Data-Driven Personalization in Customer Experience Strategy

[00:00:02]hello everybody and welcome if you stuck with us for the whole day this is the fifth session um from the retail buddhist and digital transformation strategy 2021 it's the last day of june it's not raining at the moment england won the football last night and we're halfway through the week so what what could be better than wrapping up your hump day with a final session from us if you have stuck with us for all five events today thank you so much and you're very welcome back for this final session if you are just joining us for the first time then welcome also we have a brilliant panel to wrap up today's events and i'll be asking them to introduce themselves very shortly this this session is all about leveraging data that d word that we all throw around leveraging data to deliver a digital personalized customer experience these are the guys that are going to be unpacking that in a moment as i said i'll introduce them just so but we'd love you to get involved audience uh we've always welcomed questions here at the tbrv so depending on what device you're using you'll see a q a button please use it and it's my job as moderator to make sure that every question that gets asked gets answered so um yeah please do get involved you might have a question for one of these uh lovely people in front of me right now or you might have a more general uh panel question um but we'll we'll take care of all of that and we'll make sure that we finish the session with all of your answers in place so without further ado i'm gonna ask my panel to introduce themself and i'm gonna start with you janice please hello janice who are you tell us about yourself hi i'm janice i am the e-commerce and marketing director at look fabulous forever we are a direct consumer beauty brand catering to older women and by older women i don't mean what the rest of the beauty industry generally does which is anyone over about 30 our customers are predominantly in their 60s and 70s i've worked for a range of e-commerce brands from birchbox to playboy a lot of media and entertainment um so i'm looking forward to our chat today how long's look fabulous forever been going for dennis eight years now our founder started it when she was 65 and she is 73 now i love it i love it i wasn't aware of the brand until i saw you on the panel list and we and we obviously spoke uh before today but yeah i looked up to it i looked at it so how long have you been involved for um just over a year i started uh during lockdown last year so met my colleagues for the first time about three weeks ago have you actually seen a colleague in 3d now yeah amazing well listen great great to have you on board and thank you for joining the panel uh today uh paul hello sir who are you hello um so paul morris i've been in digital marketing for about 22 plus years um started out with the likes of uh for those that remember the now deceased slate rooms.com i started out from there when there was like one person the call sent it up to about 100 um various other jobs but the likes of pz cousins run their uh e-commerce and digital globally and then ram uh food to funeral care and everything in between for the co-op uh and i'm currently um a digital acquisition and a marketing director for um the b2b side or visual soft that's me great to have you with us sir and thank you again for joining us as well and then all the way across the pond to austin in texas hello lisa well hello there daryn how are you i'm very good good um hi everyone yes i'm calling from austin texas and i am a product manager at naxio focusing on digital asset management uh so all about the rich media the data that goes along with that prior to joining netsio i was actually a client and was in the advertising space for almost 20 years and have been focused in digital asset management for about 15. and so really excited to talk about data um it's all about data data makes the world go round for sure it sure does especially when it's used well as well um yeah you win the award for being our furthest away panelist today and all of the sessions that we've ran so uh karen will sort you out a prize for being our fathers away geographical member i'm sure wonderful thank you great to have you all with us thank you so much and uh we're gonna get cracking so remember audience um stick with us please if you can and get involved use that q a button and i will get your questions to the panel don't worry if you don't have any questions or we'll just keep conversation going and you'll get lots of rich content janice i am going to kick off with you so um from a look fabulous forever perspective where do you start with personalizing experiences yes so it's been an interesting journey for us that when i joined the business just over a year ago it became apparent um quite quickly that the main way that we're going to grow the business was by improving our conversion and what was really holding us back from that point of view was that we were trying to serve everyone with a single website experience and particularly uh if you we're very different from anything else on the market you you will struggle to find products like ours elsewhere and we exist because mainstream beauty brands aren't producing products that are specifically designed for older women so when you first hear about the brand you want to understand what is our proposition you want to hear about our founder trisha's story and the fact that she was frustrated by the situation herself and decided to because those products weren't out there she was going to develop them herself and sell them herself and that's the kind of story of the brand and if you're new to us you need to understand that as a proposition but if you're a returning customer you know all that that's why you're loyal to the brand and you want to get into product and you want to you know kind of us to understand what you're going to be interested in so it became apparent very quickly that the first step on our kind of conversion improvement journey would to be to serve different experiences for different customers and while that kind of storytelling piece was really key to get started quickly where we with our first step was product recommendations that particularly if you're a new customer chances are you are going to buy one of our primers as your first purchase um because they're really key to kind of keeping your colors vibrant as you get older or you're going to buy a traditionally popular product like lipstick or eyeshadow you're very very unlikely to buy skin care from us as a first purchase but if you're a returning visitor your profile is going to be very different particularly if you're someone who's bought skincare from us before you're probably going to be in a replenishment cycle so we started with the product recommendations and then moved on to that storytelling piece and then added particularly tailored offers both based on what your kind of customer status is if you haven't bought from us for a while if you're a new customer but also particularly where we're doing tailored offers through other channels like email or facebook that actually you see that offer replicated when you land on the website so there isn't that disconnect of oh what was that code i can't remember it now we remind you so that's the journey that we've been on so far great thank you so much for that and for sharing that as a kick off to the to the event as well much appreciated i will come back to you shortly uh paul uh can you provide an example of how you're using data to provide a personalized experience uh yeah and i'd probably start where i currently am um at visual soft and more um regardless of us being um an e-commerce platform or us trying to get customers to use the platform so b2b businesses this is a b2b heavy example um so we're uh using a company called webio um and then we're mashing that together with the likes of uh you know someone on this video probably know the likes of lead forensics and hubspot so what we're doing is when um essentially the webio and lead forensics is being called it's then allowing us to start to do i'd say relatively simple um customization but we're finding really helps with conversion so often that's conversion to a lead for somebody filling in a form or giving us a call so it's things like um an at industry name tailoring or app freaking them out personalizing company names so it might be they land on a certain landing page and then we're going to tailor it to their sector so we're going to call out their sector it's specifically the name in a title and then we're going to start to dynamically change things like the images or case studies or language less language but as we go become more advanced it will be more language so i'd say that's quite a nice example um as to how to drive and in our case its engagement and its form fills and then it's hopefully business on the back of that um you know relatively simple but but pretty impactful really in terms of um specific examples around personalization and and getting people to trust it you know i think personalization is sometimes uh greeted suspiciously by the customer because they're not quite sure what's behind it how do you get your audience to trust you in terms of the way that you are trying to communicate with them yeah i am so i've completely uh stolen uh a model uh a trust model basically from um you'll have to look them up so this isn't me um meister green and galford um sort of three academics and i've been mashed in some of my elements i'll tell you about in a minute but i'd say from a trust perspective you've got to look at like what the hell do we mean by trust to begin with everybody's got their own different definition well they codified it and theirs were um so it was whether you were credible uh whether you were reliable um the level of intimacy and that's not jumping into bed with your consumer that's can you be trusted with information and i don't imagine you know like to look fabulous forever that's kind of key that's it's a quite personal thing so i imagine that that resonates there um and then things like self-orientation so too too many times i hear or see companies pretending that they care about uh consumers and they don't really um i mean i worked it's a good target a few years ago but the likes of the co-op where they did truly care about their target market their target audience and their customers um i saw a lot of the brand um studies as a result and that really aided conversion rate and conversely i won't go too much into the detail but when we saw those of um are in the country will probably recognize some of the um misgivings that some people have had over up and some of the ways that they've hit the news in the past and equally we saw conversion rate engagement rate uh lesser degree basket value but basket value go down as well as a result of that pulling on that emotional trust angle so i'd say you know that credible reliable intimate um self-orientation and then um kind of like the cherry and the icing on the top is on the top is the emotion that's around that so you know you're making them you're hopefully not going to make them angry or cry but are you evoking an emotional response to whether it's your marketing or whether it's your own site or the way that you make them look or feel um that's how i'd say and i'm not going to lecture anybody on what that mix looks like everyone's mix is different um but i'd say those are the key elements for me thank you sir that's a great point yeah and we certainly don't mean making customers cry otherwise we've got something really wrong at that point i think haven't we um i'm going to zoom across the pond to you lisa and actually lisa i should say to you as well thank you to noxio for um sponsoring the event as well um because um i didn't actually mention that before but you very kindly are the headline sponsors for this session so thank you nexio very much indeed um lisa data but let's go let's call it rich media what is the role of rich media in all of this and how does data relate right so i i think you know you talk about hey are we making our our consumer cry well actually that may be your intent in some respect to create that connection and so how we do that um is through rich media and there's the the adage of picture is worth a thousand words is is so incredibly true and it helps us ultimately get to that bottom line what we're looking to do is to build trust right so we speak the language we tell the story that corresponds to our consumer if we're on the website we need to be consistent we need to be able to show valid and truthful information we need to be authentic i know that term gets thrown around a lot but authenticity and speaking your brand is super important and we tell that through visual we tell that through audio we tell that through through video and it's something that allows us to basically put the consumer within our our shoes and vice versa and so we can use rich media to create that connection and to create that empathetic connection between the the brand and the consumer now in order to do that in order to build trust we need to be consistent and data comes into it because it allows us to do a couple of things it allows us to make the suggestions we're able to know what somebody has purchased before so we can look at the patterns of purchase we can look at what's in the box what's in the cart and put that information together to make honest and um relevant recommendations for the consumer itself to reach your goal whether that's to increase increase the basket to create empathy whatever we can use that rich media to create it and we can use that data to connect uh the various items um and it also the data allows us to speak the consumer's language and so i think it was really interesting when janice was talking about the various items that we make recommendations for and how i speak and the terms that i use are different than what janice might use and what the data allows us to do is to actually speak a common language whatever that might be we can normalize data we can make sure that in the end when i make a recommendation and i'm able to use the sku because i've been able to get that from a pim or some other system that it's still showing uh in a language that makes sense to the consumer got it janice i'm going to come back to you just as we continue that theme because intelligent guided selling is is the buzzword of many retailers as well trying to use data correctly to guide customers down a route they think they want to be guided down how do you use that in your business that intelligent guide is telling to really deliver personalized recommendations that customers appreciate as well yeah i mean this has been a really interesting challenge for the beauty industry for a long time that it's difficult to buy color makeup products online and be confident that you bought the right color but in the last 15 months you know even now when stores are open you can't test product so the online experience um has to up its game in terms of helping customers and this has been probably the biggest challenge for us as a business is how do you help the customer find the right color that will suit them and we looked um we looked a lot of different options and particularly for a while we um got quite seriously into ar um but the problem with ar and to be fair that providers were quite transparent about this is that part of the reason that certain colors suit you is to do with the way they refract light on your skin and ar can't replicate that and for our products a lot of it is to do with how it works on your skin and how it's going to sit on your skin differently to a traditional product so we decided in the end the ar was not going to be the right solution for us so we wanted some way of helping our customers and guiding them specifically to color makeup products to the to the shades that were going to suit them best so we work with a provider called conversity who specializes in intelligent guided selling and produced a tool that asks customers um a lot of questions that will help establish what colors suit them things like you know what colors do you generally wear in terms of clothes where do you when do you get compliments and things like what color are do the veins in your wrist appear because the undertone in your skin will make them look particularly blue or purple or green or yellowish depending on um that bass note in your skin and that's going to very much influence what colors will suit you so we ask customers series of questions are they looking for something because they're popping to tesco or are they looking for something because they're going out for a special dinner then the kind of colors are going to be very different and that has been really successful um for us the feedback um on that tool has been really positive and we have just in the last couple of days seen that our overall customer satisfaction that we measure on a quarterly basis through mps has drastically shot up in the last quarter and the only significant change in our experience has been adding this um personalized recommendations through our color quiz wow so commercial benefit uh hand in hand leads to customer satisfaction absolutely how's that for a hard measure of fact so in terms of whether you take that a step further now what can you do to deepen that is there is another way you can take it forward or you just continue as is for now yeah i mean there are lots of things that we can do to improve the specific experience of the tool that we've we've got things like the moment we don't have the ability to send you your recommendations because i think what we found what we expected when we implemented that this was going to be a mid to bottom funnel tool that this is going to be people have heard of us and now they're thinking about what colors to buy and what we actually found is it's been a much more topper funnel tool it's much more been the place where people have chosen to interact with us for the first time so from their point of view actually they're not ready to buy they've not got that far down the funnel with us so actually being able to send them their recommendations so they can keep them and refer back to them when they are ready to buy is going to be a kind of key part of improving um the experience but i think for us it's just getting the the kind of conversion metrics right from that product because it is very top of funnel about how do we use it um to make it work for us as a business got it thanks janice paul i'm going to come on to you if i may um i mean leveraging data is uh it can be bewildering for some retailers and some of the things we've already discussed here today it all sounds great but how how do retailers really get started what would you recommend they did here what advice would you offer them yeah i've um so that like a typical let's make sure i can remember before so the typical four like people process technology and wonga ultimately so you're going to match those four in some way and i'd say you know a couple of the key ones of those to begin with are mashing the right people whether that's aptitude or ability or experience with the right tech so that they can utilize that kind of build on it and build with it um so if i use i've got loads of other examples and i'll come on to a couple in a minute but where i am currently as an example visual soft is these two products within that suite one called campaign builder one called basket recovery and they do what kind of it says on the tin so they enable personalized campaigns based on perhaps past interactions on email um basket recovery is exactly that so it enables you to reconnect with them you know you're not just going to keep harassing them but you'll connect with them at the right time and these are the tools that can do that and then i'd say it's i'd say um often it's um a vernacular that i live by nowadays is something called pox so proof of concept so pocs so and it's really starting to move forward without having been in some long contracts you may get to the proof points of going down i don't know um a sales force einstein ai but you'd be a bit silly in my opinion to start there if you're an sme you really want to be starting with i don't know like a zoho paid sense around and he's again there's loads of other tools a b uh testing then you want to maybe move to start mvt i'm not going to speak around dams and things i'll you know like the floor with me on those but you know making sure that you've got the right tools and assets and then um you know we i mentioned in my first example before uh about the likes of hubspot so you know hubspot for us is a really key way and you know i know it's sometimes more in b2b but it's a key way of us keeping connection keeping email history um you know so i was having a complaint and a wins with virgin media um earlier today um and i can tell that they're using campaign tracking ids as we all can tell if you're in the business so they're obviously keeping a track of all of those within a crm system it's not that's another one which i've gone and forgotten i wasn't going to quote it on this call but i'd just say making sure that you use your tools in anger you're not spending huge waves of cash before you've proved out the concepts you can then prove the benefit i mean i like genesis before around the tool which was more topper funnel i think that's brilliant and then you can use that maybe for a different kind of interaction or engagement versus the bottom of a funnel that was perhaps more envisaged to begin with so i'd say start small build out um don't be scared by all the terminology and the vernacular you know i think sometimes part of my language some people like bingo um and the united sort of uh well they do don't know they like to sound intelligent and sometimes i think if you've got a few key tools to key to test key concepts and move forward that's that's a brilliant place to start i should stop she's not swearing [Music] broadcast don't worry about it lisa let me let me continue that with you if i may you know carry on this where do you get started uh theme for me please well i think the key way to cut through all of the bs is to speak the language that your consumer is using because i mean ultimately what we need to be able to do is to make our product findable by the user right if they can't find what they're looking for or what we're recommending or what have you then you've wasted their time and your time and so i think it's paying attention um to to the to how people are looking for things right so i know we have various ways that we can get the data into the system yes as paul said start small look at what data you have available to you if you have a particular pim or a product information system that where you have skus like of course nobody speaks and skews but find out what it is that they're using to refer to that product and then take advantage of that like don't ever think that your data is dead data is organic your language is organic you should be modifying how you use that data to reflect what the user is and again that goes back to trust like am i telling my brand story am i telling my product story or am i telling my consumer story and you know ultimately it's it's what the consumer wants so we know that we need to support from a backend perspective what packaging might need to be what the descriptions might need to be but learn from what's working and not working from your consumer standpoint so pay attention to those those search logs and into where is it that you may be losing that conversion right are they even getting things into the basket or not in why aren't they getting to the basket it's because they can't find it that may be a part of it and so you have to look to how do we change that and maybe create a language or a thesaurus or some other back-end index to allow your consumer to actually find what they're looking for got it and you talked a lot about i mean one of your opening statements was data makes the world go around but do you think do you think retailers truly know how to get hold of data to make the world go around because i think some retailers just have so much of it they don't know what to do with it and i think that's the the big thing is understanding how your data is used and what within that data pattern is meaningful and relevant right um so actually auditing your data to understand its use and is its relevance and so that you can modify how you maybe describe things what fields you're using any of that to make things usable um within the library or or damn world we have a saying garbage in garbage out right so pay attention to what it is that you're putting into those systems um and know what it is that you're pla putting into those systems but understand what's relevant it's often so simple though isn't it like the garbage in garbage out analogy is it's so simple and so true but people still fall in the trap of putting the garbage in and getting the garbage out exactly right and oftentimes what i i say is that well then you might as well just have like a file share where you're presenting pictures to the user because you know otherwise it's no good thank you very much i'm gonna come back to you janice if i may um what are your business uh sort of personalization priorities in the in the coming months or the next year ahead yeah so i think um there are kind of two big um projects for us one is around um product and category activation but particularly understanding um things like for example customers who buy skin care from us on average their lifetime value is twice as high as people who only buy makeup products from us so actually getting that first skincare purchase is really key and there are people who buy lipstick from us but don't mind mascara and kind of all of all of those things and kind of helping them on that journey and the other big piece for us is about post purchase that um we are about far more than just selling beauty products it's about really helping um older women look the best and make the most of their products so we have huge amounts of really rich content and because our products are different some of them work in different ways to traditional products so for example um our lip primer works in a slightly counter intuitive way that you don't put it on your lips like you do with some other products you actually put it around the outside of your lips so being able to say and send video content saying hey you've just bought our lip primer here's a video that shows you how to use it so that they get greater value from that product and they're more likely to shop with us again and more likely to engage with the rest of our video tutorial content and all of those things so i think that post purchase experience is going to be really key and also kind of replicating that when you return to the website knowing that you have just bought that product and here's a great video that shows you how to use it i mean some interested in your pro in your customer profile in the sense that um it took me ages for example to get my stepfather to convert to online shopping for his groceries because he was a bit suspicious of it and then the pandemic kind of forced us down that road and i still have to manage it all for him online and he calls me up if you want something adjusted so um but that took a long time and and the older customer is sometimes fearful of of technology and even using websites and online has that been a challenge for your business and how have you overcome it yeah i mean i think um paul's point about trust is really really important and actually you know a lot of our customers will say they feel like they're buying from trisha and and that is really key that you know that through our social channels through video content through imagery that's seeing that you know this isn't some big corporate this is trisha who created this brand because she faced the same problems as our customers face we have got data from our customers saying actually they some of them don't do that much um other shopping elsewhere i think things have changed massively in the last um year or so the over 65s are the fastest growing market in e-commerce and i get quite frustrated that a lot of brands are concentrating on gen z and millennials and think oh you know why bother with older people they're not very tech savvy it's like that's not the case anymore and if you're not thinking about an older older audience you're really missing out absolutely it was really quite it's such an inspired story that tricia started the business you know and was targeting uh women who have similar age to herself it's just i think it's a really inspired story and it is about that trust piece right you feel like you want to buy from this lady because of the story of the business as well but it can easily be lost at the same time can't it you know yeah bombs wrong you know and then wrong message yeah there's some interesting um data from facebook recently they were talking about um representation and and why it matters and they were talking about this idea that not only are older people generally under-represented in advertising but they are often they're never shown in positions of power they are shown as weak and vulnerable and you know dottery and all of those things and actually our customers really respond to being treated um with respect and empowered and given the tools to feel empowered is is a core part of our brand and yeah i think there's so many iconic role models now of senior women who are you know flying the flag you know for example uh dame jone collins helen mirren and so on some amazing incredible strong women that i think would kill someone if they were ever called doddery wouldn't they so um yeah good for you guys and good for what you're doing as well i love it paul i'm going to come on to you if i may sir this this trust piece then so i want to unpack it just a little bit further so um how does a retailer really convince a customer to trust them if the trust has been broken previously is there is there a way back from breaking trust is what i'm asking uh i i think there is so um let me give you a real life example i've got to watch again some of my language that i use but if um some of you that remember the co-op in about i can't remember the exact dates i think about 2015 when we were there and uh gentleman was essentially uh allegedly um snorting cocaine um whilst having um sex um i think possibly with rem boys born sure um and was misappropriating funds also from the bank um and then there was a a case for that and that really um that really rocked the co-op i remember watching it on tvs that we had in manchester uh is the central base of the co-op got quite a large nice building there one angel square and we're all watching it on in like the marketing floor together i was with the the header brand at the time and it was like oh my goodness you know this is being played out um in front of us um and then um thereafter we're absolutely seeing an impact on we're obviously it's quite a big business circa 9 billion pound revenue business so obviously had some quite sophisticated agencies econometrics brand studies and that absolutely hit us um uh you know i'll give you an example in areas that perhaps you wouldn't quite think but it was like funeral care and funeral care plans um were being hit and not necessarily being taken out as much and conversion rates had an electrical business and a circular million pound net net cell business and we were seeing um that was there um and i'd say what the likes of future leaders at the time did uh gentle and i reported into briefly the ceo called richard pennycook was doing was really to bring us back to the heart of what the court was about um was kind of owning up to those um mistakes and you know that was in that case you know um that absolutely shouldn't have happened but that wasn't endemic of the organization so it was trying to explain that story uh it was doing something about it it was being seen to be doing the right thing and they were also being seen to and doing the right thing and then if i'm being honest engaging in and it wasn't it wasn't calculating at all but it was things like um the new membership proposition came out of the co-op shortly thereafter where they were giving a percentage back to consumers so reciprocity and also back to charities uh that's a circle the five and the one percent i think they've more recently doubled the amount that they're giving back to charities then there was numerous numerous other examples of how they were working back on that trust and again they were leveraging the credibility the reliability the intimacy i was part of i used to run the um help run the the digital marketing team and um we did a lot around christmas about every store going to somebody that was in need uh depositing a bag i think sweet circa 25 30 pounds um to give somebody that was in need and there was a tv advertising campaign and yeah that was a tv advertising campaign but i can truly say that they meant that all of the managers of the circuit who in our thousand stores had an impact in that and we're going around to that person that was generally struggling financially or slightly older and couldn't get out we're really supporting them and how that resonated i can't remember the numbers and prepared them but how that resonated on social media um and beyond uh you know it was absolutely trending so it was something that we felt that those little micro pulses were helping reinforce the brand and get us back on track um whilst it not being forced it was just part of the brand ethos and the ethics uh that the business went back to so i'd say it can but it's not yeah it's not an instant rebound you do something like that um it takes time to rework that trust and you can't be calculating in it it's a really good example because actually that story was massive at the time and you know it it was no exaggeration to say at one point it looked like the co-op would fall over you know so yeah i mean richard pennycook i think he was the cfo that became then the ceo didn't he and uh he was he was a brilliant individual who helped steady that ship uh he's very very respected in the industry so i think people sort of appreciated his steady his steady hand lisa let's lead on this let's carry on with this theme so trust recovering trust um can it be i think absolutely it can be and i think you have an opportunity to create the foundation of trust early on right so it as paul was saying they were able to recover because they they had built a level of trust right and i i think that's what you can do ahead of time now what can you do after the time part of that is reacting quickly and create reacting honestly so how can you react quickly well that's because you know what tools you have at your disposal right so from a marketing standpoint what have we created what can we access here's what i have how can i use it so you know if you have data at your disposal to be able to know what you can use what you can't use how you can tell that story um and also to understand what has um what have your consumers responded to in the past right so also getting to the point of the of the follow-up within um within the basket like what is that message that resonates um in in speak to that message get back to that message and i know it sounds kind of crazy from a data perspective but you actually do have access to that or you should have access to that within your systems right so your your uh point of sale information should be incorporated into all of your other information um your work in progress information should be part of what you present in your your point of sale so it all is seemingly unrelated but it is so crucial to being able to respond quickly to a situation like this right so um in part two one of your first steps might be to okay hey let's pull off any marketing that involves that person right now and the way that you can do that is to go within your systems run a quick search on that talent on that person to be able to say okay you know what let's stop this let's get a more branding message within that and and let's get it into uh onto the airwaves into the interwebs what have you to to be able to own now that um that narrative and to get back to what your brand stands for it's a great answer lisa thank you and time is whizzing by we've got five minutes left would you believe so i'm gonna start thinking about a wrap with each of our panelists so i will be coming to each of you for closing thoughts um starting with you janice in just a second um so uh audience uh you stayed with us actually and i think actually our audience number has gone up since we began so if you uh if you've just joined us and uh you've got a quick burning question now is your time to chuck it in um as we start to close off with our panelists um for all of you and i'm going to start with janice i just want you to think about um any particular learns that have really come to light since the pandemic began and anything that you know a golden nugget that you could potentially share with our audience that's something that's come on come up because of the pandemic and um and it's something that you're able to share with us as a closing thought so janice over to you you have to go first the others get longer to think about it so there you go someone wants to go first i think for us it's been about building a more direct relationship with our customers that particularly when we locked down for the first time our customer base were disproportionately affected by that that most of them are retired so their lives revolved around family and grandchildren and seeing friends and volunteering and all of that stuff went away overnight so trisha decided to set up a closed facebook group for our customers there was a place not just to talk about our products but actually where women could share their experiences of how they were feeling and that's given us a much closer relationship with our customers beyond our kind of purely commercial one i love that and i think that is one i mean nobody's wanting to live through what we've been through for the last 16 18 months but one of the silver linings of the pandemic i think is the reinstatement of community and how people have tried to look out for each other more than they probably did before and that's a beautiful example of it um janice thank you so much for your contributions today on on behalf of your brilliant brand thank you and uh hopefully we can work again sometime yeah paul what's your thoughts on this matter what's your your learns over the the pandemic well i'd say um focus on truly focus on customer need and design content around that so content design i'd say is the thing that's really come out for me too many brands are still forcing content out that they believe that they want to be read or to be engaged with and they're not truly often focusing on customer need and now go back to janice's example you know i'm not an expert really in a field but it's really looking at how um during the pandemic also work for another company a habas media group they have the likes of some makeup brands and things and they were really seeing a changing dynamic of how people were wearing some of the products from some large brands that they were dealing with and then what does that mean what does that mean for people the way that they look or feel about themselves or need and we've all been through that i haven't you know the last 16 to 18 months have been you know tough uh for everybody so i'd say brands need the ones that i believe have prospered have really looked at what consumers want and reacted to it and some have been more or less successful um you look at brewdog more recently that was once the darling a good time ago and only the the content that they designed around user need which was a gold the gold glass or whatever it was recently hasn't you know so they that might have flown a good few months ago uh but now doesn't and i think the way that people are being treated uh employment from some of the pubs chains again i won't mention um some people have not dealt with very well during that so i think some of that's come to there so how can you truly focus on customer need and then create content around those customer needs i was really surprised by the brewdog story a couple of weeks ago because i think you know the reality of obviously life behind the scenes there and what's projected are clearly emerging is quite different so i was i was quite surprised and i have to say i really love that ale as well so um there you go hazy jane all the way but um anyway that's for another conversation paul brilliant brilliant insights today thank you sir and lovely to work with you lisa you're gonna wrap it up from across the pond please wow okay so um i would say that the way that the pandemic has affected business is that we've been able to see those people who have been able to quickly shift their business model whether that's to offering community versus just pure on product whether that's shifting what it is that you sell what you do um i i think those people who have done well are those companies who have shown that they have the capacity for change and to quickly respond to quickly understand that things are not going as you originally thought they were going to go and to say that you have a different need that you can fulfill within your community and to be able to shift uh your your business to be able to reflect that and to do it quickly i think is something that we've seen that those those clients of ours that have really been able to kind of pivot um in in certain ways and to respond um has definitely been a benefit you know we were seeing people go more online um and you know it was already a trajectory that was happening but what the pandemic created is this more accelerated sort of need and people having to say okay stop we need to do a 180.

[00:44:59]um and yeah the the pandemic really showed those people who are are uh agile and nimble and being able to to shift thank you so much and uh thank you again to noxio for the sponsorship today and a big uk hello to the state of texas as well oh thank you we appreciate it um thank you everybody i mean that is the end of five brilliant sessions today it's an honor to be the moderator when we get such rich content from such great panelists so thank you so much we've ran a couple of events in june so thanks for joining us look out on the retail buddhism website for upcoming events and there will be more virtual events but we're hopeful that we'll be able to deliver you an in-person event and hopefully not too distant future but for now thank you to lisa to janice and to paul for a brilliant signing off of a long day of events i hope you've got some real rich content out of it and you've taken away some learns and it must be nearly time for a beer so have a brilliant wednesday evening and thank you again enjoy take care