The Omnichannel Challenge: Balancing AI and Data Privacy

Jennifer Peters: Anyone in retail and eCommerce right now feels that the weight of we've got to get the customer to convert for the first time. You have to think about cost of acquisition. We have to think about it from an advertising perspective. We have to think about it from a discounting perspective and like ultimately long term, what is this customer gonna be worth to us? Like what is this customer's LTV maybe guessing what that might be for two years. And we were guessing before and now we don't have to guess.

Kailey Raymond: Hello and welcome to Good Data, Better Marketing. I'm your host, Kailey Raymond. Today we're exploring the fast-paced world of DTC and eCommerce where technology and marketing come together to create unforgettable customer experiences. Game-changing trends like data privacy and bleeding edge technologies like AI are shaping how brands truly develop personalized omnichannel interactions that develop trust with customers. From decoding real-time behavior patterns to tackling how to best build strategies around first party data and regulations, crafting seamless customer journeys that leave a lasting impression has never been more challenging. OLLY's, Jennifer Peters and I discuss the challenges of integrating AI in regulated environments, the implications of new legislation on data privacy and leveraging omnichannel strategies effectively.

Kailey Raymond: Today I'm joined by Jennifer Peters, the director of DTC, Martech, and Digital Compliance at OLLY. Here she drives their direct to consumer of business growth and champions the fusion of technology and marketing for top-notch digital experiences. Jennifer is a passionate CPG expert with extensive experience spanning marketing, tech and business development and eCommerce. Jennifer, welcome to the show.

Jennifer Peters: Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here.

Kailey Raymond: I am really excited to talk to you today. We've had some kind of like fun conversations already and I'm excited to learn from you. But to kick it off, I wanna hear about how you got to where you are today at OLLY. Tell me about your career journey into the land of e-Comm.

Jennifer Peters: Well, it was by accident. I think most of us probably got here by accident. I probably skew a little bit older than most people that work in eCommerce as well. So definitely by accident. It didn't exist when I was in college. So I started out at Barnes & Noble actually in brick-and-mortar retail. And I was there for 13 years and kind of learned everything I know about retail, everything I know about merchandising, everything I know about management and leadership from Barnes & Noble, which is an awesome foundation to have. Made the transition over truly by accident into eCommerce when I was hired by a company in Nashville to run what they called their online bookstore. It wasn't that long ago to use that language, it was like in 2010, but...

[laughter]

Kailey Raymond: I love it.

Jennifer Peters: That's what I did. I had no idea what I was doing. It was very cool, very old company. A 200 year old company. Most of their marketing was print at the time. They had brick-and-mortar stores and so this sort of eCommerce landscape was completely new to them. Digital marketing was completely new to them. And of course this was like 14 years ago, so a lot of it was really different than it is now. But the best thing in the world was being able to not only learn that business from the ground up, but be able to kind of teach that team, grow that team, learn on the job, learn as things evolved and changed and by the time I left, we had a team of 10 people. We had a huge business and it was very, very cool. And that was in Nashville. And after that, I moved out to the Bay Area just because there's so much opportunity here and did a couple different things.

Jennifer Peters: Worked at an IoT company, was at an agency for a little while building eCommerce stores for brands. And then after that I came to OLLY. So I get to do all of the things that I love to do really in one job. I mean, it's really the perfect job for me. I love web development, I love CX, I love UX and UI. I mean I love growing a business and having a fun brand to work on and I love customers and I love being the person on the team that sort of brings that customer empathy and that customer perspective to the team.

Kailey Raymond: I love those accidental journeys where you feel like you've stumbled into something But it just kind of becomes this place where you find a lot of interest and joy and it's kind of like it was meant to be all along. It sounds like a lot of what you do touches quite a bit of the OLLY business. Tell me about your role as it relates specifically to building the customer experience journey at OLLY.

Jennifer Peters: So I own direct to consumer. So olly.com is kind of my baby. And I think anytime you're in a brand that is very, very omnichannel like OLLY is, I mean we're foundationally a brick-and-mortar brand. Probably 70% of our revenue still comes from brick-and-mortar. But what's great is that the customers that I get to interact with, the customers that I get to sell to and the customers I get to kind of guide on their journey, are the customers that love our brand the most. And I think when you get in direct to consumer there's a lot of people that dabble in and out on your brand. We are in the supplement space so I think that it's a little bit of an advantage because you don't change what supplement you take every single month. It's not like a mascara where you're like, ugh, that was okay, I'm gonna try a different one.

Jennifer Peters: I mean, you really generally will stick to a supplement long enough to see if you get a result that you're after or not. The thing that we have that's a little challenging is we are in so many channels and so what we see are kind of those dabblers in the other channels in brick-and-mortar and maybe on Amazon too, where they're just like, I don't know, I'll try it. The people that come to olly.com are people that love this brand and probably take multiple products. Our products are meant to be layered and these customers are the ones that really are in love with the brand the most and wanna be the closest to us. I mean, you can buy our sleep gummies literally anywhere, Walgreens, airport, Target, Walmart, like everywhere. So if you come all the way to olly.com to buy and and buy from our brand, that really says something kind of about who you are and what your relationship with the brand is.

Jennifer Peters: So I'm super excited to get to work with that group of customers. We've got a great subscription program, we've got a great loyalty program, we've got a great email and SMS retention program and it's really just fun to be able to bring really cool, delightful products to customers that I know are gonna love them. And that's really kind of the best part of my job is, we have a new product that comes out, we get to send out an email to everybody, we get to put up a homepage banner, we get to do digital advertising and those customers that already love our brand are gonna love this product. Like everybody's super excited anytime we release anything new. So that's really, I think probably a good overview of how I touch them, but it's also I think a good understanding of how our customers are a little bit different than the customers that shop in other channels.

Kailey Raymond: That's great. And you've mentioned a few things in there that I wanna dig into in different ways. You mentioned like messaging and SMS and in terms of a channel, you've mentioned some loyalty programs, you've also mentioned omnichannel. There's a lot that we're gonna dig into I guess is like kind of a framing to some of this conversation. I wanna learn about some of the overarching trends that you're watching that are relating to customer engagement in the DTC and eCommerce space. What are some of those things that you're watching out for right now? 

Jennifer Peters: Well, data privacy I think is huge right now and I think it's just about to get a lot more complicated. Earlier this year, several states passed consumer data protection laws around health data. Again, we sell supplements, we sell vitamins, we are here for health and wellness and I mean if we had done this interview last week, I probably would've had a different answer. But knowing where we are now and kind of knowing where we're going, I think there's a lot of fear around that health data. And that really was the motivation in these states passing some of these laws that basically say if you collect any health data from your customers, you have to treat that the same way you treat PII like personally identifiable information. You have to store it a certain secure way, you cannot share it. There are rules around what you can and cannot do with it.

Jennifer Peters: And that's new. And I think a lot of that does come from a certain amount of fear that that health data will be sold that'll be used for tracking across state lines and kind of some of these other things that are existing in the political landscape right now that are actually really scary. And I think now kind of knowing which direction we're going post-election, I think that's gonna become even bigger. And I wouldn't be surprised if I saw that legislation passing in multiple states. In the majority of states, at a certain point. Everybody wants to protect their data, everybody wants to feel safe that if you're storing something in your phone, if you're tracking your period on your phones, that that's safe and that's not gonna be shared. And it's really scary. It's a scary time right now I think for women in particular and how they navigate their healthcare and how they navigate what they do online, what they're researching even in Google, like it's a really scary time. So I think that's gonna grow. I think overall just data privacy protections in general continue to be more complex and different by state. It's a lot to track and a lot to keep track of. Hopefully at some point we will have some kind of federal guidance around data privacy that sort of...

Kailey Raymond: Why would we do that? 

Jennifer Peters: Would create, I don't know, something consistent from state to state but at the same time, I don't know where that's gonna go either. Obviously things are gonna be different in the next four years. I don't know how that is gonna impact data privacy as well. But those are, I think are the things right now that are tough. We really, really have dug into the women's sexual wellness space that is very challenging because Google doesn't like it when you say the word vagina in ads. And we've really struggled with Google, we've really struggled with Meta. We've actually even struggled with our payment processor Shopify payments on whether it was okay for us to sell a women's libido supplement or not. We did win that battle, but it was not a great battle. It did not feel good. We did not like it, but we did win. So I think there's just like old school still like discrimination around what's a bad word? And like what's a health word out in the advertising space too that's just really frustrating and you feel like, gosh, Google should be like on the cutting edge of what's good and what's bad and and at the same time they're gonna be the first ones that are like, you can't say menopause because that's a chronic health condition. And be like, no, it's really not. It's really a...

Kailey Raymond: Oh my gosh.

Jennifer Peters: Statement of life that would be like saying puberty is a chronic health condition. So there's, I think there's just so much to navigate there. I'm glad we're doing it. It is not easy, but we are so committed to it. We just launched a menopause product that is incredible, clinically tested, amazing results from people that are taking it. Our CEO is probably one of our biggest spokespeople and supporters of this product. And we are not, I mean we're a Unilever brand and that's an advantage. Like we can go places and do things and say things that if you're a small brand, like you're probably not gonna be able to do. So we can fight those fights and I hope we can fight those fights so that other brands that come after us don't have to argue with Meta whether vagina is a bad word or not or struggling with out of home when we're talking about women's health.

Kailey Raymond: Wow.

Jennifer Peters: I don't know if you've, I mean like Bobby had that like really incredible billboard in Times Square that was super controversial because it was like a woman breastfeeding a baby. We're still just kind of like how are we still here? 

Kailey Raymond: What's controversial about this? 

Jennifer Peters: How are we still having this conversation? It's so shocking but it's real and yeah, that's a tough one and we are really committed to fighting that fight for us and for women in general to have access to information and products and be able to think differently about menopause. Like menopause has been one of the most non talked about topics. I think across the board. Like one of the questions one of our people asked us was like, "When did your mother go through menopause?" And we were all like, "I don't know."

Kailey Raymond: Totally.

Jennifer Peters: And the fact that none of us knew is part of the problem. So yeah, I think we're just trying to fight these fights that we think matter, that matter to us and that matter to women and we're not gonna give up.

Kailey Raymond: Wow. There is so much there that we're talking about right now. I can see a campaign that is just all about the vagina, honestly. It's like the anti-establishment, which is insane to even say that that would be anti-establishment campaign, but the fact that we even have to be sheepish about saying that word is absolutely bonkers. And it ties back to what you were saying with privacy. And that also touches a really interesting topic, which is AI. So these data implications, especially in a regulated environment I'm sure are something that you have been thinking a lot about. And so can you just tell me a little bit about some of your thoughts around what the implications of AI in a regulated environment like the supplement space might look like? 

Jennifer Peters: Yeah, I think you can't go to any conference, you can't go to any webinar, you can't go to anything literally in the space without having to talk about AI in some way, shape or form. And I think there's a lot of brands that are probably really using it in ways that are cool and saving them a lot of time. They're using it to write like product descriptions. They're using it to make variations on images that are going into ads and making 50 versions of ads because they can just generate different versions of the copy and images with AI. So I think there's a lot of opportunity there for some brands. In the regulated space that's pretty much a no go. Like every single thing that we put out into this world is approved by a regulatory department is super clear, very focused on the claims that we know that we can make the clinical tests that we have. So for us, it's not something that we're gonna like broadly apply across our creative and across our copy and ad copy and product copy and all of this. I know of a brand that writes 100% of their product copy right now using chatGPT. They also, to be fair, they introduce 100 new SKUs every single month. So, okay, got it. Okay.

Kailey Raymond: Okay. I'm actually...

Jennifer Peters: That sounds terrible.

Kailey Raymond: Glad a human doesn't have to do all of that work. That's great.

Jennifer Peters: That's awful. Yeah, so for them it's like they're in the lingerie space too, so it's like how descriptive they have to be. I'm not sure, I feel like the pictures probably tell the story there anyway. But yeah, for us that's never gonna be on the table. What we've really focused on is using AI for decisioning and real-time analysis. And that has been such a cool journey to see how like the space is evolving, how the vendors are evolving. We have a couple, like I would say like a couple kind of like highlight programs that we've done in this past year. One, a lot of our revenue does come from subscriptions on our DTC site and there's always gonna be a faction of customers who don't wanna subscribe. Like maybe they're not ready to commit, maybe they just feel weird about it.

Jennifer Peters: Maybe sometimes they buy it at Publix and sometimes they buy it online and sometimes they buy it at Walgreens I don't know. And not all of our products are for everyday use either. Just to be clear. Like you probably shouldn't be taking a sleep supplement every single night, but a lot of people do and that's okay, but it's not meant for that. So one of the things we built with one of our partners, Black Crow AI is basically like a decisioning machine that takes the customer's behavior and past purchase behavior and the individual product. We have about 60 SKUs kind of all over the place too. Like multivitamins, gut health, kids, cognitive, like lots of different segments. And this machine in real time processes that data about the product, about the usage, about the customer's past behaviors and can tell us the exact time that we need to send a reminder to that customer that hey, it's time for you to repurchase, like it's time for you very specifically you to repurchase this product that we know you use.

Jennifer Peters: That has been super, super cool. It's like we've always been chasing that right message at the right time kind of mantra for years and years and years. And a lot of it is guessing, a lot of it is AB testing and in this case, we have a machine that can actually learn like, Hey Jennifer Peters, it's time for you to reorder Hello Happy because it's gonna take it four days to get there and we wanna make sure you don't run out. So that has been huge. Very, very cool. We also are running with a different partner on site to trigger real-time discounts for customers that based on their behaviors appear as though they are not going to convert unless they are served a discount. And I think anyone in retail and eCommerce right now feels that weight of we've got to get the customer to convert for the first time.

Jennifer Peters: Once you get them into your retention pipeline, things are a lot easier, but getting that customer for the first time is one of the hardest things. And so this has really kind of helped us over that line of like, we have to think about cost of acquisition, we have to think about it from an advertising perspective, we have to think about it from a discounting perspective and ultimately long term, what is this customer gonna be worth to us? Like what is this customer's LTV, maybe guessing what that might be for two years. And we were guessing before and now we don't have to guess. So that's great. And that's been I think really, really helpful for us to just kind of like as we are capturing like huge amounts of traffic from channels like TikTok is a great example, like traffic from TikTok there's a lot of it, but it's not always as far down in the funnel as you want it to be.

Jennifer Peters: And this tool has helped us get those customers over the line to make their first purchase. And that has been great because we're very, very strong retention brand. Once we can get them in our systems and on our journeys and in that world we're in really good shape, but it's just really hard to maximize that traffic that we're getting, that we're paying for. It's very expensive traffic just to get them to convert for the first time. And so that has really, really helped us a lot in that space. But the other thing is like just using it for dumb things. Like there's so much dumb stuff we do every day. Like if you're writing a LinkedIn recommendation for somebody, if you are trying to introduce somebody to somebody, like there's so many little things that you're just like, just use this to write it and it saves you so much time. So, those are kind of like all of those things I think that we're focused on to understand, how can we leverage this tool in a way that is aligned with our regulatory requirements and aligned with what we do with our products and yet still using it to enhance and save time and capture efficiencies and automations and make the quality of our lives better.

Kailey Raymond: Listen, I think that some of the things that you were talking about earlier, especially when you're kind of creating those audiences and really using machine learning and predictive algorithms to be able to kind of understand the desired behaviors for your audiences. A lot of that is reliant upon first party data. So it's all of this really high quality data that you are collecting that is trusted, that is compliant and that of course you're storing in compliant ways based on each state's unique legislations.

Jennifer Peters: Yes, Of course.

Kailey Raymond: One of the things that I wanted to ask you about, because I know there is kind of this rising trend and you know we've talked a little bit about kind of different channels already today in passing is first of all this kind of concept of how DTC and like the the store omnichannel, how those two things interact. And then the second is how you actually leverage some of your digital channels to actually get those interactions to happen. So you said the right message at the right time and then the next iteration of that is on the right channel. And so I'm wondering if you're also thinking about like, okay, so how are we assessing email versus SMS versus another kind of channel? So walk me through kind of that interaction of how you're thinking about leveraging some of that data to identify different channels. And then the other question is kind of around how you think about the relationship between DTC and in-store.

Jennifer Peters: Oh, that's great. That's a great question and a great conundrum for all of us in those spaces. When you think about the right message at the right time and the right channel, that's a lot, especially when you think about how many channels we are in and customers do have preferences. One of the things we've seen in probably the last two years is like almost every tool that we use and every vendor that we work with has integrated some sort of AI based tool into their tool. So like for example, we use Attentive for email and SMS and they're one of our closest partners. They're great partners and they've kind of like tested different multiple AI tools kind of off and on in the last couple years. And it's nice to be able to leverage those 'cause it's like you're leveraging it already in this like kind of enclosed world where it's optimizing around the best send time and the best send day and all the segments that you already have in there. Like understanding of somebody's a VIP in the loyalty program versus somebody this is maybe their second purchase or you're trying to drive their second purchase if somebody's a subscriber or they're not to a product. That tool for us with like that tool within a tool has been super helpful and us to be able to just like kind of squeeze every drop out of the messaging that we're doing like via CRM.

Jennifer Peters: And that's also something like we didn't have to invest in. Like they did, they built it, they added it to their tool and now it's just helping us get better results, which is great. The hard part I think there is like when you do think about all those channels, there isn't one tool that's gonna reach across all your channels. Like there's not like a master tool. You've got this maybe in roundel, you've got like this that sits in your CRM, you've got this that sits in Amazon, none of them are connected. So it's really a matter of kind of trying to bridge those gaps internally. I mean even data is very isolated. When you think about, even if you're just looking at digital channels, like if you were just looking at like a D2C and an Amazon, maybe at walmart.com and at target.com, everybody is different. Everybody stores their data a different way. Nobody shares it because there are issues with, like obviously you don't wanna share your customer's data with somebody that they haven't consented to share it with. So like everybody kind of has these silos of data, everybody has these sort of silos of AI tools and there isn't one way to really connect like the complete customer experience because the reality is customers do shop in different channels and there's times that it makes sense to buy it at the store. There's time that it makes sense to buy it online.

Jennifer Peters: There's some products that make sense to subscribe to and there's some that don't. And we don't care where the customer shops, like we would love for them to shop wherever they want to. The hard part is connecting all those dots and I mean what CPG brands are seeing, especially those who have D2C, is that it is really hard to connect those dots. Like if you go into a target store, they store your data by your phone number and they track that back to their couponing app or whatever, they don't use the same identifiers that like we use an email address to identify a customer like on D2C. So it's really a struggle. There are some tools out there I think that are really helpful to kind of like at least directionally push you a certain way. Like when we're running an ad, we offer multiple channels to choose from.

Jennifer Peters: Like we use MikMak, they're a great tool for that kind of thing of like here's the ad, you click on the ad, it's like where do you wanna go? Amazon, olly.com, target.com, walmart.com. Then the customer can choose. And then getting that data of understanding then like what the customer choice was is really the only place we can kind of squeeze that data from. And even then you're like, you have follow-up questions of like why, how, what drove that? Like that we're probably never gonna get answers to, but it's at least directionally useful to understand that like when I do a digital ad that looks like this or it's about this kind of product or it's for kids or it's for adults or whatever it is, like you can see trends that customer is like, oh well I like to buy stuff for my kids at target.com 'cause I don't know, it feels safer, I'm not sure why.

Jennifer Peters: But then you can kind of see like there are patterns there but they're really hard to put together and you have to be able to do it yourself. Like there's not a tool that can do that for you right now. I hope that'd be great if it came someday, but I think anybody in this space that is the struggle of like trying to understand like did your customer churn or are they buying it at Kroger now? Those are two different completely different stories even to tell internally when you're trying to explain your numbers and your KPIs and you're like, we don't know if this is churn. Could be, might not be. So, just at least understanding directionally maybe where somebody would go from an ad helps, but boy it is really hard to connect all those dots.

Kailey Raymond: It's so interesting. It like in some ways reminds me of this kind of conundrum that marketers also feel with like top of funnel attribution with things that are perhaps are not gated necessarily, that folks are still interacting with. And then add the complexity of you have a bunch of retailers, you have a bunch of kind of like in store that information from some sort of point of sale system may or may not be integrating back to your customer profile and that journey and that experience. You're like, am I cannibalizing my audience or am I not? That's a really, really hard question to answer. But I like that because at the end of the day I think that this is like one of the kind of my stump speech at the moment is just like, there's been this overreliance I think for a while now on this performance marketing where we wanna be able to measure every single part of the funnel and make sure that we know that this interaction plus this interaction equals this.

Kailey Raymond: And that's a really beautiful story that we can tell ourselves, but the truth lies somewhere in between that. Like we're not gonna actually know every single thing about every single customer and be able to attribute it back. And so how can we have conviction in our own thesis of how we're actually moving this customer through the journey and how can we make sure that we're still investing in those things, which are unattributable in some ways. It's a really big challenge that I think marketers face every day, but having that kind of like conviction to stand by some of those I think is one of the first places to start. We've talked about a lot of hard things already, but I wanted to see if you had any thoughts on what you think that the biggest challenge in building this journey to great customer experiences, what would some of those challenges be? What's the biggest one in your mind? 

Jennifer Peters: I mean we've kind of hit on that just like understanding where customers are and their journey and understanding what channels they're shopping in. I think that is gonna continue for anyone that's in the CPG space or this like very, very omnichannel space. Outside of that, I think just keeping up with customer trends and being able to react to them in an agile and very quick way is gonna be something that we're all gonna be focused on very much in the next few years. Especially as more brands are launching on like TikTok shops and we're kind of in that space of like virality and influencer and being able to immediately pivot and react to things is really difficult for some of these like legacy companies. Like we were a startup, we were founded in 2015, we got acquired by Unilever in 2019, which is like not a lot of time, but we are a Unilever brand. But we still kind of have like what I would say like the heart of a startup and like the scrappiness of a startup.

Jennifer Peters: But if you work at Kellogg, if you work at General Mills or something like that and you're trying to pivot really quickly to like capitalize on these trends and this virality and whatever, it's really hard and you almost have to take budget and take people and say this is protected for you. We trust you to be able to react to these things quickly. Like we're putting all of our trust in you. It doesn't have to be a decision that your whole board consents to. Like it needs to be the decision of people who can move quickly, who understand the landscape, who really understand influencer marketing, who really understand how things on TikTok can go really quickly and really fast and how to be able to kind of squeeze every bit outta that without looking like you're trying too hard or like you're just like some old brand trying to be cool. I think you have to do it in a way that feels really genuine and feels genuine to your brand too. And I think that's tough. One of my favorite examples of this, and it's from a couple years ago and it was this video, it was for Ocean Spray and they had the, I don't know if you remember this, but there was a guy who's like driving his truck.

Kailey Raymond: I know exactly. Explain what you're about to talk to about. [laughter]

Jennifer Peters: Yes. He was driving his truck, his truck breaks down, he gets on a skateboard and he is just drinking his cranberry cocktail or whatever and on a skateboard and they're playing like a Fleetwood Mac song in the background. And like, that is so cool. And man, ocean Spray who you think of like as this, I think of it as like this monstrosity of a company. They were able to squeeze every single marketing drop out of that. And that is so cool to see that happened. Like that's hard. And to be able to move fast and be like we did it. Like look what a great job we did. Like these are the results. Like that's cool. I think that's something we could all sort of aspire to.

Kailey Raymond: The pace of change right now, especially with TikTok, the trends catch on in an instant and it's really, really hard for a brand to be able to keep pace with the creator economy. So you're right. It's like how do you make sure that you can attach yourself to that in a way that to your point feels authentic. That's not an easy thing for a brand to accomplish.

Jennifer Peters: It's not. I think the other thing too is like you have to have the right people in your org to be able to do that. Like, it's not me, that's not me, that's not what I do. That's not my area of expertise, but it's gonna be really critical for organizations, especially big legacy organizations to have cool people in their decision making process. Like younger people like Gen Z employees and you have to take what they say seriously, even if you don't like it, even if you disagree with it. Like that's one of the things I feel so, so lucky at OLLY. We have so many Gen Z employees, they're brilliant, they're wonderful, they work so hard and they are really in tune with all of that stuff.

Kailey Raymond: Absolutely.

Kailey Raymond: I'm gonna pivot us back to kind of like the original statement that you kind of brought to this podcast, which was around data. You mentioned that one of the big trends that you're really looking at is kind of some of the privacy stuff that's going on, some of the laws and implications around that, especially in your regulated space. And a lot of the kind of use cases that we've been talking about today, some of how you're actually choosing what time to send emails and the audiences that you're creating and all of these things are reliant upon you having really good quality data. And so I'm wondering if you had a definition for the term good data.

Jennifer Peters: That's a real big question. I mean, when you think about, okay, so I'm not on the marketing team. Like our marketing team is a separate team and I don't know that they think about data a lot. So I think in my role, like I'm often the bridge between the data and the actions we're taking kind of like the deployments of advertising or whatever it might be. We also have an insights team that's really quite amazing. But I have seen brands where insights will often bring information to the table that people don't like and they'll dismiss it. That's bad. So I think that good data kind of goes, like to zoom out a little bit, letting people capture that data internally and then believing them when they say they see something that's really important. I think every brand kind of has their sacred cow and even though like that was a book that was written like 20 years ago about how not to do that, but we still do it.

Jennifer Peters: We've had that internally a few times where you look at Amazon reviews and you see like a comment here and a comment there and you look at reviewsontarget.com and you see this comment there and comment there. It really feels like it's anecdotal and it doesn't feel comprehensive or actionable. And one of the things we've done this year that I am super proud of and still so excited about, we use this software called Yogi and it basically scrapes all these reviews from the whole world. Like everywhere reviews are, it scrapes social, it scrapes what's coming into your like customer service desk so like Zendesk for us. And it visualizes it and it summarizes it with like the most amazing AI summaries and then all of a sudden what used to be anecdotal is now data. And that just seeing that conversion has been super exciting to me because it's like there's nothing that we've seen in there that is a surprise to any of us.

Jennifer Peters: We know these things, but suddenly when you're presenting it as data, as product data, people suddenly will take it seriously even though you've been telling them these anecdotes for like 10 years. Like that flavor is gross, nobody likes that flavor. People don't like it. And they're like, yeah, that sucks. But then when you have this like whole data set around people complaining about that flavor suddenly you have to do something about it. Like it obligates everyone to act. And that I think has been really cool because so much in marketing is telling a good story. I mean absolutely, you look at the data like you see your monthly results in your Shopify store and you're like, all right, what story am I gonna tell here? I mean we all do it, I do it, everybody does it. We pull the data that we like that supports the story that we wanna tell and everybody does it and that's okay.

Jennifer Peters: But I think with the good data is truly like, is it useful? Is it actionable? Is it accurate? Does everybody have access to it? Is it secret? Is it hidden? Because then it's really useless. And even in the CDP space, when you're capturing data and storing it in your CDP, like people are storing stuff in their CDP that they're literally never gonna use and it's just like writing a survey, like don't ask questions of customers that if you get that information, you can't do anything with it. Like that's a waste of everyone's time. [laughter] So good data is tough. I mean, I don't know if anybody truly has good data [laughter], unless they have data that supports that story that they wanna tell. We capture a lot of data that we will never use. Why? I don't know. And do brands even know all the data that they have? So for me I think good data starts with having good people capturing it, people that listen to it and almost having an inventory of what that is. Like you have to know what you have. If you've got fields that you're capturing data for that you're never gonna use, like stop capturing that data that's dumb. Like you're just wasting time and making it harder to find the things that are useful. So yeah, that's a tough question because I don't know that anybody really has mastered that.

Kailey Raymond: Full stamp of approval on that because it's changing all the time. I mean the needs of your business, they're never gonna stop changing and it takes a lot of discipline to be able to map out the use case of all of that data, especially in the context of change. And so you're 100% right with different owners of the data and the different tools where it might live and all of those changing hands over time. It's a near impossible feat to feel like you've ever achieved the status of good data. I wonder, as somebody who's really in this space, and I'm sure kind of studies some of this as well is, do you have any examples of folks that you think are doing this right, that are building really great memorable customer experiences? 

Jennifer Peters: Oh gosh, I think Chewy is probably my favorite example of that. You order from them, they're already a great brand. They ship quickly, they have lots of products like it's great, but the fact that you go in there and you set up your dog's profile, you set up your other dog's profile, whatever, if there is a scenario where your dog passes away, like they talk to you personally, they will send you flowers like the way they handle the special relationship with what they know that people have with their pets. Like they've really been able to get at that in a way that almost feels like, how did you scale that? Like how can you scale that? But yet they are. And so what I see, what I would assume and guess is what's happening is that that is part of the core to their brand is like we love animals, our customers love animals and therefore that's something that we can always connect on and we wanna do that in the most authentic way possible. And one of the worst times is when your pet passes away and to be that brand that's like, we're here for you and your pet, we're not here just for your money, really stands out in the crowd. And I mean I've heard that from a lot of people. I've had that experience myself. I love Chewy, I'm a chewy customer, but I think that they've somehow managed to scale this kind of personalization that feels almost unscalable.

Kailey Raymond: It's so interesting the number of times that Chewy comes up on the show. I'm like, all right, we got to get Chewy. We've got to get Chewy on the show because this example of their customer experience and service is like, you're right, I've experienced some of these delightful little moments too where like, oh I actually ordered the wrong dog food and they're like, it's okay, I'll just send you the right one.

Jennifer Peters: Yeah. That's awesome.

Kailey Raymond: Exactly. So totally on the same page. My last question for you Jennifer, is if you had any steps or recommendations for somebody that's looking to uplevel their customer experience journeys, what would they be? 

Jennifer Peters: First would be to map it. I would make sure that you absolutely understand what that journey looks like and all of the channels where that can happen. I mean we just talked about every omnichannel that exists. That's not as complex for every brand, but I always think that kind of solving a problem always begins with like a full inventory of what you have, like of what you are working with here and what you understand to be true and what you don't have answers to. That would be my first suggestion is like map every customer experience that you can think of that leads to a customer buying your product. That's where I would start every single time. And the other thing is you always start with the customer. You don't start with what you want to sell. I think that is the oldest trick in the book.

Jennifer Peters: It's like when you're in retail, any retail, like we really wanna push this product versus we really wanna bring the products that our customers love to their hands. It's two different philosophies of inventory management, of promotions, like it's different ways of looking at it. So understanding what motivates your customer, what we were just talking about with Chewy, like people buy from Chewy because they love their pets, that's why. So not losing sight of that ever is probably the most important thing they can do for their brand. But knowing who their customer is and then also understanding that that customer evolves over time and that you have to be okay with that. If you have this super narrow view of who your customer is, like you're leaving a lot of money on the table. If you are over-investing in Gen Z, you could be leaving a whole lot of Gen X money on the table. And that's a whole generation that has a lot of discretionary money and I mean like in the supplement space, like Gen Z isn't buying up... They're not sitting there in the morning taking 10 supplements like I am.

Jennifer Peters: They're maybe taking a cognitive here or there or like eventually they will. So it's great of course important to kind of pave that road to build that in as like a future customer, but don't overlook what is your bread and butter? Like who the people are that are actually buying and what they want and what they're motivated by. So that, I think design thinking about customers is always a solution. Like if you have a problem and you need to solve it, and I don't even care what problem it is in your business, it should always start with the customer and it should always work backwards. It should never start top down. If your supply chain team thinks your customer is Target, that is a problem, that is a cultural problem. So everyone in your business has to be on aligned on the most important thing is the end user of this product. And that can be really challenging, especially when you think about, like people in accounting, people in supply chain, people in creative, like are they all thinking that way? And how can you drive that, even if you're just influencing that and not necessarily responsible for that in your organization. Like how do you spread that way of thinking of like everything starts with the customer and then it works backwards to like how we meet them there and not the other way around.

Kailey Raymond: That makes perfect sense to me, driving that alignment, making sure that you're investing in their journeys and never forgetting who's at the center of your story.

Jennifer Peters: Absolutely.

Kailey Raymond: Beautiful. Jennifer, thanks so much for being here. This was a lot of fun.

Jennifer Peters: Yeah, thanks for having me. This was great. I love it. This is such a good way to end the week.