Statements of Intent

~ This transcript is automatically generated so may contain some errors ~

a guy called Steve Quayle was an amazing retailer. In my view, whoever's on shift first thing in the morning, he would go and walk the whole team out to the other side of the road, where the store was.

And we would walk in like a snake and we would walk and basically snake the whole store looking for things that were wrong, untidy, missing point of sale, undressed shelves.

So it's just that kind of, you know, walking the store, I think often people just live in the kind of e commerce CMS in the background and actually never shop their stores.

Welcome to Statements of Intent. In this 20 minute episode, we're addressing how eCommerce has lost sight of the people at its very heart. You, the customer. It's a chat that's optimistic, it's casual, it's probably slightly ranty in places, but that's okay. But it's a place where I talk to senior eCommerce marketers.

And share their statement of how they're looking to change the status quo of eCommerce, adding more care, being more considerate to those very people that they're selling to - the customer. I'm your host, David Mannheim, the founder of Made With Intent. And we're going to jump right into it. Have fun

I'm not even going to introduce you, Richard. I, you were, we were talking pre podcast. We are now recording, but we're not going to edit this bit out. So I will introduce you, but carry on on what it is that you're about saying. You've just been in a meeting and you came out and. We

said,

um, thinking about acting like a retailer is my statement of intent.

And we, you and I were quickly chatting about. You know, maybe the future of retail and how consumers are going to get inspiration and find those things they want to purchase and where they're going to buy them from. But, um, I, uh, and perhaps I'll do some of the introduction for you, David, is that I started my retail career in the mid nineties, working on the shop floor at Sainsbury's home base.

So when Sainsbury's owned it, um, and having the. I suppose the grounding in, um, really good physical retailing in terms of visual merchandising, you know, customer flow through the aisles upsell, um, delivering a promise you make, all those good things is really, really key. And then transitioning my career into, uh, starting my first pure play DTC e commerce, uh, uh, marketing job was at a business called play.

com in 2004. So I was head of marketing there, 20 million turnover, Um, and I was there and grew to 500 million in three years, just over three years. So bananas growth. But suddenly you go from a 3D, you know, fully immersive environment as a consumer or thinking about that as a, you know, merchandiser, visual merchandiser to a two dimensional one and having to try and sell, you know, millions of books, CVDs, DVDs, Blu rays, video games is quite a different challenge, right?

So that's kind of, yeah. I'll stop there and, uh, you can guide me a bit more.

One way communication as well, right? Like, at least in a physical environment, uh, you get two way communication. You can ask for some support or, you know, sometimes some support comes over to you in the form of a physical human, a shop assistant.

Yeah. But moving from a two way communication to a one way communication set.

Yeah, it's one way communication. And one of the things I, um, actually I did a piece of work for Unilever a few years back where they said, could you write us a, uh, A sort of a one on one e commerce for dummies to some degree, and that sort of downplays it a little bit for their, um, for their sort of global e com team.

Um, and I sort of use that sort of retail analogy to think about, you know, um, try and sort of every day, you know, like the, the, the to do list, basically today's to do list, if you're a sort of a trading manager or a retail manager of an e com store was just put different persona on every day. So I'm a new customer.

Thinking about this thing, I'm inspired. So maybe I'm not in full high intent shopping mode. I'm just inspiration. Never, you know, don't know your brand. How, how do we, you know, in that one way communication style from the retailer, you're doing a good enough job of putting over that content and explaining the features and benefits to, to a prospect.

And then, you know, next day swap over and think, right. I'm a, maybe a high frequency, quite loyal, you know, customer. Does the actual shopping experience do and delight them still, right? Or are you still very much set up for new customers? It's really interesting often when we get, I've been asked in my career to critique kind of, you know, um, the look and feel or designs of new websites, particularly retail ones.

Um, and, you know, maybe the majority of their traffic is new and they'll put the, you know, back in the day, this might be 10 years ago, uh, you know, Before Shopify came and sort of standardized a lot of things, um, for brands, but they'd put like, you know, the, the login button would be the first thing you'd see at the checkout.

And you're like, actually, most of your customers haven't even got an account. So why is that the button that you see first? Yeah, just putting those different, I suppose, persona hats on and actually mystery shopping the site. Trying to get your head into, right. I'm here to buy a gift. I'm here as a new customer.

I'm here as a repeat customer and think about that. Is your mindset

one of trying to translate from the physical environment to the virtual? I mean, let me, let me ask you, let me phrase the question a little bit differently.

So you moved from continuing the Richard Chappell career path. You moved from play.

com. Did you then go to THG ingenuity? Yeah, I went to

THG. Yeah. So I was head of e comm there, um, for the, for all of the brands. And actually when I joined that business, it was still just only, The hut. com and we were powering white label, uh, entertainment retail sites for Tesco, Asda and a few others.

Great. And then during my tenure there, uh, THG received some institutional investment and we were able then to go and acquire MyProtein and look fantastic and start building our own, um, you know, first party brands that we acquired in sort of nutrition and beauty space. And then at that point when we actually, uh, acquired those brands, I moved into, yeah, sort of a VP or the founder of Ingenuity, um, which was then us selling, uh, our, our The whole end to end THG stack to the likes of actually Unilever where I met them, um, Nintendo, Elizabeth Arden and other brands were using it.

So I was exposed much more to the, I suppose, the back end of retail businesses on e commerce that I've spent all my time 10 years or so in demand creation front end. But then I had to worry about. You know, making promises to the likes of Nintendo around our operations and our technology and our finance and all those other things.

So I became, I suppose, a much more rounded general manager of an e commerce business then. And then there till 2015, then went consulting, met Jim Shark at 8Million and ended up as their CMO for a couple of years. That's cool. So yeah, and that was a good journey. Um, and now, yeah, founder of the growth foundation, we've been going for three years, team of nearly 30 people showing, um, scale up brands, um, and investors in this space of how to grow the right way.

And we talk about that being profitable, sustainable, manageable, and enjoyable. So that's what we do.

All the apples. I love it. Yeah.

Just like going back to the THG and the Gymshark. So you've got to think there that those brands predominantly, especially Gymshark, didn't have a physical environment. Yeah.

So their own, their, their e computer play businesses. So how do you, how do you, do you find there to be a bias with that or how do you bring that physical, uh, human interaction into those pure play businesses? I think just,

yeah, I suppose it's thinking about, um, when I talk about think about physical retail, it's trying to, where, where we could.

Try and I suppose create a almost like a pseudo two way conversation, but you can't have a conversation as you say But actually it's thinking about you know, if you know And testing things like you know arriving on homepages and saying are you are any or you know? Almost like signposting as you would do in a physical store where you walk in and go right the breads over there and you know The milk's over there, you know you Point people where you need to go.

It's a great navigation. So instead of perhaps, you know, we would test things like it says more graphics and kind of getting people to shop straight from the homepage. It would be, are you a new customer? Come down this path. If you're a returning customer, come here. We'll just, you know, just things like that where you try and think about the navigation and help people on their journey.

Um, and then the other thing I was, I suppose thinking about is the, um, my brain's gone a bit of a brain fog is the, um, 2:00 PM on a Friday. We'll forgive that. Yeah. The, actually the, I suppose the way that you communicate as a, as a retail brand to a consumer, at what part of part, what stage is the better word of the path to purchase you're at.

So one of the things I've experienced is that, um, maybe this isn't perhaps as as obvious in a big like, you know, a department store or a big, uh, you know, physical store, like a home base or something like that, but more of a boutique. Is that that first entry point when you perhaps spy, here's a new customer I've never seen before.

So imagine you put your, your head of right. I'm a, a small, let's say, you know, boutique shoe shop and you, you and you are there, you're fortunate 'cause you work there every day, you know you are returning customers and your new ones. So you can spot them and identify them quickly. You can, I suppose, also you, as a, as a human, you start to make some perhaps, um, either stereotypes or some judgments about how they look, where they've come from, you know, maybe you could see the car they've turned up in from the car park.

You make a judgment around them. But in those initial conversations that you have in those early moments are around amplifying, expressing perhaps the features and benefits of the products or service that you're selling. So, you know, trying to excite them about the benefits they're going to get. Um, and also in a way that you're thinking, how do I sort of meet, um, and I suppose connect with that consumer both on sort of their, their rational and conscious needs, but also the subconscious ones and more emotional ones as well.

So Jim Schultz is a good example of knowing that. You know, that brand kind of stood for, um, making people really fill in control, but also look great while they were training in the gym. So we used to do a lot of that yoga, you know, offensively showing imagery and, and content around how fabulous your arms or shoulders or bum is going to look in our products.

But as you then move to a more of the sort of the checkout and the back end of the store, which obviously happens in an e com and in physical retail, typically we start to think about communicating anxiety suppression messages. So, you know, trying to pacify. Thoughts around why you shouldn't buy it. You know, you'd start to think, Oh, should I buy this today?

Am I going to get that buyer's remorse and regret this decision? Or actually, am I nervous that, um, you know, it's going to fit me. Okay. And all those things that's much more rational anxiety comes in, you know, to a consumer towards the end of that purchase. So think about how do you suppress that? And it's more that kind of great salespeople or in physical.

I've got, can, can, I suppose, tailor their conversation based on that knowledge of where the consumer is in their store and how they're feeling and it's trying to take some of that into e com.

It feels very easy, very easy, it feels much easier to do in the physical, physical world because you're looking at someone and you have the conscious and the subconscious cues.

You know, you can ask them explicit questions or you can get implicit feedback. Yeah. You can't do that online. Like how? Right. And it, it feels, forgive me for like, putting my, my, uh, flagpole in the ground. It feels as though we've genericized the world of e commerce, where everything is templatized or homogenized, all the eyes, uh, in the world.

I mean, how do you, how do you get out of that mindset? Or do we even So I think

there are some things the way you can play, perhaps, a better game. Pre test principle where certain areas of your e comm store are kind of like homogenized or generic and have to be to some degree for every, every user. Um, and obviously as you close, you get to the car that, um, it potentially gets a little bit more of the ability to serve personalized content gets a bit more difficult.

Um, an example, like for a power brands that we've worked in, typically this test works really well. So if you've got something like a You know, a chat widget, you might see in the bottom corner of the story and say, you know, sometimes it either pops up after a few seconds or if you click on it and say, Hey, how can I help you?

Um, we would change that generic message, which comes out of the box to something like, um, Hey, how can I help you? Dot, dot, dot 94 percent of our customers say our sizing is brilliant. So you're already thinking that a lot of our, we know that a lot of questions we get in the chat are about sizing. So why don't we just.

Can pacify that anxiety around sizing by saying 94 percent of our customers say our sizing is incredible, whatever. So that can be a generic message that everyone benefits from. Um, we've worked with a, an amazing partner of ours actually, he's got a business called shopbox. ai. They're an AI driven, um, almost like that sales associate that looks at other, um, the way that you navigate the site, either with your finger and thumb, the speed you swipe on a mobile, or when you're hovering your mouse and what you're looking at.

And starts to act a bit more like a human sales associate to say, actually, I know you're here and you're motivated. Let's say in footwear, it might be that you're into just black, ugly trainers. So I can, through the AI, just give you more black, ugly trainers to look at versus, um, you've come in and let's say you might have clicked on it.

Um, you've come in via, let's say Adidas black trainer search term on paid search. You dropped into that product page. The AI starts to take some signals that are sort of less people who bought this product also bought, which is sort of the traditional way of serving, you know, complimentary products or basket building with those kind of things.

So it's a combination of using, I suppose. If there's generic templates you have to use with, what could you do to think like a salesperson would do in terms of that? I've got an opportunity to connect and, you know, communicate. What could I say that would either amplify the feature and benefit at this stage or suppress anxiety?

And sometimes you want to test both of those. Or are there some tools that you can use? You know, not from the likes of Nosto or Shopbox or others that allows you to sort of personalize that based on previous buying behavior and, and, and activity in real time. And it's really quick as well. Or

just for reference, uh, Maid of Intent, not to like put our flagpole in the ground, but we focus very much on the intent of the audience, right?

The signals that you're giving off. Help us, uh, we can contextualize those signals as something really meaningful, whether you have a high level of intent, whether you are indeed ready to buy, whether you are actually browsing. And it feels to me like a lot of the, the tools and more so the thinking out there is focused, I'm going to push you a bit on this, if that's okay.

I focused on product affinity. It's focused on helping you find right items. So discovery of products. I don't know about you. I, that, that feels to me like it's one quarter of the sell, uh, when you're, when you're selling to an individual. Helping you find something feels Myopic in the grand scheme of things.

Do you agree? Do you

disagree?

Yeah, I

mean, it's interesting, isn't it? It's like what? And I, the other complexity to this is that it will be very, it will be linked directly to perhaps the, um, I suppose the positioning of the brand, be it a, let's say a low order value, high, sorry, you know, low, um, uh, kind of decision, I suppose size of weighted decision commercially on you as a consumer.

Like an S is a premium, yeah, that's the word. Or is it a sort of a premium luxury product? And the other thing, is it a, maybe not linked to expense so much, but it, is it something where it has a massive impact on your, your life or your environment, um, post the purchase? So, you know, we've done some work with, you know, sofa brands and floor covering brands where the sales cycle and the inspiration to purchase can be eight to 12 weeks or even longer.

So, you know, if you've got someone who's coming in, a good example, we've got, did some amazing work with, uh, snog sofa, uh, amazing. Um, so for brands, modular software, you know, basically you can get a sofa in a box, right? And, um, and what was really interesting again, sort of taking new visitors down a sample journey versus a buy now journey had a much greater overall conversion rate by knowing, Hey, this is the first person first visit.

Don't say buy now, they're most likely in a, in an inspiration mode. So let's talk about, you know, again, the features and benefits of why a modular sofa is so good. Let's get the sample to them. Let's do that. And then from that point, using CRM, get them back into a buy mode, right? Um, but you're absolutely right.

And I suppose the other point as well is that sometimes So what's interesting around products, but I was thinking more of the brand thing for thinking about sort of apparel, you know, typically apparel is usually sort of the uniform we wear to say something about us, right? So there's other things that products do for us as consumers, you know, the emotional and rational problems that products solve for us.

And some of them are very emotional, irrational, and, um, you know, about status and others are much more functional and, and rational, aren't they, and conscious and things like that. So, yeah, it really depends. And I suppose for brands or owners to understand where they are on that matrix is, is interesting in terms of, again, what they say and when they say it.

Sorry. I, I. I'm listening, but at the same time, I'm hearing my three year old child outside the door say something. It's like I can hear it. I've got my team in the meeting

room next door and I can overhear them slightly, so hopefully it's not picking up.

Um, it's, so it's fascinating, it's like, we've talked about almost the benefits of Acting like a physical retailer or like being in the mindset of, you are a physical retailer, we do these certain things that we should translate over to the online world.

What prevents people from thinking in that way or what are the barriers to the practicalities of that type of approach?

I think there's, I think the one that jumps out most obviously is that you typically, perhaps if you're a, you know, either a small business and maybe a founder that's wearing every hat from, You know, setting up the Shopify store to, you know, picking and packing from the kitchen table.

If you're a bigger business with a team that, you know, it's already managing that and all different teams across your business. You only have a, unless you're probably picking and packing the product yourself, you're never in a physical environment. You're in a virtual one looking at one or two screens.

And I was just thinking then, you know, the ability, um, one of the things, again, my store manager back at my home in those days, a guy called Steve Quayle was an amazing retailer. In my view, he used to take myself wherever every day, whoever's on shift first thing in the morning, he would go and walk the whole team out to the other side of the road, where the store was.

And we would walk in like a snake and we would walk and basically snake the whole store looking for things that were wrong, untidy, missing point of sale, undressed shelves. You know, um, in the paint aisle, which I was responsible for at the time, you know, if I had, you know, the white emulsion and there was a strip next to that without brushes on it, um, you know, that would be a very highly large reprimand, um, from my manager on those things.

So it's just that kind of, you know, walking the store, you know, and I think often people just live in the kind of e commerce CMS in the background and actually never shop the shop, never shop their stores. I mean, it's amazing the amount of people, like a couple of questions I ask when I meet new brands is like, when was the last time we actually did a transaction on your site properly?

When did you last shop? And it's amazing. That can be sometimes weeks or months before members of the team have actually tried to buy us things on their, in their own shop. Um,

service I can imagine. Yeah.

Also asking, like, do you tell me the name of your top five customers? By name and where they live.

Again, most people will go, uh, probably one in five can do that when I meet them. Some, some founders or managers are really onto who their best customers are. Um, you know, and again, in physical retail, you would know who your top customers are, you know, what cars they drive, you know, you know, and what, you know, what things are into, what they're not, because you have a conversation with them, um, cause they're so frequent.

And so visible. So yeah, that's, it just is this sort of almost like, um, sort of two dimensional screen barrier that sets up this, this block for me. And then the next one will be obviously. The capability of having, as you say, um, or the lack of capability to have two way conversation, the ease to create the volume and quality of content, to have different conversations with different consumers based on where they are in their buying journey.

Um, but I'm, I'm pretty bullish around how. I suppose the support with AI and other things that's coming our way, that that was going to get much, much easier, um, to be able to have more personalized, you know, um, the right message to the right consumer at the right time, effectively.

Sounds like personalization 101.

Yeah. It's really interesting because I feel as though, I feel a barrier is tech. I feel as though Yeah, kind of, yeah. Maybe like an excuse, uh, for, uh, because what you're talking about, if I'm honest, Richard sounds a lot like just bringing things back to basics, speaking to your customers, going back into the school, having a relationship, a human interaction with someone.

And that's hard to do in an online environment. And tech is designed to facilitate those kinds of conversations. I don't know whether sometimes we see it as a bit of an excuse to say, in lieu of doing this, which feels really hard and sociable and as me, a millennial, I don't want to do that. I'm going to use a piece of tech that might help me or might make that relationship a bit easier.

I don't know. What do you, what do you, what do you think?

Yeah, I think, well, if I think about what we mentioned there, kind of, you know, either if you're just CMS or it's difficult to the capability from the technology or the tech is kind of that, um, that barrier isn't there you're right. Um, but I mean, what, some of the things we've done or advised our sort of founders or sort of e com leaders to do is actually, you know, Finding that space, the right communication method, but actually reaching out to those top customers, you know, we've had some brilliant success and insight come from getting founders, owners, and sort of team members to talk to their customers directly.

Phone can be safe for millennials and Gen Z may not be the best place to make, but maybe the initial WhatsApp, Hey, I'm the founder from this brand that you've bought quite regularly from, I'd love to, can we have a chat, can we have a zoom or, you know, often and learning around, you know, what they do, where they found the brand, what they like, but, and then extending that not only out into the best customers, but new customers as well, you know, looking at, right, you know, we had, Hopefully maybe hundreds of new customers yesterday, randomly picking 10 and dropping them a message to say, Hey, I'm a founder or senior manager at this business you purchased yesterday could have a chat.

And most people will say, yes, you know, they'll spare you five minutes, right? And you can, the amount of insight you can gain from that's phenomenal. Um, so we've set up quite a few when we've been engaged to help on set up sort of CRM flows and automations in businesses, we'll, we'll set up a. A trigger that drops, you know, a number of customers into an inbox of one of the teams as they write, contact these customers.

Today. Yeah, it's really good.

I feel as though I could speak to you for another 30 minutes. My three year old, uh, banging outside the door, asking for Lego. Uh, so just some parting words, I suppose, Richard, what would be the, the one thing that you would encourage people to act like a physical retail? How would you encourage people?

Well, I think

perhaps, um, well, I would say act like, um, Steve Quayle at Homebase circa 1995 when I was there as a teenager, Walk to the store, walk properly, get in, and actually, when you say start from the other side of the car park, so go and find one of your ads. I know it's difficult to click on 30p or maybe a bit more, but follow the flow that a customer does and you know, proper shop, you know, mystery shop your site and critique it.

And, um, don't live in the back end of the, of the e comm management tool all day, get shopping.

I love that Richard. Thank you very much. People can find you on LinkedIn, right?

Yeah, yeah. It's Richard Chappell on LinkedIn, or you can find us at, uh, thegrowth. foundation. Lovely. Thank you very much for your time.

Thanks. Take care.

There we have it. Thank you so much for listening. Please do like, subscribe and share on whatever platform it is that you're listening to on today. This show comes from the team behind Made With Intent, the customer intent platform for retailers. If you are of course, interested in being more profitable, whilst being more personal.

And please feel free to check us out at madewithintent. ai. Thanks again for listening and joining us on our mission to change how eCommerce sees, measures, and treats their customers. I've been your host, David Mannheim. Have a great day.