Statements of Intent

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

It's about being being relevant in that moment. So my shopping journey is probably different to your shopping journey on the next three websites we both go on .

How do you become more relevant for each of those shopping journeys or a shopping missions? I might be researching, you might be purchasing immediately, I might be looking for a gift, you might be looking for a self purchase, and we could both be on the same websites.

So the shopping missions can be different, but knowing what we can know from first party data, from signals, from browsing, intents, et cetera. How do we become more relevant for that shopping experience there and then?

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

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Statements of Intent. I am here with the ethereal Mr. Matthew Gratz. I don't know what ethereal means, Matt, but welcome. How are you doing?

I'm good, thanks. How are you? I'm

all right. I'm all right. I feel a little bit awkward now that I've just used a word that I don't really understand.

Uh, Matt, I'm really excited to speak to you because you're, you're LinkedIn anyways, but your experience is Is awesome. So mothercare head of e commerce and summers director of globally commerce, uh, mothercare is mothercare still going. Was that bought out by Morrison's?

Uh, they're, they're franchised to boots in the UK, uh, but there's still, yeah, it's still got their global franchises in existence.

And then you moved to Halfords, right?

That's correct. Yep. Uh, director of e commerce, uh, director of online at Halfords. Yep.

Amazing. And then Cigna as director of digital and director of customer.

Exactly. And Cigna for those that don't know is, you know, they run H. Samuel and Ernest Jones Jewellers in the UK.

So, as, as like amazing as all that is, and we will get to your statements of intent soon. You worked at Apple as a PR exec. That was the thing that stood out to me.

Uh, when I was doing a sandwich course at university, the, the year of work placement was with Apple. Yep. Uh, in the, in the PR team.

So talk to me about that.

Not like I might already have some, some little information in the back of my mind.

It was great. It was 2003 slash 2004. Um, so the iPod, uh, generation three had just been launched. Um, and at the same time we were launching the iTunes music store into the UK. It was great. Um, it was awesome. Like, you know, the, the likes of, um, Jonathan Ives, um, Stephen Fry was a big advocate, so we sort of managed to spend time with him.

And even Steve Jobs was in the UK to launch the iTunes music store. So again, you know, PR team, it was very fortunate time, uh, to be able to meet some of these people. That's amazing,

dude.

Like, you know, when we're talking on this podcast and just in general about how we should be treating customers online, uh, or just treating people in general.

Um, what would you say that you learned from that sandwich course about treating people or selling in general?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mean, you know, Apple's synonymous, isn't it? With making sure that the design and the product just works. Um, and and just makes your lives easier. Um, so I guess that that that brand kind of vision, the brand's direction sat with me because it's very customer first.

It was just just make it work, make it easy, make people's lives enormous, enormously quicker and simpler. Um, and and you can take that anywhere you want. You put that into your theory at work, you put that into your practice with what you do. If you get the customer to, you know, if they can shop with you very easily, if they can get, you know, complete their mission seamlessly, uh, then, then you're onto a winner straight away.

So ease, friction free, simplicity. I dunno, like, is that, are those your mantras in how you approach customer centricity or?

Well, 100%. I mean, when, when, when you look at the, you know, I, I followed up with a dissertation on the, uh, the design principles of the iPod, uh, and, and And, and what makes good product, good brand, and it all comes down to good design.

Um, if you can design a journey or a product or a mission or a, uh, whatever it is you're trying to do, if you can design that perfectly with the customer in mind, um, then 100%, um, it's very difficult to go, I know, you know, there's pricing promotion and the old school way of doing things, price, products, promotion.

So there are things that can let you down, but if you, if you design. If you design your journey, you design it for the customer and you have everything at the forefront of your mind. Um, it's very difficult to go wrong from that stance.

Yeah, I can imagine there's, there's probably a lot of other factors that come into it, right?

But those, is it the four P's? They've been around for, for donkey's years. And I guess we, we, we sometimes try to overcomplicate processes and how we. How we sell and really it's about going back to basics. I don't know, like how have you approached that in your work, either at Holford's on summers or at Cigna, like how do you embrace simplicity or how do you encourage people to embrace simplicity?

Yeah. So, so, so I think you just mentioned it. Don't get bogged down in the minutia of the detail. Um, it doesn't matter where you are, right? Every, every place I've worked, whether it be on summers, mothercare, et cetera. There's always been real simple. areas that you can, that you can tackle real simple things to look at the basics and they always need improving.

And, you know, every year the hygiene factors get moved on, whether it's a new innovation on an app that you've got on your smartphone, whether it's a, you know, a high end website that have brought something new out, or they've just improved the way we normally do things, you know, like Apple Pay is a great example, came out and now everyone pays.

with Apple Pay. It's just a hygiene factor. You have to have it. So I think I think there's some incredibly simple basics that the businesses and retailers just need to get right. And I think what I found in organizations that I've gone to and worked through is the amount of detail you can get bogged down in and really interrogate things that don't really matter tremendously, or they matter to a very small minority of customers.

Rather than looking at the bigger picture and thinking, actually just fix the basics, get it right. Um, and, and the customer will be your advocate because, you know, they'll enjoy shopping with you, they'll come back, uh, you've got more chance of, of, of, um, achieving a second purchase or a third purchase.

You've got more chance of them. bringing you up in conversation and just saying, Oh, I had a great experience with these guys, bought a good product, et cetera. Um, you know, the, the, I think the, the simplicity sometimes, um, is, is missed. Just, just, just, just aim for the simple, get it right. Um, and don't try and don't try and be too, too advanced or too high end.

Don't, don't try and over complicate things. Why,

why do you think the simplicity is this? Why do you think us as retailers? Do we overcomplicate things? Is that society? Is it competition or pressure? Is there, there's too much data? There's too much stimulus going on. Like, what's, what's causing us to not go back to basics?

Um,

there's a number of things. I think, um, you know, we, we, within teams, within products, within life cycles of, of journeys and teams, we sometimes put something onto a website, an app or, or, or improve a customer experience and then we tick a box and we move on. Right. We think it's done. Uh, then you move on to the next one.

You move on to the next one. And as that funnel, you end up getting more narrower and narrower in that funnel. And sometimes you then neglect the things that you did a year ago or two years ago. You don't go back and revisit them and make sure that they're still on point. They're still, you know, they're still working or, or, or, you know, As tweaks you can make.

So I think that's one thing. Uh, I also think, um, you know, retail gets incredibly tough and I think we get, we get internalized by our, our reports and our KPIs and the meetings that we're in where, um, you know, the hippo effect, the, the, the highest voice, the highest paid voice of influence, you know, that they'll say one thing and it becomes gospel through the business and you've got to go and fix something very, very quickly.

And at the end of the day is, you know, we get, we get stuck with short term views and we try and fix these very small things that someone had a brain fart about two weeks ago and or two meetings ago and you jump, everyone jumps in the bandwagon and that's the thing that's broken. And that's the thing needs to be fixed.

I think it is an element of, of, you know, the direction and the way that you view. You monitor and you focus on your customer journey. And then I think there's the internal reporting and KPIs that just get very, very short term focused. Um, and, and you can easily be, uh, chasing down, uh, you can easily find yourself falling down a rabbit hole of, of, of investigation and you just overcomplicate things.

Yeah. And you probably, you probably become really tactical. I've never worked in retail. I've just only worked alongside retailers and always find it interesting that you have these two different types of pressures. You've got the short term pressures or that'd be like your weekly trading meetings, your, uh, monthly, your monthly targets.

And then you've got the longer term pressures, which will be like, uh, annual budgeting and forecasting, uh, would be your quarterly P and L. I don't know. What are you, do you have a fear of any of those things? Like, do you have, are you more aware of one of those four, uh, elements than the other?

Yeah. I mean, it's within retail, someone said years ago, there's never, never a good week to be in retail.

You can beat your forecast, beat your budget, but. It's never good enough, right? How do you, how do you improve it the following week? How do you improve it the week after? It's never a good week, really. Um, and I think over the last two, three years, it's become even more intense. Um, retailers have become more short term focused, um, and you would take your eye off of the long term.

No, sorry, this isn't a, this isn't every retailer. This is, this is my view on the world from my experience at the moment and the people I speak to is, is we are becoming very short term focused because P& Ls are becoming Um, consolidated, uh, there's a lot of pressure, um, coming down from shareholders or whether it be, um, boards and, uh, and investors or whatever, to be able to turn a return on investment in a very short time period.

So because of that, we, we do, we do kind of put the medium and the long term to one side because we're solely focused on, on, on winning this week and winning this month and winning this period. Um, and don't get me wrong, you have to do that. You have to be able to earn the right to play. Medium and long term, um, fully aware of that.

But I think, I think that in itself then puts pressure on the medium and long term. And unfortunately we're just, we're just then designing very quick wins, very short term wins that can be to the detriment of the customer journey in the long term, um, or the customer experience in the long term.

Yeah. I'm, I'm thinking of it almost again, like I say, Matt, I've never, I've never been on that side of the fence.

But what I, if there's one thing I do know, well, it's football. So I'm thinking of like a 10 harg scenario in Manchester United, right? I'm thinking of if I were 10 harg, all these things, or, you know, all the wins or the losses they compound into an overall view, and I would be fearing for my job or I feel safe in my job.

And I feel as though there are external factors that really matter. So at Manchester United, it would be buying a football club, you know, in retail, it could be something as small as like the weather. Being so impactful on sales or a new competition or, uh, I don't know, a price hike, you know, China increasing its costs, cost based or whatever it might be.

So it's, I just find it really interesting that these things compound. Uh, but really it's, it's, you know, the need for continuous wins. So the weekly, the weekly matches or in your case. The weekly, the weekly trading reports.

The weekly numbers are 100 percent and you're probably right. If you was 10 hug, you probably should be looking for a new job, um, or at least on the phone to recruitment agencies every other day.

It'll

be absolutely fine. It'll be fine.

You are right, right. So, so, um, I often find that when, when you're in that, that, that train of thought, you're constantly looking for those wins every week. Um, what, what, what you end to do is, is you then, you then start doing, um, what you, what you do normally. Yeah. You, you, you, you go back into routines and you don't change.

What you're doing, you just go back in, you search for that tiny bit of growth here, tiny bit of growth there. And then you could, you could argue it's like football, you know, rather than completely changing everything and you could be annoying the fans, you could get kicked back from the chairman, um, from the players and everyone else.

But sometimes you need to revolutionize that way of thinking.

Um, an example I would use, you know, when we're looking at acquisition versus retention, we're constantly looking at driving higher ROIs. Trying to, trying to find new customers to buy products, trying to find new markets to go and find new, new avenues to sell more things.

And, and sometimes you do that and, and, and everyone's behind you, let's invest more in this type of marketing, more in that type of marketing, et cetera. And you think, you know, if you take a step back, you think, well, hang on, we, we've just had a whole year of customers shopping with us. Why aren't we talking to those guys?

Why aren't we, we've already acquired them, right? So, so why don't we make sure that we, We surprise and delight, you know, rather invest in all that marketing money over here, trying to find more and more customers, uh, that can shop with us. And don't get me wrong, it's very, very important. We have to do that, but we take our eye off of the customers that have already purchased with us.

Let's, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of work to be done there that you can focus on those as well. And, and I guess it could be, you know, if you put it back to Ten Hag, right. Do you develop the players you've got, or do you go out and buy some new players? You know, how do you balance it?

Talk to me about that.

I, we will get to your statement of intent, which I think we've been discussing it throughout and your statement of intent is being relevant, but I feel like a lot, a lot of what we're talking about here is bringing things back to basics. So in that instance, you're talking about new, new customer acquisition, almost being more prioritized.

retention or speaking or creating relationships with existing customers. Why is that the focus? Why do people, whoever those people may be stakeholders, shareholders, those in charge of, of, of the budget, why do they focus so much on new customer acquisition or retention? Buying new players in your football analogy.

Don't get me wrong. It is, it's extremely important as well, but you, you, you, you get the FOMO, I think, um, when it's very easy to sit around a table and all of a sudden, if we decide not to focus on a keyword in Google or not to focus on, um, uh, some kind of acquisition prioritization, it means someone else will be.

Right? So when you've got an army of people around the business that rightly care about their products or care about where they're sat or care about how visible the brand is on PPC or paid social or whatever else it might be, you get that FOMO impact. Well, they're there, so why aren't we? Um, and, and, and sometimes you've got to turn around and say, well, actually, because the return on investment doesn't justify it.

And I may be spending, I may be getting a pound for every pound I spend there, but if I focus on second purchase or third purchase over here and put a bit more of my investment there, I could get a higher ROI. It's a longer burn. It's not going to come overnight. Cause if I've just bought something from you or I bought something from you two weeks ago, it doesn't mean I'm naturally going to come back immediately because the product might not be a suitable product for every, every other week.

So, so I think, again, it comes back down to being short termism. I know that if I invest a pound here, I can get a pound back from, from or two pounds back or three pounds back from this cohort of customers that I know will be shopping with us or, or we can compete to shop and gain that traffic versus something where I can invest here, but I might not see the return for three or six months.

And I think, I think that's why it becomes a much bigger risk, um, and, uh, for, for the business, for the shareholders, um, for the board, et cetera, to say, actually, let's, let's take a punt on that. Let's pull back spend here and you know what, we might not see that, that customer dip in and out, or we might not be acquiring customers at the rate we need to, but there's a, there's a medium to long term gain over here where we can, we can get that second, third and fourth purchase and build the loyal relationship that we need to build.

It's not, don't get me wrong, it's not, it's not as straightforward as that. It's never as black and white as that. There's loads of bits and pieces in between.

Well, they're not mutually exclusive either. It's not one or the other, right? It's a, it's a balancing act. I totally appreciate that. It just feels so imbalanced that it almost feels inefficient to some, it feels like that FOMO and the pressure that we spoke about earlier is, is It's pushing this side of the seesaw down and creating this imbalance between acquisition and retention.

Um, or new, new, new quantity, quantity, quantity, more, more, more over our loyalty relationships, something, uh, let's say something ethereal. Let's just hop back to that word. I don't understand what it means.

Um, we've only got a few minutes left, but why don't we just jump straight into your statement of intent, which is, which is being relevant.

So we've talked about simple, simplifying things. We've talked about bringing things back to basics. What does being relevant mean?

It's about being, um, being relevant in that moment. So, so my shopping journey is probably different to your shopping journey on the next three websites we both go on and it might be common websites.

I think that, you know, being relevant and it does, it does now take you away from being simple. Because, because it becomes more complex, but how do you become more relevant for each of those shopping journeys or a shopping missions? I might be researching, you might be purchasing immediately, I might be looking for a gift, you might be looking for a self purchase, and we could, we could both be on the same websites.

So the shopping missions can be different, um, but knowing what we can know from first party data, from, from, um, signals, from browsing, intents, et cetera. How do we become more relevant for that shopping experience there and then? And I think that for me is where retailers come, could come win. I, I, I was talking to a contact, uh, a very good friend of mine actually, um, uh, uh, at a, at a well-known agency.

And he was saying to me, he, he's a, he's a, um, a vegetarian and he still gets emails with promotions around meat products in them, even though he is never bought a meat products, even though he, you know, he doesn't care about the meat products, but he still gets emails talking about offers on. So he's like, why are you, why are you sending me this?

It's not relevant. In the end it does the reverse and it kind of makes him think that the brand doesn't care about him. So how, how, how, how can you pick up on those signals and make sure that you send relevant comms to that individual? And the same as when, you know, it doesn't have to be on the website.

It can be comms, it can be marketing. Um, it can be elsewhere in the, in the, in the digital arena, but how can you. How can you improve relevancy? How can you be more and more relevant, authentic and everything else, but, but just be relevant all the time for those different various missions, segments, um, et cetera.

So I think it's really nice. Cause you're basically, you're trying to bring things back to basics, just as, you know, your vegetarian friend that would feel like a very basic. form of communication. Um, do you think that relevancy is different than personalization? Do you think they're one and the same? Do you think, would you classify that as the same or would you classify the two as just being different things?

From a customer lens? I would say they they're different because I because you could look at personalization saying, um, you know, Hi, Matthew. How are you as a personalized experience? Matthew, we know you've purchased this before. Do you want to take a look at these? Um, you know, we know you bought this as a gift last year.

Do you want to buy something similar this year? That for me is is is from a customer lens that's best personalized. Um, versus relevant would be, you know, what, um, look at these, um, spring, uh, whatever, whatever it might be, look at the spring products that are on the trend right now. Um, or, or, you know, uh, let me show you a buying guide.

Cause I know that you, you might need some, some, some help buying what you need based on the, based on the signals we picked up that then becomes a little bit more relevant. Um, you know, show me men's product, not female products on, on my favorite clothing site or whatever. That, that, that then becomes a bit more relevant, but I think internally, we know that actually we're trying to personalize those experiences for the customer.

So it becomes a little bit blurred, I think internally, because we know that they are segments and cohorts that we're trying to personalize to, um, uh, and be relevant to. So I think, I think the two internally become the same, but from a customer perspective, you could look at them slightly differently.

Yeah. You know what, I really agree with you. I'm not even just saying that I, so I, I go on this little mission to say that personalization is. In society, it's currently seen as recommendations or segmenting shit. Basically finding shit or segmenting shit. And, it, it, it's really, what it should be is all about being more personal.

You know, the act, it's the actual process, it's a noun, the actual process of being personal. Because obviously it's a doing word. Um, I don't even know if that's a noun, but, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna stick with it. Whereas relevancy, we call that a made of intent, we call that appropriateness. It's just going back to the basics of being appropriate with a customer so you can respect them, so you can acknowledge them, so you can meet them where they're at, because guess what?

We need to, as retailers, optimize how we sell in accordance with how people really buy, because they don't really buy by looking at, if you're a vegetarian, by looking at a meat menu. That is not how your agency friend would buy. And I feel I feel like we're talking the same language, but we're using two different terms, relevancy and appropriateness.

Yeah. I think you're absolutely right. Um, and they all go hand in hand, don't they? Um, you know, you need to be relevant. It needs to be appropriate. Um, and you could classify that under the umbrella of personalized or a personalization work stream, uh, 100%, but you, but I think it all, it still comes down to the fact that you need to know.

Yeah. Absolutely. The customer, you need to pick up on those triggers, the, um, understanding, uh, you know, what, what, what the customer's doing, what the customer journey is, what the customer mission could be, um, you know, where are they in that stage of the purchase life cycle? I think, I think it all comes back down to knowing and setting up those, those, those missions, those journeys, those sequences, um, for the relevant customer data that you've got.

I agree, Matt.

Well, look, we're out of time. Do you have any parting words for us? How was Stephen Fry? Is he a cool dude?

Very clever, very funny, um, ridiculously. So on any level, um, you know, when you're, we are a 19 year old student, um, there's only so much you think you can talk to him about, but for some reason you can hold a conversation with him for a very long time, uh, over, over numerous bottles of wine.

Uh, but just, just one of those, um, uh, rare people in life that can find humor and wit in anything that you're talking about, regardless of how techie or how detailed it is, uh, generally nice chat, really nice guy.

Not unlike yourself, Mr. Gratz. Well, look, thank you very much for joining us. Really appreciate it.

Have a good one. Thank you very much. Bye.

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.