Statements of Intent

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

it takes two people to start a movement, the lone outsider and the first follower.

But you've got to be vulnerable to be that first or second person. And in order to effect change, that requires you to be willing to put your head above the parapet or to, you know, to put a cycling metaphor on it, go in the break and, you know, and push yourself really hard you know, risk of puncture risks, you know, uh, mechanical, like these things and that, yeah, it requires that, yeah, that vulnerability and being, being open to that,

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, and welcome to Statements of Intent, the, I don't, I think it's weekly or bi weekly podcast, maybe monthly, Lib will tell me off for that, where we talk about all things e commerce, specifically going against the status quo of e commerce.

I can think of no better person to speak to than Mr.

Cynical himself. Mr. Nick Fletcher. How you doing, Nick? I'm so sorry for calling you cynical. It's all right. It's all right. I've been called worse at times, so it's all good. Well, Nick, you're, you're head of digital experience at Rafa. You've been there for seven or eight years now. Yeah, I'll be eight years at the end of next month.

So quite a while. Congratulations. How are you feeling? Yeah, it's good. It's been a, it's always a fun ride. We, uh, sorry, that's probably not going to be the last of the sightseeing puns today. Um, but yeah, it's, uh. I'm very fortunate to work doing things that I've done my whole career, you know, the digital space and also to combine that with a passion.

Um, it's, uh, you know, when you've got that, it's, it makes it so much easier when you've got those harder battles and tougher hills to climb. Well, I can, again, another fun. Uh, I can imagine that you are just so much more involved. In your work when you actually genuinely care about it, I suppose, you know, you're both a user and a practitioner.

Yeah, I think there's also, uh, sometimes a bit of a danger that you, you want to have a customer and shopper bias that it's you, right. And as a brand we've grown over the, over the years, you know, it's a much more, I guess I inclusive, uh, approach. You know, we've got some incredible products for a much broader range of cyclists.

And. I mean, we talk about the idea of living life by bike, and that's a really good way to step back from how I might want to live life by bike and how we can use that passion to give people their experience of life by bike on their terms, but enabled by what we, what we do in the products that we make for them.

Lovely. Do you feel as though by having such a passion, uh, as, uh, as, as a user and both as a practitioner. That you almost hold yourself, or indeed your brand, or indeed your work, to a really high, high standard. I wonder, is that a very subconscious, deep, therapeutic question for a podcaster? Yeah, definitely.

I think there's a, you know, it's part of the moral fibre, perhaps, when you've got the You know, we close the office three times a year to go riding. Um, you know, we don't do it in the winter, but all three other seasons, we'll have at least one office ride a quarter. And um, you know, that, yeah, it feels like a part of the, you know, we, I joke sometimes that we, we bleed hi vis pink, which is one of our brand colors.

Um, and that's what's, that's part of the fuel that helps us, uh, To think about it and really push ourselves really hard. Yeah. That's really, really nice. I like that.

Well, you know, when we're talking about e commerce and putting ourselves to a high standard, your statement of intent today is progress over perfection, which I think is a lovely line in that it's alliterative, but could you, could you maybe explain, elaborate on it?

What does that mean? I think sometimes it can appear to be that we're only interested in the short term. And that's, so to go to the worst interpretation of that, it could be that you're only worrying about the short term. But I think it's about that, I think purpose comes to help anchor that is that we know that the needs of our visitors, shoppers, customers, the term we use them, uh, you know, that's going to evolve faster than we can respond necessarily.

So to say, what is the perfect thing or the perfect piece? It's only a snapshot in time. So sometimes it has to be the thing that's over the horizon that you're riding towards, and it's about continually making that progress. You know, the Tour de France or the Giro Vuelta, it's a 21 day stage race, and you can't always win it on one day, but you can almost certainly lose a 21 day Grand Cycling Tour.

And so you've got to have that tenacity to keep going and to think, we're just going to keep going, because In, in some ways, maybe it's a compound interest mindset as opposed to a sort of pops and drops kind of mindset. But, you know, if we're a long, if we think around long term customer value as well, which so CRM sits as part of my world, there's that nurturing, there's that, that nudging, that, you know, exhilarating that, you know, finding the right moments, knowing that it's for the long, the slightly longer term you have to keep, you know, people hold you to that bar as a customer and you have to make sure that you're moving continuously.

And that, yes, nothing will be, you know, there will be some times where you have to execute with perfection, to be clear. That's not saying there's no perfection. It's just that find that level of making that change and keeping change, keeping that change moving and being able to respond. That's, that's perhaps more important than any particular output.

And I think that's the bit that I'd probably summarize. It's like that real outcome mindset. Knowing the direction of travel and making sure you're still true to it, but not letting yourself get held up along the way on that journey. Your legs have to keep spinning to ride the bike at the end of the day.

Number three. Is it That's number four actually.

Is it, instead of being over perfection, is it more of a balance between the two? So is it progress And perfection, uh, or progress opposed to perfection. Yeah. I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I definitely don't think so. It's like progress, knowing that vision of where you want to be and holding that true.

It's about keeping that justice. Yeah. Keep staying true to that and making the progress is just as important as. Um, yeah, it's not, they're not mutually exclusive for sure. And when you talk about compound interesting, obviously my head immediately goes as a Manchester United fan goes to Sir David Brailsford, the old 1%.

Um, I'm aware he did quite a few things for cycling, but for me now it's just myopically focused on, on Ineos and Manchester United. And when you look at compound interesting, it feels as though you need some kind of measurement protocol to understand that you're going in the right direction. Because Perfection has usually a key metric, a standardized, homogenized, global metric to say Maybe even a lagging indicator as well.

That's the other thing as well, is that you, it's a bit like, I'm going to say conversion rate is super important, but you know, if we are, if the goal of a, let's say we've got a jersey on our website. The goal is to attract people to, to know about that jersey, step one, then there's, well, do they add it to basket?

And you've got those leading indicators. And so to your point, it's like, are we moving the leading indicators while still staying true to that conversion rate? Does it, you know, cause at the end of the day, I think we've spoken about this before. Uh, it's a bit of a fixed system. You apply pressure somewhere else somewhere, you know, so you drive a load of traffic to a product page.

You might see a drop in add to bag. You've not done something right. There's so many variables. It's just got to keep. Tweaking and responding and kind of like evolving your mindset and your approach and things like that. And that's why I think the, uh, the compound interest piece just really helps you thinking like, okay, what did we learn?

And then we, you know, you can sort of bank the learning, stack that up. Does it still hold true? Keep moving. And you know, you start to make progress towards, I'm going to say a success metric of some sorts. Not, well, you know, that'll nearly always be conversion rate and revenue at the end of the day. We are businesses, but that leading in that leading indicator and figuring out the right sort of, okay, why are we really successful?

Is it essentially people who viewed that product, who added to bag to get into the real nitty gritty? Is that our truest sort of, yeah, we, we, we, we managed, we, we hit that one out of the park or in this case, we didn't. And it's, it requires a, I think that double edged sword of like long, long and lagging indicators and shortened immediate indicators in combination to really help you drive some progress.

In combination, you're right. The balance between the two and we've, we've obviously spoken loads of times before, but the, you spoke to me last time about an acronym that Rafa uses. To like attract, convert and retain customers. What was that acronym again? Yeah. So this, I think this stems down to the mindset that we try to bring into digital actually, which is it's uses the, um, the acronym we use in our retail stores or clubhouses called clip in, which is cycling mentioned number five, um, and the key one for me was the N at the end stands for next time.

And I think that's something that sometimes gets lost in the cold clinical nature of working from screen, you know, doing stuff on a screen and it being then populated to a low, you know, tens of thousands of other screens coldly and clinically. And it's, um, you know, it's a bit like a window shopper. If you came to a physical store, You adjust your approach based on how you can read the shopper and what they say to you.

The sub, the subconscious cue, someone might be picking up a jersey. They might pick up two jerseys and they'll be like, you know, which one they're preferring because they're probably interrogating, auditioning the material they're playing with a zipper there, you know, but they're not going, I like this jersey right now.

And yet we have this kind of bluntness or this, I don't know, sometimes a little naive around the idea that we were the only tab that someone has open. And in reality, they've got three other tabs. Three other jerseys from us, you know, two pairs of bibs from a competitor plus Google Shopping, like it's much more nuanced than perhaps we assume sometimes.

And that, I think the, the retail analogy, uh, I use that quite heavily. In fact, we have a, I call that an experience framework, which is basically jobs to be done esque kind of goals for each of the key steps of a shopping journey. Now, they happen to be tied to pages, uh, in, in some cases, in some cases, they're probably, you know, we, we try to.

Isolate them from the page, but they are the jobs to be done when of a shopper's mindset. And we provide real life examples of what that probably looks and feels like in a clubhouse. So if there's a team that maybe isn't as used to thinking about digital as being a customer facing team, they can go, Oh, I understand why this is.

So a product page, it sets up that expectation of how that product feels when you receive a hoodie, a jersey or whatever, and you put it on for the first time. And so you have to, you know, knowing that someone is going to, their, their expectation of how that feels is going to be set on a totally different page or a totally different step of the buying journey is super, you know, people find that super useful because it means that you've got to layer on.

different things in your assets or your copy or your fit, you know, selling Lycra is quite challenging because it's a, you know, a compressive fabric. And so, um, yeah, we've gone from kind of high level theory down to materials, but, uh, you know, that's the, the job, that's the job that the people hire our website to do arguably.

And that's how we think about it and use some of those retail analogies, because I think, yeah, we've lost a little bit of. It is just, I sometimes joke that we do e retailing, not e commerce, and that's a deliberate provocation perhaps, uh, to try and encourage people to think around, well How would we know this is working in the real world?

And what's the, how would we, does, does that, does that matter in, in the digital, uh, sphere? I find like, um, when I founded my conversion optimization consultancy, I used to sit in workshops. One of the most common phrases in workshops with clients used to be, what would it be like in the real world? You know, like with boots.

I remember when we were going through a navigation redesign with them, it was, it was a case of everybody was thinking. Using acronyms like information architecture, you know, trying to look at multi faceted navigation. These terms that we've just invented ourselves, but it only takes somebody to say, well, what's it like in a store?

Like, can we try it? And I feel like that's the most foundational, human, common sense, aligned way of looking at things. Yet, it feels like we've lost that. How do, how do Rafa try and Try and combine those two, the in store experience and the e retail experience. Oh, um, it's really interesting because we're, so much of our business is digital.

So, you know, over, um, three quarters of it basically. And so we're kind of the opposite of many retailers in the UK who might have, you know, a hundred stores and an e commerce site. I think there's just a starting to think about it as a. Experience, not as a channel, if that makes sense, you know, we are, we're in, we have 23 stores around the world, or clubhouses as we call them, and We, we, we, you know, we now start merchandising them similarly, you know, when there's, um, that sounds probably a little bit more basic than it is, but like for, you know, for the longest time, again, that progress piece is like, okay, what are we naming things?

What's the naming, you know, uh, in the stores that we're using. So we're using, uh, I think it was the end of 2020. Time is a blur at the moment, um, but, uh, you know, the name, you know, road riding, road and gravel, um, sorry, um, racing or pro team, as we call it, uh, trail or MTB, like we were using all these different terms sort of sort of almost interchangeably and actually.

You know, my, my role, and I was like, let's just standardize this because it's not IA. It is IA, but it's basically wayfinding. It's like, how would you, to your point, you come in and you look around and you go, okay, how do I orientate myself around where the right place to go is? And that is, that's, so we've started to make sure that we're just consistent and it sounds maybe a little bit lowest common denominator and not really aspirational and inspiring.

But when you start there, you can make that progress. You can find what works. You can share the learning. So you're using the same taxonomy across everything and you can go, okay. Let, let, let, let's iterate on it. And in that example, like when we're talking about progress over perfection, did that have a KPI associated with it or was that just a case of no, we're making progress for reasons X, Y, and Z and we don't need to associate a global metric to it?

Or was there a proxy metric associated, if you can remember that far? Yeah, there was a. This is more of a consistency of brand, which I think is a really interesting dynamic. And maybe some people might say dilemma, um, that we just wanted to be a little bit more incisive, you know, we'd, we'd gone from being a very, uh, singular focused road racing and, uh, cycling brands to this, you know, much more expansive range and.

For us, it was about giving clarity of articulating the brand as much as it was helping people find the right product. So there was a degree of, we're going to do this and let's just check. It doesn't hamper product views, but it's a more qualitative. Does it feel authentic? And are we therefore upholding what people reputationally would come to the brand to discover and expect from us?

It's fascinating and do you know what I, I, I can't stop thinking about what I called you at the beginning of this chat. I feel like I want to profusely apologize for calling you cynical. Uh, I think what I meant by that term is that you feel as though someone who cares so much about clearly, clearly, uh, cycling, but also how we should be treating the customer.

And it feels as though not just. That, that within e commerce, we're not doing a good enough job with that thing. Why do you think that is the case?

What is preventing e retailers, which is a lovely term, by the way, from caring more for customer, because everybody talks about it. I think it's a, it's, I think it's a, almost a pace of, I don't know, it's going with the flow perhaps a little too much.

It's about thinking, it's about stepping, it requires you to almost, I said this to my team multiple times, you know, the transition to being truly customer centric is one that requires you to almost turn yourself. inside out. You have to let go of all those things that, as we spoke about at the beginning, all those things that like, as a customer, I know, I know what I want.

I know, I know what, what is right. And it requires you to almost lose that ego and turn yourself inside out. And it's It's hard because when you're passion driven, it can be, you're like, yeah, but, but, but, but it's like, no, no, but when we find the right audience or we know the right audience as you know, as you sharpen that continual progress piece, there's that, you know, what I can, I can still have the experience of.

Protein, and we know that that's all about performance, so great, I've got that beating heart in my chest that's going great, but in the areas of ambiguity, you're like, well, we know that we've turned, we've, we've done that hard, you know, we've done the hard miles to figure out this is how we need to. think differently about it, and sometimes I think it's, uh, just a, it's a long term decision, and that's sometimes hard, particularly when there's a squeeze, or the, the volatility of the last four years has shown that you have to be able to respond to so many things so quickly, that sometimes you just get knocked off kilter a little bit, and suddenly it becomes a snowball thing that kind of, it requires a deliberate choice to, to say, actually we're going to How do we think about this slightly differently?

Yeah, I, I like what, you know, you used a word at the beginning of, of that, which was ego. And I think that got snowballed into, into these other concepts. I do, I have wondered, I actually wrote it down in my book, Nick, and I took it out for fear. For fear of, I don't know, getting lambasted by somebody. I feel like ego is a big driver.

In preventing, and risk, and the need to do well, and narcissism, uh, is a big factor within a commercial environment such as e commerce. I feel like it could prevent people from thinking differently. I feel like it could prevent more care for the customer because at the end of the day, numbers need to be hit.

And the two are not often synonymous with one another. The two can be conflicting. Caring does not mean making more money and vice versa. I think perhaps it's not just ego though, I think it requires you to be vulnerable. And I think that's a more important term. I agree. Like if you think about this, the amazing TED talk, you know, it takes two people to start a movement, the lone outsider and the first follower.

But you've got to be vulnerable to be that first or second person. And in order to effect change, that requires you to be willing to put your head above the parapet or to, you know, to put a cycling metaphor on it, go in the break and, you know, and push yourself really hard while, and hope that. You know, and, you know, risk of puncture risks, you know, uh, mechanical, like these things, oh, we're, we're, we're way lost beyond, uh, two hands now.

Um, and that, yeah, it requires that, yeah, that vulnerability and being, being open to that, I guess.

Well, at 4 30 PM on a Friday night, you have, uh, opened my eyes and I'm going to go for a long drink. Uh, is there anything else that you'd like to say, like to end this? Your statement of intent. Oh, not really.

No. I think we, I think we've covered quite a lot of it. I think there was, you know, there's, I mean, we could talk for forever, but I think that's probably the way to close it because I think it's about, it's about starting. It's about learning. It's like continual learning piece. We have an internal behavior, which is, uh, find your own road, we call it.

And I think that's the, that would be my parting piece of that's the mindset that we all kind of need to embrace to keep moving and not being afraid to make, to be vulnerable and, and, uh, you know, think about the, the e retail, uh, or the, or if we were talking person to person, how would we think about it?

I love that. Nick, thank you very much for your wisdom. I appreciate it. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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.