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Transcript
Our transcripts are generated by AI. Please excuse any typos and if you have any specific questions please email info@digitalshelfinstitute.org.
Peter Crosby (00:00):
Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age.
Lauren Livak Gilbert (00:16):
Hi everyone. Lauren Livak Gilbert here from the Digital Shelf Institute. Welcome to our first ever crossover podcast with the E-commerce braintrust. I joined hosts Jordan Ripley and Julie Spear from Acadia as we chatted with John Harding, CIO of Conair, about the latest DSI research report. We dug into how it and the rest of the business need to collaborate to see success in 2025. Enjoy.
Julie Spear (00:43):
Hello and welcome to the E-Commerce braintrust podcast. I'm Julie Spear, head of Retail Marketplace Services at Acadia. Alongside my co-host Jordan Ripley, director of retail operations, and today we are joined by a couple of great guests. We have Lauren Livak Gilbert, the executive director of the Digital Shelf Institute, and John Harding, SVP and global CIO for Conair. They'll be sharing some of the key takeaways from the report they released last month with MikMak. That's a guide to managing technology change across the business and specifically how to leverage IT teams to accomplish transformational growth. So without further ado, welcome Lauren and John, it's great to have you here.
John Harding (01:25):
Thank you, Julie. It's great to be here.
Julie Spear (01:28):
Thanks for having us. I'm so glad to be back. Nice to see you both.
John Harding (01:31):
Likewise.
Julie Spear (01:32):
Yes, it's great to have you as a return guest. Lauren and John, first time, long time listener, I'm sure first time caller, but great to have you both here. Well, we'll go ahead and just get started because there's a lot of heft to the report that you shared, and so we'll just dig right in. One of the things that this report does really well is kind of challenge the idea that it only matters when something breaks. It's more than that moment when my control, alt delete doesn't affect change. The leaders you highlight frame it as both the nervous system of a business and the real driver of growth. Do you think it has always played a role that kind of a role and we're just now recognizing it? Or has its function actually evolved as areas like sales and marketing relied more on tech?
John Harding (02:21):
I would say this has always sort of been true, or at least from the IT leadership perspective. We like to believe it was true and we've definitely over the years striven to be supportive of the commercial side of the business, particularly in consumer products company, but companies. But it is also true that I think with the advent of digital and so much technology innovation in the last 10 years, it really has become a high priority for us to focus on the commercial side of the business as well as the traditional back office functions like finance and supply chain and manufacturing.
Lauren Livak Gilbert (03:03):
I also would say that just digital commerce in general, you need technology to be able to do it successfully. Does
Julie Spear (03:10):
Not happen without it.
Lauren Livak Gilbert (03:11):
Exactly, exactly. But if you think about in-store shopping, and yes, you had a technology for planogramming and for pricing and things like that, but you probably had the same technology that everybody else used. Now if you're in digital commerce, you might have 15 different pieces of technology to enable you to just do your job well. So there's more tools, there's more things that need to be vetted. It needs to make sure all of those things integrate into the business. So there's just so much more that you need on the digital commerce side to be successful. And so that's what I've seen the connection between IT really need to strengthen, but historically you didn't have it right. So it's a big change and if you haven't built that relationship, you need to begin to do that.
Jordan Ripley (03:58):
That brings up a good point and maybe this is a question for, I mean certainly a question for John, which is it sounds like the complexity in terms of your stack has increased over time based on Lauren's point there, but presumably the technology has also gotten better, at least that would be my hope over time that its ability to integrate and interface with each other has improved. So is the C'S role in that? It is gotten more complex but also more gratifying over time as more of the business becomes technology dependent or it's just gotten more complex? Where do you see that?
John Harding (04:33):
A is definitely more gratifying because we're all in the business as IT leaders inside consumer products companies to provide great business outcomes and great return on the investment in tech drive business growth. All of that is obviously very, can be more directly attributable sometimes to commercially focused applications, whether the digital commerce or some kind of sales enablement systems. So I think it's definitely got more gratifying. I think you are right that while the technology's improved, the scope has definitely broadened that corporate IT groups now need to address inside any kind of consumer products, retail or manufacturing corporation. So for that reason, the jobs definitely got bigger. Maybe not exactly scaled in terms of difficulty, but it's definitely more difficult than it was just because of the greatest scale. And yes, technologies do integrate, but again, there's a lot of best of breed solutions out there, which for very valid reasons one could buy into at different times. And then you always have the integration challenge that never goes away in my experience.
Jordan Ripley (05:49):
And that brings up another point, which is the nervous system component of information technology that Julie brought up previously. It seems like the CIO role is always going to be a highly cross-functional one where you're having to understand a lot of different elements of the business. And one of the quotes that I really liked from this report was when the CIO sells an idea, that's an uphill climb, but when you can bring in other leaders to really empower that conversation and lead that, that's where change often happens and you get through things a lot faster. So this is the desire of it. I think a lot of the functional business leaders would also want it to work this way. So I love your perspective of for those people that sit in a CMO position or a VP of E-comm or something like that and they know they want to bring this project to fruition with the help of IT leadership, how do they best involve you in that planning process? What does that look like? In an ideal world?
John Harding (06:50):
Think in an ideal world, it's very, very much a collaborative partnership. In some cases, I like to think of it as a catalyst where I've been to marketing peers and said, Hey, here's an idea how they picked up at something. Maybe it was the Digital shelf Institute, whatever. I picked up some idea here and perhaps it's relevant to us. But rather than come and say, Hey, here's a project, you better assign people to it. It's much more important to just suggest it and say, look, we can provide from the IT side some level of corporate funding for this. We can also provide technology vendor management, but we're not going to dictate what the solution is. We want to collaborate and figure out what's the right solution that fits our particular needs, especially that our particular marketing team's needs. Have had long ago battles about with marketing teams about is this the right technology or not? And in my experience, letting them pick the solution is usually 60% of the time makes it a much quicker win than coming and saying, Hey, we're going to do this. Here's a solution.
Lauren Livak Gilbert (08:07):
I remember in some of the interviews we were doing for the report, a lot of the people we interviewed from IT were saying they don't want to say no. They're not trying to say no, but they have a more informed understanding of the technology, of the integrations, of even technology that already exists. Maybe we can do this with something that's already happening. So I think both sides need to come in with the best intentions. Like marketing comes in and understands it, doesn't want to say no, it comes in and understands marketing has this need and I need to fix it. I think that's the best way of coming into this conversation where previously I think everybody kind of had their guard up a little bit. We
John Harding (08:49):
Definitely had the guard up. I agree. 20 years ago, mom would go to meetings and there would be a lot of standoff around things or marketing would've spent money and bought something and then they were stuck reluctantly called us in or equally well we came with something pushed it and it never got traction. So the key to avoiding that is getting involved together as early as possible and not talk about technology solutions, talk about what is the business need and the expected outcome
Julie Spear (09:21):
And to operate from that place of, we always call it here at Acadia MRI, the most reasonable interpretation come from a place that both sides are operating from a place of reason and from a place of collaboration instead of confrontation or obstruction or what other negative connotation. It's not that it's knowledge gaps on both sides that need to be closed.
Jordan Ripley (09:46):
Once you get that initial collaboration that hopefully takes place at the start of the process, there's also that need to actually go through the planning and implementation process where I feel like a lot of these can, everyone's excited at the start and then when the rubber hits the road, then all of a sudden these obstacles come up that you didn't foresee or there's politics come into play. All those things that can sort of derail a project that has the best intentions from the start. One of the recommendations in this report is moving from a situation where we do all of our planning for technology in one big annual planning session and we march against that for the entire year. And then we come back at a year and we say, well, did we do any of this and it wasn't successful? And instead recommends a more nimble cadence where you're doing this perhaps quarterly. And so I'm just wondering, is this sort of taking the sort of lean methodology and applying that into this application where I know I need to find things that I can prototype early and bring that to it or how do you actually see this happen in practice where I can do that sort of nimble planning? Yeah, what does that look like?
Lauren Livak Gilbert (10:53):
The real focus on planning, and this is not just tech planning, think retail media planning, think content planning, new product launches, everything changes so quickly you cannot plan for a year. So you just need to be more nimble and you need to have more ability to flex. And I think that challenges the infrastructure of businesses that exist today, especially large CPG who have done the same thing the same way for hundreds of years. So I think about this as a fundamental shift for organizations to say, we know what we know now and we know that's going to change. So how can we build processes cross-functionally, including IT commercial finance so they're included in the conversation and revisit it, whether that's quarterly, whether that's bi-annually, I know some people that were a part of this research actually did it on a monthly basis to really check like, Hey, are we prioritizing things appropriately? Does it have a very clear business value and is this where we should be spending our time? So it does take on the agile mindset a bit, but it's more to say this is the industry we're in, this is how it works, this is how we function, so we need to change our processes to be able to match that.
John Harding (12:12):
Yeah, I would very much agree with that. In fact, last year we got into a cadence of meeting biweekly around our direct to consumer websites because there was so much changing business wise, promotions wise and so on, that marketing that we needed to respond to from a web development perspective. So yeah, I definitely, I also think that to the point made earlier that it's very important to have quick wins. You can't do your classic waterfall project where you spend six months planning and nobody marketing sees anything because everybody's fault mindset is moved on by the time you come back and say, right here's the plan. So I think quick wins the advent of software as a service. What 10 years ago has made this so much easier where if you can find something that's even a 75% fit to what you expect, it's worth trying it particularly in some kind of free of charge, proof of concept facilitated by a vendor. That way you can actually be seen to produce something even if it's a throw away prototype. So I very much support this being a much more agile and iterative process
Lauren Livak Gilbert (13:26):
And I think John really pinpoints on something that's super important and it's the fact that it doesn't naturally market themselves and their quick wins, but marketing does because that is their, that's all they do. They're literally their job, right? They're marketers. So they market themselves internally and they talk about all the things that they've done, but this is a muscle that it really needs to lean into as well because unfortunately, like we said in the beginning, they sometimes only get called if something goes wrong, but they do a lot of amazing things that enable the business today. So one best practice from the report that I really loved is there was a monthly newsletter that went out from the IT team to say, Hey, this is a new technology we implemented. Here's the time that we saved. Here's the collaboration we did with the commercial side of the business. So it's not that it isn't making an impact, it's just that they are not naturally marketers and so that muscle can help them evolve inside the organization and break down that stereotype that really enables and showcases all the value that they're driving and can make that friction a little bit less.
Julie Spear (14:33):
That's such a great call out for something that is so often so behind the scenes and working quietly away, you got to merchandise yourself, merchandise your wins along the way. It's a great call out. One of the lines that stood out to me in the report, which seemed might test that MRI assertion is that it often deprioritizes commerce or marketing needs. I'm curious why you think that is. It could tie back to the concept of it's not broken, don't fix it. Where something like if you have an order management issue, there's a clear need and there's clear return, clear ROI. But when you think about projects like improving A CRM or lifecycle marketing, you can't really quantify that upfront. You have to implement and maybe see the value after a period of testing. Is that kind of a fair take on why these initiatives could get pushed down the list?
John Harding (15:28):
Obviously I don't necessarily recognize that. No, I'm kidding. So yes, so obviously we strive very hard not to deprioritize the, because there's often a direct correlation to great business outcomes. The challenge frequently is resource bottlenecks. There's only so much that can be done. And I think sometimes the back office projects, whether it's finance changes especially or supply chain changes or manufacturing sort of have to be done for external compliance reasons. Somebody surfaces, heaven forbid, with some kind of audit report highlighting some kind of gap, then it's very hard to say, Hey, we'll get to that in nine months time when we finish this great CRM that we're working on with marketing. It's very difficult, particularly in any corporation to say, well, there's an issue, a compliance issue of any sort that we aren't addressing. So I think that often marketing issues unfortunately lack those kind of teeth. But I do think that this situation has improved as the technology has got better, as Jordan alluded to earlier, and there's more availability of solutions, not plug and play I hasten to add, but easier to implement. Initiatives are no longer as long as they were for the multi-year CRM projects, one hopes a finger the pass. Now
Lauren Livak Gilbert (16:59):
I also think, to my point earlier, you might need 15 different bases of technology to be able to do digital commerce correctly. And that can be challenging. And if it's not clear in the planning process or the expectation is not set that you need those things, that can be really hard to fit in on the fly. But what I think can really help from the commerce team's perspective when working with IT and with finance is really looking at your entire portfolio and prioritizing where you're spending your time and where the bang for your buck from a SKU perspective makes sense. So 20% of the SKUs drive 80% of the profit, right? So how are you focusing on that driving a clear business value with the technology that you're asking the IT team to support and to implement and are those things matched And then building out a crawl, walk, run type of framework for your technology to say like, Hey, if we do this, we are meeting the top skews that we have. If we do this, it's kind of the second tier. If we do this, it's the third tier. So I also think there needs to be a communication from the commerce team side to be super clear about why they need this and what it's going to drive with business value, but also with just clarity on how it affects the overall portfolio, knowing that they're going to continue to ask for more tech needs because of the changing in the industry.
Jordan Ripley (18:23):
It brings up a good point, which is in traditional software development companies, you would have somebody that sits in sort of a product manager, a product owner role that helps rationalize the needs of the business with the actual development priorities. But your point there, Lord, about I as the business owner have to understand what is the 80 20 that's achievable from the IT department that could then meet me halfway and start to show those early wins. And you outline a few different instances of the way that those two organizations can come together, both IT and the functional area of the business, whether that's marketing or what have you. There was shared service direct IT business partners, the IT business is partners embedded in the business or the sort of project management office. We don't have time to get into each of those in great detail, but I do want to understand, granted, no, I think single solution fits all use cases, but if you were to build this from scratch, do you find that one of these ways of working generally is most effective for say a commerce organization and an IT organization to collaborate ongoing?
Lauren Livak Gilbert (19:31):
I think it's more of what are the common threads that make sense? Because every organization is so different. And I think one of my favorite quotes from the report that I think is the overarching common thread, it's not IT versus the business,
(19:46):
It's IT and the rest of the business because it is the business. So whatever structure you have, you can't pit it as this separate entity. They are a part of the broader business. So I think when you're looking at all of these different structures, one of the common themes is that you have someone in the rest of the business owning it, who's collaborating with someone in it, and they're in lockstep and they are communicating throughout the process. So regardless of if you have shared services or you have a project management office, there has to be that clear ownership from both of the functions and they need to be in constant communication in order for any of this to be successful. So that's what I would say no matter what your organizational structure looks like, you have to have that and then you have to have processes built out. There has to be a planning process, it has to be standard, there has to be a way of communicating needs, whether that's a system, whether that's a standup, every, you just have to put more processes in place so it's clear who owns what and who's communicating what at what point in the overarching kind of planning
John Harding (20:58):
Process. Absolutely. And it resonates with me about it and the rest of the business, finance don't talk about finance and the business, HR don't talk about, I think it, we've done ourselves over the years disservice constantly trying to saying these things and hence appearing some different tribe. And I think to that point about the two people aligned, I increasingly like the product management model, particularly around commerce especially. So especially when it's website development, I think a product management model involving folks from the different disciplines including it and a product management structure is very powerful there. And you also do need the PMO, the program management office as well to try and balance those shared resources. Even if you've got product management on the website, if you need a change in the back office or the management system, if it's, let's say it's SAP, you need somebody involved from the SAP team and they inevitably are pulled various ways, which is where the PMO can help. I think there's a lot of different models one can use within the same organization depending on exactly what it is that you're trying to achieve.
Lauren Livak Gilbert (22:13):
And I also think another thing to add to what John just said is you also have to be metrics against the same thing, right? If the IT team is measured against, I don't know, the efficiency of something and then marketing is measured on sales, obviously they're going to be worried about different things. And that goes for it, that goes for finance, that goes for legal sales, marketing. Everybody needs to be on the same playing field, so you're not working in silos against each other. And I think specifically with it, I haven't really seen that come together quite yet, but if it is not successful, the rest, excuse me, of the business is not successful, marketing is not successful. If marketing is not successful, then it didn't do their job. So they are interconnected. So how can you find real accountability in that,
John Harding (23:03):
Right? Absolutely. And I think that's where the more collaboration there is, the more chance that you actually get to that where there's a clear understanding of both of everybody's goals and a shared agreement to pursue those goals together. That's sort of the nirvana that we strive to get to.
Julie Spear (23:21):
It's the constant quest. We say it in different conversations, silos equal sadness in any form, Scott shout outs reference Scott Ashman. But it's the constant quest across business functions is ways to come together and effectively collaborate in order to move things forward. So I don't think we could have any conversation about in any form in today's day and age without talking about ai. I just feel like it would be completely remiss. Where do you see the next wave of AI adoption coming from? It's it going to be a top down with enterprise platforms baking in more AI features or bottoms up with teams using tools like chat GPT to boost productivity or is it choose a separate adventure something else entirely? What do you guys think about this?
John Harding (24:17):
For me, it's all of the above. I think there has to be a focus among certain knowledge workers to improve their ways of working using tools like using the various copilots, which are essentially embedded in their tool set. There's also an opportunity to use the enterprise business applications embedded ai, whether it's Salesforce Einstein to improve recommendations on the websites, whether it's SAP, Juul to hopefully improve aspects of the back office processes. That's all coming and I think that's all good and it's all internally efficiency focused. I think at the same time though, there is still room for the sort of more best of breed answers where you could bring in a gen AI enabled chat bot did that last year to improve consumer experience where people don't have to wait for a call center agent. If they're query sufficiently, they can try with the chat bot or the chat or more to the point.
(25:19):
They always know it's the chat bot. The chat bot can start and refer them to an agent if it got stuck. So I think that's inevitably a best of breed solution at this point in time because externally facing and you have to make sure it's robust. I think the other area where there's a lot of AI opportunity of course is in creation of digital content with this insatiable need for fresh content to drive digital commerce, whether it's on your own sites or retailer. I think there's a lot of great products out there that can speed up that process. So to me, there's not one size fits all. However, they do all have to fit inside some kind of overall corporate guideline involving legal as to what can and can't be done from a risk perspective for the corporation. And that obviously varies depending on the kind of organization.
Lauren Livak Gilbert (26:14):
What I see is it's a big unlock of time for people who are working in, let's take commerce for example, like all those remedial tasks that you would love for someone to take off your plate so you can be more strategic or so that you can create a content strategy and not have to build everything or look at every single SKU on Amazon and type that there's no batteries in your shampoo. I did do that once when I was a brand. So it's just unlocking those moments and then being to do other things that are going to drive the business. And I really look at it, especially from the in-store side for people who are focused on in-store in an organization, what can AI take away so that they can bring e-commerce more into their umbrella and they're more omni-channel focused. That's where I see the future of organizations moving.
(27:05):
You're not siloed within, I work on in-store sales or I work on online sales. Like you are an omnichannel leader that looks across the business. And to me, AI is that unlock that will finally enable us to do that because you can't just add more humans. You just can't duplicate your in-store team to mimic on the online side. That's just not feasible. So AI will enable you to do that and to infuse more of those elements throughout the business so you're more holistically focused on the customer or the consumer journey, excuse me, and not just on the channel.
Julie Spear (27:43):
I like the take that you both offered there and I don't know if that's the next report for Digital Shelf Institute. I feel like it should be now. I don't know. I won't push an agenda here of my own, whatever it is, whatever the topic is. We'll, of course have you back, Lauren. John, it was great having you on to dig into this with us today. And thank you both for taking the time to do the research and framing this report and then to come and talk with me and Jordan today about it. So it was lovely having you both here. Thank you. Thank you.
Lauren Livak Gilbert (28:17):
Thanks for having us. And a quick plug, if you go to digital shelf institute.org and you click on resources, you'll be able to download the full report and hopefully it will be helpful in your organization
Julie Spear (28:27):
And we will make sure to include it in our show notes as well and when we share this episode out. So all sorts of ways to access it.
Lauren Livak Gilbert (28:35):
Thank
Julie Spear (28:35):
You.
Lauren Livak Gilbert (28:37):
Thank you for listening and as always, thank you for being a member of our community.
