Ep. 93 | Get More from Retail Technology w Nixon’s Gary Penn
This week Gary Penn, Global Vice President of Digital and Ecommerce at Nixon joins Allison Hartsoe in the Accelerator. Gary began his career in technology and then shifted to ecommerce so he has both a deep knowledge and love for online retail tech. Today, as a senior leader, he’s changed how he evaluates retail technology. Hear Gary’s tips in this week’s episode.
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Allison Hartsoe: 00:01 This is the customer equity accelerator. If you are a marketing executive who wants to deliver bottom line impact by identifying and connecting with revenue generating customers, then this is the show for you. I’m your host, Allison Hartsoe, CEO of ambition data. Each week I bring you the leaders behind the customer-centric revolution who share their expert advice. Are you ready to accelerate? Then let’s go. Welcome everyone. Today’s show is about getting more bang for your buck and retail technology, and to help me discuss this topic is Gary Penn. Gary is the Global Vice President of Digital and eCommerce at Nixon, a premium watch and accessories brand for the youth lifestyle market. Gary, welcome to the show.
Gary Penn: 00:50 Hi. Thanks very much. I’m happy to be here.
Allison Hartsoe: 00:52 Can you tell us a little bit more about your background? I assume that you might be of the generation that didn’t get a master’s degree in digital and eCommerce. How did you get to this role?
Gary Penn: 01:01 Yeah. Interestingly, my roommate in college, I think, got the first degree ever mixing arts and digital media, and he was thinking way ahead of the curve, but I cannot say that I was. So I got the standard arts and literature degree and actually ended up getting into technology. I’ve always kind of had a knack for technology, which brought me into the cost side of any business working in INT. And when I saw the opportunity being on the profit center side of the business in the mid two thousand, I jumped at the opportunity, and I’ve been in e-com ever since, so it’s been a 20-year run working on the web and 15 years just in commerce.
Allison Hartsoe: 01:40 And you’ve been with several brands and not just Nixon, of course.
Gary Penn: 01:43 I’ve been extremely fortunate to work with a slew of really great consumer-centric global brands. The first big brand that I worked with Shimano, the global Japanese cycling, fishing back when I was working with them, they were doing golfing and snowboarding in Japan. It was awesome business to work with. And from there I got into action sports. I’ve worked at Quicksilver, and I’ve worked at Columbia sportswear and fortunate now to work at Nixon.
Allison Hartsoe: 02:10 Very good. Now tell us a little bit more about what your team does and what you specifically do.
Gary Penn: 02:15 My role at Nixon is overseeing direct to consumer, so that includes basically anything from a digital standpoint that touches the consumer including direct to consumer sale, but also including areas where the consumer might shop off of nixon.com like global marketplaces, TMall, Amazon, things like that and the team supports that in every way, shape or form, whether that’s design or development operationally, analytically, there’s a lot of pieces of the pie.
Allison Hartsoe: 02:43 Did I just hear you say TMall as in the Asian online shopping mall
Gary Penn: 02:47 TMall yes, something opportunity that I’ve been exploring for a little while now that we’re looking at and that Columbia had gotten into a while ago and seeing a lot of success on.
Allison Hartsoe: 02:57 Very nice. We had done some previous shows talking about Alibaba versus Amazon, and that was very interesting, we won’t go into that part today, but feel free to add in color commentary about the global market as you see fit, because I think that’s an area that a lot of people underestimate because the US market has traditionally been so big.
Gary Penn: 03:15 For sure. And I’m again very fortunate to be in a position where Nixon’s a very global brand. And so the education working at a global brand naturally comes day in and day out, both culturally, but also in terms of business practice globally and digital practice globally. What is digital social look like? What does digital marketplace look like on a global scale? It’s a blessing and a curse. Some days it’s great and then there are some days when I say, man, I’m just working in an English only site in North America would be so much easier, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world. It’s fun to be able to work not only within the context of global cultures, but I’m glad to have a team that’s located in different regions of the world that I can communicate and collaborate with.
Allison Hartsoe: 03:55 Well, I think that brings us really nicely into retail technology because that may be a slightly different criteria that you use, but I imagine a lot of people, you know, when they think about retail talk, they might be thinking, Oh, you know, I pick a tool. It gets the job done. Hopefully, it makes my life easier. And then I move on to the next thing. Why should I care more about the kinds of retail technologies I use?
Gary Penn: 04:19 I look at everything, and I think I would recommend that most brands look at everything in terms of digital from a consumer-centric standpoint. So the question is, what is this tool really providing to my consumer? Regardless of what the tool is, whether it’s a backend tool that your consumers never see, your analytics, or your KPI measurement tool, or whether it’s something very consumer-centric that’s front end that provides bells and whistles or personalization or countdown clocks. Whenever it might be, there are so many different tools that it’s really easy to get overwhelmed. And so why you should care is in the process of being overwhelmed, it’s not only easy to make bad decisions, it’s easy to make too many decisions if I may say so. So I E you can end up with an arsenal that might be too big for what you require and that can be a danger in and of itself.
Gary Penn: 05:07 It’s hard to get maximum value or too many things going on. And I’ve learned this through experience because I grew up starting with digital operations and development teams, and I was kind of a tools guy. I was the bells and whistles guy, was building user experience on the site, and I love to talk to vendors and look at what was out there in terms of technology. I still do, but I wanted to bring in everything, and I learned from a great mentor who was not super into the tools. He was more into what’s the overall customer experience? Are we doing a good job at the critical function and is our return process, for instance, as good as our sales process because we need to have the full funnel of information that the consumer’s faces be clear and comprehensible and simple to execute on and tools can, it’s a double-edged sword. They can help that, or they can hinder that.
Allison Hartsoe: 06:02 I imagine that as we now have like 7,000 just in the MarTech space, that maybe at the beginning it was really like an additional tool would actually enhance the experience was more likely to do that. But just as you were saying, too many tools, too many decisions. Do you use the MarTech chart to say, Oh, I need a tool in this box, this box in this box, or are you more or less cuing from your mentor and saying there’s a different way to think about it?
Gary Penn: 06:31 I think I’ve been in the business long enough to know where the fundamental gaps are if I come into an organization. So I’ve been at Nixon two years, and obviously, when I got here, I was able to look at the overall consumer experience and the user experience on the site and figure out where do I think that we need to make improvements a little bit. It’s better than it was two years ago from a website perspective. So knock on wood, I hope that continues.
Allison Hartsoe: 06:53 To more of a functional.
Gary Penn: 06:54 Yeah, the functional aspect for sure. But I really use a chart per se. I think it’s a matter of asking folks who are in the business what they think is going well. I think you have to put yourself in the shoes of the customer and actually shock your own site. It helps if you have a spouse who likes your product and can give you input of, my wife has given me great input at the last four brands that have been at, and it’s super helpful because it’s a fresh set of eyes. It’s just a different perspective as somebody who’s not thinking digital strategy everyday, but just wants a great consumer experience and will tell the truth. So I think it’s a variety of different inputs, but interviewing your customers, serving people, understanding where the gaps are is absolutely critical.
Allison Hartsoe: 07:35 I love that example of the spouse input I used to use back in the dotcom day we used to say, could your mom understand it? And it kind of reminds me of that.
Gary Penn: 07:45 Right, that was a great one.
Allison Hartsoe: 07:45 Yeah. Can your spouse get through this and the fresh eyes is such a big deal because we oftentimes are thinking about all the different pieces that are happening under the covers, and that can cause us not to make good choices because you’re thinking, Oh, well if I switched off this tool, then it’s really painful, and this database does this thing, and that tool does that thing. We just got it to connect. Your average consumer doesn’t care about that, right? They just want it to work.
Gary Penn: 08:11 They just want it to work. And I think it’s important to also look from the perspective of your staff and your expense budget. Right? What’s your P and L look like? Because at the end of the day, we’re all limited on resources. Nobody is indefinite in resources. Potentially with the exception of Amazon is just kind of building everything themselves from scratch. But for the rest of us who are running brands of small to medium size, maybe even large brands, the budget’s constrained. And so the question then becomes, is this tool doing what it is that we want it to do first and foremost. Secondly, does it do anything beyond what we’re utilizing it for? Could you think back to the demos and everybody, every listener out there has heard or been through a demo of some kind, and when you see the demos, there are all kinds of examples, interactive experiences, toys to play with.
Gary Penn: 09:00 Okay, what is that do for the brand? How much of that is your brand and your business actually utilizing? Is a really important question to ask yourself. So I actually had really interesting learning, and this is a great learning for me to just kind of check myself at the door every day. We wanted to put a net promoter score on the website, and this was a request directly from our CEO, and it’s very reasonable request. I think knowing NPS in this day and age for omnichannel brand is really important. So my first thought was, well, I have to go figure out what the NPS tool is. And I talked to one of Nixon sister companies, that’s using an NPS tool that seems really clean, and I was asking about Tyson and poking around and come to find out, I don’t remember if it was by rocker somebody just said, sent me a link.
Gary Penn: 09:45 One of the tools that we already were using literally already paying for enabled serving on the site or via email. And one of the outlets box features of that survey, because it’s so popular, was NPS, which is just a simple one to 10 ranking. And so I literally had no idea that this tool did this. I was researching survey monkey, you know, as researching tools that just specialize in NPS. And at the end of the day, I was literally able to log into the tool. I already had an admin login, and I do not get in the weeds that often. I was so enamored with the fact that I had missed this that I went in, and I built the survey, and I put it on the site literally within 15 minutes, and the next day, when I woke up, I had responses to my NPS survey. So it just goes to show that sometimes it helps to review what you already have.
Gary Penn: 10:33 Maybe you have seven tools supporting your eCommerce business. Maybe you have two or three different tools that are supporting your brick and mortar retail business. Go back and see what other features that toolset enables or ask for a new demo. It’s coming up in 2020 soon. It’s a whole new age. It’s a different world. The tool that you bought in 2015 or 2017 or even 2019 roadmaps changes just as fast as your business is moving. Hopefully, that vendor’s business is moving, and if their business isn’t moving and providing more, it begs the question, should they be?
Allison Hartsoe: 11:06 Well, what’s interesting about your example in the NPS is I sometimes subscribe to the philosophy that wherever a tool began is what they’re really natively good at. And sometimes as they expand into other areas, you can end up with these Franken stack style platforms where A doesn’t connect to B, and it just makes more of a headache because you know as they cobble things together, they then have to put the glue and the smoothing in between them, and you suffer while that happens. Is there a rule of thumb that might be, when do you look for a tool that’s really good at what it does versus when you look at what you already have?
Gary Penn: 11:44 Yeah, I think so. I think with some of the simpler concepts like NPS, there’s a good chance that if you have some type of tool that measures consumer behavior on the site that might enable consumer questionnaires. So, in this case, I’ll call out Hotjar because I love them, and they’re a great tool, and like I said, they’re providing NPS for us now. So we were using Hotjar to measure audience engagement on the site and heat map audience interaction with different elements of our navigation, et cetera. It stands reason naturally, and to your point, that type of facility could also enable, well, if we’re measuring what the customer is clicking on, does that tool also measure how they feel about the site at the end of their experience or during their experience? And the answer is yes. So I think when there’s a logical tie-in, you almost have to think forward, and it might behoove you to go ask the vendor, Hey, I see a natural tie in here.
Gary Penn: 12:40 Do you guys do this? A lot of the times you will hear is that’s on the roadmap. And recently, what I’m hearing from a lot of software vendors is most roadmaps are not that far out. I think back in the day, people were saying that’s on the roadmap. It would come two to three years later. Now I’m hearing it’s on the roadmap and with some of our partners like Salesforce who runs our eCommerce platform, roadmap unannounced doesn’t mean that generally available, but it does mean that usually within three quarters it’s up and running so how badly do you need it and can you wait three quarters or two quarters or one quarter to not have to implement something different, get a second set of data, integrate that data into your KPI measurements and figure out how to most efficiently use that tool. I would guess that most folks out there are moving faster than 92 to 180 days.
Allison Hartsoe: 13:27 What’s interesting about what you called out as the implementation time and that was kind of subtly under the first example was if you basically enabled this feature and then the next day you had what you needed. You skipped over all of that implementation time, the contracting time, the negotiation time. There’s a whole lot of time saved there that when you pick up a new tool, you have to go through in order to get to the results. I think the three-quarters Mark is actually not too far off. If you consider, it might even just take you a quarter to get through the RFP or what is it that I really want and then the contracting and everything else.
Gary Penn: 14:03 Right. I think the question that you might ask yourself when you’re looking at something like this because there’s always something better is when is good enough great? In this case, good enough is great. I’m sure that there are tools out there that have more functionality and more capacity than many of the things that are in our arsenal, but the implementation, the times of market, the pain of going through contract negotiation process, making sure that gets to the CFO and making sure that your controller knows about it. There are so many pieces, and it seems so small. Oh, it’s not going to be that hard, but it’s still hours and hours and hours, and what’s your time work? Well, ultimately, it’s your most valuable asset.
Allison Hartsoe: 14:40 That’s just perfect. What other examples come to mind when you’re thinking about what fits in the technology stack you? So first, look at what you have. What about things you don’t have?
Gary Penn: 14:49 So, I think so. Let’s take a couple of buzzwords that are out there right now. So one of them is AR, one of them is AI, and both of those things are really critical to the overall business, but you have to understand what it is that you’re seeking. So for us, for instance, we’ve been looking at AR technology because ultimately, we are an accessories manufacturer who specializes in watch and accessories or one of those things that are very difficult to fit, quote-unquote on the human body. Right. It’s hard to picture how broad the hat is. It goes on your head. It’s hard to figure out how big the watch is in space that goes on your wrist. Now, apparel companies have figured this out pretty well over the course of time. They have figured out how to share data amongst themselves with third-party vendors about their fit because it’s not hidden.
Gary Penn: 15:40 It just takes somebody to come up with fitting tool and then from that fitting tool you can reasonably assume, Hey, if I’m a medium in Gap, I might be a medium in J crew, I might be a medium in XYZ. With accessories that’s actually a lot more difficult because there’s not that depth of data, and there are all kinds of different types of bits for whatever it is that you’re talking about and getting things in the real-time and space is extraordinarily challenging because how do you know what a 52 millimeter watch looks like versus a 38 millimeter watch?
Allison Hartsoe: 16:11 I can’t say that I talk about that. I don’t use that language.
Gary Penn: 16:16 Yes, it’s crazy. It’s something that is absolutely unsolved, and if you think just five years ago, it basically was unsolved for apparel too. It’s just that apparel companies have started to move a little bit forward with being able to share information. So AI has the potential to take businesses that are running accessories, sales online that are not necessarily digital natives but are growing in digital sales and move that into an area where AR can help.
Allison Hartsoe: 16:42 So how does AI help get you closer to AR, augmented reality?
Gary Penn: 16:50 Let me take the AI question first because I think AI and AR, yes, they’re buzz words, but they’re both very addressable in today’s market, AI is something that is becoming prevalent in a variety of tools. So AI is now out of the box as part of a variety of platforms to help cross-sell certain merchandise with other merchandise. So Hey, you bought this shirt, we see lots of consumers are also buying these pants with this shirt. We bought this hat, they all go together. The computer then, through algorithm, it algorithms is able to take that and spit out the suggested cross-selling. That technology has been around for a long time, but it wasn’t necessarily big data-driven. It was small data-driven. With AI, it’s now taking into account larger datasets. But AI is also helping in other ways that weren’t as easily available before. So one of those is in predictive storing.
Gary Penn: 17:40 Let’s talk about personalization. Imagine if every time you went on a page, you are actually seeing a different sort order than a different company because there’s a computer behind the scenes algorithmically trying to determine what it is that you would have wanted or that would have the most relevance for you in that Walt set. So that’s where AI comes in handy. Now, AI, by entering that realm, is actually freed up the time of merchandisers who had to do that work manually previously. So this is an area where you say, okay, I don’t have a tool in the arsenal that necessarily solves this problem. We’re hearing a lot about AI. Well, what the heck is AI? Or it’s nothing but a buzz word. It just means a lot of data and an algorithm. But what is important to the business is the CEO is probably whispering about personalization.
Gary Penn: 18:22 Guarantee you somebody on the executive team is walking up and asking about personalization. It’s, I’ve yet to hear a business that’s not. What AI is personalization it drives personalization. And the cost offset is yes, higher conversion. Yes, higher engagement. Yes, higher click through, but also reduced merchandising costs. Now, it doesn’t mean that the merchandiser’s role is threatened by AI. I had a lot of people ask about that, and I don’t see that as a threat. I think for menial jobs, yes, but for something that requires something of a merchandiser’s skill, I think it actually just opens up the merchandising. There’s time to do more interesting work than manually sort a hundred products on a product listing.
Allison Hartsoe: 19:00 It’s like assisted intelligence instead of artificial. I’ve heard people flip out the a to be augmented or assisted or otherwise pair the intelligence side with something that’s more human-related.
Gary Penn: 19:11 Yeah, that’s great. I love that 100% I don’t think it’s gonna replace merchandisers. There’s going to be a role for merchants long after every single sort on. Every single website is driven by a computer, so then you look at something like AR and AR technology, which is augmented reality. It’s all just the problem of it and the ability of accessories companies to be able to fit something. This is something that apparel companies figured out a little while back by sharing data about their fit, but AR can enable, Hey, I really don’t know how big a 52-millimeter watches and 38-millimeter watches. I don’t think most people know. Do you know?
Allison Hartsoe: 19:43 I do not know. I know a giant swatch that I bought ages ago, but I have no idea what it is in millimeters.
Gary Penn: 19:50 There you go. It’s a great example, right? And so that’s in the watch market. And believe me, I didn’t know before I joined Nixon two years ago, I had no idea. So consumers don’t know this information, and yet this is how the whole market run. So with something like AR, now you’re taking a buzzword that is basically saying, Hey, I’m going to help enable problems that couldn’t be solved before like the relative size of an object to a human. So how big is that watch on my wrist in actual size, how big is that computer on my desk? Will it fit in my new office? How big is that hat? Does it get on my head? There are so many applications of AR. They’re immediately available just around us. Apple has several on their website right now, or they’re astoundingly clean and perfect. They’re great examples of what AR can do to be helpful to your life as opposed to some disruptor, and we’re just literally teeny teeny scratching the surface of what AR is going to do.
Gary Penn: 20:42 I look at e-comm as being in a series of steps. The first is getting over the barrier of converting. I think we crossed that threshold a long time ago, and two years ago, we crossed that threshold with mobile, and now it’s e-comm all the time. Anytime on any device, great. Glad we’re past that. The next is I can’t touch it. I can’t feel it. I can’t smell it. Well, the touch aspect is getting better with video, with better photography, with high-resolution capabilities on our phone. People are much more comfortable being able to cross the barrier number one because of the data that’s coming alive and making the product come to life in number two, and I mentioned the apparel companies now have fit, so you are less scared of the fit area. The third is smell it, touch it, and I have not figured out how to smell something through the internet yet, and nobody else has either. But Hey, there’s your trillion dollar idea. If you can figure out virtual smell,
Allison Hartsoe: 21:35 There’s the value of the podcast right there. Trillion dollar idea in one sentence.
Gary Penn: 21:39 There you go. Three trillion dollar idea. Any listeners who can come up with virtual smell.
Allison Hartsoe: 21:43 Smelly vision.
Gary Penn: 21:44 And write yourself a check. Smelly mission. Right?
Allison Hartsoe: 21:47 Right. So what you were saying before about augmented reality, it makes it seem like, okay, there’s a new normal that’s coming up every time we turn the corner in eCommerce, is there a P and L operation or a mathematical calculation you have to ask yourself when you’re saying, okay, do we just need to do this because everybody else is doing it and we can’t be behind or is this actually going to move the bottom line? Is that part of your thought process?
Gary Penn: 22:13 A hundred percent, I think it has to be, their company of Nixon size, which we are not a large company. I think we’re somewhere between a small and a medium size business and probably on the lower end of a medium sized business. The idea of not thinking about what both the top and the bottom line are going to do by implementing any tool would be reckless. That would be silly for me to do, and so AR is a great example where we have actually investigated the technology, and we think it has legs, but the barrier to entry is extremely expensive right now.
Allison Hartsoe: 22:42 Is that a place where you could think about it in terms of customer lifetime value if it brought you higher value customers that would buy more often and more frequently as opposed to just would it result in more conversions? I wonder if the math would be different.
Gary Penn: 22:59 It would. I think we’ve thought about it in terms of brand value. What does it bring to the brand to be first to the technology on it first is a relative term but early adopters of the technology. What does it bring in terms of cache? What does it bring in terms of new customers, what does it bring just in terms of marketing opportunities to be able to tell a story and then we also look at the more performance marketing aspect of the tool? What’s the conversion lift? What’s the return on investment? I think it’s a combination of the two things. AR is one of those things where it’s not quite prevalent and not yet on a web-based interface, especially to be implemented on a broad scale for a company of our size. I think it is very close, and I’ve talked to other trusted colleagues in the industry who work at footwear companies that have tried AR and apparel companies that have tried AR and people do see engagement with the tool but not necessarily the ease. And the deployment is not there to see the list of conversion or even opportunity offset costs.
Allison Hartsoe: 24:02 Yeah, I could see that where people are engaging with it, but does that actually make it worth your time in terms of how hard it is to get it in and constantly updated and I guess that’s one of the challenges you always have to think about in your retail tool stack is it’s not just the first use, it’s the ongoing use and then, of course, we’ll we like to think about is where does that data go and how do you pull that into your holistic system of understanding the customer?
Gary Penn: 24:28 For sure. It has to be part of your thought process of not only what’s the engagement but I suppose you can AB test having an on and off of the specific product page in order to determine lift, but is that the best way to determine lift and how do you measure thrill on a KPI that comes up is consumer sentiment about a particular technology?
Allison Hartsoe: 24:48 Are there other examples that you want to share that are maybe different than the first two? We’ve talked about technology you don’t have, we’ve talked about finding more value in the technology that you do have. Is there any other flavor that you want to hit on?
Gary Penn: 25:02 I’ll give you one other example of where we’ve seen success recently, and it seems so basic, but we Nixon attract a unique, and I wouldn’t say it’s a fashion-centric is probably the wrong term. Design the trick customers, do value unique, bold designs that can be uniquely theirs because they’re uniquely Nixon, and they associate with the brand. And we see the engagement of those customers on social, and through social, we’ve been able to use some of the onsite tools. We specifically use Pixley to pull that engagement on to the site to share one customer’s excitement with another customer. Because at the end of the day, read any white paper, customers trust customers. They don’t trust brands and nor should they necessarily trust brands. Right? Brands have not in the last 70 years, not necessarily been the most trustworthy entity. So great, let’s get our customers telling other customers what they think.
Gary Penn: 25:56 And let’s have it be unvarnished and real. So we do that through Pixley but we amazingly for 2019 Omni channel retail brand, we did not have ratings and reviews on the site, and I was very keen to get that up. We put in a technology called turn to which to me one of the best ratings interviews tools on the market cause they offer a suite of different areas where the customer can interact both the checkout and to ask questions to other customers and to leave reviews. So it’s multi tier. Now we put the whole suite on there because we believed that customer interactions were high enough in social and high enough in Pixley with people submitting and tagging us that we would see a deep level of engagement, and I can’t disclose the engagement numbers, but they are off the charts. Unbelievable levels of people engaging with our brand. It’s been live for about 110 120 days, and it just keeps growing. It’s unbelievable to me that not only are people leaving reviews, but they are pitting with our team because they know that our customer service folks are reading every review and replying to those that need attention.
Allison Hartsoe: 27:00 You’re building a tribe.
Gary Penn: 27:01 I suppose it’s giving, I think the tribe was already there.
Allison Hartsoe: 27:04 You’re activating a tribe.
Gary Penn: 27:06 And we sensed it through social, right? We gave them a place to converse. We provided when in the 90s would have been a forum, right? An online forum, a bulletin board system. We’d given them a place to interact with the brand. Now it begs the question, should there be a place for customers to interact with each other? I don’t know. I think that’s an age old question in action sports and people have tried that building communities, so very little success. So I think that’s a more difficult one to tackle. But in terms of giving people a voice within the brand, 100%, and that’s how Nixon was founded. It was founded on the premise that we don’t know what’s cool, and we’re not going to tell you what’s cool, but we know that the people that we interact with who are also our customers do know. So we’re going to ask them, which is where the term team designed came from because we consider all our customers to be the team. All our influencers are the team, all our athletes are the team, and we don’t pay our influencers. They have to want to engage with us. So they are giving us suggestions, and we’re working in collaboration to create great products that we want that as much on the consumer side as well. So give us suggestions.
Allison Hartsoe: 28:09 And so this allowed you to pick up perhaps more product innovation ideas to listen to your community more. Is that or can that be too much of a good thing if you decide for one reason or another that you’re not going to take action that the team design group wants you to take?
Gary Penn: 28:25 I don’t think so. I think if we hear a loud enough voice, first of all, from a broad enough array of folks, Nixon is very willing to take action, but I think more important than that is that you have to look at other like businesses that are based purely on action and stuff like Kickstarter, right, literally based on action and you might have lots and lots of people vote on something and it still doesn’t reach the threshold and you might have lots and lots of people vote on something and reach a threshold and the project still fails or the founder owner of the idea decides that they don’t want to go through with it. There are lots of things that get consumer voice and consumer sentiment that don’t move forward. I think the goal is to make sure that you have trust and Nixon turned 20 last year, and I believe we have that customer trust.
Allison Hartsoe: 29:08 That’s something I see in just the newer brands. I think that humility that we don’t know it all as something that’s unique. You don’t see Gillette reaching out and say, we don’t know at all. Tell us more about how to design a razor that you want, or you don’t even see like the airplanes. I wish they would ask how would you design an airplane because it’s not the way it works today. So I think this idea is something unique to newer brands, and that’s great. It sounds like this tool that you’ve picked up really helped you activate not just the tribe that was already there, but the premise of the brand. So it sounds like our third example is looking for tools that that a bigger purpose.
Gary Penn: 29:45 Yeah, I think fitting a bigger purpose and again, seeing the trends. So we saw ratings and reviews is nothing vessel earth shattering in terms of new technology. It’s been around since the beginning of eCommerce, and it’s all about transparency, but we saw a need for customer engagement, and so that’s why we said, okay, we need a full suite of user-generated content experience tools. We need places that people can engage. Yes. At checkout and yes, ask other customers questions. Yes, ask customer service question. Yes, leave reviews once they’ve enjoyed or not enjoyed our product, and let’s publish all that and try to be honest and open about it. And the outcome, like I said, has been very positive for us.
Allison Hartsoe: 30:26 Lovely. So let’s say I’m convinced, and I’d got to follow new strategies to set up my retail stack. What should I do first, second third? How should I think about this problem?
Gary Penn: 30:37 First, figure out what it is that you’re lacking in your platform. Let’s assume that your retail stack already has an ecom platform, which in and of itself is a huge decision for any business and potentially a multimillion dollar one. Once it is established, you know what is in the utility of that platform and what is not. And the reality is that some are more bare bones than others. Salesforce shines when it comes to things like AI, and they have a tool called Einstein built into everything they do, but they don’t have anything in terms of package tracking or post-purchase or order management. On the flip side, if you look at something like Shopify, which tends to gear their marketing toward small to midsize customers, they have lots of alternative payments built in. They have post-purchase tracking built in, they have universal login built in, so they’re looking at it very customer centric perspective, but they’re not giving you free AI out of the box. So it just depends on what it is that your platform provides and then what is your business needs. So for many businesses, a lot of the things that are built into lots of these platforms are everything they need, and maybe you don’t need that much more if cross-selling is available as part of the tool, use the out of the box one until you have a business needs to drive more. Or until you see, Hey, this is not driving the conversion that we need. We think we really needed more intelligent dynamics solutions.
Allison Hartsoe: 31:56 I’m going to throw you this question, which I don’t know if you know the answer to, but because of your global background, it’s one that’s been niggling in the back of my head as we’ve been talking. The tools that Alibaba sets up are designed to help retailers move along at a very fast pace and not just warehouse selling in volume. And I wonder is there an Avenue for companies to think about moving onto that stack versus a US centric stack or is the gap just too big right now and it’s really geared for the Asian market and also other spots of the world. But you know, the US consumer is just different. We don’t buy in the same way that the Asian market does.
Gary Penn: 32:38 If you’re asking if the platform is viable for US companies, I think within the Asian market, yes, with a lot of help. Is it viable for US business? Not yet, in my very humble opinion.
Allison Hartsoe: 32:49 Awesome. Good to know.
Gary Penn: 32:50 It is very complex, and if nothing else, the learning curve for everybody that’s been in retail is extreme. I mean, it’s like the uphill on the roller coaster, and then you’d better hang on for the downhill because it’s every piece of terminology. Every acronym is different, and they all operate differently. It’s just a different beast culturally different.
Allison Hartsoe: 33:12 Yeah. Okay. So back to what you were saying, we were talking about Salesforce and Shopify, and then you were about to move on to the next step.
Gary Penn: 33:19 Yeah. So I think you determine what it is that’s in your core platform. Then once you identify what’s not there, you asked yourself what is it you have to prioritize? Cause like you said, what’d you six or 7,000 tools or something like that out in the market. There’s so many. So you can look at the different stacks and say where are we missing something? What do we have in terms of personalization? What do we have in terms across the line? Oh, those things mesh together. What do we have in terms of shipping? Do we provide easy return? You have to kind of look at and prioritize what it is that you need in order of operations. And I would put ten things on that list because you might knock out one and then you might get two and three done fairly quickly after that.
Gary Penn: 33:57 And then four takes you six months. And number five. I mean, you need to have that list and you need to be refining it probably twice a year. And then you pair that with resourcing, budget, and by resourcing, I’m not talking about financial resource and talking about human resourcing or developer resourcing and whatever’s required project budget to actually pay for it and time and dismiss patient. What is your timeline? What’s your aspiration? Do you know something’s more difficult to integrate? How important is it that you tackle that right now? Where should you jump to? Hey, this rank number three but given human resources, financial resources, and the trajectory of the business, we’re gonna jump to number four. So I would say those are the only pieces that you need to be successful or can make a choice that will move the business forward. Because if you’re hitting all those boxes, even if it doesn’t work, and digital is all about risks.
Gary Penn: 34:44 I have a rule that I’ve run for ten years in multiple different businesses with lots of teams, and it’s the do no harm policy. And then do no harm policy is you don’t need to ask to put something into play as long as it’s not gonna completely take down the result because there’s risk involved and you’re never going to know the answer 100% so at the end of the day, let’s say you put in solution one and you put in solution two, and you skipped three cause it’s not right for the business where it is right now, and you start four, and then you come back and find out that two really wasn’t performing the way that you thought it was. Well, was that a bad decision? No, not if you made all the inputs. Hindsight’s 2020, but if you made a good decision based on the inputs that you have at that point in time, you made the best decision you could. And more importantly, you can explain that decision very logically to anybody that inquires.
Allison Hartsoe: 35:31 Excellent. So those are good tips for how to get started and how to think about it. If people want to reach out to you and say, Hey Gary, I have some other questions, or we’re thinking about this technology. What’s the best way for them to get in touch?
Gary Penn: 35:43 I am very active on LinkedIn. I have a video theories on LinkedIn and part of the LinkedIn video hashtag group, and you can find me at linkedin.com/in/gpenn, so G, like Gary, P. E. N. N., so please reach out to me and follow me on LinkedIn and feel free to message me. If you follow me, that’s great. If you want to link in with me, I will accept your invitation. I’m not picky at people that want to be pals of network totally down for that.
Allison Hartsoe: 36:11 I can verify for that. You’re not picky. We connected. Hey,
Gary Penn: 36:15 I am very open to networking. How about that.
Allison Hartsoe: 36:19 I’m very good at it. It’s always just fun to talk to you Gary. Are there any incentives that you’d like to offer the audience? Like Hey, come check out Nixon.
Gary Penn: 36:27 Yeah, 100% I would love to distribute a coupon code on this podcast and that coupon code is CCNixon, N I X O N and the number 10, CCNixon10 and that will be good for 10% off of anything on nixon.com and mixing is a not an off price brands. That is a hot commodity right there exclusively for podcast listeners.
Allison Hartsoe: 36:48 Awesome. And I will be looking forward to using that and Nixon is not just watches for guys, you have a broader inventory of accessories so definitely go and check it out.
Gary Penn: 37:00 Correct. We are a men’s and women’s lifestyle accessories company. We have hats, bags, wallets, watches for him and for her and lots of, everything on that list is unisex, so you can find something for pretty much anybody that you know and the holidays are coming. So it’s gifting season. Probably the most giftable item on the planet is some type of accessory because you don’t necessarily need to worry about if it fits that person or if they’re going to like the color. Everybody likes gold, silver, and black.
Allison Hartsoe: 37:28 That is so true. All right. Well, as always, links to everything we discussed are at ambitiondata.com/podcast, and the coupon code that Gary just mentioned will also be in our show notes. Gary, thank you so much for joining today. I really enjoyed our discussion about how to think about the retail technology. It is a mess of a space. I was thinking of a much harsher word to use, but I’ll just call it a mess, and it’s certainly not something that people should navigate through without some guidance. So thank you for sharing your best practices and your advice.
Gary Penn: 37:59 It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me on, and hopefully, listeners have a better idea of how to sort through that 7,000 and growing pile of things that you might implement.
Allison Hartsoe: 38:07 Oh my gosh. Yeah, and that’s just the MarTech side, you know, start adding in more AI, AR, and then it just gets even worse. Remember everyone, when you do use your data effectively, you can build customer equity. It is not magic. It’s just a very specific journey that you can follow to get results. Thank you for joining today’s show. This is your host, Allison Hartsoe and I have two gifts for you. First, I’ve written a guide for the customer centric CMO, which contains some of the best ideas from this podcast and you can receive it right now. Simply text, ambitiondata, one word, to three one nine nine six (31996) and after you get that white paper, you’ll have the option for the second gift, which is to receive the signal. Once a month. I put together a list of three to five things I’ve seen that represent customer equity signal, not noise, and believe me, there’s a lot of noise out there. Things I include could be smart tools I’ve run across, articles I’ve shared, cool statistics or people and companies I think are making amazing progress as they build customer equity. I hope you enjoy the CMO guide and the signal. See you next week on the customer equity accelerator.