Coffee & Commerce with Cascone: Personal Commerce with Sherene Hilal
At the onset of COVID-19, one thing became clear: Retailers needed guidance. In an effort to help brands operate effectively and efficiently in this digital world, we launched Coffee & Commerce with Cascone: A biweekly series with bite-sized episodes tackling the latest in retail, featuring established marketers from today’s biggest brands.
On today’s episode, Sherene Hilal, Bluecore’s SVP of Marketing and Business Operations, joins Sarah to discuss how personalization and the concept of personal commerce are reshaping the retail landscape. Hear Sherene talk cross-channel marketing, digital native brands, consolidated customer data and more.
CASCONE: Hi everyone. Welcome to Coffee & Commerce with Cascone. Today I have back with me Sherene Hilal, our SVP of Marketing and Business Operations at Bluecore, where she spends the majority of her time working with retailers on use case development to compete in a digital first world. Sherene, thanks for returning.
SHERENE: Hey everyone. It’s good to be back.
CASCONE: So for today, Bluecore has been talking a lot about this concept called personal commerce. And I want to understand from you what exactly is personal commerce, because it sounds a lot like personalization. So are we just introducing another buzzword into the market? Talk to me about it.
SHERENE: Part of it is that personalization has a lot of definition around it and a lot of baggage. I hear personalization being described as everything from using a shopper’s first name in an email to this really robust, dynamic set of offers and content and product recommendations that are catered to where they are in the shopping journey. The reason we thought it was important to get out of the tactic of personalization and instead describe the shopper experience, which is personal commerce, is that it’s really about connecting to the shopper wherever they are with products that they’ll love.
And for a lot of brands today, they hyper-focus on the tactic and the channel versus the shopper. So we wanted a concept that really put the shopper even ahead of the brand when they were thinking about how to construct digital programs and commerce programs for their customers.
CASCONE: This is very common for what I’m hearing too from brands around how they become more customer centric. So this sounds right in line with that and puts the shopper in the driver’s seat. So how does this approach differ for a pure play, digital- first DTC brand versus a traditionally store-first brand who has an eCommerce presence?
SHERENE: A lot of digital native brands have been able to benefit from an understanding of how shoppers not just purchase online, but also discover and evaluate. And that whole online journey that takes them to that end state of buying on the eCommerce site for pure play and traditional retailers that are really focused on driving shoppers to store. There’s a whole world that surrounds the shopper that is not necessarily well understood because there’s a disconnect between the online activities that are surrounding the browsing and the discovery processes versus the in-store evaluation and purchase. So I think traditional retailers have a heavier lift because they have their data in more places, they have more channels, their shoppers can buy in more areas. But at the same time, they actually have the ability to really connect different channels to different shopper expectations in a way that digital natives will struggle with. So I think there’s benefits to each business model and a lot of the store-first retailers are now starting to adopt some of the best practices of digitally native brands and finding that they’re creating cross-channel shoppers that really start to enrich the experience in an online environment versus in a store environment.
CASCONE: What you’re getting at is all brands are trying to go direct to consumer right now. It’s really just each one is coming at it from a different angle, depending on where they’re starting from. I’m curious what are some of the biggest hurdles you’re hearing as brands try to move to a personal commerce approach to support this digital first world and really compete and get those shoppers to come back to buy again and again?
SHERENE: There are a couple, so I’ll name the top two. One is around the technology, the other is around the organization. So on the technology side, I would say for brands that are defining the end goal as digital transformation, they are missing the big picture of the transformation as a means to a superior customer experience. I see a lot of RFPs come out that are pages and pages and pages of features and checklists and capabilities that feel transformative to the brand because they’re things that they’ve never done before, but it’s still unclear if all of those check boxes are going to actually drive a better connected and superior shopper experience where people feel like there is a single way for them to buy that meets their preferences and their needs wherever they are. I think that’s a struggle for a lot of organizations. There’s a lot of different teams that own the channel and the data and the merchandising and the creative. And so getting everyone in a room to talk about the shopper versus the process, is a big hurdle and gets to that second thing, which is the organization. Most organizations are built around a channel versus shopper and product. And the thing about that is it starts to silo the insights about the shopper based on where they are engaging versus the holistic journey, and things like journey orchestration have been hot topics for a very, very long time.
CASCONE: And I know you have a lot of these conversations with different retail executives. What do you recommend for them as they try to overcome these hurdles?
SHERENE: Some of it is things I recommend to not do versus things that I recommend to do. First and foremost is stepping away from what seemed like an obvious or logical conclusion. So an example is “I need all my customer data in one place.” That tends to be the first stop that every brand or retailer makes when they feel like they need more control over their channels. And while that’s not untrue, as having customer data in a single place can make it easier to act on that information, there’s also a lot of lower hanging, faster benefits to acting on shopper data within the channels brands are already operating in. That ideal state of everything in one place, in a single consolidated tool and workflow is a great aspiration and something that brands can work towards, but even within existing channels there are more attainable wins. That might be starting with things like selecting partners that can manage real-time data or selecting partners that can access your product catalog so that you’re not manually coding in recommendations and dynamic content and experiences to make it more unique to that individual shopper. Those are things that feel less transformative but are actually what will drive real performance and time saving for teams that are trying to now experiment and figure out what’s best for their brand.
CASCONE: And we’re seeing this across the retailers we work with, who are taking this approach to heart and really thriving in this environment. So Sherene thank you so much for joining us today. This was fun. I’ll have to have you back for a third time. Thanks everyone. And thank you everyone for joining Coffee & Commerce.
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