Unpacking the Digital Shelf

Building and growing a middle market manufacturer and retail company is a challenge not for the faint of heart. But entrepreneurial passion and grit matched with operational expertise can lead to outstanding differentiation and growth. That’s the investment thesis of MidOcean partners, a private equity firm focused on transformative growth opportunities in middle-market consumer and business services companies. Eric Roth, Managing Director at MidOcean Partners, joined Rob and Peter to talk through private equity investing in a time of disruption, and the fascinating investment opportunities in the Davids vs. Goliaths battle.

Preparing content for the digital shelf, or in truth, all the digital shelves, is a process, organizational, and technical challenge. Not for the faint of heart. This is a podcast presentation of a recent Digital Shelf Playbook series webinar, featuring two experts who are deeply experienced in driving this process across multiple organizations. Lauren Livak, who ran North American Digital shelf strategy at Johnson and Johnson and is now the Director of the Digital Shelf Institute and Barbara Jenny-Wilson, Director of Digital Content Programs at Coty. Peter is on board as emcee.

In ecommerce, industry trends are really just the sum total of individual consumer behaviors. Rob and Peter take a look at trends in how DTC and consumer shopping experiences evolved during the pandemic, and how those shifts impact acquisition, loyalty, and who decides what your brand is. Plus, the world's cutest puppy is identified.

Until our robot overlords take over, winning on the digital shelf requires the right team of people. What is the mix of hard and soft skills that team members need to have to deliver and thrive in a rapidly changing and critical sector of the business? Lauren Livak, who ran North American Digital shelf strategy at Johnson and Johnson and is now Director of the Digital Shelf Institute, teamed up with Sheri Stoller, Director of Ecommerce at Trilliant Food and Nutrition in a recent Digital Shelf Playbook series webinar to answer this question and many more. It’s such a great conversation, we wanted to share it with our podcast audience as well.

Anyone in on the early days of ecommerce knows the name One Click Retail. They created the seminal platform for ecommerce measurement, sales analytics and search optimization, one that was acquired by Edge by Ascential in 2016. Nathan Rigby and his founding partner have teamed up again to raise the bar on ecommerce analytics and data-driven decision making with their new company, Analytic Index. Nathan joined Rob and Peter to talk about private brands, retailer ad platforms, the new science of search optimization, and, surprisingly, almond flour.

There is no question that our future will continue to be one of disruption. Either acute disruption, like COVID, or chronic disruption, like the emergence of digital technologies across industries and use cases. So the question isn’t a matter of will there be disruption, but what do leaders do in response? Business Professor Gerald Kane of Boston University, along with his co-authors, found themselves in the middle of a pandemic conducting deep research through hundreds of interviews with executives that resulted in new scholarship around thriving through disruption. The book is the Transformation Myth, and Professor Kane sat down with Peter to discuss it.

In a business dictated by an algorithm, designing a fluid, flexible process to get products ready for ecommerce and built out with content is essential. Lauren Livak, who ran North American Digital shelf strategy at Johnson and Johnson and is now Director of the Digital Shelf Institute, has embarked on a ten episode series of webinars with new research and executive conversations. The content is so foundational to any leader plotting their digital shelf strategy, that we will be presenting it here in podcast format as well. Today’s episode focuses on the necessary elements of a winning digital shelf process and features Lauren, Peter, and Lizbeth James, eBusiness Director at Nestlé.

The local brands called out in this episode were SCVA and Caring Kind. Cann was the national beverage brand.

The journey to winning on the digital shelf can not be made in weeks, or months, but years. To manage expectations, the right outcomes, and your sanity, it is vital to understand where you and your company are on that journey, and what the right next steps are to move along a maturity curve towards operational and performance excellence. Experts from Salsify and the DSI teamed up to articulate a Digital Shelf Maturity Curve, and they presented it in a recent webinar. The content is so foundational to any leader plotting their digital shelf strategy, that we wanted to present it here in podcast format. Here with Peter are Joe Gaudreau, head of the Commerce Strategy Team at Salsify, and Lauren Livak, Director of the Digital Shelf Institute.

Thrasio often gets lumped into the “Amazon seller aggregator” category. But when you talk to them, that’s just the how. Here’s their mission:”to be the most impactful consumer products company of the next century.” A key part of achieving that mission is creating and expanding thousands of global brands at scale. The man in charge of that part of the mission is Arturo Aranda, who brings his experience leading creative at BBDO, Facebook, MRM/McCann, working with some of the biggest brands in the world. Rob and Peter dug into what it takes to do brand building at the scale and speed of a Thrasio, and what it means to the company’s overall mission.

When one ecommerce executive from a global brand tells you they are pushing for a radical rethinking of the beliefs that have driven growth for decades at their company, it’s an interesting anecdote. When 10 executives tell you the same thing, it’s a research project. When Molly Schonthal, founder of the Digital Shelf Institute Executive Forum, and Chris Perry, Chief Learning Officer at firstmovr, started hearing similar anecdotes and data points around shifts from members of the Executive Forum around the shifts their companies were making to maximize growth - consequential shifts in long-standing pricing strategies, assortment planning, org and budget, they decided to tackle bringing a forceful call to action in the market. This new research is titled The Shift to Total Growth Accountability, and Molly and Chris joined Peter to talk it through.

In the early days at Marketplace Ignition, one of the first marketplace strategy consultancies, the question founder Eric Heller heard repeatedly from his biggest client was “What do I do next?” In some ways, very little has changed. Winning the algorithm requires constant attention, and the new shiny object of retail media should not obscure that fact. Eric, who sold Marketplace Ignition to Wunderman in 2017 and went on to become WPP’s Chief Knowledge Officer for their AMazon Center of Excellence, joined Rob and Peter to highlight the trends that are rapidly shaking the box of ecommerce, media, and omnichannel growth, and how brand execs must keep their eye on the ball.

Is Loyalty the new CAC? The Post Purchase Consumer Journey represents an multi-staged opportunity to drive loyalty and customer lifetime value, deriving greater margin from the investment in D2C. David Morin, Sr. Director, Retail + Client Strategy at post-purchase platform provider Narvar joined Peter to bring to life the various stages of the post-purchase journey and how brands are intensifying their focus to drive trust, transparency, and advocacy, and making every customer feel like their most important customer.

Inside Amazon, vendor managers are renowned for having vast amounts of data at their fingertips to fine tune performance and, famously, drive negotiation with their brand manufacturer partners. Imagine if you could go to those negotiations, or better yet, fine-tune your Amazon business every day with your own set of financial, retail, advertising, and brand data out of Amazon systems. The team of ex-Amazonians at Reason Automation have set out to provide just that. Rob and Peter sat down with Reason’s co-founder and CEO, to talk about what data is critical to managing your business and how they democratize access for any brand looking to win.

What do Drew Barrymore, Mindy McKnight, Taraji P. Henson, and Priyanka Chopra Jonas all have in common, besides being famous, talented, and beautiful? They are building successful brands with beauty brand incubator Maesa. They also all work with Rich Simpson Senior Vice President, Customer Development, North America & International at Maesa. Rich is charged with building a repeatable, scalable, sustainable process to grow Maesa’s brands in a digital-first omnichannel world. It’s challenging, innovative, fun work, and Rich brings the discipline of his big brand experience with General Mills and JnJ and merges that with the agility and creativity demanded by brands built on personal connections and storytelling.

Amazon, and the rest of the world has changed a lot since the last edition of John Rossman’s bestselling book on leadership and innovation, The Amazon Way. The updated 3rd edition has hit the digital and physical shelves, and the author joined Peter to talk about how those changes have impacted the classic leadership principles that made Amazon the innovators they are. In this new era, Amazon’s experiences through massive growth have demonstrated that some changes need to be made, changes that are instructive for brands that are riding a wave of change themselves.

Keeping up with the rate of innovation and investment flowing in the retailer ad space is almost an impossible task. It requires both brand and retailers to stay focused on building the capabilities to make the right decision to take greatest advantage of the right opportunities. From her role as Managing Director of Retail Media, Americas at Criteo, Sherry Smith brings her experience running global media agency Triad to the tech space, which gives her a 360 degree view of the ecosystem and best practices in the space.

From P&G, to global confectioner Ferrero, and now to helming digital commerce at PE-owned Eastpoint Sports, Rachel Tetreault brings a competitive mindset and a fierce commitment to continually refining the organization, the processes, and the key KPIs it takes to win. Rachel joined Peter to share her key learnings and best practices from across her adventures in ecommerce.

The opportunity for brands to drive revenue through cross-border commerce is greater than it's ever been. But the complexity keeps rising. The taxman cometh wherever you sell. Craig Reed, SVP of Global Trade at cross-border technology provider Avalara joined Peter and Rob to talk through some of the complexities and the innovations that make it possible to sell globally at the scale that’s right for you.

The holy grail of omnichannel marketing is merging the informative richness of the online experience with the see it, feel it, touch it experience of the brick and mortar store. The grail is on its way. Arsen Avakian, formerly CEO and CO-founder of Argo Tea, and now CEO and Co-founder of Cooler Screens, joined Peter to talk about how his company is providing a new digital retail media opportunity in stores that is driving tremendous growth and consumer delight.

The number one question on the minds of any commerce executive is how should I organize my teams and processes to drive the right results in the right time? The actual answer is always, it depends. But there are clear guideposts and a maturity curve to consider along the way. This episode features two people on this topic: Christina Vail, Director of Client Strategy at Profitero, who has just published a new research report on the topic entitled Building a High-Performance CPG eCommerce Organization. She joins Peter along with guest co-host, Lauren Livak, who ran North American Digital shelf strategy at Johnson and Johnson and is now a Commerce Strategist for Salsify.

Having the right images on the digital shelf wins search and drives conversion on the product page. Optimizing images for performance, at scale, is no longer an art, but now a science at the fingertips of digital marketers. Jehan Hamedi, founder and CEO of Visual Brand Performance platform provider Vizit, joined Peter and Rob to explain how brands are perfecting what your consumer sees.

It seems like every week another retailer is announcing their new retail ad platform, and its both a challenge and opportunity for brands to reach their consumers in a more targeted and trustworthy way. Walgreens is bringing 100 million consumers to the fore with new tech and nimble ways, and Luke Kigel, VP, Walgreens Media & Head of Walgreens Advertising Group, joined Rob and me to talk about it and the rapidly evolving retail media landscape.

Every brand leader dreams of that truly authentic viral social media moment that will juice sales and transform the brand for a new audience. Turns out, if it happens, managing that fleeting moment is a tricky exercise, for which there are no rule books. Trace Rutland, Digital Hub Director at Ocean Spray Cranberries, was the leader in the hot seat when Nathan Apodaca, DoggFace208 on Linkedin, showed up on TikTok with a longboard, some Dreams, and a 64 ounce bottle of Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry. The rest of the story is now marketing legend, and we’ve got Trace here to talk about it.

Join James Seidl, VP of digital commerce at McCormick, to learn how he built a powerful ecommerce organization while leading the transformation of its direct-to-consumer (D2C) strategy. Explore McCormick's wins and lessons learned on this D2C journey, as well as Seidl’s actionable insights on how to build and execute a winning D2C strategy.

Online grocery will more than double to 21.5% of total U.S. grocery sales by 2025. A major outlet for that growth will likely be Instacart, and brand leaders need to fully understand the challenges, opportunities, and likely evolution of this platform to maximize revenue and minimize risk. Kiri Masters, founder of digital marketing agency Bobsled Marketing, is the co-author of a new book, Instacart for CMOs. Join host Peter Crosby of the Digital Shelf Institute for an interview with Kiri as she presents the key takeaways from her research.

With the onslaught of niche brands, the movement from mass market to the market of masses, and the impact of digital on omnichannel commerce, what it means to be a brand today is rapidly changing. Andrea Leigh, VP of Strategy at Ideoclick, joined Peter and Rob to discuss how brand leaders need to re-examine how brands are built and grown for the digital-first omnichannel shelf.

There’s a lot at stake when B2B industrial buyers shop for safety products. The data’s got to be right and these days, it’s got to be digital. Sean Donovan, Digital Channel Manager for the Americas at MSA- the Safety Company, sat down with Peter and B2B Whisperer Justin King to discuss his strategy for making sure every channel partner has the data they need to build the trust needed to buy.

From the hallowed halls of Ogilvy, where branding was born, comes a new set of thinking around how brand can and must be infused into every stage of the consumer commerce journey. Edward Kim, Managing Partner of the Commerce practice at Ogilvy and Dan Saltzman, their VICE PRESIDENT, DESIGN + USER EXPERIENCE joined Rob and Peter to discuss how teams of misfits at global manufacturers are coming together to reinvigorate the role of brand in commerce.

Peter V.S. Bond, well-known as the co-host of the CPG Guys podcast, has a day job as VP Strategy & Retail Partnerships at PowerReviews. He put on that hat to share the results of a brand new survey of 4,000 consumers on the evolution of their omnichannel grocery shopping behaviors. Great data, with some powerful takeaways for brands.

If you heard there is a commerce experience driving conversion rates of 20-40% on average, wouldn’t you want in? That’s what many brands worldwide are seeing through their live video shopping experiments, and many are doubling down in 2021. Mary Ghahremani, CEO of live video shopping platform provider Bambuser, joined Peter Crosby and Rob Gonzalez to outline the strategies that are working and how brands can test and learn their way into this exciting new commerce experience opportunity.

There’s so much noise in ecommerce today, and filtering out that noise to find the meaningful signal to push your business forward can be hard to find. Don Brett, Chief Digital Officer, NBG Home, shows us how his playbook, refined over the years, can lead to modern commerce success.

Melissa Burdick, co-founder and President of advertising platform provider Pacvue, and overall ecommerce and Amazon whisperer, joins Rob and Peter to talk Amazon earnings and to read the tea leaves for brands as to what executive shifts, ad growth, and competitive forces might mean for business with the behemoth in 2021.

The trend of brand manufacturers going direct to consumer has created more opportunities than ever for them to delight their consumers with moments that matter. That delight turns into consumer advocacy and loyalty, which drives margin and revenue. Fred Reichheld, creator of the loyalty practice at Bain & Company, and the legendary creator of the Net Promoter System, spoke with Peter Crosby about what it means to be a promoter-based business and the path to turning consumer delight into business success.

In this D2C era, first-party consumer data is increasingly becoming a brands’ most valuable asset. The hard part is how to draw the line from that data to the right action in marketing, merchandising, and product innovation. Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, President at consumer data platform Lytics, joined Rob and Peter to outline now brands can fill the consumer data decision gap and turn your data lake into revenue and loyalty.

The digital upending of almost every dimension of commerce has created the opportunity for a new kind of P&G for the digital age, powered by the acquisition and constant performance optimization of thousands of small challenger Amazon marketplace brands. Thrasio is the leading example of this business model, and Carlos Cashman, Co-founder and Co-CEO sat down with Peter and Rob to discuss the innovations in branding, performance marketing, supply chain and most importantly, culture that are creating a 21st Century House of Brands.

2022. The Year the Cookie Dies. What’s a brand leader to do? Rob and Peter welcomed Nishant Desai, Senior Director of Tech and Ad Ops at Xaxis, and Stu Richards, Lead Programmatic Strategist at Catalyst to detail the actions brands can take this year to thrive in a cookieless world.

On January 27th, Peter hosted a webinar entitled 'A Crash Course in TikTok Marketing', featuring Evan Horowitz, CEO, and co-founder of creative agency Movers+Shakers, who created the most successful marketing campaign on TikTok ever.

In 2018, Dawn Foods, a 100 year old, family-owned bakery ingredient manufacturer, made the strategic decision to invest in delivering a best-in-class digital experience for its customers. Gireesh Sahukar, their VP of Digital, joined Justin King and Peter Crosby to lay out their ongoing journey to digital and commerce success.

Podcast cross-over event! Rob Gonzalez recently went deep on commerce in 2021 with the renowned Sri Rajagopalan and Peter V.S. Bond on their podcast CPG Guys. A rollicking survey of some of the biggest trends and opportunities in the year to come in commerce.

Epic Games buying a 980,000 sq. ft. mall kicks off a deep dive into the Future of Malls. And, Rob and Peter argue about regulations.

The rise of the digital-first omnichannel world has opened up some new strategic growth opportunities for brands. Rob and I recently pinned down Phillip Jackson, founder of FutureCommerce.fm and co-host of the Future Commerce podcast, to extract his POV on where brands should lean-in to grow top-line revenues in 2021 and beyond.

The explosion of marketplaces is both opportunity and crisis for brands. There is an continuous danger of losing control of your brand, and only a multifaceted, ongoing effort will win the day. James Thomson, Chief Strategy Officer at Buy Box Experts and co-author of the new book “Controlling Your Brand in the Age of Amazon” outlines the three-pronged strategy for minimizing risk and maximizing success on the world’s biggest marketplaces.

As we kick 2020 to the curb, it's a good time to take McKinsey's advice and make sure we are set up for a reenergized 2021. We will continue to live in interesting times, and Rob and Peter offer some perspectives on strategies to thrive in the New Year.

When the rumor mill starts humming that Amazon is contemplating a Shopify killer, it's time for Rob and Peter to talk D2C turkey. What would this deathmatch mean for brands? Should each stay in their lane? Tune in.

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As more and more brands go direct, it is critical that they get the most value from their new data asset. Julie Bernard has spent a career making data speak truth to power at organizations like Macy’s, IAB, and Authority Brands. Peter Crosby sat down with Julie for an in-depth conversation of lessons learned, advice on pitfalls, and the mantras of leadership that drive change.

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The omnichannel marketing world is in a state of continual change — from new channels and the explosion of retailer ad platforms to shifting logistics and operational challenges. In this webinar recording, Peter joins ecomemrce leaders Melissa Burdick, John Denny, Macarena Herrera, and Jim Morgan, who will give you the tools for deciding between insourcing or outsourcing for your organization.