Future Commerce

Phillip and Brian, AKA Clarks stan, are joined live at eTail in Boston with the Chief Marketing and Digital Officer at Clarks, Tara McRae, as she shares about what she believes the future of commerce is, what makes innovation truly meaningful, and how a company can stay relevant after 200 years.And before that, the guys review a review of The Multiplayer Brand, complete with a couple of compelling pull quotes.Bubbling Up{00:12:46} - “For a brand that's been around for nearly 200 years, we're an extremely diverse brand and we serve a very diverse audience. So for us, that can get scattered if we're not consumer-centric, if we don't have very clear consumer muses and who we're going after and how we reach those consumers.” - Tara{00:17:42} - “What's amazing about our brand is we do pull more than we push within these communities, which is exciting.” - Tara{00:21:50} - “Our number one goal isn't to try to force people to be omnichannel because a lifetime value is higher. It is to deliver the best brand experience that we possibly can, no matter what channel they want to come through, and really service them that way.” - Tara{00:28:57} - “We're really, really focused on how do we strategically embed innovation in everybody's life. It's the same thing I talk about with diversity, equity, and inclusion. You're not going to just give it to a department and go focus on that. It's baked into everybody's job description. That's how I look at innovation.” - Tara{00:32:35} - “You're actually stepping into media and having a moment in a way that doesn't make sense to the millennial. Our shoe moments are in the office or some movie, but their media moments are in Roblox and they're in Fortnite.” - Brian{00:33:53} - “I wonder sometimes if we abandon opportunities or we neglect opportunities that are inherently less measurable because the current crop of talent is so trained on focusing and doubling down on things that are measurable. But the future is not measurable because it doesn't exist yet. We can't quantify it yet.” - Phillip{00:46:39} “You need to be in the market touching and feeling it, chatting with consumers, and seeing trends. So market travel is extremely important to us.” - TaraAssociated Links:Learn more about Tara McRae and ClarksReview of The Multiplayer Brand by Jess from FireTeamGrab your copy of The Multiplayer Brand hereHave you checked out our YouTube channel yet?Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce worldListen to our other episodes of Future CommerceHave any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Everyman brands may have amazing stories, great products, and incredible people behind them, but they aren't trendy. We do tend to forget how important they are and how different life would be without them. The Everyman is always within reach, always there for us. But this wasn't everyone's favorite result when taking the Archetypes quiz.Jesse Lazarus, Orchid Bertelsen, and Kris Gösser explain why their initial reaction to the Archetypes quiz result of “The Everyman” left them less than impressed and what they’ve come to think of themselves and brands in The Everyman category since then. Not Just Ordinary{00:04:18} “To find out that you are "ordinary," if you think about it in our society, it is frowned upon to be basic, but I think what it negates is the fact that there are some things that are so universally loved and useful that of course everybody gravitates towards it. It is the fabric on which communities are woven.” - Orchid{00:06:19} “The Everyman can relate in some respect to everyone in the most basic human sense of what it means to be human, the basic necessities that we need to live, but also the basic things that we need in order to start to become more of ourselves in order to flourish.” - Orchid{00:07:50} “Brands that want to scale, that want to have longevity, that want to address a large audience or a varying marketplace, the core of that build has to be from the largest applicable perspective, and that is going to be The Everyman concept. There's a time for trendiness, for innovation, for pushing the envelope, but at a certain point when you are proving to enough of a varied audience, that has to be one tool in the kit, not the only tool.” - Jesse{00:10:32} “I've actually started to now think even more aggressively than I was prior about who are the actual people behind the brands that are building these things. And I think Archetypes overall has been interesting and helpful in that way. I've actually started to see more businesses that I think are The Everyman.” - Kris{00:14:06} “Going to Safeway or the grocery store every week is essentially my weekly Everyman journey. And you can always depend on the prices. You can depend on the products, you can depend on them solving a need for you without ever really kind of grandstanding about it.” - Kris{00:15:40} “One, if your name is synonymous with the category, that's a good indicator of an Everyman brand. And second, anything that you have on subscription because you simply cannot live without.” - Orchid{00:17:23} “In the end, you couldn't do it only as an Everyman. You have to have a mix of all of those attitudes and approaches, and brands that can effectively inhabit a majority of those things I think are the most successful that are in the market.” - JesseAssociated Links: Learn more about Jesse Lazarus and KravetLearn more about Orchid Bertelsen and Common Thread CollectiveLearn more about Kris Gösser and ShipiumCheck out other Future Commerce podcastsSubscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world!Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

This season on Decoded, brought to you by BigCommerce, we're going to break down the ways that winning brands build and launch new products, how decisions are made, how goals are set, and how an entire organization collaborates effectively to bring a new product to life.In this episode, Phillip and Aaron talk with Penny Porterfield and Kabeer Chopra about this idea of concept to cart and bringing a new product, a physical product, to life. The website, the eCommerce site, that channel is a product, too. That product is in constant management, constant revision, and constant evolution. How does a brand strike the balance of experimentation while also meeting goals for profitability and customer retention? Listen now for this and much more!Progress Over Perfection{00:05:48} - “One of the amazing privileges of having that perspective is seeing fads come and go and having seen things that become truth over long periods of time and the truisms that remain.” - Phillip{00:08:05} - “You can spend a lot of money making mistakes. So if you're working with an expert, an agency, they have a lot of experience they bring to the table and can allow you to not only get the biggest value for your money but also do it properly.” - Penny{00:24:29} - “If you are taking into account and regularly looking at your site and how it's performing and adjusting to how your customers are behaving, that's how you really build up the functionality, and then your costs are kind of contained a little bit and they're spread out over time and it allows you to kind of lean in hard, identify the critical stuff, but then grow over time as you see how customers are responding.” - Penny{01:04:47} - “Timing is so important when it comes to launching products, especially when you're a young company. One of the best pieces of advice we received early on is if you are not embarrassed of the first product that you've put in the market, you're too late.” - Kabeer{01:23:59} - “The payoff period may not be what you're expecting. Conditions in the market might be different. So one thing we've been very careful about is working with the right manufacturers whom we can place purchase orders with that allow us to take less risk, giving ourselves more breathing room and not investing everything into that one launch and hoping for success.” - Kabeer{01:28:15} - “Obviously at a certain scale, it makes sense to have a central visualization tool which we do, but more of the investment is keeping on going into more ways of looking at the data from a pure slice and dice perspective or enriching it as opposed to fancier ways of looking at it visually.” - Kabeer{01:32:26} - “The route we optimize often for removing the buyer friction, the end consumer friction for point of purchase. It's a conversion tactic. There's also removing the friction in making business decisions.” - AaronAssociated Links:Learn more about Penny Porterfield and ZaneRayLearn more about Kabeer Chopra and BurrowGrab your copy of The Multiplayer Brand hereHave you checked out our YouTube channel yet?Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce worldListen to our other episodes of Future CommerceHave any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

The holidays are upon us. Or are they? Well, the holiday merch is on display already in August. How has Black Friday/Cyber Monday evolved and what do vendors and merchants do to keep up and meet consumers where they are? The world has changed and so has the shopper experience and what they expect to experience. Listen now to hear Meghan Stabler, Senior Vice President of Marketing at BigCommerce, share key insights to how to navigate these changes and set up your brand for a winning strategy for this coming holiday season.Tickle Me Elmo{00:04:30} - “The world has changed. The shopper experience has changed. That linear thing that you talked about from an experience perspective has changed. That journey that customers go on has changed. The way that they interface, they search, they click, they like, they turn you into a buyer immediately has changed. So merchants have to change too. So now is the time, if you haven't already thought about is what is your strategy?” - Meghan{00:15:24} - “eCommerce nowadays is the mentality of all of these things coming together: the infrastructure, the platform capabilities, and then what you want to do as an eCommerce brand manager that has to be seamless to capture me in that very emotional moment of buying.” - Meghan{00:22:07} - “One of the things that I think is super important and it's not discussed too much in typical holiday shopping prep is you actually need to prep for other types of shoppers that you wouldn't normally deal with when you're typically running your promotional promos or your marketing or messaging campaigns. The type of buyer might be someone who's way outside of your ICP, but they're buying it for someone that they know is in your ICP.” - Brian{00:41:47} - “Merchants have to think global at local as well and when they think about this is just a Thanksgiving Day sale, yeah, it may be but Thanksgiving is not celebrated overseas. But at the same time, your sales are celebrated and people are going to your site to think about things.” - Meghan{00:44:08} - “Some retailers definitely have to lean more into promotion to have a clear out and to make room for inventory. And others are leaving money on the table. That's where you don't ever really get the demand curve perfectly. What I think we've seen most recently is that there were some missed forecasts and demand that have led to the industry having to lean more into promotion over the last 18 months.” - Phillip{00:47:44} - “The future of commerce is where AI is going to lead us from where I sort of surrounded it on the data side and analytics and then getting into predictive analytics and then getting into predictive changes and then making individualized journey changes.” - MeghanAssociated Links:Learn more about Meghan Stabler and BigCommerce.Grab your copy of The Multiplayer Brand hereMeet us at eTail Boston 2023Check out The Edge Summit from BloomreachHave you checked out our YouTube channel yet?Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce worldListen to our other episodes of Future CommerceHave any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

In this podcast, they discuss the interconnection between relationship status and consumer behavior, exploring how our shopping preferences are influenced by our love interests. They also touch on topics such as zine creation, branded credit cards, and building decentralized products for writers.

Brands that act as The Jester appeal not to the reason and logic center of our brains, but to the emotional center of our gut. In our personal lives and in business, we often need the reminder to not take things too seriously. Denise Foley, Vice President of eCommerce and Direct to Consumer at The Bollman Hat Company, gives us her thoughts on the role of the Jester and why we could all use more of the levity the Jester brings. Finding the Funny{00:03:36 “Just because you're in the corporate world or have an important job, we spend way too much time working to not have fun. There needs to be some sense of levity and fun in the business and the work and it just makes it better, makes it easier to kind of see the humor in things and not take yourself so seriously.” - Denise{00:05:29} “We're a manufacturer, so Bollman in and of itself, while we have a brand line under that is really the manufacturer and the umbrella brand. And we've been around for 155 years. Part of the levity we said was this was our second pandemic that we've gone through and survived and thrived through.” - Denise{00:07:42} - “There's a lot of great history, not just about Bollman the brand and the company, but the people that have built it.” - Denise{00:09:47} “One of the misconceptions I would hope that people would break from around The Jester is that having a sense of humor around the work you do or your brand doesn't mean that you're not serious about making it a success.” - DeniseAssociated Links: Learn more about Denise Foley and The Bollman Hat CompanyCheck out other Future Commerce podcastsSubscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world!Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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 SoffeAssociated Links:Learn more about Loretta SoffeGrab your copy of The Multiplayer Brand hereMeet us at eTail Boston 2023Check out The Edge Summit from BloomreachHave you checked out our YouTube channel yet?Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce worldListen to our other episodes of Future CommerceHave any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

The podcast discusses the importance of culture in shaping the future of commerce. Topics covered include the endurance and persistence of branding, the grounding experience of physical media, the role of nostalgia in a fast-paced digital world, the need for authentic experiences, and the impact of decreasing attention spans. The podcast also explores the resurgence of older media forms, the rise of niche critics in e-commerce, the concept of physical permanence in subcultures, and wide-ranging discussions on branding and childhood memories.

Consumers hold more power than ever before, brands are at the center of a moment, and generative AI is creating an opportunity for people to make bigger cultural critiques. How far can you control how your images are being used? How much does your own literacy of culture and media enlighten your understanding of the nuances of the subtext? Why does this all really matter in commerce, art, and culture? Eating its Own Tail{00:03:43} - “We've become known at Future Commerce for hosting salons, and now we have this new Future Commerce learning offering. If you are an agency operator or you're building high-performance teams in a brand, if you're a brand operator side, if you're wanting to go deeper down the rabbit hole as a brand operator on the topics of retention or new customer acquisition and learn more about things like loyalty, this is for you.” - Phillip{00:11:46} - “You see this happen in the founder ecosystem all the time. The founder actually is the brand. The founder is the product. And the things that the founder creates may or may not be good, but that's not the product. That's not why people are bandwagoning. They're bandwagoning on the founder themselves.” - Brian{00:22:17} - “Consumers hold more power than ever before. Consumers have an unprecedented amount of power in the way that brands market to them, shape the products and their offerings for the customer.” - Phillip{00:24:56} - “Hyperstition is happening in the world of commerce by people now taking a brand and making it part of their own story and fashioning it in their own liking. And when people do that in concert together, they're actually a more powerful driver of that narrative than you as a brand are on your own and can actually manifest where your brand heads as a result of this collective power through these tools and through these ways of electronic communication. “ - Brian{00:34:26} - “We're moving to this idea of the discourse being not, hey, look at what generative AI can do, but we're juxtaposing your literacy of a number of things having to... You have to be caught up in the discourse to understand the subtext.” - Phillip{00:41:49} - “All of these companies like Reddit and Quora want to prevent companies like OpenAI from training on their data because they have an unbelievable amount of human knowledge in their walled gardens, so why would they not want to capitalize on that for themselves?” - Phillip{00:49:14} - “You had cultures that would create things in the realms of science, art, literature, and mathematics. Classics that were simultaneously all occurring at the same time independent of each other. Today, that's happening in fashion and in cultural discourse and in brand.” - Phillip{00:52:00} - “We're going to use AI for the critique. We're going to use it to do a bunch of grunt work that no one wants to do. But for original art creation, we're still the center of that. Humanity has to be the one to bring the new ideas to the table.” - BrianAssociated Links:Grab your copy of The Multiplayer Brand hereHave you checked out our YouTube channel yet?Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce worldListen to our other episodes of Future CommerceHave any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

The Hero is the aspirational archetype that inspires and motivates with optimism and strength. Heroes are there for us, offering security and a reason to be better tomorrow than we are today.We've looked at the Hero before in this season of Archetypes, but not all Heroes are alike. Listen now as Ian Leslie, CMO at Industry West, shares his take on what it means to be the Hero as a person and as a brand, including some of the pressures, the positives, the negatives, and why it all matters in the scope of the broader story.Standing in the Gap{00:04:14} “There's a lot of pressure that comes with like, "I need to fix it now. It needs to be right now. It needs to work right now." I think understanding and always kind of going back to what am I solving for, and can I solve for it?” - Ian{00:06:03} “Batman is representative of something, and oftentimes he can't be in two places at once. And so he has to, just by his presence, empower Gotham to stand up for itself. That's really, I think, probably the most important part of the Hero archetype.” - Ian{00:08:22} “I joke that a brand that doesn't come with a side order of world change is kind of looked down upon these days. But I think that's important, as the Hero brand that we are, that our side order of World Change is just accessibility and availability.” - Ian{00:12:40} “I coach varsity soccer and that's something that is passed along to my soccer players and just truly when I instruct them, it's just like, "Hey, guys, this isn't because I don't trust you. It's because I'm trying to stand in the gap between you and a decision that could really change the trajectory of your life.’" - IanAssociated Links: Learn more about Ian Leslie and Industry WestCheck out other Future Commerce podcastsSubscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world!Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!