Future Commerce

Monday Update #003 in time for evening commute! Billionare heiress Veronica Chou launches Everybody & Everyone, a socially-conscious fashion brand. PLUS: The Conscious Closet by Elisabeth L. Cline, and a review of INSIDERS 011. Listen now! Learn more about Climate Neutral Certification here: http://climateneutral.org Join Future Commerce and contribute to the Climate Neutral Kickstarter here.

Jump into the world of Madrona Venture Labs! Our deep dive conversation with Ishani Gujral illuminates the ins and outs of a VC Lab. The best part: she guides a fun-sized ideation session on the fly. Get ready for the worst ideas ever!

"The best marketing is when the customer doesn't know they're being marketed to" says RXBAR CMO, Victor Lee. His statement may ruffle some feathers but the truth is that great storytelling transcends marketing and becomes valuable entertainment. Episode 130 of Future Commerce covers lots of ground from the founder story of RXBAR to their broad category expansion in mass market and grocery, and how they have built tremendous brand affinity on a culture of honest, often blunt, simplicity and transparency. Future Commerce has partnered with eTail to bring our listeners exclusive content and interviews. A huge thanks to the team at eTail for providing the show with such great content and material. Main Takeaways: Phillip is joined by the CMO of RXBAR, Victor Lee as part of the Future Commerce Etail series. RXBAR has created a legacy brand with marketing that is aggressively transparent and honest. In this day and age, a brand really can't dictate to consumers who they are; consumers tell the brand who they are, but brands like RXBAR can decide for themselves. Storytelling in commerce has been skewed to mean many different things, but Victor gives us a very real and applicable definition of how to make your brand into a storyteller that matters. RXBAR's History: Some Insights About Protein Bars: RXBAR is a whole, real-food protein bar that has been around for a little over six years. It was created in Chicago by two founders, one of which was an avid CrossFit aficionado who paid attention to what he was putting into his body. The protein bar industry was booming, but most of the protein bars on the market did not live up to the promises they made when it came to their ingredients. He then took his food knowledge and created the first versions of RXBAR out of his kitchen. An Iconic Voice: How RXBAR Developed Their Messaging: Phillip asks Victor to talk a little bit about the voice and tone that RXBAR has established and how that has become iconic at this point. There was a problem with the big food industry and manufacturing industry, and RXBAR purposefully set out to not follow the negative standards being set by those industries. Having a clean label product means that you can produce a label in which your product is made with the fewest ingredients possible. One of the tones and mantras that RXBAR has held onto is the no BS Law, which can be interpreted as both the aggressive "no bullsh*t" side and the no "bad stuff" side. Radical transparency and no BS work almost as mission statements for RXBAR. Broadening Horizons: Not Just a Protein Bar Anymore: There was a recent campaign featuring Ice T that captured the radical transparency that RXBAR has come to be known for. In this day and age, a brand really can't dictate to consumers who they are; consumers tell the brand who they are. RXBAR is maintaining its tone, but they are shifting focus to the product itself and what makes it no BS. RXBAR also launched a kid's line of bars as well as a line of nut-butters this past year, bot of which maintain the guardrails set in place by the quality of the brand itself. Expanding Without Dilution: Tips from an Expert: From a CMO's perspective, how do you approach widening a product line in a way that does not dilute the brand as a whole? If a product, brand, or company is afraid of a category because that category has been around for years, then that category never innovates. There are lots of buzzwords regarding disruption and innovation, but RXBAR was able to go into a category to call out kind of what consumers need. The best part about the truth is you never have to remember it. The Keys to Success: How Victor Does It: As a CMO, or at any level, you can't treat your role or job as a role or a job, you have to be a fan of it. Victor is naturally curious about what other people are doing and why and the behaviors of such, because if he's not, then he's not thinking about his job the right way. Typically, school rewards you for being right. But life and your career reward you for taking risks. The average attention span of a human being is less than a goldfish; if Victor can't tell you something in three seconds, he loses, and he is fascinated with the psychology behind that. Misunderstood Storytelling: The Harsh Truth: Everybody says, "I want to tell a story," but then when it comes down to the creative execution of it, sometimes it's not a story, it's an ad. If you tell a good story, and you're honest and forthright about it, and you're not trying to sell something that's not marketing, that's a story. Brands should want to hear the stories of their consumers and not the other way around. If a consumer tells a brand the story of why that consumer used a product and why it was more beneficial for their life, then that is the story that needs to be told. Leaving a Legacy: Things to Strive For: The end of the whole journey of a brand is the legacy that a brand leaves behind. If tomorrow this brand did not exist would anybody notice? Legacy comes in many forms and fashions, and it can be defined in many different ways and calculated with many different formulas. How would you measure your brand's impact? Brands Mentioned in this Episode: RXBAR As always: We want to hear what our listeners think! Where you aks yourself if tomorrow this brand did not exist will anybody notice? And is that a good barometer of "did you do the right thing and did you resonate"? Did you make an impact? Did you have the all-important legacy? And does this matter? Let us know in the content section on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Linkedin. Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at info@futurecommerce.fm or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners! Retail Tech is moving fast, but Future Commerce is moving faster.

If you thought a deep-dive on supply chain couldn't be stimulating, think again. Hugh Holman, CEO at Observa, gives us a primer on what it takes to implement retail planning and forecasting. Observa is building retail compliance systems powered by AI, on-demand workforces, machine learning and machine vision - not just to enforce compliance, but to arm retailers with data to plan orders, manufacturing, demand planning. Main Takeaways: Brian is on location at Grocery Shop 2019 and is joined by Hugh Holman, the CEO and Co-Founder of Observa. Observa is breaking open the black box of real-time data that shows what is going on in a physical retail location. What are the further applications of real-time retail data? How can brands and retailers work together to create experiential shopping experiences for different groups of consumers? Hugh's Story: Experience Gained Through Technological Mastery: Hugh has spent most of his career as a technology manager; starting at a startup and soon became the CIO of Aqua Star. At Aqua Star, Hugh was placed in a role where he was in control of driving technology and technology strategy. After obtaining his MBA, Hugh moved into a different role focusing on strategy at Aqua Star that let him modernize the company and approach the market differently. Eventually he took over retail sales and was running a $400 million dollar business in the retail sector which provided the foundational experience he needed to found Observa. What is Observa?: Fixing the Black Hole of Real-Time Data: When Hugh was at Aqua Star, he noticed that there was a black hole of data in retail that did not show real-time data of what has happening in the store. You could subscribe to data sources that provide data in four week chunks, but we do not think in four week chunks in today's retail climate. At Aqua Star, Hugh was developing trade programs with large corporations and wanted a way to see if these trade deals were driving sales and boosting customer acquisition. Observa was created to give brands a way to see what the consumer sees in store, in real time. What Makes It Tick?: How Does Observa Capture Data?: Observa in actuality is a retail audit service company so they are measuring retail store execution. Observa has created a network of over 90,000 field workers called Observers that go into stores and use Observa's mobile apps to collect information on what is happening on the shelf where products are placed as well as promotions across the store. Observa processes the data and images sent in from the Observers using AI and image recognition to generate a thorough snapshot of what is happening in stores. Observa is agnostic to the data capture mechanism, so it doesn't matter where the images or data is coming from, and they are able to turn this into usable information. Getting Into the Details: What Happens With the Images? Brian asks Hugh to talk a little bit more about what happens with the images once they are received by Observa. Observa is using computer vision by using artificial intelligence to do image recognition. The intelligence and neural network within Observa's system is being trained to recognize products so that when it receives photos, it can instantaneously recognized them and categorize what is in the photos. This enables Observa to measure what is happening in stores and compare that to expectations and recognized deviations for actionable insights. Further Implications: Actionable Data Beyond the Surface: Brands can also use the data captured by Observa identify inventory problems and plan for future stock orders. Inventory data in most computers is not accurate and phantom inventory cannot be removed until you identify the problem: which Observa does. Retailers and brands always end up erring on the side of caution and will be able to do so with accurate insights if they have a true omnichannel strategy. The consumer experience today is a combination of brick-and-mortar and online experiences, and the more data you can collect on both experiences will help you make the most informed decisions. Planogram Perfection: How Orientation Can Influence Purchases: A planogram (or modular) is a design that indicates the placement of retail products on shelves in order to maximize sales. Observa's technology is giving brands the capability to measure performance directly against planograms. Planograms are used by the retailers themselves to create the ideal layout to generate the largest profit for individual stores. By getting the expectation of a store via a planogram, Observa is able to identify the problems within the store and direct change. Deeper Dives: Shaping Retail Data: Traditionally, the ability to capture data on product placement was reserved for eCommerce, but Observa is bringing those actionable insights to brick-and-mortar. Brian asks if these new data points are creating new roles in retail strategy thanks to previously unobtainable data. Observa is also taking a consultative role with retail brands because of the large amounts of data they are capturing across their entire portfolio. Traffic heat maps have been used in grocery stores for a long time, but newer mechanisms are being used to track customer segmentation. Emerging Trends: Checkout-less Payments: Retailers have started to adopt checkout-less payment solutions and Observa's data will begin to become even more valuable as purchases happen closer to the items themselves. Image recognition is an important part of checkout-less payments, and the reliance on barcodes can lead to customers making mistakes when checking out. The ability to identify the package and not just the barcode on a product provides a huge value for retailers exploring this technology. Is adding a checkout-less option a lucrative move for most retailers? Brands Vs. Retailers: Where Does the Power Lie? Brian asks Hugh who he thinks has more power when it comes to retail: the retailers themselves or consumer brands. Hugh clarifies that instead of a competition, the relationship between brands and retailers should be a partnership. There is a lot of conversation about segmentation of the market and presenting curated experiences in retail. We might see different sections in stores tailored to different people within various categories. Visions of the Future: Hugh's Predictions: Brick-and-mortar retail is growing and the consumer experience is changing along with this growth. Going forward, the retailers that pay attention to the wants and needs of the consumer and then try to implement changes that fit these wants and needs are the retailers that are going to be successful. Warby Parker and Allbirds are testing store locations and seeing what the impact of having tangible product is upon their customer base. The focus should be on understanding the consumer using data, and applying those actionable insights to both eCommerce and retail presence. Brands Mentioned in this Episode: Observa Warby Parker Allbirds As always: We want to hear what our listeners think! How can your brand use Observa's data to improve retail performance. Let us know in the content section on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Linkedin. Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at mailto:hello@futurecommerce.fm or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners!

Monday update is back! Today we OWN IT. The theme of this year's Klaviyo:BOS event was to own your channel. We chat about tools like Webflow that are shortening the path from concept to launch - giving designers , marketers, and creatives the ability to own their entire experience without a developer. Listen now!

"The intersection of content and commerce" asks the question - would you buy Cheesy Blasters while watching 30 Rock? Odds are, you would. And that's the bet that NBC/Universal is placing on investing in bringing DTC brands to their large audiences across their portfolio of original programming and content. From Goop to the Minions we go deep on the opportunity at hand with Evan Moore. Listen now! Main Takeaways: In today's episode, Brian and Phillip are joined by the Vice President of Content and eCommerce at NBCUniversal, Evan Moore. Over-personalization has started to run rampant, so how do you battle against too much personalization? NBCUniversal has taken a content-first strategy across its vast portfolio to create meaningful marketplaces and platforms for different verticals. Empowered creatives are becoming the driving force in the commerce powerhouses of the future. A Brief History of Evan: The Intersection of Content and Commerce: For the past 11-12 years, Evan has worked mainly in a digital product capacity for several different companies (e.g. Ticketmaster, Goop, Beautycounter) all at the intersection of content and commerce. At Goop, Evan had the opportunity to put the commerce and content strategy into the world and drive a lot of massive commerce scale using Goop's strong content. NBCUniversal was trying to do something similar so they hired Evan to execute the same strategies at scale across their entire content portfolio. How did Evan merge the content and commerce to create successful brands? The Goop Story: From Email Newsletter to a Commerce Powerhouse: Brian mentions that Goop is one of the first examples he can think of that has a brand taking an email newsletter and turning it into a commerce powerhouse, but how did that happen? Goop has been around for about eleven years and the first six years it was mainly an email newsletter that had recipes that Gwyneth Paltrow wanted to send to her friends. Over the next six years, Goop grew organically and built equity with its audience around some lucrative content verticals like clean beauty, high-end fashion, travel, and home goods. Just in the last few years, Goop kicked its monetization into high gear by giving brand partners great exposure to its audience and finally launching its eCommerce marketplace. Plagued by Targeting: What is Too Much Personalization?: Having content comes first establishes ideals and allows your audience to almost fanatically align with a brand's ideals. Really good content is the antidote to over-personalization of the internet and there are fewer companies that have harnessed the power of storytelling better than NBCUniversal. Retargeting algorithms are effective at driving lower funnel activity, but they are not cognizant of who the customer actually is. (Phillip apparently doesn't avidly love toilet seats.) Even with how far AI technology has come, we still don't understand how people identify themselves of the meaning they derive from the products that they buy. The Antidote: Combating Over-Personalization The stories that we tell and that we read are how we connect with each other and with the rest of the world, which inevitably informs our decisions on what we consume and the brands that we align ourselves with. NBCUniversal reaches a massive part of the US audience lets brands tell stories that its massive viewer base can connect with. Create your audience first and then decide what the need before you create a product. As we get to a place where more and more content is becoming niche, if a brand has a message that you don't relate to, it will be harder to align with that brand. Shop With Golf: Capturing a Coveted Demographic: The first result of NBCUniversal playing with its new content and commerce model is Shop With Golf, a part of the Gold ecosystem of brands. The site fills a white space within the golf that features lifestyle content that relates to golfers, which is a sought after demographic. (Golf is Goop for men.) Over the past six months, 45 different brands have been featured on Shop With Golf. Bill Murray and his brothers even did a music video for Shop With Golf. Next Steps: Expanding the Model: NBCUniversal is looking at how to apply the model used for Shop With Golf across the entire NBC portfolio. While looking at their portfolio, the goal is still to create a marketplace of interesting brands and providing them a platform to tell engaging stories around relevant contact that reaches audiences that care about those stories. Evan clarifies that NBCUniversal is not trying to compete with retailers, but are becoming a channel for both consumer/packaged goods brands and direct-to-consumer brands. What Evan and NBCUniversal are doing could be an antidote to brands like Away and Amazon are doing. Bringing Commerce Closer: Purchasing in the Moment: Evan joins both Brian and Phillip in their excitement about up and coming shoppable formats. Consumers are more willing to transact wherever they are when they are using their digital devices. The eCommerce experience is no longer a differentiator as much as it is a commodity. Can consumer demand create enough need for brands and marketplaces to pursue options for consumers to purchase at the moment they see a product? Defying Expectations: Empowered Creatives Driving Progress: Phillip asks Evan what it's like bringing transformational initiatives to a larger organization and how that compares to his previous experience. Evan would have expected to get more resistance to bringing in new ideas, but the hunger to grow that is present at NBCUniversal has been the opposite of his expectations. Empowered creatives working with a plethora of resources and opportunity has proven to have quite the impact. Evan has been able to do something different, impactful, and valuable to both consumers and brands on a massive scale. Standing Out from the Pack: Artistry Leads the Way: What should big merchants be doing to separate themselves from other brands? Right now, artistry and creatives should lead the way in regards to where a brand's money ends up. There is nothing more important right now than telling stories. Brands that tell stories and can capture the values and ideals of their customers in a content form are going to be the brands that stand out. The Future Commerce Send-Off: Predictions for the Future: Evan predicts a decentralization of marketplaces occurring at the same time as a proliferation of content channels and commerce will stay closely coupled to the content. The antidote to becoming over-personalized is having empowered creatives that are looking at data and making creative decisions about what that data means. Brands should be taking a second look at television and the scale that companies like NBCUniversal can bring to brands is a huge opportunity for direct-to-consumer brands. The wall between digital video and television and the difference between the two is almost negligible. Brands Mentioned in this Episode: NBCUniversal Goop Shop With Golf Away Amazon As always: We want to hear what our listeners think! How can you use storytelling to reach customers and connect with their values? Let us know in the content section on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Linkedin. Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at mailto:hello@futurecommerce.fm or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners!

Product discovery and marketplaces are all the rage right now but when Jules Pieri launched a product discovery marketplace 11 years ago she pioneered a cross-section of entrepreneurship that launches products more than 300 times per year. The Grommet is a curated marketplace of small businesses producing unique products from inspirational founders. Listen now! -- Main Takeaways: Brian and Phillip are joined on today's episode by Jules Pieri, Co-founder and CEO of The Grommet. The Grommet is a unique marketplace that takes the guesswork out of finding quality brands that represent truthful and meaningful brands. Today's market has paved the way for the romantic entrepreneur, but how do you turn your great idea into a successful business? The marketplace model has seen a prolific rise in variety, but how do you know what products and brands you can trust when shopping in a marketplace? Small Business Innovation: The Story of the Grommet: Phillip first met Jules at Magento Imagine and was entranced by the founder story of the Grommet, which he had never heard of before the conference. Jules started The Grommet eleven years ago, which launches one innovative consumer product from small businesses per day, a lot of which have become household names. The Grommet was founded because Jules saw that technology has made it easier for individuals to create products and larger companies were becoming less and less innovative. The innovation of small businesses proved to be very disruptive and now The Grommet is viewed by around four million people every day. From The Wrong Side of the Tracks: An Entrepreneurial Playbook: Brian asks Jules to talk more about herself and how she came to start the Grommet. Jules recounts how she grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in Detroit, was the first person in her family to go to college, and when she was fourteen, she snuck behind her parents back and applied for boarding school. From very early, Jules developed a playbook for doing things that were scary and uncomfortable for her, and she learned to like it: a perfect platform for an entrepreneur. Her career tracks through three different phases: an early career as an industrial designer, later working for two separate start ups, and finally, Jules worked for some larger brands that led her to coming up with the idea for The Grommet. Left on the Cutting Room Floor: The Fallout of Innovation: Phillip recently listened to a podcast with Malcom Gladwell and Rick Rubin about the artistry is left on the cutting room floor as a musician and that the final product is only released after several edits and fine tuning. Larger brands have a tendency to play closer towards the plight of the musician where a lot ends up on the cutting room floor, but smaller brands have a lot of advantages in innovation, but tend to be capital constrained. Brian is reminded of an older episode with Sucharita Kodali from Forrester in which Sucharita describes her experience regarding the purchasing cycle of Toys"R"Us. Why do you think most products don't make it to shelves when being evaluated by large brands? A Call to Action: Citizen Commerce is Shaping the World: Jules has recently coined the term "citizen commerce" which means that every act a person takes to vote with either their time or money to support a product shapes a business. If you really care about a cause or a product, you have the opportunity to make that happen in the world by being more intentional with how you spend your time and money. Jules suggests to take a mer 10% of what you spend and put that towards products that you truly believe in and think will make a difference in the world. Consumers' demands and expectations of brands have become heightened and consumers have the power to determine winners in the marketplace; consumers can change the future of the world by not engaging with brands that don't meet these heightened expectations. A Massive Product Stream: How The Grommet Chooses Products: The Grommet lends credibility to the products it chooses to highlight each day, but only 3% of products actually make the cut. It takes a lot of time to figure out what companies truly stand for, but Grommet does that research for you and takes the time to make sure brands are being truthful. The Grommet engages deeply when a company is or is about to be in production and helps them craft their story and get that product to market. The hardest thing to do is get an audience in a crowded world, and retailers aren't interested in a single-product company in the current climate. The Power of the Marketplace: How Different Landscapes Highlight Different Products: What are the challenges that marketplaces face today, especially considering the hype around marketplaces as a business model? Jules sees that there is a trend to move more towards marketplaces and becoming increasingly more niche. Etsy and Amazon offer opposite sides of the spectrum when it comes to marketplace originality and ease of shopping. There are a lot of interesting (yet scalable) marketplace models and The Grommet has a very interesting place in this landscape that they will be developing in the near future. Diminishing Returns: But Not How You Think: The return rate at The Grommet is an infinitesimal 3%, where as other eCommerce sites see returns in the high teens to low twenties percentage wise. The Grommet accomplishes this by using video to create product understanding, and the simple fact that they don't present products that aren't worth your money. The Grommet wins customers based on quality and trust, but most marketplaces are antithetical to those qualities by not providing products that are authentic. There was a recent article in the Wall Street Journal that examines how the ceding of product control has led to thousands of banned, unsafe, or mislabeled products. The Power of the Entrepreneur: Romanticizing Business: Statiscally, 66% of millenials and 75% of high school age students want to start their own businesses. Jules believes that there is a healthy ecosystem forming around the entrepreneurs that The Grommet works with and a lot of products that used to be locked up behind large companies, are now available to the public. It is not just the fact that there is an explosion of entrepreneurial companies that has led to this current market, but also due to an explosion of services and platforms that are helping the entrepreneurial brands. "In the Gold Rush, you want to be in the pickaxe business, because even people who never find gold still need the tool." The Right to Exist: Who Says What Products Belong in a Marketplace?: Phillip points out that crowdfunding platforms are an easy way to suss out need for a product in the marketplace. Jules reveals that the audiences on crowdfunding platforms tend to be older males with high disposable incomes, and the powerhouse consumers in the economy are older females with high disposable incomes. There is a whole world of opportunity beyond crowdfunding platforms, and companies like Away earn their place in the market by making the experience of purchasing their products better than that of their competitors. Jules personally does not like some of the trendy brands message of cutting out the middle the middle man to get a better product (which she affirms is a lie). How We Make Stuff Now: Turn Ideas Into Products That Build Successful Businesses: Jules has written a book called "How We Make Stuff Now: Turn Ideas Into Products That Build Successful Businesses". Based upon ten years of running The Grommet, Jules wrote the book to put all of the things she learned from makers into a form of reference for other makers out there. Writing a book was a low-priority bucket list item for Jules, but she found that there was no book like this out there, so she needed to create one for the industry. Due to her unique background and way of thinking, this book is clearly a stand out from other books out there and is truly unique in its advice and suggestions. Getting Capital: How To Get Funding for Your Product: CircleUp is a platform that aggregates angel investors and does equity funding in a vetted and curated offering to smaller companies. Phillip spent some time with Jason Calacanis and the world of syndicates and angels doing more passive investment is a new way for companies to bring entrepreneurship to market. Now is such a magical time to build a business because there are so many options available to you in regards to getting funding. Jules sees a huge competitive advantage in pursuing capitalist funds that promote diversity, especially the inclusion of women on their teams. Predicting the Future: The Standard Future Commerce Question: Phillip asks Jules to talk about a challenge or obstacle that some listeners may be facing right now. Every single week, Jules is blown away by some of the innovations that come through The Grommet. "Sometimes the world is just waiting for you to work an idea. Don't get discouraged if there is no proof that your idea is a great one." If you examine the market and don't see a need for your idea, that could mean that your innovation will be the exact thing that the world is waiting for. Brands Mentioned in this Episode: The Grommet Forrester Toys"R"Us Etsy Amazon Away CircleUp As always: We want to hear what our listeners think! Where was your most unlikely source of inspiration for one of your successful products? How are you capitalizing on today's entrepreneurial market? Let us know in the content section on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Linkedin. Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at info@futurecommerce.fm or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners! Retail Tech is moving fast, but Future Commerce is moving faster.

With retail customers like Dollar Tree and White House Black Market, Oracle knows a thing or two about commerce. Their recent report, published in conjunction with CommerceNext, dives into how brands of all sizes - from DTC to Enterprise and Luxury, are investing in 2019 and beyond. Main Takeaways: Bob Meixner, Director of Product Strategy - Commerce & Loyalty at Oracle, joins Phillip on today's episode. API-focused commerce gives brands the power and flexibility to create innovate commerce solutions. Headless commerce is the future, but sometimes developing standalone headless solutions brings you back to square one with functionality. Thanks to some insightful marketing research by Oracle, we have greater insight into where brands are spending their recently increased marketing budgets. First Meetings and Background: Who is Bob Meixner?: Phillip first became aware of Bob at CommerceNext where he was a speaker with a session called "Measuring Up: How 100+ Leading Retailers are Investing in Digital Commerce". Back in 2006, Oracle acquired an enterprise content management vendor called Stellent (for whom Bob worked) which was one of the first acquisitions made by Oracle in the customer experience space. Bob later got the opportunity to lead the presales consulting team at eBay and Magento which was an exciting challenge given Magento's growth. Wanting to get to know a different side of the industry, Bob took his current role as being the Director of Product Strategy - Commerce & Loyalty. Oracle Today: Who is Using the Platform? Phillip asks Bob to talk more about what companies are using Oracle today, especially given Phillip's perspective that it is all large scale, enterprise corporations. Bob informs us that they have taken a lot of time taking on-premise systems that had longer implementation times and reimagining them as a cloud solution that is API first. The expectation of the software vendor being the actual hosting provider of the platform is something that is a big shift from the way platforms used to be hosted. Oracle has developed an architecture that allows you to have total creative control and extensibility on both the frontend and the backend while not losing upgradeability and the benefits of what you would expect in modern SaaS. Examining the Report: How Retailers are Investing in Digital Commerce: Phillip alludes back to Bob's talk at CommerceNext and talks about how interesting and comprehensive the report covered in the talk was. Oracle wanted to get a take on where folks were investing and they thought it would be helpful to publish some numbers on where digital commerce professionals were investing on a year to year comparative basis. Respondents include over 100 people at various large brands such as wholesale manufacturers, direct to consumer brands, multi-brand retailers, and digital-first multi-brand retailers. Download the report to take a look at the report yourself and get a better insight into the data. Key Insights: What Does the Report Tell Us?: Great news: budgets are on the rise in regards to eCommerce marketing and interesting enough, direct to consumer brands are increasing their budgets at a higher rate than traditional retailers. These budget increases are being used to make transactions much more frictionless which includes things like alternative payment types and chatbots for customer service scenarios. If you think about a lot of buzzwords in the industry such as augmented reality and voice, those are not being heavily invested in. The biggest barriers to achieving eCommerce goals are managing the array of solutions that brands deploy in their commerce and marketing stacks, issues with quickly executing on commerce initiatives, the inability to get a unified view of the customer, and aging technology systems. Things Are Harder Than They Seem: The Difficulties With Commerce: In another bit of research done by Oracle in partnership with Jeanne Bliss, there were over a thousand consumers surveyed that showed that consumers are willing to pay a premium for personalized and novel experiences. More than half of consumers are comfortable sharing personal information if they receive a better experience. People are willing to share information, but how are brands capturing this information and what are they doing with it? These challenges have not been solved yet due to all of the different solutions that claim to solve it, but many of them only solve a piece of the puzzle. Ways to Stick Out: Getting Ahead of the Competition: The Oracle report also mentions that there is an opportunity for brands to differentiate themselves amongst their peers by investing in voice technology. Bob adds that ignoring voice technology might be something that is a detriment to your brand. With the move to a headless world, voice technology will be a major player in the toolset that allows customers to interact with the brands they shop at. Phillip did a talk a few years ago called The Shopping Cart is Dead that spoke about similar possibilities with voice technology. How to Be Successful With Innovation: Tidbits to Live By: The fear of the unknown does not keep consumer brands from trying new things. Retailers and brands need platforms that allow them to succeed quickly or fail fast because that is what you need to figure out to succeed in today's economy. There are some many different unknowns at all levels in commerce, so leveraging platforms that have open APIs that let you experiment with new technologies is imperative. Open APIs that build differential experiences for their customers are going to be necessities for brands to push the envelope. Bringing It Back: How Oracle Is Approaching Innovation: Oracle Commerce Cloud is API first, cloud-native, and grants its users the ability to inject commerce into any level of engagement. Sometimes people approach commerce with the need to reinvent the wheel, but if you do this, you end up back where you started from. Oracle wanted to make sure that they provided a platform that lets your brand go headless where it makes sense, but gives the powerful automation that doesn't come along with custom-built API interactions. "Quick is king right now. Most people suffer from spending an inordinate amount of time with their legacy platforms trying to do basic functions". The Future Commerce Tradition: Thoughts for the Future: Phillip asks Bob to give his thoughts on what commerce will look like in the next few years in addition to what challenges retailers will face. Bob mentions that direct to consumer startups will need to figure out how to scale if they truly want to succeed: scalability is king. Enterprise retailers need to move faster because the ability to think and execute like a digitally native brand is how they're going to survive. In the luxury market, brands need to continue to invest in the overall customer experience because the value of the overall experience is greater than the actual product or service than the brand provides. Brands Mentioned in this Episode: Oracle As always: We want to hear what our listeners think! Where would you focus a larger marketing budget to make sure that you are keeping up with headless trends while still providing stability and functionality for your commerce platform? Let us know in the content section on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Linkedin. Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at hello@futurecommerce.fm or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners! With retail customers like Dollar Tree and White House Black Market, Oracle knows a thing or two about commerce. Their recent report, published in conjunction with CommerceNext, dives into how brands of all sizes - from DTC to Enterprise and Luxury, are investing in 2019 and beyond. With retail customers like Dollar Tree and White House Black Market, Oracle knows a thing or two about commerce. Their recent report, published in conjunction with CommerceNext, dives into how brands of all sizes - from DTC to Enterprise and Luxury, are investing in 2019 and beyond.

No episode today. Climate change is the biggest threat to the future of our lives, country, and world. Youth across the U.S. will lead a #ClimateStrike on September 20 to demand legislative action to combat climate change #StrikeWithUs strikewithus.org

Brands and consumers alike are addicted to Amazon. In this interview Kiri Masters, Author of "Amazon for CMOs", joins us to talk about her new book launch, how brands are battling addiction to the big-A, how consumers are being lured in with everything from advertising to QVC-style programming, and how everyone from Lady Gaga to Mitsubishi are competing for your attention on the world's biggest store. Main Takeaways: Today, Brian and Phillip are joined by Kiri Masters, the founder of Bobsled Marketing, author of the upcoming book Amazon for CMOs, and co-host of the Ecommerce Braintrust Podcast.  With its plethora of sales channels, many brands don't know how to find the perfect Amazon solution to sell their products on the platform. What are some best practices for being successful in selling your products on Amazon? Amazon has grown exponentially in recent years, but what do the next few years hold for the eCommerce giant? First Meetings Up Until Today: The Kiri Masters Story: Phillip and Brian first met back in February of 2018 when they were on the Ecommerce Braintrust Podcast talking about voice commerce. (Now that's on brand.) Bobsled Marketing is an agency that helps brands with their Amazon channel across branding, marketing, and operation support. Kiri started Bobsled Marketing about five years ago after a completed unrelated career in banking.  It's a passion of Kiri to not just keep their passion and learnings at Bobsled to themselves, but to share them with the world.  The Amazon Buffet: Many Different Choices for Many Different Companies: Phillip asks Kiri to give some examples of the advice they give and the expertise they impart to their clients when it comes to Amazon.  As an agency, Bobsled mainly deals with mid-market companies that have already done well in their own sales channels but need some clarification around Amazon-specific sales channels. If you're not educating yourself on the different business models within Amazon, then you are already behind the curve.  There are so many different paths and options you can choose with Amazon so it can be challenging to align your brand with the correct channel if you are not educated in its structure.  A Missed Opportunity: Why Don't More Brands Sell on Amazon? Kiri is still surprised at the number of household brands that do not have a presence on Amazon: but why are they not present on the platform? A lot of the information that you find written about selling on Amazon is geared towards the "wantrepreneur" crowd and not towards established brands. Amazon brings in about 50% of the eCommerce market, so not considering Amazon as a place to sell your product is missing a crucial portion of your retail strategy. Amazon serves as the point of discovery for a large portion of online shoppers. Starting With Amazon: What is Different About Brands that Start on Amazon?: Amazon is creating an addictive product not only for consumers but for brands as well.  There is an organic problem on Amazon when brands cannot control the shift to retention marketing that has become a trend in online retail.  On one hand, Amazon doesn't want merchants or sellers to interact directly with customers, but on the other hand, with regulatory issues like taxes, Amazon takes a backseat. The lack of direct connection with the customer is a major pitfall with brands who sell on Amazon because they are giving up any data that they would otherwise collect on their shoppers. Feeding the Beast: Selfish Trajectories for an Ecommerce Giant: Amazon has started to share customer acquisition metrics with the brands and sellers that are selling on their platform. All of the metrics that they are now launching look great on paper, but it still all circles back to Amazon building a self-serving advertising business. Lady Gaga launched her makeup line on Prime Day, but what does this mean for Amazon going forward? Amazon's private label strategy upsets a lot of brands because the extent of data that Amazon has on its shoppers seems much more significant.  Is the Future Bright or Dark?: Insider Insights Into Amazon's Trajectory: Kiri believes that Amazon is trying to fill gaps in their assortment rather than becoming an OEM manufacturer. Amazon is starting to look more like a social media channel every day as they are pushing more towards content creation. If Amazon is looking to create a massive marketing powerhouse, they need to vastly broaden their offerings at the top of the funnel.  Amazon has to make its platform stickier to keep people more engaged as everyone is competing for real estate in the attention of the consumer.  Amazon Live: Marketing Through Informational Videos: Brian asks Kiri and Phillip if they had watched Amazon Live, a QVC-like video stream that can showcase brands on the Amazon platform. Amazon Live is a pay-to-play channel but shows that Amazon is offering a lot of different ways to leverage the Amazon platform to get their products noticed.  As brands with backing come in with larger budgets, a lot of the smaller brands might not be able to compete with the spends.  Do you think offerings like Amazon Live will help smaller brands compete with larger brands for awareness? The Cost of Amazon: How Much is Too Much to Spend for Acquisition: The acquisition cost to get customers on Amazon is high, but after spending that much to get a customer, that customer belongs to Amazon. Anker started out selling exclusively on Amazon but used customer feedback and intelligent data capture to grow the brand. Digital native vertical brands like Glossier and Away have stated that they want direct connections with their customers and have stayed away from selling on Amazon. Other brands have a mote of sorts around their brands from Amazon because they require extension customization like Care/of and Madison Reed. Digitally Native Brands vs. Amazon: Is It Possible to Compete?: Kiri asks Brian and Phillip if they believe that digitally native brands can compete without having to sell on Amazon in the future? Brands are now able to put together a tech stack that is quite similar to what Amazon Prime can offer.  Amazon set the expectation for how brands have to interact with their customers in regards to logistics and fulfillment, and now brands can deliver at a palatable price point. Phillip brings up Nike, Allbirds, and Tumi to demonstrate a way that brands will eventually begin to differentiate between brand and product Amazon for CMOs: What's It All About?: Amazon for CMOs is co-authored by Kiri and her friend Mark Power who also runs an Amazon agency (but they are still friends). Kiri noticed that a lot of frank and honest conversations about Amazon between Executives was happening behind closed doors and this advice was based on your network and ability to connect with these people.  Kiri and Mark wanted a resource for the Executive audience that brought the voice of the industry into the book and talks about how brands are doing things.  The book also contains about 15 interviews with CMOs and Executive at large retail companies.  If you want a free copy of the book, they will be giving away free Kindle editions during the launch week of September 24th if you sign up on the site.  Looking Ahead: The Future of Amazon: Brian asks Kiri the standard question of where she sees Amazon heading in the next few years.  Kiri sees some external factors coming into Amazon's future, and a lot of those on regulation, which will lead to AWS splitting off from Amazon itself.  AWS was built for Amazon internally initially, so if it is separated, will the retail division have to pay market rates for AWS? Anti-trust in the United States has broken apart companies that eventually came back together, so there is a cyclical nature to splitting up large corporations. Brands Mentioned in this Episode: Bobsled Marketing Amazon Anker Glossier Away Care/of Madison Reed Nike Allbirds Tumi As always: We want to hear what our listeners think! Where do you think the next few years will take Amazon in regards to becoming a marketing giant? What are some of your best practices for selling your products on Amazon? Let us know in the content section on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Linkedin. Have any questions or comments about the show? You can reach out to us at info@futurecommerce.fm or any of our social channels; we love hearing from our listeners! Retail Tech is moving fast, but Future Commerce is moving faster.