[DECODED] The Secret to Successful Product Development: From Data-Driven Decision Making to Intuition

This season on Decoded, brought to you by BigCommerce, we're going to break down the ways that winning brands build and launch new products, how decisions are made, how goals are set, and how an entire organization collaborates effectively to bring a new product to life.

Could a retailer be their own competition, and not necessarily in a good way, in the sense of chasing their own past a little bit and maybe not innovating and simply lightly iterating on something that worked for them maybe in a past season, in the past year or even a past decade? Join the conversation as Phillip and Aaron Sheehan sit down with Loretta Soffe, SVP of Global Retail at Assemble, to discuss this and more. Listen now!

Proactive Versus Reactive

• {00:01:52} - “The products that we click on, on a website, the things that we add to our cart are really just the tip of a very, very large iceberg of thought and care and work and design that goes into getting it into a place where not only we as consumers want to buy it, but that we even knew about the product in the first place.” - Aaron
• {00:06:38} - “If you're only listening to your existing customers, you're only listening to your existing fans, you can become actually fairly stale. And I think any kind of business that wants to evolve and grow is always looking to challenge.” - Aaron
• {00:14:02} - “When you start anchored in the customer, your decisions are going to have a little bit more longevity instead of trying to keep chasing the competition. The competition is going to be moving around like crazy, but if you put it through the filter of a customer and their wants, desires, expectations and how can you kind of continue to delight them, I think you're going to be much better served.” - Loretta Soffe
• {00:24:21} - “It's not enough to simply have good ideas or be able to articulate the good if you cannot convince and persuade and adapt it to the needs of the business and the stakeholders.” - Aaron
• {00:29:20} - “If they haven't really dug in and detailed out customer desire, behavior, life stage, and priorities, and if they're not really able to articulate that, the rest of the whole thing is going to be garbage. If you're not able to develop that level or have that level of knowledge, your product isn't going to be good enough because you don't even understand what you're going up against.” - Loretta Soffe
• {00:40:34} - “Traditional retail has been very intuition driven and not a lot of data. And eCommerce, I think suffers from the other problem. A successful retailer has to be able to blend both the data and the intuition.” - Aaron
• {00:49:15} - “If you're a brand introducing new products, you want to get a bigger share of wallet. So be conscious about not cannibalizing your own business, but adding on. And I think of it as a bigger share of wallet or a bigger piece of the closet.” - Loretta Soffe

Associated Links:

• Learn more about Loretta Soffe
• Grab your copy of The Multiplayer Brand here
• Meet us at eTail Boston 2023
• Check out The Edge Summit from Bloomreach
• Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet?
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

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