ChatGPT’s generative AI capabilities are spreading through business applications like wildfire—and retail marketing is no exception. A piece in Multichannel Merchant looks at how the tool may be applied to product marketing and ecommerce, plus how fast-fashion brand Shein is taking advantage of the service.

Photo credit: Om siva Prakash on Unsplash

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With online shopping now the norm, a sound ecommerce merchandising strategy is crucial to keeping customers’ attention and driving conversions. An article in Multichannel Merchant reviews five tips for creating an engaging online shopping experience—from responsive websites to filtering methods to product bundling.

The post Five Aspects of a Killer Ecommerce Merchandising Strategy appeared first on Chief Marketer.

For a growing number of consumers—particularly within younger generations—assigning purpose to a brand cannot be an afterthought. It must be incorporated into the business’s values and practices from the ground up.

One such company is Cotopaxi, a founder-led, direct-to-consumer brand that makes sustainably-designed outdoor gear. But beyond the products, it’s deeply committed to developing and uplifting communities and dedicates a percentage of its revenue to nonprofits working to improve the human condition.

That’s one of the things that attracted Brad Hiranaga, its new Chief Brand Officer, to the gig. “One of the major goals for Cotopaxi is how do we create a blueprint that will work not just for this company, but for other companies. So that they can take it and use it in ways that will do good for whatever their organization’s trying to do. That’s exciting,” he told Chief Marketer this week. “It’s open code for other folks.”

We spoke with Hiranaga—one of our first Marketers on Fire—about his vision for the company, how he believes purpose-driven marketing will evolve, lessons learned from his recent stint as CBO at General Mills and what marketers with C-suite aspirations should be focusing on to advance their careers.

Chief Marketer: You’ve only been at Cotopaxi for a month or so, but what is your current vision for the company?

Brad Hiranaga, Chief Brand Officer at Cotopaxi: As they’re crossing the hundred million mark in sales this year, they felt it was time to expand the marketing efforts and start to double-down on the resources to put against the brand. I’m coming in at a really exciting time for them.

A little context will help paint the picture. They’re a founder-led brand. Davis Smith is the entrepreneur who started the company nine years ago. The small team that’s been there on the ground from the beginning has done a truly incredible job of building a brand. When I came into this, having worked on lots of big brands with lots of big budgets, [I noticed] some of the amazing actions that they’ve taken as a brand have been instinctual. Davis as a founder is a well-spoken leader and believes in culture, and a lot of his personal values around leadership and taking care of people really feed into the brand. So as I’ve come into it, it’s nowhere near starting from scratch.

Now I have to build this brand up. They’ve got great visual assets, they’ve got great products, they’ve got an amazing mission. They’ve got a really good culture. Now they’re ready to go much bigger and get out into the world and into culture. So how do I take all of these really good parts and sync them together so that more people can get exposed to the brand and are aware of what this brand is? And not only that it makes great gear and products that you can wear that are cool and fashionable. There’s a bigger intention behind it of doing good.

CM: What was your motivation for joining the company?

BH: The reason I joined was twofold. It was the potential of the brand to be a lifestyle, iconic brand in culture. But then a secondary part for me is Davis’s mission, which is how do you create a model and a blueprint for other businesses to follow that can transform capitalism? We are a business built on doing good, and we obviously want be successful so that we can do more good. And because it’s so much in the DNA, what an opportunity to come in and get it out there so that mission can come to life and scale.

CM: Do you have any ideas as to how you’re going to do that tactically, through specific marketing channels? How do you plan to approach that?

BH: We’re doing a couple things. It’s a direct-to-consumer brand, so it was built up through e-comm and now it’s expanding into its own stores and retail channels. It sells through wholesale, too, with partners like REI and Dick’s. The distribution’s getting larger. But to date, most of the marketing efforts have been twofold. One, you can run it digitally through social, through anything to lead you into the ecommerce experience.

And then two, more at a local grassroots level, where they’re building stores, but also building communities, mostly in the West Coast mountain regions. There’s an event they’ve done for the last seven or eight years called Quest, a gamified event where a couple thousand people over 24 hours accomplish a bunch of different missions around adventure or doing good. A lot of people got to know the brand that way. Obviously, Covid had a little bit of an impact on it the last of couple years.

As I come in, we’re kicking off ways to expand out from a media perspective. We’re looking more holistically around how and where we invest in a smart way, given where we’re located geographically. But also, this is a brand that’s built on e-comm, so it can go anywhere. How do we want to invest in that? There’s a lot of experimentation to figure out the best way to spend behind it to drive scale.

And then PR, lifestyle and culture is going to be a big part of where the brand can extend itself. It’s already naturally showing up in places like that, with influencers and people who like the brand, or it’ll show up in product placement, in shows and movies. But [it can] be placed within popular culture with a lot more intentionality.

CM: Purpose-driven marketing is kind of baked into the brand itself. What’s different about that in terms of marketing processes?

BH: It starts with the founder. Davis grew up all over Latin America, where he saw unequal opportunities to prosper and create a fair living condition for your family. That was always something that he was striving for: to be able to give access to opportunity for everybody, and is there a model to be able to do that.

I’ve worked on brands where you have mission goals and you have a purpose that you’ve articulated. But probably the brand was built to sell something. It was selling a product or a good or a service, whereas this was truly built on the intention of doing good. That’s where the difference is. What do we need to go do so that we can share it?

One of their big pillars is eradicating extreme poverty and creating fair opportunities. There’s a Cotopaxi foundation that donates a percentage of every sale so that that foundation can donate to organizations that are trying to live that same mission. Most of them are in Latin America right now and that’ll probably continue to expand, but that’s just built into the business model. And then from a planet health perspective, the business has been climate neutral for the last couple years.

They want to be as transparent as possible, but in everything, so other companies can take it and leverage it for themselves. I know consumers and people like myself are interested in businesses doing that, and I will support businesses that do that. But the scale of it comes if other companies that participate in those kinds of business practices also do it. So, how do I share that and get more people to participate in it.

CM: Do you think that this model of leading by example will be the way to go for companies in the future? How do you see purpose-driven marketing progressing overall?

BH: I do. Given the amount of information that’s out there on any company, it’s so easy to find out what a company is doing and what they stand for and what they believe. Cotopaxi is built on that transparency and willing to share and look at a bigger mission. It’s in the business of trying to build human sustainability, which is broader than just the planet. It’s the breadth of everything.

One of the major goals for Cotopaxi is how do we create a blueprint that will work not just for this company, but for other companies, so that they can take it and use it in ways that will do good for whatever their organization’s trying to do. That’s what it was founded on, and that’s exciting. It’s open code for other folks.

As a marketer I’ve been in roles before that are more about CoEs and best practices. You’re always trying to figure out the framework for this or for that that we can share. This [at Cotopaxi] as a framework to share is exciting because you can have conversations like this and be more open about that, versus saying we don’t want to share IP, so I’m only going to share this little bit that makes our marketing look good. It’s a very different approach.

CM: What are some lessons learned from your gig at General Mills that you’re applying to your new role?

BH: I was fortunate to work with some founder-led brands there that had been built like this. Annie’s was one of them. [CEO] John Foraker came in, and similar to Davis, he was very passionate about what they were doing and had a strong belief in the brand, what they stood for and the impact they could have. That was very helpful to have experience working on different size brands and different life stages of brands, in addition to all of the great stuff you learn at a big company that knows how to do marketing like General Mills. Sitting on brands like Cheerios and Totino’s and Pillsbury, I could bring that [knowledge of] what best in class looks like from a standardm classical CPG marketing [perspective]. But also, here’s how you need to work in a smaller, more iterative, more entrepreneurial brand, and now apply that to a brand at Cotopaxi’s life stage.

The other thing I’d say is that over the last several years I was at General Mills, a lot of the focus for myself and our team was around being more articulate and vocal about the mission, internally and externally, and how that connected to the brands. And it’s a little bit different there, because it’s a portfolio of lots of brands. So I had to do a lot of work to figure out how that mission comes through these brands and how we set not just sales and profit targets, but also force-for-good targets that the brands would have to go achieve and be held accountable to. Those KPIs around doing good became part of the planning process and the quarterly check-in process. Those kinds of things are already built-in with Cotopaxi. But they need to continue to be developed and elevated.

CM: Lastly, for marketers looking to ascend to the C-suite, what skills they should be honing?

BH: This has been on my mind a lot, especially recently. I’m coming from a big company, a big brand with big resources. At that size of brand, the situation for marketers for the last five years has been about how do I infuse digital and data and performance marketing into my business? Now I’m on the other side of this at a small brand. I know how to infuse data in performance. It’s how the brand was built. But now, how do I create a brand that people are going to care about that has the same kind of awareness?

Whatever career path I [took] had to have the latter in that for me because I wanted to experience it from the other side. And I felt that as a marketer, if I only knew the way of big brand, big business… I would be less well-rounded than having the other experience of going into [the way] all brands are now being built today. Staying close enough to the marketing and the technology and the consumer to keep it at my fingertips was very intentional.

I think for marketers that are coming up, if there’s a way to have experiences on both types of brands, legacy nostalgic brands that you learn a ton of stuff on in addition to smaller, digitally-native brands that are built that way, it’s important to have both those types of experiences. Because otherwise, you can eventually pigeonhole yourself into being just a performance-based marketer, or just a big brand marketer. When you step up into CMO roles and C-suite roles, you don’t have to be necessarily an expert on every single thing, but you have to understand how all of those parts fit together for the bigger picture of what you’re trying to drive. You have to understand the consumer and where technology’s going. So being curious and constantly reinventing yourself and your skills is crucial.

Image source: Cotopaxi Instagram

The post Brands on Fire: Cotopaxi Chief Brand Officer on the Future of Purpose-Driven Marketing appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Dozens of media and tech brands activated at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity last month, from big tech on the beach to adtech along yacht row to pop-ups from newcomers along the Croisette, each looking to make a splash during the festival’s first in-person experience since the start of the pandemic. (ICYMI, here’s a photo tour of some of the standout brand activations).

But digital advertising company Infillion, formerly known as TrueX, Inc. and Gimbal, wanted to signal something new. A key objective was to allow people to touch, feel and experience the tech rather than simply talk about it. It also introduced its location-based “We Cannes” app at the fest, designed to raise funds for Ukraine Refugee Relief and reward attendees with tokens redeemed for swag when they participated in partner activities.

We spoke with Infillion CMO Laurel Rossi about the strategic marketing goals of the company’s Cannes presence, the challenges of marketing a tech brand and how it’s navigating the demise of third-party cookies.

Chief Marketer: Why was it important to create an experience for Infillion at Cannes?

Laurel Rossi, CMO of Infillion: Two things. One, we tried to create a presence. We also have a new brand, so obviously we wanted a big debut. There are conventions [at Cannes] that I think put people in boxes. You’ve got adtech in a yacht, the platforms around the beach. We decided we were going to be ourselves, and be a little bit more grown up than adtech row—which is not a bad thing, but it is what it is, and we wanted signal new.

Probably the most important part, though, outside of the space and the geography we picked, is the fact that we decided that we would… create interactivity, give people an opportunity to actually touch the tech, feel the tech, experience the tech, and not just talk about the tech. And, because we’re so consumer-forward, we wanted the person who was going through the experience to feel like a consumer as well.

CM: What are the challenges of brand marketing a tech product?

LR: Tech loves to talk about tech, and maybe sometimes not the outcome of the tech. We are so lucky. Streaming blew up, and we have a streaming business. Ecommerce also blew up during COVID and we own a commerce business. The biggest challenge is making sure that we stay grounded around what is relevant, coherent, and not talk too much about the tech only, and get to the outputs, the things that are either consumer-facing or customer-facing. I find that on the tech side, we tend to talk about the inner workings a lot.

And sometimes people make it super competitive. You’ll have two or three products, and they don’t even have to be in the same space, but they talk competitively. That’s just the nature of tech; you’re kind of groomed that way. I think we’re starting to ungroom. We’re starting to integrate into the fabric of people’s real lives.

CM: From an event marketing perspective, what are the strategic marketing goals of the Infillion experience?

LR: Our business plan was to launch the brand hot in the first six months and then hope that we would have a really good brand by the middle of the year so that we could focus on driving the two business units. [We] won’t ever stop building the brand. But what better way to be in front of all these brands and all our clients on the agency side than to be here? Once [we knew] everybody was coming, it made sense and we wanted to make it immersive. I hope people come, hang out and do the tech, and talk to our people rather than being talked to.

CM: We speak with marketers often about balancing data privacy with targeting consumers online. What’s your perspective on that?

LR: Both of our products are opt-in, so we don’t have a cookie problem. With our programmatic business, obviously there’s some cookies involved necessarily, but our whole business model is about opt-in consumer engagement. We are getting your permission up front, and then we have our clients transact based on those relationships. If you take a location app, you’ve already opted in. If you’re looking at our streaming products, same thing. We’ve gotten lucky, although we are looking at ways to put that opt-in feature in programmatic.

I don’t see cookies as a problem. We launched this study—2,500 consumers and what their habits are—and I think people are starting to talk about this a lot more: If you give the consumer more relevance, they’ll give you plenty of information. Not that we’re trying to steal it from them, but they’ll give [it to you]. They’ll give you time. They’ll give you attention. The principle we’re working on is, what can we give you in exchange for your time, attention and privacy? Make it opt-in.

CM: From a general marketing perspective, what trends should CMOs be looking at right now?

LR: There’s some myth-busting we need to do about the consumer in terms of what they’re willing to do to get more relevant, interesting, entertaining brand information, ads, whatever it is, in front of them. What they’re willing to trade in terms of their time, their attention and their data and information is astounding to me. That’s the rising trend. I feel like we don’t make enough of it, and I don’t think we really knew that. We just talk about how much privacy is a problem.

CM: What are the qualities a successful CMO should have to be successful in today’s business world?

LR: Bravery is at the top of the list. You cannot be afraid to be contrarian. You cannot be afraid to tell the truth. I think CMOs get a bad rap for a lot of reasons. They’re too creative. They’re too business-oriented. They’re too data-driven, whatever. At the end of the day, you have to be brave and be very clear on what your goal is and match those two things up.

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Ecommerce innovation is an important area of focus for savvy marketing executives, particularly over the past two years. Indeed, industry leaders largely agree that the influx of online purchase behavior is one pandemic-borne shift that’s here to stay. But are successful, on-time deliveries keeping pace with consumer demand, in light of continued supply chain disruption? Multichannel Merchant looks at the challenges retail marketers face, plus research that suggests consistent delivery performance outweighs speed.

The post Solutions for Retail Marketers Amid Delivery Failures and Supply Chain Disruption appeared first on Chief Marketer.

At its annual advertiser summit this week, Pinterest announced plans to roll out new ecommerce tools for brands with the end goal of transforming the platform into a personalized shopping destination. Here’s what marketers need to know about the new features, according to coverage in AdExchanger, which include a tool that identifies trends, access to Pinterest’s first-party data, monetization of its Idea Pins, and more.

The post Pinterest Unveils New Ecommerce Tools for Brands appeared first on Chief Marketer.

For ecommerce marketers, measuring return on ad spend is critical. But there are several common pitfalls to navigate, from pinpointing conversion attribution to properly gauging growth to taking into account disparate measurement tactics depending on the marketing channel. An article in Multichannel Merchant examines how to proactively address these issues.

The post Enhancing ROAS With Ecommerce Marketing: Four Pitfalls to Avoid appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Online spending accounted for more than a fifth of total retail sales in 2020, according to a piece in Multichannel Merchant, up from 15.8 percent in 2019. So, if you haven’t perfected your ecommerce marketing strategy yet, here are a few tips for creating a compelling digital shelf through mobile optimization, image selection, positive reviews and more.

Use Keyword-Rich Copy

Brand copy should contain search term keywords that shoppers would use to find your product. This applies to the title, feature bullets, product descriptions and metadata—all key elements of proper search engine optimization.

Make it Mobile-First

Optimize your copy for mobile by ensuring that four components—brand recognition, product type recognition, variant recognition and size recognition—are applied to your hero image. This will allow consumers to find your product more easily, reduce accidental adds to shopping carts, create incremental sales across platforms and improve mobile conversions.

Savvy Image Selection

Product images should be up-to-date, accurate and high-quality, with your digital shelf featuring an average of 3-4 images. Your product’s primary image should be the most compelling, but the supporting gallery of imagery can include real-life moments and use cases.

For more tips on how marketers can enhance their digital presence—through reviews and rich media forms, among others—read on in Multichannel Merchant.

The post Ecommerce Strategies: How to Make Your Brand’s Digital Shelf Stand Out Online appeared first on Chief Marketer.

The post How Driscoll’s Transitioned to Online Grocery Shopping and Product Marketing appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Mobile Optimization

According to data from Namagoo, the 2020 holiday shopping season saw mobile purchases surpass desktop for the first time. Brands should therefore optimize their mobile experience, starting with user-friendly account creation and an accessible and clearly visible search function.

Real-Time Intent

Tap technology to develop individualized promotions based on location, device, time of day and more. Use relevant, tailored promotions, such as buy-one-get-one-free or free shipping, to keep customers engaged.

For additional ways in which brands can increase engagement and conversions through ecommerce, including by preventing customer journey hijacking and offering flexible payment options, read more in Multichannel Merchant.

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