eCommerce Trends and Smarter Growth with FirstMovr’s Chris Perry

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Chris Perry: And so, generally, we’ve seen a lot of brands pursuing both challengers and big brands kind of pursuing blind growth. Right. It’s just any growth I can get because it’s happening online I want. I’m gonna pull the levers I know that can get it or that I’ve seen other brands do that get it, and then I’m gonna be a winner. Yes. Up until everyone else does the same thing that you were doing. So what will make you different? M? You’re listening to CPG launch leaders, the show where we interview new product trailblazers. Get ready for inspiration and secrets from the front lines of CPG innovation. Now, here are our hosts, Darcy Rambler and Alan Peretz.

Allan: Welcome to CPG launch leaders. I’m Alan Peretz, and I’m here with my co host, Darcy Ramler. Today we’re connecting with Chris Perry, the chief learning officer and co founder of First Mover, an institution that’s focused on e commerce, education, change management and consulting. And I’m m pretty sure this is Chris’s first podcast, so we’ll be gentle with them.

Darcy: Chris, we’re beyond excited to have you on and to hear your perspective as a category management expert on how brands can leverage smarter growth strategies to compete in their markets. Before we dive in, we like to start each episode with one particular question, currently, what new product has caught your attention in the market?

Chris Perry: Well, thank you, Alan and Darcy. I’m m really excited to be here. And, uh, that’s an interesting question, because sometimes I find that new products, to me, aren’t always new products to the market. So I had to think a little bit about this. But, um, two that pop up to me, honestly, are the whole body deodorants, Lumi and Mando. Now, I don’t want to say those because I need them, but most people need them, as I’ve learned in this space. But they’ve caught my attention. They’ve actually been around for several years now. Shannon Klingman, who’s the founder, has been, obviously, as an entrepreneur, has been driving those brands in the personal care space for a while as she and her team have built some prominence in the space and got more placement and distribution. Uh, you’ve started to see them break out, uh, and obviously see them on tv and some of the traditional bigger channels, uh, of marketing and media. So what I love about their brand, uh, more than anything, is that they found a need and helped identify the need. Because I would say some people, I don’t realize that they may need whole body deodorant. But they’re also very authentic about how they discuss the issue, even on their television, uh, copy. It’s within the social media frame. Everything is obviously modern and authentic, but yet also professional and credible because her background is, uh, she’s a doctor, so she comes with that experience. So, uh, I love that she’s still in that mode of. It’s still founder driven. It calls to you, it actually serves a functional need, but also is a little bit real and funny and yet then delivers on the solution.

Allan: Yeah, great examples. Uh, definitely redefining categories that have been around for a long time, uh, driving new, uh, reasons for consumption. So. Love those. So you talk a lot about moving beyond just pulling operational levers in e commerce. Can you define what you mean when you talk about smarter growth? Um, and how it differs from traditional strategies, for sure.

Chris Perry: So I know all of us are very well aware that e commerce is and was the number one driver of growth in retail before COVID Obviously, Covid just accelerated a lot of consumer behavior, forced a lot of retailers to address omnichannel models and fulfillment. If not, then also brands to follow suit. If they weren’t already doing it holistically or if they’d had a siloed team that was doing it. The challenge is with that growth, both for those early movers or first movers in the space, and then those who fast followed because of COVID You had a lot of brands pursuing this growth, an overall growth number based on capabilities. Right? So I need to have great product detail, page content, and I need to be optimized for search, and I need to leverage paid and retail media to grow. And I probably, over time, need to adapt my assortment to Fitzhenous. The online platforms and fulfillment models, all correct things. Those are the how you win the levers. Uh, and don’t get me wrong, the principles of winning in commerce are the same online and in store. It’s. The practices are different. So those all needed to be capability built for the first time and then optimized over time. However, we do a lot of training across now, like 100 different cpgs, and everyone has their proprietary model for how they win online. It’s all the same stuff, right? It’s all, it’s content, it’s retail media acceleration. It’s omni adaptive or responsive assortment, right? All of those things, those aren’t building blocks for success. Because if I do content and then I grow, I don’t know exactly why I grew, except that content helped somehow. I don’t really know what type of growth actually got me the growth. I just grew. And so generally we’ve seen a lot of brands pursuing both challengers and big brands kind of pursuing blind growth. Right. It’s just any growth I can get because it’s happening online I want, I’m going to pull the levers I know that can get it or that I’ve seen other brands do that get it, and then I’m going to be a winner. Yes. Up until everyone else does the same thing that you were doing. So what will make you different? Well, obviously it could be your process, it could be your partners, it could be a number of those things, but also it’s, it’s the type of growth you go after. And so we came up with borrowing on the smart, not because we are all smart, borrowing on that smart acronym of specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time bound, say that five times fast. And we kind of added the ER to it because we want to be smarter than our competition. The idea was how do we go after with the hows, those levers, the whys? So really bringing back, I would say intercategory management stage left, whos been there in the wings waiting to come on stage, all those specific types of growth objectives that we could actually design around like bigger baskets or more trips or new category buyers or lapsed brand buyers or nothing that new to us mentally, but something that we haven’t been operating around as intentionally as we could.

Darcy: And on that note, I would love to kind of have you explore and talk to us a little bit about how, um, traditional category management principles can be integrated into e commerce strategies. You know, we talk. There’s that key word of always, incrementality and how we’re going to get that. Like you said, growth has been happening, but now the big word has become incrementality. And how do you lean into that?

Chris Perry: What is funny, because when I say, like cat man, I get like rolled eyes from some and then I get this like peaked curiosity from others. And I wasn’t a traditional category manager, I was a brand manager first. But I was both on when I started my career at wreck it. I was on a global brand where we had a Catman team and we had a lot of resources. E.com people weren’t historically Catman people. Catman people still had the base business where the majority of their sales were, that they were focused on maturely managing. So we kind of entered this weird like dark age period where like new things are being worked on. But like the enlightenment we already had wasn’t being transferred between the teams now as the businesses are starting to mature and we’re looking for Darcy, to your point, that incrementality, uh, I was asked that question many times in the past, like, is e.com incremental? Isn’t it just channel shifting? Well, it is for some, and we want to catch those people, but we could design it for more incrementality if we were actually using Catman principles around again. Number of houses or households, number of shoppers, dollars per shopper trips. Per, uh, shopper dollars per trip. This is what circana, Iri and Nielsen used to teach us all day long. I had the laminated piece of paper on my desk on how you grow, and it’s just bringing, I wish I made this up, but I didn’t. It’s just bringing it back and reapplying it for that incrementality. And so I honestly, there’s so many examples out there. We put kind of a playbook together and we’re doing our kind of our smarter series of events focused around these that are all free for brands who attend. But these are just really trying to democratize this, this Catman principleship, if you will, and bring it forward into e commerce so that we can get that incrementality right. So how, through content, promo, media assortment and other levers available. Just could I go after cross selling as a subset of basket building if that was my opportunity? If I’m a big company with lots of different brands, or I’m a big brand with lots of different segments, how do I, if the market position is right, how do I sell across those as opposed to only focusing on going after net new people? Cause maybe I have a bigger growth opportunity in 2024 or 2025 from that opportunity than I do trying to go after share stealing from my competitors, even though you gotta have a little bit of everything. But how do I use my limited resources and maybe put the 80 20 rule, 80% is on a specific higher potential incrementality growth strategy, smarter strategy than I have before.

Darcy: Absolutely. And as the digital shelf continues to just grow and tactics continue to change, right, that discovery within that same brand, or like you said, if you are a company that has multiple brands, you have those opportunities to cross sell to upsell to really build on your brand awareness, then you are ever going to have that discoverability at the shelf, right? So you may be walking down four or five different aisles to see all your products, wherever Amazon curates them nicely into what I say now, a brand store is really a micro DTC.

Allan: So, Chris, when I think back to my first, uh, big DTC assignment, what excited me was the data. Like, I could see every single thing the shopper did. I mean, I could actually even see it, uh, record it, watch it, uh, and of course had a ton of data, but more data isn’t always better. Uh, as I quickly learn. And, uh, today I think we find ourselves in a situation where there is a lot of information available, but it’s hard to figure out what’s important. What do you tell e commerce leaders, uh, marketers to focus on as they try to really fine tune their strategy?

Chris Perry: First, I like to think in terms of, and this is something I took a sales training on when I got into sales. And honestly, I probably rolled my own eyes at the training, thinking I wasn’t going to learn a lot of the sales fundamentals. But the most powerful thing I learned, and I ended up designing my whole team around it was the concept of leading and lagging metrics because it helped me organize the metrics that were plentiful in general, but also, I would say, not as plentiful on the e comm omni side as much as I would have liked to. It helped me organize around what I did have that would lead to the outcome I really did want. And so obviously everybody wants total sales and share growth and ideally profitable sales share growth. But that’s a lagging metric. I don’t really control that. I influence that. What I do control. And obviously from a d, two c perspective, you actually do own a little bit more of this and can see more of it. It’s traffic, it’s conversion, it’s basket size, it’s trips, it’s profitability. Arguably, we’re starting to get back to smarter growth using that customer lifetime value equation because those are all in there. But even then, traffic isn’t by itself a metric. It’s a macro leading metric. But then there are impressions and clicks and page views and bounce rate, which then might get blurred depending on how you slice it into the conversion bucket. Uh, but I like to focus in on those leading metrics by bucket, which then allows you to put whatever number of headcount or resources or functional areas against the ones they influence. But then when you get into the smarter part though, that’s where you would start saying, okay, well, again, if I’m running an Amazon campaign and they can give me that percent new to brand, that’s starting to help me understand a little bit more on the incrementality of people coming in from the category or outside the category into my brand on the platform. If I’ve got unique assortment that builds baskets, I could be looking at the sales of that specific SKU or the redemption of that promotion around building buy three, get x. So there are some leading actions and metrics I can measure to know if I’m achieving overall performance, but also smarter performance.

Allan: Sorting through all that is a lot of work. It sounds like a good use case for AI. Do you see any of that helping, uh, marketers in the short term?

Chris Perry: Definitely. I think everybody is at a different stage of actually Oscar, my business partner, uh, at first mover, and I just recently got to present at Brave Commerce Live with Profeteria and mic Mac. But we were talking about, we had the theme, the Matrix, not just the movie, but Matrix with AI instead of just the a in the middle. But it was about not just the hype around AI, but where is AI really coming into the full multiple p four P process and where are the use cases and what we found. When we build out the ecosystem map, which we’re building on and happy to share with any listeners out there, it’s all free. This is just content leadership we’re trying to put out there again to democratize, um, the knowledge that we can all be those first movers. We found, though, that I think everybody was hoping that there’s somebody out there who’s already mastered this and nobody has. Everyone is leaning on partners to do pieces. The partners are still testing and learning, but there are one example that pops into my mind is like, profitero in their digital shelf. Analytics is a great example of a, uh, company that has implemented AI with their ask profitero tool, which in its early stages is trying to help you go through that plethora of data that they’re collecting for you and identify the core issues, the potential root causes, and then recommenda some logical first places to go, not to remove your thinking, which we still need healthy critical thinking and analysis. But there’s so much that might be low hanging fruit that if you had to sift through, you’d miss the chance to use your precious 30 minutes or an hour to go do that first, which would then buy you some time to go back and do some of the next level thinking and insight mining. So I was just going to say.

Allan: It sounds like you’re saying there’s a lot of pieces out there, but nobody’s really brought it together yet. But we hope that’s going to happen.

Chris Perry: Not in a comprehensive process yet, but that’s why part of what we’re trying to do is show. Here are the steps of the process. Here’s who has done each piece. And yes, there’s still room for us first movers out there getting paid the big bucks to figure out how to put those puzzle pieces together. Um, even though it’s not going to be perfect, and this is a space that’s iterating faster than even e commerce has over the last five to ten years, we need all of you out there who are those challengers of the status quo, those who are willing to deal with ambiguity, both in big companies, but also in small companies, because that’s a lot of the challenger brands, as you all know very well, working with so many of them, they are the first movers. They’re the ones that went and did something because they weren’t afraid to go do it. They needed to go do it to break out. And then everybody else follows their example, whether they realize it or nothing.

Darcy: Well, I think it’s also, uh, about figuring out how to, you know, how to utilize the tools too. So, you, uh, know, AI is, we’re in this space where, yes, it’s exciting, it’s new, every brand is figuring it out, every agency is figuring it out. But what is that correct handoff from AI to person as well? Like, you take something like a visit where it’s love what they’re doing. Super exciting. At what point do you get your creative involved? You know, you can go out there, you can generate a bunch of AI visuals, you can test them, you can get that information back, see who that lead horse is, and then be able to pass it off to a creative which understands the data behind it and can make it then their own or a version of it where, you know, it’s generated. So I find it fascinating to see, like, where are we defining those points? When you take someone like a profitero and you connect them to someone like a sky, you know, when do you start reading? Like, hey, I, we can take this, we can look at the digital shelf, we can read things, and then we can start to filter it through maybe a media channel to know when is your competitors digital shelf score dropping? Uh, what should you be doing? Like, when we start to connect all of those dots is when it really becomes powerful, 100%.

Chris Perry: And I don’t know that I have the answer for the industry yet, but I would say what we see at first mover is a lot of solution providers kind of trying to naturally, whether for AI specifically or in general, they’re kind of trying to be the one stop shop and while that’s wonderful when you try to do everything, you aren’t doing anything. Um, and so to your point, to some degree, not that every solution provider or agency is trying to be everything, but, like, truly everything, but they’re trying to, like, okay, well, I’m known for this, but I also want to do that, and I want to do that, and I acquired this. Well, then you’re not known for what you really were good at. In a perfect world that we almost need to be, and I use the analogy, a lot of the Avengers, but I’ll say Avengers so that I’m not, you know, copyright infringing, but we need to, like, it’s okay to be the Hulk and only be super strong. Go get Black Widow and be super agile, and then go get Captain America and be super, you know, uh, have super virtue in addition to super strength, and then go get Iron man, because he knows literally how to build anything. And he’s, you know, uh, and he’s got a real edge and personality. Right. Build. It’s easier said than done. But again, I know a lot of partners are trying to build, like, their own, like, ecosystem, connectivity through APIs and connectivity. And how do we build dashboards that we both feed? And I think that’s gonna. Don’t focus only on trying to build it in house yourself. Figure out how you create that seamless connectivity with everyone else. Because then there are, uh, choices, there’s competition. People can really own what they’re good at, and then the brand still get the benefit of all of those coming together in a seamless way.

Darcy: Absolutely. The most powerful thing you can do is know your strengths, but know your weaknesses as well, and then find the right partners that fulfill those weaknesses. So I know we’ve talked a little bit about the how and the why. Could you share some examples of where aligning the how with the why has significantly benefited brands in the digital space?

Chris Perry: Mondelez does some really amazing work globally and locally. They are an expandable consumption category. In general. Yes, people plan to purchase them, and they have, like, I mean, who doesn’t love Oreo and Ritz and sour patch kids and all these amazing Cadbury and all these amazing brands, but they have to actively go after, especially in a very health conscious society today, reasons to snack, more reasons to indulge. And so what I’ve loved about them is the mindset, because I can hear it when I talk to my friends at Mondelez. They. Globally and locally, it’s like, hey, certain missions are uniquely happening online or opportunities to happen online, I wouldn’t have had a mission like that in store. So online opens up an incremental chance to buy, but then as long as I design around that opportunity. So examples are like in India, um, on Flipkart in India, the Mondelez team has built these amazing. They started with content, proved it out, then did it with media and promotion, then proved it out, then built assortment around movie night. So they’ve got products that are just for movie night. Makes total sense since we’ve been at home streaming more content than going to the movies. But they wanted to own that because their products aren’t designed only around the movie night occasion. You just could if you knew you loved to eat Cadbury chocolate. But they built assortment around that after proving a crawl walk run by testing their way into building the assortment that takes a little longer to build, they’ve got, for every major indian religious holiday, like Diwali, they’ve got a special gifting pack that’s uber premium. That obviously opens up an occasion to give yourself a gift or someone else you love a gift. Again, they create holiday packs and they’ve even used their d two C site, Oreo id, to create like birthday, customized birthday and thank you packs and things in the US that were exclusive to the Walmart or Amazon to test them out. So they’re very quick to test and some of them haven’t, aren’t around anymore after the test. So I assume they learned and they moved on to something else very Amazon like of them. But I like that because then they find the things that really work and can scale. The other one that I love though, because we are a, we have our furry children in the form of two feline, um, children. Ah, we, ah, also having been at Wellness pet company, um, having led that Ecom team in the early days, one of the realities of pet food is that it’s a planned category. It’s not as expandable unless you go into treats or toys or accessories, which gets out of the food space. So the food is actually really difficult to get incrementality from because I don’t need more food than my pet is willing to eat. But fancy feasts at Nestle Purina did something cool on walmart.com two years ago that then they repeated where they took, uh, a page from toys and beauty around advent calendars, and they created this fancy feast advent calendar of wet cat food, which was, I didn’t need more food for my cats, but I bought more food. So I built a basket. And then guess what they did in there? Which I thought was really clever. What were some of the options that my cats would eat? The premium food. Which ones do they only eat now? The premium food. So I’m now spending, I’m still repeating, but now on something that cost me more dollars per trip than I was before. So they created an occasion. They built my basket first they built my basket over time and then they kept my loyalty. So it’s like a multifaceted, smarter growth. And again, they tested it. And arguably, I imagine at some point maybe they’d bring that in store if they wanted to keep it exclusive to Walmart or whatnot. I haven’t seen it in store yet, but maybe it was this year. I didn’t see it. I saw it online. So I love those examples. Or just some of many, of using content, media, promo and assortment to kind of drive these smarter growth strategies and then dropping the ones that failed, scaling the ones that did. Well, hi, Jesse. What brings you to the airport, Mike? I’m off to the headquarters to share an update on the big launch. Oh, I’ve heard it’s selling really well. Care to share your secret? Well, just between us, it’s all thanks to bold Labs. Their exclusive digital test market research allows, um, you to optimize your product marketing and pricing before the big launch. That sounds fantastic. How can I learn more? Just visit www.boldlabs.com. it’s all right there.

Darcy: This is the final call for flight 723 to Chicago.

Chris Perry: Looks like we’d better go. Thanks for the tip, Jesse. See you soon, Mike. And remember, bold Labs is ready to help your product soar.

Darcy: You are the second person to talk about fancy feast advent calendar to me. So we know that they definitely hit it on nail on the head. But I was actually just talking the other day to a brand who is very focused. You know, their products are very key temple. Um, but with social content these days, with the way that you can look at the digital shelf, we were just talking about whether it may be carving tools for pumpkins. There’s so many different ideas now with social content. People are carving watermelons in the summer. People are doing, there’s this whole dyi of your own cocktails, your own rage of things. How can you continue to update that content that doesn’t make it so focused on seasonality as well, which is so important in today’s. It’s like, yes, you have your key temples, but thinking outside of the box of how you can leverage that to get those new to brand new consumers. Like you said, incrementality along the way.

Chris Perry: And I would just build like M and Ms. I know has done a lot of stuff too, where like, I wish I’d been watching day by day to see it change. Because it has changed. Maybe not daily, but monthly, weekly. But like during a holiday, all their content changes to the holiday. So they’ve got their big tentpole events, right, their big seasons. But then in between the content changes to birthday or. Cause there’s always a birthday or movie night or something else. So some other occasion that isn’t the big tentpole, but actually could be if you aggregated it across all the occasions of movie night all year long or all the occasions of birthday all year long. That is a tent pole. It, uh, just isn’t one time a year for everyone. It’s one time a year for you, the shopper. So to that point, the content can always feel fluid, within reason, right? With some level of scaling.

Allan: So every year, uh, I get a cheese, uh, advent calendar. Um, and I think it’s brilliant because, uh, it’s like a great way to get someone to pay for a sampling event at my house. Uh, I end up buying a lot of those things back. So I love the fancy feast example, but, um, you opened up with a couple of challenger brands and, uh, what they were doing and obviously the huge success they both had. Uh, and your view, as you look at those types of brands, what are some of the big challenges that they face in 2024?

Chris Perry: Some of these, I imagine are probably not unique to 2024 or any challenger brand, but I would say things that come to mind having historically been on, I would say I was on the challenger team of a large bureaucratic company. So I saw the benefit of being the way we wanted to be, but not always allowed to be the way we wanted to be. But again, generally a challenger brand isn’t going to have as much investment as the big companies. So that just dollar for dollar, pound for pound, they’re not going to, not going to be on the same weight class in the ring initially, unless they do something different to fight the fight, if you will, to win a resources by nature, but not just investment, it might be the headcount. Just the sheer number of hours I have to do what I need to do may mean I have to be a lot more prioritized in what I can do versus having a lot more headcount and levels to help get both the grunt work and the strategic work done. Uh, brand equity and history. There are just certain brands that have been around forever and so they could almost do nothing and win a little bit, they can. Halo. Whereas, again, I’ve seen some of those charts from different challenger brands. New brands typically have to hit audiences many, many more times. So, uh, again, they don’t have as much money, but they’ve got to hit more frequency in order to break through. All the brands who have already got some share of mind doesn’t mean they can’t break through, but it takes some time. That’s why, honestly, some of the new brands that pop up to me, when I look them up, I’m like, you’ve been around since 2017. You’ve been around since 2014. Where have I been? I think cachava. I drank cachava shakes. I thought that was new last year, but it’s been around for ten years. I just didn’t know about it. But slow. And I would say the tortoise and the hare. The tortoise can win even if the tortoise is also agile and fast. At different points.

Allan: It seems like one advantage a lot of them, um, use over and over again is the ability to position themselves against the dominant brand in the marketplace. And that seems to work really well, especially and better for you and similar types of propositions. But what are some other opportunities, uh, that come from some of the disadvantages you laid out?

Chris Perry: So maybe low hanging one is without all. And I’m not trying to be mean to big CPG because I was in it. I know we’ve all partnered with it, we’ve been employed by it. It’s not against a person. The bureaucracy of the system limits the whole ambition of the system. The whole point was to do the thing you don’t let your teams do because you can’t like. And then, unfortunately, in inefficiency, it actually drives, unfortunately, a little bit more of an ego approach, because then leaders are preserving themselves and their own. I mean, we’re all human, we’re all protecting ourselves, but then we’re not actually doing things because it’s the right thing to do. We’re doing the thing because it’s the right thing for me and not, and I’m not blaming it. I don’t have a vendetta against anybody. It’s just more of like, once you’re outside of it, you go, oh, my gosh, what are we doing? Like, isn’t your actual goal is to benefit your shareholders and stakeholders and your employee base? And I think everybody would say that in their heart, but that’s not, uh, what ends up being enabled by bureaucracy. So I’d say it’s the challenger speed to market. Often having fewer go to market channels actually means you are forced to be better at those because you’re not trying to be everything to every channel. Honestly, there’s no priority at most big cpgs, I kid you not. I won’t name the company, but, um, uh, we’ve been contractors at a lot of companies and we get their emails. We’re all under NDA at all these companies, but we get their emails. There was one very large CPG had sent out a note saying, we’ve gotten feedback that we had too many priorities this year, so we’ve reduced it from 19 to eleven. Like, oh, my gosh, I can’t remember three, let alone 19. And thank you for bringing it back to eleven. All of which, when I read them, were actually pertaining to almost everyone. It wasn’t like, oh, the supply chain team has one of these, so you don’t have to do that one. It’s like it was kind of something, uh, that’s too much for anyone to do. Whereas a challenger brand still has a lot of priorities. But my point is, they might say, well, my only route to markets right now is our D, two C and my Amazon marketplace. So I can’t be in drug and dollar and mass and club and grocery and online and divide up all my resources. I can only win where I can win. So there’s a little bit of that, like, speed to market, speed to test forced focus, which maybe is forced, but should be kept if you can keep it. Um, I would argue then the ability to be more specific about smarter growth strategies. If you’re a challenger brand, you want new people, but you might be able to go after new people a little bit more effectively than the big brands who are trying to go after new and keep their current. So you kind of create a two front war by really doubling down on how you bring new people in or being really good at keeping the people that do find you on the marketplace because you show up high and actually using that success to spiral you to the top or keep you at the top.

Allan: I’ll add one kind of building on your continuity point. Uh, Darcy and I have spoken to a lot of founders in this podcast, and over and over again, what we hear is they have human conversations with shoppers on a daily basis. And you talk about a big company, you almost outsource in a lot of cases, that shopper knowledge to a different department. These people are in touch, and I think that makes a big difference, too.

Darcy: And I think when you work with, we often work with the disruptors out there or even the enterprise, the brands that are the disruptor brands that they’ve acquired. It’s interesting because, as you said, when you kind of go to navigate, they’re able to be nimble, they’re able to be flexible, pivot very quickly. Whether it’s through our lab site and we’re doing testing or it’s just working with them, their preference is always, hey, you have a creative team, you have a media team. Can we use your team? Just because, like you said, you’re not having to go through the layers, that slows everything down, where they lose that whole entire speed and flexibility. So what made them successful is being able to stay in those lanes as they get acquired. Uh, it’s a very push pull dynamic that takes place.

Chris Perry: And I know we’ve seen this in the industry, but how many challenger brands do so well, doing the thing that every other big brand had wanted to do, that then the big brand buys them and then ruins the formula that made them successful in the first place. And I don’t just mean that unicorn effect where people overbought and then didn’t get the value out. You bought the challenger brand for their speed and agility, added resources, and then 15 layers that kept them from being agile, and then they couldn’t perform anymore. And then, oh, see, that was a failure. We should never have bought them. Oh, really? Um, no, you messed them up. Like, I mean, I understand. Yeah, I want you to have the resources, but the resources shouldn’t always come with 17 more strings. We still need legal and all. Yeah, I mean, there’s still some filters that need to be in there, but maybe we shouldn’t add all of those filters. And I have seen some companies to acquire a company, and then they’re like, no one is touching them, don’t even talk to them. Which isn’t probably right either, because then there isn’t as much sharing between the two. But the sharing doesn’t have to inhibit. The sharing can just enable, if we don’t add the layers of, I want to say, self justification, honestly, um, or job justification, unfortunately, does lead to a lot of that when it, when it’s not meant to.

Darcy: Well, and like you said, chris, is a lot of these challenger brands, they haven’t just been around for a year or two. I know they seem like it to really, the consumer, they hear from them the first time, but when you go back and you look at the history of the company, it’s more that ten to twelve year mark. So they’ve been doing this. They’re not new to the game either. Right. So they understand what they’re building and how they’re building upon it. So I think it is. It’s how they get brought in. It’s a very fine line of how do you share and how do we utilize each other’s information and resources, but without necessarily contaminating the other side of the fence that has made them what they are today. So, uh, we’re going to jump on a little bit here and talk about e commerce, and really, I’d love to hear your thoughts on where do you see the future of e commerce heading?

Chris Perry: So that’s a good one. So I’m going to say it’s a little finger in the wind because I don’t know exactly where it’s going to land, but I will generally say for the same reason that we’ve seen e commerce continue to grow, and obviously Covid bumped it up, and hopefully we will never have another Covid. But it accelerated what was already. E commerce is going to continue to grow as a share of business, as a share of sales for every category. Yes, some categories, like BEVZ Alk, have some regulatory hindrances that keep them from growing as quickly, but they are growing fast on a percent basis. Not obviously fast yet, as a share of total sales. But e comm is going to continue to grow. But I always like to say, as long as the store complements e commerce, the store isn’t dead. The store is going to continue to be an important part of omnichannel because it will serve missions that online can’t easily. It will be, if used right. It’ll be an experience. It’ll be a showroom. It’ll be a fulfillment center. It’ll be a service center. Um, it’ll be a number of things, if complementary, e commerce correctly. And in fact, they are asking a number of large cpgs to test their new innovation online first, to then earn their way in store. That makes sense, right? Test before you scale. What’s the best way to test before you scale without actually risking, really almost anything in store in that finite space? Test online. But testing online requires a completely different set of practices to ramp up to a certain velocity, to then earn the right to do what you actually still know how to do in store really well. So it’s a reversal of the order of operations. And so challenger brands who are already going to market on in d, two c in social commerce, in and or in Amazon or other retail marketplaces are actually practicing the. I have to prove myself out first in a short window or over a long period of time, like we just said, for a lot of these brands, and then they don’t have to start from scratch because they’ve got the continuity, they’ve got the consistency, they’ve got the history of the knowledge, they’ve clearly got the depth of knowledge. And so they have a better chance, I think, long term, of earning the coveted in store placement from some of those big brands because they also may understand the value of strategic differentiation. See a lot of brands, big brands have brands and products they sell everywhere. And it’s really hard to backpedal out and go, hey, you know what, Kroger? Uh, I can’t sell you this national brand because I’m trying to be more exclusive now to Walmart. You can’t go backwards easily, but if you’re a new brand going forwards, you could say, well, I’m going to give this line potentially to this key retailer as I grow strategically, but I might create something different that’s equally a value because I know how to build it, um, and do it well with Target. So I’m going to create two worlds where my brand exists, but two different experiences exist. So I can win in a profitable and appealing way for both the retailer and the brand. So I think e.com will be it. Uh, already is the route to growth, but it’s a route to get in store. And I think a lot more digital brands who are tapped, like you said, alan, into the shopper real time, can actually build an experience and a product for that shopper more quickly and then earn their way in store faster or earn place away from some of the bigger brands faster than the big brands can keep it. Um, I actually think the future of e commerce is the barrier to entry, which is lower and more easier for brands that have already practiced this for a long time versus the ones that are trying to retrofit their business to it, or like you said, Alan outsourced a lot of it and now we’re trying to figure out how to do it and not lose it again because they stagnate somewhere.

Darcy: And I think the testing part of it online. It’s interesting with some retailers, there’s this nuance, right where Walmart and Target are huge OPD and when you’re testing, and immediately we’ve trained that shopper to go through the app and there’s an awareness play on the app of being able to search and come across the product. But there is that barrier of, hey, I’m the target mom who goes and just drives into my spot and everything gets loaded in. So it’s that fine line between what is that consumer? Have we trained them to uncertain retailers to be looking at it from a just order and pickup and delivery side of it versus how an Amazon testing on an Amazon, it’s a true even playing field for all products that are on there. There’s probably an argument to be made if you’re a buyer at Target or Walmart. And I’ve been on the manufacturing side of it, paying attention to those brands that are succeeding in testing on Amazon and knowing that they may have a place in your store just from the results over there as well.

Allan: My last question, Chris. E commerce still gets knocked a lot for being very transactional. So you’re always paying for fighting for that next purchase. And it doesn’t necessarily always lead to loyalty. How are we going to fix that long term as we look into the future?

Chris Perry: That’s a really good one by nature of being on the digital shelf and at a closer point of purchase, it will be innately tied to more closely tied to a transaction. But I think some of it has been the way companies have measured themselves, which again, then gives them the wrong mindset. I know we here have experienced this issue with Roas, for instance. For instance, right? So if I’m measuring my performance of my media investment on RoAs, and I don’t understand that a higher RoAs return on ad spend doesn’t necessarily mean more incrementality, I may then say I may treat it more transactionally because it’s only about getting me a sale. It’s only even if the sales I’m getting aren’t incremental. Whereas if I think about, well, because again, I’m sure we’ve seen this before without, I know, bold helping, maybe brands pivot their strategy. There is room for branded keywords as an example, but, uh, branded keywords, I think if we use smarter strategies, could be positioned to both defend your brand versus your competitors, where that’s an issue, but also trade people up or add on or cross sell so that your roas actually is a little lower. It’ll be higher than category keywords, but it’ll be lower because you’re actually getting more, something new bought that wasn’t bought before. But maybe a heavier weight should be on category keywords because then the people that are seeing you wouldn’t have seen you before, so you’re actually driving a new relationship, some equity, but it’s also going up that funnel too. And again, I think there’s been a historic, it’s starting to merge now, thankfully, with more of a full funnel approach. But there’s still been this, like, I’m measuring my national media on awareness metrics and I’m measuring my retail media on sales metrics, and actually, I could measure both. On both. If I can measure, you know, try to apples to apples theme, increasingly. But more importantly, I can measure my full funnel retail media on awareness, too, and not penalize it because the sales were low, because that wasn’t my goal. So I think some of it is the, it’s the measurement part, which then holds us back from being accountable to its opportunity. I think also it’s just, you know, it’s, how can we be more shopper centric with our messaging, right. As opposed to. And I almost equate that more to, like, a store brand. Typically, a private label is a little bit more about. I’m just the copycat version of the thing to the left. I’m, um, just a product that’s supposed to be less expensive for you. Be shopper centric. Yes, sell me on the product. But why you? Why your product if all things are kept equal and why a little bit more than the store brand? Right. So it’s that shopper centricity. It’s definitely the way we measure. Maybe the last thing I’d say is there are a lot of brands that have that on their brand website, are touting their sustainability initiatives or their cause marketing. Like, whether it’s pride or maybe it’s a charitable tie in, and then you go to their digital shelf and it’s never mentioned. And it’s a weird situation where you’re not building any equity with me. Because if that was the only brand site I saw. Darcy, to your point, the brand store is my new microsite, and that’s not mentioned. I don’t know. You do that. So I don’t have an extra good feeling about you beyond. You served my need this one transactional moment, I don’t know, to come back to you beyond. Hopefully you’ll keep serving me again, functionally. What about emotionally, knowing that I’m helping contribute? Because when I buy this pet food, they donate to pet shelters. I didn’t know that. If I’m not paying attention to that, and it’s not because I don’t care. I don’t know. Consumers don’t know what they want until you show it to them. Whether it’s cause marketing, charity marketing, sustainability marketing, whether it’s also rewards programs and other things like not to be gimmicky, but, like, keep me in the fold so you can collect my data, talk to me, personalize things for me, help get closer to that shopper. And that just brought up one thing somebody said the other day, and I thought this was so important. So many brands try to talk to every shopper on the digital shelf because they don’t want to be exclusive. But maybe you should.

Darcy: Yeah, there was. When you say exclusivity, I’m just talking. Over the weekend, there was a big campaign that was launched by a major fashion online retailer, and they are known for size inclusivity, and they did a very large social campaign where they had a zero x, a medium, and a one x model walk out and all the same outfit, and they did multiple takes on it. But you talk about also speaking to your consumer and knowing who they are, how it looks, not being afraid of any of that. It was definitely a very, like they said, I know my consumer, we’re going to talk to her and we’re going to bring her into the fold and show her that we understand her and we understand her body. And it was quite powerful and definitely made a lot of buzz. So I think you’re going to see more and more of that start to happen. So I know we’re getting ready to wind down here, but, um, Chris, if you had one piece of advice to really give to challenger CPG companies, what would that be?

Chris Perry: Summing it all down to one thing, it’s going to seem really cliche. You are a big challenger brand person, and I know bold. I’m, um, talking to my own people here, but I would say one of my favorite books or group of books is by Adam Morgan from Eat Big Fish, which is a challenger brand agency. And I actually find it so bizarre because I think they should literally be like, the top, uh, like, top ad agency or like, like, brand agency in the world, because they really democratize challenger brand thinking way before anybody else was talking about. But every brand is a challenger brand, or should be and should approach it. But I think they bring some of these best practices and principles to the table. But they talk about this, but I know this is talked about within the realms of challenger brand, um, positioning. But David did not beat Goliath in that story, whether true, or just to give us some virtues and some principles, because he played Goliath’s game the same way that Goliath. Because Goliath would have just clobbered that kid to death, right? But he slung a rock at his head, according to the story and knocked him cold. Right. Um, which was crazy. But to everyone else, he was a hero. He was a hero because he won. But they weren’t necessarily, at the time in that story. They weren’t saying, oh, he won because he was a challenger brand. They just took it. He, God, must have been on his side and he had luck, but he actually changed the game. And that’s a common story for challenger brand mindsets. Uh, but, like, don’t play the big brand’s game the way the big brand is playing the game. You don’t have as much money as them. You don’t have as many head count. You don’t have to, though, because if you pick one, if you double down as many of you are on the digital influence and digital performance, you will be winning. And that’s why most of those brands are on their back, back foot. Right. They’re backpedaling. I’m not saying you’re the number one brand yet, but you could be very soon. And if you apply smarter growth strategies, shopper centricity, as you already are, but keep doing, don’t question yourself, because it’s not what’s being done by your competitors. They don’t know how to do that. And you do, I would just say change the game. If they’re playing checkers, play chess, because you will win playing that other game. As long as chess chess outcome is still to win. Right. So as long as the outcome is different, play to some different leading actions and leading metrics, which might be the cat man ones we talked about or others that will get you there. And don’t worry that you’re the only one on the field doing what you do, because that’s what made you special to begin with. So don’t question yourself. I would say, and do figure out a way to change the game. But those eat big fish books are really good ways. All of them are like, timeless principles and give some cool examples. And I just, I love Adam Morgan’s theories because they’re not theories, they’re practices that really can work for brands. We even try to employ them at first mover just to be different as a, uh, partner to companies. And that’s kind of helped us thus far. And I know you all both do the same. So I think there’s just something, something there that we should really internalize versus just listen to and nod, nod at, uh, but like, really do the way we’ve all been trying to do for our brands and for ourselves.

Darcy: Absolutely. Well, Chris, thank you so much for talking all about how understanding the why behind the how can transform standard operational efforts into powerful growth levers. It’s perspectives like yours that help us to keep inspiring continue to redefine the world of CPG innovation. Thank you so much.

Chris Perry: Thank you for having me.

Allan: Thanks Chris.

Chris Perry: You’ve been listening to CPG launch leaders, a show from Bold Strategies, Inc. Don’t miss the next thrilling launch story. Follow the podcast on your podcast player now. Please give us a rating, leave a comment, and share episodes with your friends until next time.