Future Commerce

What is the often-overlooked marker of body data?{00:08:55} - “The culture of commerce right now is participatory and people right now are building on each other's ideas so rapidly and in real time that they can manifest things that it used to be only a luxury brand could pull something like that off.” - Phillip{00:11:45} - “It's context collapse. This is effectively deepfaking the world, resetting how people think about things. It's artificial context.” - Brian{00:13:51} - “The strategy is literally nothing more than getting in a room with your marketing team and even with your brand team and sitting down and just doing a whiteboarding session with a million Post-its that say, "What is happening in the discourse right now?’” - Phillip{00:19:53} - “When you're going to build a system to fix a problem that you created that involves differentiating between whether someone's a human or a robot, don't build an orb for people to line up and get signed up. But you have to look evil to get press.” - Brian{00:32:04} - “Increasingly customers outside of retail are coming to us and saying they want their B2B experience to be as elegant as possible because they recognize as people that that makes their end buyers happier, probably more likely to convert and ultimately, hopefully, save them money and drive up their actual revenue.” - Michael{00:36:38} - “The really interesting change over the last 12 months alone is that we're just seeing new buyers come to the table, especially in non-retail industries, who at the executive level have needs that when you reduce them down, are just like you said, it's about helping a buyer convert and actually exchange that value with the company.” - Michael{00:43:24} - “When money is more expensive, folks are going to tighten the screws down. And what we have also seen is the brands that are doing the best are the ones who have been leaning into their loyalty offerings because, as you and I know, a loyal customer is a happy customer.” - Michael{00:50:51} - “We believe AI truly is the future and moving beyond a world of just predictive recommendations to truly a generative future that really will change the shape of the experience for both buyers and merchants.” - MichaelAssociated Links:Learn more about Michael Affronti and SalesforceAmazon Blimp articleGrab 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!

"In the future, every company is a media company." That’s hogwash, according to Tommy Walker. Tommy is all too familiar with this ideology and the pitfalls in the business of creating media and aggregating attention.Listen in to hear this insightful discussion and join the conversation.“Committed to the Bit”{00:05:03} - “Understanding the cost structure and what it takes to hire talent and all of that, without that sort of knowledge, if you don't have that currently right now, then no, not every company needs to be a media company. You're better off spending your money in ads or some other type of growth lever.” - Tommy{00:10:34} - “With my own personal brand, I wanted to do a podcast, but I didn't have the bandwidth to do it. But I would become a Serial podcast guest. If you have an infrastructure in place, then let me just be a part of that infrastructure, show up as part of that conversation, do what I do, do what I do well, and then bounce and go do my thing that's independent of all that.” - Tommy{00:14:41} - “What I had to do at that time was just a ton of research. This is it. This is the complete unsexy answer to the entire thing. It was a ton of research…constantly looking at what everybody was saying in this DTC space…” - Tommy{00:23:46} - “There are unspoken expectations that people have that they don't even know they have until you meet them and what you're doing is setting a higher bar for production and engagement that feels much more like a consumer-type experience.” - Phillip{00:28:50} - “Are you establishing those true fans? When you start to get an executive team that is looking for a quick return or has quarterly results they have to answer to that it gets way harder to say, "The long-term success of our business depends on creating things that people actually care about.’" - Brian{00:32:24} - “If we live in a participatory economy and we have multiplayer brands, brands look more like bands in the future. And that's why you have these marketers that are so good at what they do. People like Bobby Hundreds who come from local scenes. They come from a scene, and a scene fuses fashion, art, culture, entertainment, and music. It's a state of being.” - Phillip{00:40:54} - “What makes a compelling media play is when you can continue to reinvent {the reason to exist} so that you yourself stay interested in it.” - PhillipAssociated Links:Learn more about Tommy Walker and The Content StudioGrab 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 Sage brings wisdom to those who inquire and mentors those who seek guidance in a kind, calm, and steady manner. They have accumulated knowledge and experience over time and are a valuable resource for others. A brand that acts as a wise Sage can help us open our minds to wisdom and create a more equitable world. What if, as a merchant, you could go to that one place and get the support and guidance you need? What if that one place has so much experience that you can learn from them and know they are on your side? That is the layer of value Adobe adds. Listen in as Nitu Walker represents Adobe as The Sage. For The Heros and The Outlaws Alike{00:04:41} “Adobe has always been known to have very strategic partnerships. We have a huge partner ecosystem, but what we really wanted to do is provide a holistic commerce experience. And by doing so, utilizing our partnerships to create value-added integrations.” - Nitu{00:07:20} “You've built an entire ecosystem that can meet each merchant where they're at because there are different needs that different merchants have.” - Brian{00:11:01} “The Sage meets the Hero on their journey to give them advice and equip them either through knowledge or wisdom or by helping them bring other people around them for the next part of their journey. And that's kind of what you do.” - Phillip{00:13:08} “What really resonated with me about Archetypes, especially, which was why I was really excited to do this, was that we have to look at our base, our ecosystem, not as a linear one type of merchant or one type of partner or one type of provider, but that there are so many different ways that we interact with them and that everyone has their own archetype and their own way of how they think, feel, and do things.” - NituAssociated Links: Learn more about Adobe Commerce ServicesCheck out other Future Commerce podcastsSubscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of 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!

Unless you’ve been under a rock somewhere, you probably are aware of the Barbie marketing machine ahead of the major motion picture release. What does this signify as a moment in our culture and the ways culture and commerce intersect? Barbie brought some major shifts when she first showed up in our world. What will this highly-marketed film bring with it?Alicia Esposito joins Phillip for an in-depth look at Barbie: the doll, the brand, the film. All brands can learn something from this moment in time, but if we aren’t careful, we’ll learn the wrong lessons and chase some rabbit holes that just don’t make sense. There’s a lot to talk about, so get your popcorn and have a listen!Nostalgia is Power {00:04:12} - “There's cultural acceptance of certain types of media and popular media that shapes the way that we perceive the world.” - Phillip{00:05:11} - “A brand is not a logo or fonts or colors. A brand is a marker of trust of a corporation that was able to endure despite all odds, and that means that you have to remain culturally relevant. Brands pass away when the culture doesn't accept them.” - Phillip{00:06:25} - “If people see the outline of the little flippy ponytail, they're like, "Oh, yeah, Barbie." That's association, but relevance and true brand loyalty tie to a brand's ability to keep the core of what people initially love about a brand or a person, but also be able to adapt to some of the new realities of the consumer, and also accept some of the pitfalls or problematic nature of the past of the brand.” - Alicia{00:16:25} - “{Airbnb} is a really great example of a brand that doesn't necessarily have ties to the commercial product world, but really turns it into a commercial product moment through great collaborations.” - Alicia{00:27:17} - “Having this brand recall and this nostalgia does create a new vehicle for filmmakers like Greta Gerwig to kind of tap into the mainstream market and tell a really powerful story. But then it kind of goes down this rabbit hole of but if all of the funds are going towards these things and these big corporations that have all the IP already and selling all of the products, what does that leave for new stories?” - Alicia{00:29:44} - “Barbie represented a shift of the idea of children's playthings in culture, but it also represented a new monolith, a new way to see and perceive the world through this artifice of fashion, desirability, and idealistic standards.” - Phillip{00:40:12} - “We have to {see explicit brand tie-ins in the film} only because a lot of the Barbie dolls of the past did have product tie-ins. There were always some subtle or direct brand partnerships there. I’m curious to see.” - AliciaAssociated Links:Learn more about Alicia Esposito and Retail TouchPointsGrab 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!

Orchid Bertelsen has lived many lives in her journey from innovation to business ops. Ever heard of Nestlé’s digital human Cookie Coach, Ruth? Hint: She was heavily involved in the making of Ruth and its success in bridging the gap between technology and human connection. Be sure to stay tuned until the end to hear about the shifting dynamics between consumers and corporations in the digital age, the loving nature of critique, how Facebook never really died in the land of Suburbia, and in true Orchid fashion: a Scandoval reference. Threadaverse{00:12:12} - “At the heart of {the Virtual Human Cookie Coach} was how can we serve more customers through a connected and consistent experience while utilizing technology and obviously using all of that information to make the product better, to make the experience better.” - Orchid{00:14:45} - “Microsoft is so far ahead of everything and they always fail as a result. That's the problem.” - Brian{00:16:52} - “If you use technology you can infinitely have more relationships and connectivity and serve more customers than your human constraints of the nature of having one person having one conversation at a time.” - Orchid{00:23:29} - “There is an opportunity and also a watch out that a lot of those fake relationships can take up more mental space than the real relationships that you're creating.” - Orchid{00:31:03} - “Because there's a deficiency in the services that the government is providing or a frustration around that, people are looking to the private sector, and so all of those things between the rise of social media, between just asking more of corporations, I think that's where people want to engage. And that's why there is critique because there is a higher expectation of how brands and companies conduct their business.” - Orchid{00:33:20} - “Customers and fans have an unbelievable amount of power that outweighs the collective bargaining capabilities of the workforce. And I wonder if that's a fundamentally modern problem that we've never really said out loud, but we all sense to be true.” - Phillip{00:40:43} - “They had to find something novel that they were uniquely positioned to deliver on and so that's why you had the pivot from a lot of talk about the Metaverse to all of a sudden they have released a product. And I would say one of the most successful product releases in modern history. But now they've released a product that is not shiny, it is not new, it is not innovative, but it works and it works for the people in this time.” - OrchidAssociated Links:Learn more about Orchid Bertelsen and Common Thread CollectiveGrab your copy of The Multiplayer Brand hereHave you checked out our YouTube channel yet?Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world!Listen 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 Outlaw defies, disrupts, and brings change by paving their own way. They challenge established ways of thinking, by pioneering and innovating fearlessly. The Outlaw represents the world of possibility that comes when coloring outside the lines. Meet our Outlaw, TUSHY Founder Miki Agarwal, and hear how she is taking the world by [sh*t]storm and will not apologize for it.No Butts About It{00:04:52} “The more you talk about something, the less taboo it becomes, the more normalized it becomes. And that's actually the whole point is to make this be something where people aren't saying, "Did they take it too far?" - Miki{00:07:20} “I've heard you say throughout the course of this chat, "The things that we do aren't just for the sake of them. It's to open up a broader conversation.” It's not just about the thing itself. It's about what it inspires afterward.” - Brian{00:09:11} “When we show humanity, which includes humor, levity, fun, and authentic people sharing who they are through the brand, I think that has given a lot of affinity for us.” - Miki{00:10:17} “A lot of our industry, especially in trade, eCommerce trade, and digital retail trade media, try to do is they try to convince you of the validity of their argument with data and logical explanation. And very few are trying to connect with an emotional response through art and demonstration.” - Phillip{00:12:25} “The second part is can this product seemingly be an opening, a gateway to questioning everything else in our life? Can we question, "Why am I doing this in my life?" "Why am I using dry paper?" That's crazy. “What else am I doing in my life that's not actually true for me, but I'm just following the pack.’” - MikiAssociated Links: Learn more about Miki Agrawal and TUSHYCheck out other Future Commerce podcastsSubscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of 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!

In this episode, we are bringing to you a new old piece of content that is more relevant today than it has ever been as we just celebrated our 2023 edition of Visions, our annual Audio-Visual Trends report, first with a launch in Chicago at our Visions Summit at the Retail Innovation Conference and then with the launch of our multiplayer experience and our new zine, the Multiplayer Brand. Visions Volume 4 is the biggest, baddest piece of content that we have ever produced, but that makes the content we did last year that much more relevant because from the vantage point of 2023, we can see how predictions and anxieties that we had in 2022 came true or were put to rest. ‍It’s a great interview with Michael Miraflor, an incredibly prolific thinker and the Chief Brand Officer at Hannah Grey VC, and the then CEO and now President of Trade Coffee, Mike Lackman, to talk about the changing nature of work, how our roles in society are altered and our perspectives are altered by algorithmic timelines and how automation and AI are redefining all of the above. Listen now!“Google, how do I speak to a human?”“It's creating some dynamics where a much smaller number of people can drive outcomes with a much larger number of dollars. If we're not really effective at promoting financial literacy and asking some big questions about what's different looking 20 years ahead from what the last 20 years were like, then there's going to be some collateral damage in the system that I think is really bad for everybody involved.” - Mike Lackman“You can automate things to make them more efficient, but you have to know how to do it well in the first place with a certain level of agency and authority and getting your hands dirty with it.” - Michael Miraflor“Just blatantly throwing software at problems to solve problems, thinking that it's the software that overcomes the deficiencies of an impractical product or business, I think is itself inherently a challenge that we're all facing in our industry.” - Phillip Jackson“One of the most frustrating things about customer service is when you end up on the phone with a system that is trying to replicate that of a human voice, human interaction, or human way of answering questions... You don't have to try to trick me to think that you're a person because you're just not. I would rather hit a series of numbers…to get you to answer versus me interacting with this AI as if you were human.” - Michael Miraflor“You have to get a gauge on what young people are thinking as expressed by what they're wearing and what they're doing. If you can't really get a sense of that, because the dominant form of social media is encouraging the proliferation of micro trends that really aren't a reflection, but they send a smoke signal, then you might have something that's a bit problematic on your hands.” - Michael Miraflor“The interesting piece here is that when we talk about this dystopian sort of like, well, this AI future, we're all going to get pushed around this and that. The alternative to that has to be an institution with enough trust and credibility that we're willing to let them become tastemakers, editors of newspapers, curators of fashion, pairers of coffee, those kinds of things.” - Mike Lackman“There was a dark side to those things that we do see as unifying, which is they tend to have some sort of pretty strong editorial, perhaps even tyrannical authority associated with them to be able to set those standards in place. And I guess my point of jousting with you on that when we think about AI, the counterpoint to letting the system just run the algorithm unchecked is that someone has to put guardrails on that.” - Mike LackmanAssociated Links:Learn more about Michael Miraflor of Hannah Grey VCLearn morea about Mike Lackman of Trade CoffeeHave you checked out our YouTube channel yet?Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world!Listen 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!

Brian Lange sat down with visionary Brian Roemmele this week, and luckily we get to listen in on a couple of hours of their conversation! Are you an AI user in the workplace? If so, Brian Roemmele challenges you to look at AI as a tool for creativity and empowerment, rather than replacement. Don’t Throw the Baby out with the Bathwater{00:03:30} “We're not designed to be in safety literally our entire life. We should always be a little unbalanced and a little challenged. So the same is true with AI. And that challenge forces creativity.” - Brian Roemmele{00:16:40} “I also challenge you to accept the fact that you no longer have a cemented position on anything. That does not mean that you just don't have a position. It means the tree is flexible so the wind doesn't break the tree.” - Brian Roemmele{00:21:24} “They'll tell me, “Brian, you're crazy. You're a charlatan. It's just math.” I go, "That's interesting. Now, we're dealing with human language. We're dealing with the psychology of humans that created the math. That's what you're seeing here.’" - Brian Roemmele{00:30:06} “You're now going to become seven times more powerful because you're going to know how to use this technology in a way that's going to empower you to be stronger. It is not a replacement. It's a tool. The spreadsheet didn't fire the accountant. It made the accountant more powerful.” - Brian Roemmele{00:37:23} “How do you train an AI system to understand good unless it knows bad? Now you can train good and bad, but the bad has got to be in there as a reference point because it needs a contextual way to identify.” - Brian Roemmele{00:41:56} “We build a persona. We build a personality. Because that creates engagement. If you're just going to put out robotic statements and go to freaking a Google search or Wikipedia, it's not engaging. So if I'm going to have a customer-facing interface, that interface better be useful and engaging.” - Brian Roemmele{01:28:11} “That machine is actually going to be able to have a bank and understand more of how I relate to the things that I find resonance with and find wisdom in. And it's actually going to be able to relate those things back to who I am and use an even more full understanding of the things that I find to be inspiring or the things that reflect me to interact with other people and other people's extended versions of themselves, i.e. their AI component. - Brian LangeAssociated Links:Dive into more of Brian Roemmele’s workListen to our past episodes with Brian RoemmeleDid you see our VISIONS: Volume IV drop? Check it out here.Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet?Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world!Listen 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!

When a brand discovers the needs of their consumers and then provides them with that well, that is magic. For Keely Copeland, Founder of Second Chance Initiative, building a brand was about solving a problem that was bigger than her. She saw a need, she dreamed of a different way to meet that need, and then she began to build a brand that would bring hope to not just consumers, but also the women involved with the creation of their products. Listen now to this episode of Archetypes!Empty Vessel{00:04:27} “It was about how can we use commerce as a vehicle to create safe and secure jobs for women in recovery who are reentering the workforce so that they can come work in a healthy, secure environment for a few months, up to a year while they get back on their feet and then they can go back to either the career they used to have or something new altogether.” - Keely{00:07:48} “There's a tug of war of power between the brand and the consumer. And in this tug of war of power brands believe that they wield some power in the organization. In fact, what we're realizing is that consumers wield unlimited power over all of us. We are at their mercy and we adapt our businesses to their desires, not the other way around. You can't shape their needs. You can only find or discover the thing that they want from you.” - Phillip{00:10:08} “After Covid, there's a lot more alignment of priorities based on values that actually matter. I think for a long time we were trapped in junk values as a society, and when the world stopped for a few years, we got back to remembering what matters.” - Keely{00:14:39} “For every creator, I have come to believe that the emptying out is just as important as the taking in because there's no room for the new idea if your mind's already full, if you're thinking about what you have to do tomorrow and the paragraph that you want to write next or the podcast that you want to record next. And so an empty vessel is, in my mind, exclusively possibility. And it doesn't get much more optimistic than that.” - KeelyAssociated Links: Learn more about Keely Copeland and Second Chance InitiativeCheck out other Future Commerce podcastsSubscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of 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!

Have you checked out our other podcast Infinite Shelf yet? Here is a taste of our latest episode: Succession IRL. Listen in with hosts Ingrid Milman Cordy and Orchid Bertelsen and don't forget to subscribe!There comes a time when every DTC company hits the pause button and asks, “What’s next?” Cue the Patrick Bateman and Kendall Roy mergers and acquisitions quotes. If acquisition does end up being an option, when you cede power as a founder, will you be happy with what the new parent company decides to do? Will your legacy live on?Secret Sauce{00:11:11} “When we're talking about multinational corporations or larger corporations, usually you got to make sure that you've got a healthy business that you can just put your resources against in order to grow.” - Orchid{00:16:28} “There's a reason why acquisitions don't have the most fantastic reputation for succeeding post-acquisition. A lot of that is because too much emphasis is put on the acquirer to solve those problems after the fact. My advice is to have the founder or have the people who are running that DTC business think about what is that secret sauce of the company.” - Ingrid{00:17:53} “If you're a founder and you're selling, what you also have to be emotionally ready for is if the parent company starts to make strategic decisions about how to use the brand that you wouldn't necessarily agree with because it's not yours anymore. Post-acquisition is not yours anymore. That's why they paid you the money.” - Orchid{00:25:44} “With growth comes mass, more mass opportunities. You have to be more approachable, you have to be more accessible, unless you are a true luxury good.” - Orchid{00:32:03} “The people that you hire to help you be acquired, is another huge, important decision. They have to know your business and see the vision and see the purpose and be your champion just as much as the founders.” - IngridAssociated Links: Follow Infinite Shelf on InstagramWant to hear more? Check out past episodes hereLove your new co-host? Check her out on LinkedInCheck out other Future Commerce podcastsHave 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!