person video, which I think is pretty huge
and a great opportunity for consumers or businesses to tap into.
And then, some of the things
that not tapped into before, which is like the Black Tux
experience, which is like, you can try on a piece before you decide, you can imagine that being sort of paired with a live sort of remote
styling session as well. And so I think there’s a lot
of opportunity there for brands to add value at various points of the sort of purchase journey. – Definitely, so another
interesting question here. So one of the concerns that
they have is that eCommerce, and the way that eCommerce is booming now, it’s leading a lot of the independents, and mom-and-pop shops
to get easily edged out. So eventually we’re gonna see that people are gonna go for what they see on the top Amazon recommended,
or the algorithm might win, or people with bigger spends
might start to edge them out. So for those smaller,
independent businesses, you know, what is your
recommendation to them? How can they play in this
Amazon-driven environment? – So I think you need to find a niche.
So, you know, who were the first 100, 250 consumers that would
wanna buy your product? How do you cater to them? How do you listen to them? How do you give them a product
that meets their needs? And build a Shopify experience,
meaning your store, don’t go on Amazon,
’cause you go on Amazon, you’re not gonna be able to
collect first-party data, so you won’t know who those people are. That’s a big issue that
a lot of companies do, they jump on Amazon, they don’t know who their consumer is, and then they can’t
create lookalike modeling, they can’t go out and expand, because Amazon’s keeping all the data. So do the hard work to
identify your audience, and create a great experience, and once you learn from that
core audience slowly build-out. But I think, you know, don’t try to make a product for everyone, try to make a product for
a very particular niche of consumer, and then go
out and expand upon it. And I think that creates the opportunity, but listen, it’s not the
same way it used to be in terms of just throwing up a shingle, and opening up a storefront, you need to be sophisticated
with the ad buying tools, and programmatic, and your
ability to be able to fulfill it, and deliver cost-effectively.
So it does take a whole new
set of skillsets right now to go out and actually
build your store in the virtual sense. – Definitely, and this question, next one is as more and more consumers are now buying online. We’ve seen there’s
been issues with sustainability and over-packaging especially with Prime, and The easy shipping of single products, maybe Scott, a question for you, but what do you think
the future will look like when it comes to sustainable packaging? – It’s a challenge, I think
the reverse logistics thing is gonna be a huge sort of aspect of this, which is ultimately how are you if you’re going into more
sustainable packaging, and certainly there’s the
biodegradable materials, the new sort of innovations
that is happening with packaging in that sense, that feels a little bit further out to me.
Whereas thinking about, you
know you have packages coming in and out on a sort of daily basis. And so thinking about either
sort of multi-use packaging that can be sort of
picked up and returned. There’s a really interesting
company called Loop, which is a subsidiary of Terracycle, which does a lot of the sort
of sustainable packaging. And they’re working within
the grocery and CPG space, sort of essentially building
refillable containers for the Haagen-Dazs of
the world, et cetera.
And they have a whole sort
of logistics piece in place where, you know, as you’re, and again, going back to that sort
of recurring revenue, as you’re finishing
packaging, that’s returned, as new stuff is coming in, the old packaging is
sanitized, and then refilled, and delivered to another consumer. And so I think that whole
sort of like refillable space is gonna be interesting. So sort of putting the onus
of packaging for the business rather than for the
consumer to deal with it.
I think there’s a huge opportunity there. – Definitely, so next
question is how do you feel businesses can better deliver
an emotional brand experience that you would traditionally
get in-store retail beyond the more functional
benefits of convenience that you get through eCommerce? – So I think, first of all, how can you bring your
friends along the journey? I think the best way to kind of bring an emotional experience for your consumer is to make it social. So is there a way where you
can shop with your friends, bring your friends along, ask your friends for feedback
on what you’re gonna try on. I think that could really
create a tight connection with the experience and the brand itself. I believe that there’s a
way to create some type of a local flavor to
whatever you’re doing, I think that’s important as well, so if there was a way when
you’re buying something online, but you know who else in your
the local market was buying it, or is there a way to
support the businesses in your local market
by buying this product, that’s another way, and then lastly, anything that’s cause-based, how can you be
social responsibility as a brand, especially in this day and age, when so many people and
organizations are in need, that’s another way
where you can give back, do something good as
well as kind of inject some type of emotional component into the online shopping experience.
– Yeah, I would just
add the community piece, which you’re sort of
hinting at there as well, with a lot of these direct
to consumer brands that, going back to your previous response, like did a lot of work building
up these small communities over time, understanding
what was relevant to them. They thrived early on in COVID because then they were able to sort of tap into that community and
provide experiences to them, whether it was wellness-related things or just education
and sort of distraction during the midst of all the crazy stuff that was going on. You know I think there’s
a lot of opportunity to bring education, product optimization, all these things that sort
of help people achieve through the context of your
exciting brand. And then on the social
shopping sort of tip, there’s a new app or sort of
service called Squad Shopping, folks should check out, it’s cool, it’s sort of like a layer on
top of an eCommerce experience that allows you to bring friends along, and do exactly what you sort of described, which is cool.
– That’s awesome. All right, final question
for you all here, but again, kind of going back to
the mom-and-pop shops, and also the in-store, physical retail, a lot of times that’s a place for people to maybe discover new products that they never would have
had exposure to otherwise. So I guess, you know, my
question to you both is, in an environment where they only have kind of the algorithm,
what’s the best way for people to discover those new types of products that they may not have even known that they were gonna go purchase in store. – I think there’s been some
really interesting stuff happening just in a very
sort of ad hoc context with store windows.
And so making that shoppable sort of first and foremost, I think is interesting. I think text is a big opportunity for any sort of small brand looking for a way to connect with consumers. You know, it’s a pull, it’s a pull rather than
a push sort of context. So people are choosing to
sort of engage with you in that way. And so if you can establish a
rapport with them through text then that can carry on into
the sort of store experience, which I think is interesting. And then, we touched on it earlier, but having some sort of a presence, probably Instagram is the one
that’s probably most important just in terms of providing a
point of view for your store, and what it is that you’re
selling is probably the one that you would wanna start
to sort of think about sort of early on. – Absolutely. – Awesome, and that’s all the questions that we have for you all.
– Great. So I want to, first of all, thank Scott, our special guest from PSFK. Scott, you’ve been, you
and the PSFK organization, have been so great to work with, especially during the pandemic, looking forward to
doing many more reports, and hopefully one day
live physical events, but in the meantime, this will just have to do
so thanks so much, Scott, for joining as always
you guys and yourself provide great insights.
So yeah. – Thanks for having me, this was great. And for anyone who wonders, my puppy was behind me
and he knocked a photo on my head, that’s the look
on my face for a moment, but hopefully, I recovered well, so thanks for bringing me along. – Awesome, and Abel thank you. And the entire Suzy marketing team for putting this together. I’m Matt Britton, CEO of Suzy,
if you have any questions for me in terms of how Suzy, our product, can help you put your finger on the pulse of today’s consumer, please do not hesitate to reach out. On behalf of the whole team, I want to thank you guys for continuing to join our State Of
The Consumer webinars, and don’t forget to join us next week as our brilliant chief
customer officer, Katie Gross, is joined by two of our
valued clients, Nick Graham, VP of Insights and Analytics
PepsiCo, and Kim Spaid, Head of Consumer Insights for
Joint Ventures at Kraft Heinz.
So be sure to register for that, but until then on behalf of
myself and the Suzy team, thank you so much for your time. Hope everyone stays safe
out there until next time, take care, everyone, bye-bye.
Why Make Yourself Crazy? 400 Strategies for a Stress-Free Life – by…pickmeupbooks.com
