Decoding Consumer Behaviors: Insights On How to Better Reach Your Consumer, with Jeriad Zoghby, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Interpublic Group (IPG)

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. Hey everyone. Peter Crosby here from The Digital Shelf Institute, consumer shopping behaviors are ever changing and they are rewriting the rules. Brands who understand their consumer preferences and desires, what channels they prefer and how they want to receive their products will be a step ahead. This is an audio rebroadcast of a webinar focused on just that, led by Lauren Leivak Gilbert with guest expert Jeriad Zoghby, chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Interpublic Group or IPG.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (00:45):

Hello everyone and welcome to today's Digital Shelf Institute webinar with IPG. We are so excited about this topic. I've been waiting to talk to Jeriad about this, the why behind the buy. We all know that the secret to selling better products is understanding who we're selling to. So Jeriad is going to go through some really interesting and insightful consumer behavior information that hopefully can help you adapt some additional strategies when selling your products, whichever category you are selling it. So for those of you who do not know me, my name is Lauren Le Gilbert. I lead the Digital Shelf Institute. If you are a DSI member, thank you for being a member. If you are not, I encourage you to become a member so that you can see all of the great content that we collaborate with industry thought leaders like Jeriad on. So thank you for joining everyone. I am going to pass it off to Jeriad to introduce himself and to kick us off for the day.

Jeriad Zoghby (01:40):

Yeah, thank you Lauren. I really appreciate getting to do this. I've known Lauren and the DSI for a long time. Great organization. I worked for Interpublic Group, IPG. Many of you may not know them. You may know some of our agencies, MRM, Esso, commerce, Axiom, rafter one, a bunch of great companies that do commerce stuff, chase design. But I just wanted to want to say thank you. Very excited to share this. We've got research that we did for 13 countries. We're only going to look at the US today. Multiple categories and the topics we're going to cover. Lemme see if I can. There we go. Topics we're going to cover today, buying and shopping. Those are very different things as we all know and we all experience. Buying is something you expect to be easy and simple. And as we all know, frictionless shopping is different though, right?

(02:30):

Often we want shopping to be fun and engaging, but definitely want it to be where we make good confident decisions experiences. We're going to look at that, which is probably my favorite topic. And then we're going to profile millennials, which is an interesting segment. You're going to see why in just a bit, but this was data we did on consumer commerce, so I hope you enjoy this. Let's go ahead and go to the next one. Here we go. So the first one we're going to start with is this idea that buying should be basically simple as possible. We call it a transparent sticky layer to our lives. And we're going to start first with these two data points. My favorite one is buyin. There's lots of data on subscriptions. Many of you know what your subscription rates are, but I don't think there's enough research and focus on buyin, and it's one of the stickiest things that we have.

(03:20):

It is effectively a soft commitment on a subscription. We all use it. It's extremely convenient, whether it's because you don't want to remember the type of light bulbs you bought or the type of toothpaste your family prefers or even what you ordered last time from a restaurant. It becomes really important to be able to use that feature and the number has gone up a lot. So I have been studying, some of you know me, I've been studying this data since 2019. I think it was the first study or 20 18, 20 19. So a little bit before covid. We actually were running studies during me personally with a bunch of the friends that I've known in the industry for a long time. And then now that things have stabilized again, and we've seen this buy again, feature jump from about, I think it was in the low thirties when we first started tracking it.

(04:04):

Now it's up to 65%. And this is across all different categories, so it's not expecting that people use it for everything, but really powerful feature for convenience is what it's, and the same thing for subscriptions. And if we combine those two together, we get about 71% of people saying they're using one or other or both, which means that there's a lot of overlap, right? So 65% of people are using buy again, it doesn't go up a whole lot. So the people who use vigon and subscriptions are very common group there using this stuff for convenience. And again, it's a wonderful way to make things easy. But Lauren asked me also to break this out by category so that we could see what it looked like by category. So here I've got the groups depending on where you're, which group you're in. And I'm going to go a little bit into grocery because that number looks really high and it actually is high, but it's broken out into three groups and we often look at it grocery being the top one here, not surprising pet food and supplies being not too far behind because they're always very high on subscriptions, beauty and cosmetics, medicine and pharma also being high.

(05:10):

One thing on grocery is we looked at three different types of grocery buying and we actually looked at 'em separately, household goods, personal care and food and beverage. And the truth is, and I'm just looking at my notes, household was actually 50% just by itself of using buy again or subscriptions. And again, that gets back to you get a lot of options as a consumer sometimes, and you want to make sure you're getting the same stuff you got. Last time personal care was 48% and food and beverage was 45. So each one of the individual grocery things were significantly higher than all the other areas. So groceries that a space that we definitely see buy again, a subscription's happening.

(05:52):

This is the other data point, and this is one I only started looking at recently last few years, and it came from the fact of personal experience. So besides buyin features that we all use or subscriptions we set up, we wanted to know when you're walking through your house, when you're waiting in line for something and when you're sitting in your car waiting for a kid to come out of school, often we realize we need something and what are we doing? Are we putting on a list? Are we adding it to a digital list? Do you put it in a basket right away or do you buy it right away? And those last two, and again, this number has jumped up by about 20 percentage points. I honestly think it's even higher in real life. I think it's hard for people to remember how often they do this, but we are seeing this happening quite substantially.

(06:36):

So if someone's walking into their home, they realize they need more light bulbs, they need paper towels, and they're acting on it right away. And when you combine that with the buy-in feature of saying, cool, I just walked to the house, I realized I need light bulbs or I need certain food product or whatever it may be, or personal care product. If I am immediately going and putting in the basket or buying it through a buyin feature, it's effectively creating a bit of an intimacy gap for us because I'm not looking even at the product page, much less walking through a store for that. And so we have to keep this in mind that this is what's happening because when I am using these features combined, I'm also doing some form of fulfillment where it's either being shipped to me, it's being delivered to my house or I'm picking it up curbside or picking up in the store.

(07:27):

And what that's doing is we're losing some of our brand intimacy with our physical store traffic. So I'm not walking down the aisle, I'm not seeing competitor products, I'm not seeing display ads, I'm not seeing promotions. And so what's effectively happening is my relationship as a brand to consumers. It's not that it's going away, it's not that people don't shop physically, it's just some of those trips are diminishing as they use these options. And in the process you do create a bit of a risk that you need to make up for when we talk about brand intimacy. So this is the second data point that we wanted to highlight. And this gets back to this idea that commerce is transparent. So if we look at one more on this, oops, sorry, is the fulfillment side. So again, I'm using buy again, I'm doing at the moment, I have a need.

(08:19):

And then often yes, shipped to home. I mean just about everyone in the US uses shipped to home for one thing or another, but curbside and local delivery have continued to come up. I think they're more at a closer to a stable rate, but we're seeing it's more than half we're going to see when we get to the segments that can be kind of unique. And this is creating this transparent nature of commerce. It's not that commerce isn't occurring. It used to be that I would drive to the store, I would walk down the aisle, I'd try to remember the preferences that I have. My family has what I bought last time. I would go through the POS transaction. I would drive home if I'm using something like I might be doing a single click and it's handling all of that behind the scenes. Someone's still walking down the aisle doing pick pack, someone's still transacting for it, someone's still bringing to my home, I just don't see it.

(09:08):

So this gets to this concept of an intimacy gap, but there's two dimensions to this that I think are really important takeaways. The first is, and I know we all know this, but this is one of the most powerful lifetime value. Loyalty plays a risk if I'm able to just click on a button and rebuy the stuff that I've bought from you in the past as a brand, you're locked in. And I had a recent conversation with, it was actually in the C-suite where they kind of realized there was a big risk because of a skew changeover that they may have lost a lot of their buy-in customers. And so I would say on the first side is you want to protect that lifetime value as much as possible. And then on the flip side, if you're not the one in the basket and you're trying to win share, and we've lost some of this intimacy gap where they're not walking down the aisle and you can as much as they were for display ads and sampling and promotions, you need to be very data driven to be able to act on when there's an out of stock because that may be your one chance to steal the buy again shopper.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (10:09):

And Jeriad, I know we were having a conversation about this previously. I think it also goes back to the importance of building your brand, having the right content. So if they have the opportunity to engage with your brand and you weren't in the buy again or in the subscribe, they get the information they need, they understand if it's the right product for you and they can immediately make that action. So it kind of closes the loop to say having the right content, having the right imagery, building that brand story is all connected to this being successful.

Jeriad Zoghby (10:38):

Absolutely everything from your content to your, and in fact, that's a great point too. I was going to come to, it's a great point about having all this connected and especially the quality and the speed of content. We're going to come back to the quality of content later. But you're right, the speed of content to act in real time because often you're trying to conquest and now we're realizing how much more, it's not just that it's a thing you can do, it's becoming super important because it's sometimes your only way to win share now. And we've relied very heavily on other methods that are going to diminish over time as people use these features. I combine these together again just so that we can see the clarity on it. So what's interesting is this one goes up to 70%, so there's less overlap here than as we saw with ganus subscriptions, which implies there are people who lean very heavily towards having stuff brought to their home versus people who are very much like things like curbside.

(11:30):

So it's not that there's not people who use both. In fact the majority do use both who do use one or the other. It's just there are people who lean and you see this, it's not uncommon depending on the age demographic or the family demographic. Small children in the household, especially newborns, sometimes one thing is so much more convenient than the other that that's what they're using. Now if we look at it by category, again, you see the grocery being high, it's worth noting that if we broke out grocery, a household is 52% higher than everything else. Personal care was 48 and food and beverage was 53, so it was actually the highest in this case. And all three of 'em are higher. And that's not too surprising. I think people gotten used to it. Plus it's the frequency grocery, unlike some of these other ones is so much more common. The frequency and the regularity of the trips enables them to take advantage of this more frequently. It becomes much more of a pattern, but you still see high adoption rates across just everybody using these things because of the convenience of it.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (12:32):

And Jeriad, since you've been doing this since 2019, and we know that Covid was a huge driver in curbside and click and collect and local delivery, have you seen these numbers drop rise even out after the peak with covid?

Jeriad Zoghby (12:48):

Such a great question. So when I was watching this pre covid, this really didn't exist. I'm just being brutally honest. There was often a joke about even just the concept of digital commerce was very foreign to a lot of the brands, even if they were doing it going, I don't sell frozen pizza through Amazon, so why do I care? And not only did we, the two things that happened during covid, and we did see this, there was a major jump and then there's been just slow increases over time. So it's not that it's flatlined or gone down, it's just the speed of which the growth has just kind of slowed down a little bit. Everybody who's gotten comfortable got there. It was two things. One was the, we call it equity building. So you kind of got over the hump to do curbside meant you had to store your credit card, you had to learn how to use that system, you had to get the familiarity with it, and Covid forced everyone to earn that kind of equity build in.

(13:38):

So you're looking to go, I still prefer shopping the store, great, but if I need to do curbside, it's all set up for me. So it's not like this major hurdle. And we got past that. And then the other thing was people started to learn to find the balance with this stuff. They started going, okay, I fall into my routines now that things are back to normal and I use curbside for one thing and I use physical store shopping for another. And so we start to see that. And there are people and I talk to 'em all the time and we're going to see as we talk about these numbers, how much they go up. It kind of depends on where you are in your stage of life of how important these conveniences are for you. And that's why we save that demographic for last because the numbers definitely go up for certain groups. So there was a great question though. We are starting to see this stabilize, but I think it's more stabilizing for the older generation and the younger generation is continuing to adopt features.

(14:34):

And then the last thing on this is the risk. And we're going to do this on each of these topics, we're going to talk about what is the risk of basically shopping abandonment. And so you see these two here, 40% of people who have said, if I've clicked on an ad and there's too many steps, or I found something in social media and there's too many steps to buy, I've just given up. And that's a sign that that's common. And then the same thing if the checkout process is difficult or the inability to reorder, same thing. And I personally am notorious for the reorder stuff. If I go to a site and I'm having trouble reordering what I've ordered before, it's basically like a start over anyway. And when it comes to this is shameful, but I have two teenagers and if I have to ask them what they want on their pizza and go through the process of rebuilding it instead of just reordering it, I'm not doing it.

(15:20):

I'm going somewhere else. So there's two things I wanted to highlight here. So the first one is this golden rule, and this is so important and I know we all get frustrated sometimes with philosophical stuff, but if you're not checking your prioritization of the things you're putting into your Amazon pages, your direct consumer products, everything you do with your ad placement to buying, never make it hard for someone to give you their money. If that is not guiding your prioritization, you're probably making some bad decisions. And you would be, as consumers, we all know this occurs, one of the ones that drives me nuts is the autofill. I mean if you're not putting autofill on those pages and you're forcing me to take the time, we all enjoy that convenience. We expect it to be frictionless. You don't take care of that, that's a risk.

(16:08):

But the other one gets back to Lauren, what you were saying, which is we've got to break down the walls within our organizations across commerce, content and supply chain. Because if we cannot not only make this seamless and obviously advertising too, we not only make this seamless, but that we can't act quick enough to go and say, oh, I need to protect those. Buy again customers. If I lose them, that's a risk to me. And simultaneously, if I want to chase and conquest someone else, I can't afford to put myself out of stock. We all know these things occur. I know everyone knows the importance of this, but if we're not connecting the systems, we're not operating systematically, this is going to be a bigger risk for us in the future.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (16:51):

And Jeriad, I know this webinar is timely because we're still in the midst of prime day and I love that you mentioned media because I was digging in the depths of Amazon today and I clicked on a retail media ad that had a beautiful photo of a food product on a cutting board and I click into the PDP and it had two images of the product. It didn't have a description and there was no enhanced content. So I bring that up because I think it's so relevant if you are not engaging with your retail media teams, that is a huge miss. They had a beautiful ad, I clicked on it. I did not want to buy that product because I didn't know the ingredients and there was no compelling reason why I should pick it versus the other products in the search.

Jeriad Zoghby (17:37):

I'm going to come back to this in a bit. I am going to share a personal story on this, but it is so relevant that often the brand experience is focused in environments that are outside of commerce and somehow commerce is just, and this is why we want to talk about commerce is not a transactional channel. It's so much more than that, but I could not agree with Lauren more on that. Alright, so I'm going to go to the next topic. This is shopping. This is a little bit of how do you help them navigate the chaos. I honestly think this is the biggest weakness in the industry just putting us out there. And I think it's both brands and retailers and then working together. This is going to close this gap, but we took a look at a few things, product recommendations being the first one, how many people are using product recommendations.

(18:20):

This number was lower than I expected. I used to run a personalization business for many years for a very large consulting firm and these numbers used to be much higher. And I do believe what's happened is people still want this help because they need to make good confident decisions. But I think search and ratings reviews have somewhat overtaken the value of product recommendations. I'm going to look for my specific needs based on my language. You're not only going to show me results in the search, but then I'm going to evaluate a rating of reviews. And I think this is replacing, we're going to come back to radiation reviews in a bit kind of overtaking product recommendation. It's not that they're not important 61%, it's not a number to scoff at, but it's not as high as it used to be. So when you look at it by category and grocery, by the way, this is the one time grocery was higher for all those convenience features when it comes to this stuff, product recommendations, it's kind of flat.

(19:16):

It was 21 to 23%. So it's basically in line with everything else. Beauty and cosmetics, you see that being higher than the rest. Consumer electronics, fashion and clothing. So places where people really struggle with making good decisions and feeling like I want to make a good one, but I also want to be really key confident in it. You see a little bit higher numbers but not as strong a numbers as you would expect, at least for me historically. And then when we look at enhanced product visualization such as 360 degree views for purchases number was a little higher than I expected. We looked at so many different categories and when we break it down and grocery, again, this is a case where groceries actually less than most of these other ones, but people do use it, especially like food and beverage for looking at the labels to try to understand stuff.

(20:01):

But obviously the more that you can when you're shopping digitally for things like fashion, you want to be able to see what it looks like. Same thing with home improvement. We want to see what something looks like in your home, what you think it might look like in your yard. These kind of visualizations become more prevalent, so not too surprising, but again, part of this goes back to a challenge that we have more options than we've ever had. Markets are basically saturated with options. We all know it when we shop. The long tail is a bit of a burden. It sounds all great, but always like to joke, nobody wants a multiple choice test. With a hundred options, it makes you less confident in the decision you make, you're more likely to make a bad decision and you're also more likely to abandon it. And why is that important to brands? Because the brands create this too. Trying to pick out the right toothpaste for example, and thinking, trying to navigate that. So if we're not helping them navigate even your own options, no matter how brand loyal I am, that can be overwhelming for people. So they're looking for things like product visualization and product recommendations to get that confidence and make the decision.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (21:07):

Jeriad, when you said multiple choice, the first thing that popped into my head was do I have my number two pencil? So it definitely is triggering of tests in the younger years, but my comment I wanted to make, what was that?

Jeriad Zoghby (21:20):

It's such a stressful thought to think back to those kind of tests

Lauren Livak Gilbert (21:22):

And the little circles you had to fill in. Yes. So the comment I wanted to make was around personalization. So I think that is a topic that is very prevalent in e-commerce right now. A lot due to these visualizations.

Jeriad Zoghby (21:37):

Very important. Yes.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (21:39):

Yeah. So I wanted to get your thoughts. How do you think that fits into providing the right visuals to the shopper at the right time?

Jeriad Zoghby (21:47):

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think part of this, and we're going to see this a little bit in the future stuff, but personalized recommendations is a area of personalization, right? It's not the whole thing. And that's part of it is we're starting to see, I mean to be honest, me searching for my specific needs, and this is what's made marketplaces so powerful. When we shop in physical re retail, we shop through a construct that's designed around merchandising, right? You're going saying, cool, I'm going to walk through the skincare aisle or walk through this aisle that has a skincare shelf on it and try to find what I need or I'm going to walk through the aspirin shelf and try to find what I need, but I may be going in there to find a solution for a hangover cure or I'm trying to look for neck wrinkle cream.

(22:28):

And you start to realize there's very nuanced needs that we have as consumers that are very personal to us. And so this gets back to the search. So our ability to create very personalized content's very important, whether it's in advertising or in product pages or anything else. But product recommendations is only one dimension and it assumes you already know what I'm looking for when in fact I may not have expressed it to you yet. And that's the reason we don't want to, I'm not in any way say product recommendations aren't important. They are, it's just not sufficient. When I'm looking for my unique needs, and this is why I kind of look and I go, if you've watched, not only is search important search and ratings and reviews is important, I don't want to just know that it's got four and a half stars or 4.1 star.

(23:11):

I want to actually know does it address the questions I have for the use I might have and we're going to come back to the, but to that point, personalization is even more important now than ever and people have that expectation. To Lauren's question though, one of the things we did is we tried to look more to the future because again, part of personalization is I'm trying to navigate more options than ever, but I want to get something that's specific to me that I feel confident about. That's really good. And so we asked about AI shopping assistance, basically chat bots using the new AI stuff. But both in store and online we're about the same. There's about a third of the people saying, I would be interested in that. And you think about it, there are times when there might be planning an event you're going, I wonder what would be a good wine for this menu I'm putting together?

(23:59):

Or I'm trying to look for something great to cook tonight or I'm trying to think of the best thing to whiten my teeth, but I have these certain things with dental sensitivity. People are looking at these things as opposite, not everybody. And we're going to come back to that in a bit. The one that threw us a little bit was the augmented reality being as high as it was. But what's important to note is when we dug into it, it had to do with product information. It was not about personalized coupons, it was about can I eat this product on a whole 30 diet? And I remember working with a retailer, this was I think about 10 years, no, it was about seven years ago. And people love the idea of saying, I pick up this can. And the retailer realized people were pulling out their phones and trying to figure out could I have this on a diet?

(24:46):

Does this product have allergies that I can't give out for Halloween candy? And the idea of just holding up the phone and going, Hey, can I have this on a whole 30 diet? Can I have this on a paleo diet? Does this have peanut allergy stuff? It's just convenience. But you have to realize that factors into having so many options and trying to find the best thing that you're saying personable to me. Can you help me figure it out? So that number being that high made sense because it wasn't about us trying to sell more. It was about helping to answer the questions they had.

(25:19):

And then the last one on this is again, the risk. 37% of people say they will abandon if the navigation experience is bad or there's just too many options to choose from. And this gets back to you got to make it easier for people to make decisions, make them feel confident. One thing I want to highlight here, we talk about the personal experience and something that Lauren was kind of alluding to too is brands cannot rely solely on, and this is not to knock any retailers on the call, but can't rely solely on retailers to address that thing like the augmented reality thing. If I have a question about your product, again nutritional information, diet information, ingredient information, recall information, allergy information, I might want that information when I'm in the retailer, but I also may want it when it's in my pantry and a bathroom cabinet at my neighbor's house.

(26:08):

And the idea of being able to just hold up my phone and going, if I've got a big enough product portfolio, should I not make that part of the reason you come to my site or have my mobile web experience and go, great, if you have a question ask us, we'll tell you because I'll recognize the sku. I mean you could do that with an iPhone six, seven years ago and be able to provide you any information you have right then and there. And that allows the brands that close that intimacy gap we talked about earlier. So I do think it's really important we think about how do we personalize the brand experience regardless if they're in the shopping aisle or elsewhere and owning that and closing that intimacy gap.

(26:49):

Alright, now we're going to get into this next chapter and this is about the experience. And this gets to a lot of the stuff Lauren was bringing up, which is we cannot think of commerce as a transactional channel. It is very much a dialogue platform. And I've been looking at this since the very beginning. This is the one topic that was never new pre covid. We were looking at this and the one thing that's interesting if you ask this is the recall of imagery, product descriptions, rating reviews of somebody who shopped in the last month on a marketplace. And if you combine 'em together and go, do you recall anything from that product page? It's 98%. I mean it's basically what's interesting about that, so I'm going to talk about a couple of things. One is when we first started looking at this, we would only ask about name brand products.

(27:33):

And the reason we did is that number when you would combine 'em together was in the mid eighties in the us and then we had this fund with it because then we'd say, okay, great. Did you buy a name brand product on a marketplace? Yes or no? If you did, do you have a recall this stuff? It was around 85%. And then we'd say, cool, do you remember the TV ad associated with that product? And it was always in the mid twenties. And I remember we used to do this roll Van Wick who works with me and I've known for many years, we would do this in talks where we would do a lot, it was always kind of bit nerve wracking. It was like doing a standup company or something, you don't know if it's going to work. And we'd go, how many people bought a name brand product on Amazon?

(28:09):

Because if we were doing in the US, everybody's hands would go up and we'd go, how many people can recall the imagery description or rate reviews from that product? Everybody's hands stay up and we'd go, how many people remember the TV ad? And not only would everyone's hands come down, they'd all start laughing because it seemed like such a ridiculous thing. And yet to Lauren's earlier point, we spend a fortune creating great brand assets for TB, for social. And then too often commerce is getting leftover assets built for other channels dumped into here. And that's if you're lucky that it's at least the right assets. And that's what I was going to say, a story with one of the tree strategy officer. One of the big agencies I worked with one time was talking about this great work they were doing and then we started talking to him about commerce and he jumps up and he runs to his laptop and he pulls the product up on Amazon and he just loses his mind starts cursing because they're showing assets from four years prior from a previous campaign and he did all this great brand creative work and it doesn't show up there.

(29:08):

So it is such an important thing that when we're building brand assets that we ensure that those brand assets are not only built for commerce but they're extended through the commerce channels. All of 'em, they're showing up with great quality and we're going to talk about the risk of that great quality content consistently across there because if not, it's a major risk. And one last thing on this, it is very demo oriented. The one group, basically younger people are more interested in ratings reviews. And I'm going to explain why with a weird little, I want to keep an eye on time, a weird little thought exercise. I did this with Lauren Peter recently, but most of us have bought products on Amazon because of writing to reviews even though we had never heard of 'em before, right? But 20 years ago I bought something online from a brand I'd never heard of and I ate it or put it on my skin, plugged into a wall or gave it to my children because strangers that I had never met said, oh, it's a great product.

(30:09):

It would've sounded insane. And that is the market we live in now is that brand trust has been democratized. Why is that important? It means that the quality of the content, and when I say quality of content, I don't just even mean high quality content. I mean your brand assets that aren't making in a commerce channel, you're at risk because if you're a big brand and you're not putting in all the great stuff you're doing as a brand into these channels where the greatest traffic is occurring, it's a huge risk. And that friend of mine rolled, he has these two slides where one of 'em is like a movie theater where there's like five people in it and he's like, this is brand, this is what's happening is we're putting the greatest brand assets in the channels where no one's at. And then he's got this parking lot with thousand people looking at a PPP page and he's going, and here's where the audience really is.

(30:59):

And the PDP page on that screen was pretty much crap. And he was trying to highlight, you do all this great stuff here and you don't bring it into these channels. Massive risk. So not to talk too much about it, but I love that Lauren brought that up. It is critical that we do this. This is where they are getting their recall and you are building brand relationships. One last thing, data point. I can't say who this brand was, it was in the personal care space that I worked with. They put in some work they were doing with a national donation center and they had this video and the idea was why would we put that in there? It's personal care. People don't really read these pages, they put it in there. Time on page went up by I think 50% conversions increased. It was incredible.

(31:42):

But the assumption was nobody's going to watch that video on there until they put it in there. So I would say, please test, but also pushback when you're getting leftover content. Use this kind of data and some of those stuff I'm going to show you to push back because we are really falling short in commerce and with the markets growing and smaller brands having, and for any small brands out there, no offense to you, but smaller brands can create better content than they've ever done. And they are digital natives. They know to put the best stuff in here. If you're a big brand and not doing that, that's a shame on you.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (32:15):

And to Jeriad's point, I just want to emphasize, use these stats when you're talking to your brand managers, your abms, if maybe they're not digitally native. I know from my own personal experience working at a brand, they sometimes just default to TV because they have the clear ROI and they know how to do it. But this kind of data can really help support your case and even include this in your education programs, in your e-commerce literacy programs that you might have inside your organization so that all the different functions involved understand how it all matches together.

Jeriad Zoghby (32:49):

Alright, so this was by the way, the most shocking data point for me, but this really plays into this whole idea that commerce, unlike other channels which are very one-directional, right? You push content out there, you run test and learn. Test and learn is not listening or dialogue test and learn is yelling at people until they turn around and you're like, okay, cool, that worked. Not that it's not important, it's just it's not an actual dialogue and commerce is truly a dialogue channel. So this number being 43% shocked us. And by the way, I want to highlight this number, the recall. And there was one other thing that I want to pretty consistent across countries, there's a couple of these data points that are shockingly consistent. Not all of 'em, but oh buy again, definitely things like curbside and local delivery varies, especially in Europe and APAC and latam.

(33:38):

We did 13 countries, we did all major content, but this number is very high and I think this is really important because Reagan's reviews q and a forums, you see these consumers really being vocal. And I won't name this company, although I think they should be bragging about this, but there was a company I got to know a little bit previously and they work in the protein powder space. That's not the only product they have, but they have a protein powder on Amazon that has 200,000 ratings and over 40,000 reviews. That's 40,000 people taking the time to give feedback on recipe ideas, product enhancement ideas, complaints about fulfillment, whatever. But they're, that's a social media and that's the way I look at it and go, we have to think of it as a product community because often we think of range reviews, all we're doing is reacting and going cool, tell you why that didn't work.

(34:31):

Lemme tell you why that didn't work. And maybe I'm mining it for some insight, but you're not treating it as a community to manage. And that's a miss for some brands. Hopefully, I do know some brands are doing it. More brands need to treat it as a product community to manage. The other thing is we often think of it as a very negative channel. It's not more than half the people are giving some form of positive feedback. So when we asked what kind of feedback, product suggestions or enhancements is a big one. Like I said, it's always amazing to me the number of people putting in recipes, sizing guides to help. There was a brand that I worked with that their number one review, it had, I think it had over 5,000 likes, was literally somebody providing a sizing chart. They didn't put it in their own damn content, which really upset that CEO advice to other customers of how best to use how to do installment.

(35:17):

It is amazing the advice you give and then suggestions. I mean if you think about product innovation, you run these panels to ask people, this is a public consumer panel that's always in session. So here's the risk, by the way. Well one thing here, if you are not listening to this group and you're not engaging with this group, I can promise you someone else is, there's an entire brand businesses being launched on Amazon Daily that are tied to you aren't listening. And I am. So just keep that in mind. So here's the last thing. The risk on this. When you have a poor brand experience or the quality of the content's not good, it is having an impact on people walking away. So really important, I've got here in the blue, it's about treating this as a dialogue channel. Can't stress that enough. But part of that being a dialogue channel is getting your brand assets into this channel building. And this is really important, building content and brand experiences for commerce and not just putting content and experiences in commerce. Huge miss when we don't do that. Alright,

Lauren Livak Gilbert (36:22):

One thing I want to add in just really quickly, another prime day example because it's relevant right now around ai. When you're looking on Amazon, everybody knows now that they summarize the reviews at the top. So looking at that, but also using rufuss. So I did a little test yesterday using rufuss, which is the AI assistant for Amazon, and I asked it to recommend a product to me and before it even recommended a product, I asked for face lotion. It said the ingredients I should look for in my product, the type of product I should be looking for. And so brands need to use that to understand are those ingredients in my products or am I using those keywords in my searches? So there's a lot of different elements with ratings and reviews beyond just the user generated ones, but also what AI is taking from the insights of those ratings and reviews that brands need to incorporate into this as well.

Jeriad Zoghby (37:11):

Such a great point. I was at CAN this year, Lauren was can this year, and I gave a

Lauren Livak Gilbert (37:17):

Talk, we met in person, it was great Jeriad.

Jeriad Zoghby (37:21):

And one of the big themes of the talk was, is your brand comfortable? And one of the things we have to remember is, and it was kind of funny, we have to remember one of the interesting things about rufuss and other things is I don't have to work with any kind of structure. I don't have to worry about filters or sort or categories or NI can just ask whatever the hell I want. And so what ends up happening is those systems like rufuss are navigating the construct on my behalf. Which means if your content isn't ready to ensure that as that thing's looking through and trying to make sense of stuff, it's still relying on your content to answer the question and decide if you're going to be. So you have to think both this new world is my brand profitable, but your content becomes even more valuable in that world, not less.

(38:08):

And by the way, people are going to shop both. It's very much an additive thing, just like physical store or digital store is additive. This can be additive, but your content becomes even more critical to ensure that it makes your brand profitable in things like rufuss. Alright, last topic. I got to be honest. This is one we went through obviously the one I'm most passionate about. This is to me the most fun one. I kind of hinted on this on LinkedIn about sharing something that might surprise people. And I've got some added data points I'll bring up.

(38:36):

The thing is is that we often talk about, first I want to highlight there is a true demographic gap. So you look at going who's discovering products and where are they discovering it? And this first set of data points, gen Z and millennials versus Gen X and boomers is social media. And you see a massive gap there. It's not saying especially Gen X, less so boomers, but Gen X is using social media to discover products. But Gen Z millennials, very much so what may surprise people is they're still discovering products more in marketplaces than even social. So again, this is not about social being bad, it's just sometimes we almost over rotate and go, well, everybody's only in social and you're like, no, no, no. They're still discovering quite a bit. And actually more so in online marketplaces. What was interesting to me though, and I didn't put this in the slide, so I wanted to talk about, this is two dimensions.

(39:26):

The first one is purchase and the second one is the split. Well actually we'll split it. So when we say social media, gen Z and millennials who's finding in social, it's actually 71% of Gen Z are finding new products in social. And 79% of millennials, so millennials more so than Gen Z, are finding new products in social. And when it comes to marketplaces, it's kind of similar, 85% of Gen Z are finding products and social and 89 are finding it in marketplace. So you see these, sorry, 85 gen Z and 89 millennials. Millennials again higher. But the other question we asked was that's great, that's where you're discovering where are you actually buying the product? And this is where it gets interesting. So in social, 47% of Gen Z, so they went from 71 down to 47. So they're finding 'em in social, but they're not necessarily buying 'em in social.

(40:21):

In fact, 81% are buying in the marketplace. And when it looks at millennials, the numbers I have in part of policies, I'm going to look over to the side to make sure I see it right. 63% of millennials find the products and social, or sorry, 79% find in social only 63 buy and social. Whereas the marketplace is 87% are buying there. So what you're seeing is two things. One, marketplace is still dominate for product discovery, but it's closing the gap. Social is closing the gap for those younger generations, but it is still very, and this is why we see these studies and it often will only talk about social and going, oh look how many people at Gen Z are looking at social. But you have to put it relative to marketplaces. Go and say, because I can search for my specific needs, marketplaces haven't disappeared.

(41:04):

In fact, there's still the dominant play even for the younger generation, but the gaps are closed. But when it comes to buying, it's still greater and significantly greater in marketplaces. So this was the first one. Now for the rest of this, I'm going to dig a little bit into millennials and here's why. And I want to give a little context for this. If we think about us, forget Gen Z, millennials being like as they grow older, but just the current state of today, gen Z and I have two of them are kind of like pottery, still being formed, still being painted, still being shaped. They like to experiment, they're trying to figure out, they don't know who they are yet that phase Millennials on the other hand are in the pressure cooker of life. They are dealing with the family dynamics sometimes with babies, young children, they have career stuff that they're working trying to establish their career, housing car.

(41:58):

So this is the group that feels the greatest pressure in life. And then you get to Gen X and boomers and they're kind of like the pottery that's moved out of the pressure cooker of the oven and they're kind of on the shelf. And it's not that they're not open to this stuff, but they're also more set in their ways. And this has kind of played out because you look at, especially boomers grew up with physical retail being curated for them. And then millennials and part of Gen X grew up with things like Amazon where it was not curated for them, but allowed them to search what they wanted. And now we're seeing this Gen Z group coming in and part of millennials saying, actually an algorithm is going to figure it out for me. So it's really important to realize that retail shapes the way we do these things. And that millennial group is the one that's sitting in the oven right now.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (42:43):

Yes, we are. Jeriad, yes, we are talk about

Jeriad Zoghby (42:48):

Always nod along going, yes, I know what that feels like. I'm that. So here's a couple of the data points. Going back through what we saw. So curbside for these millennials was originally, or sorry for the group overall, when we looked at everybody, it was around 57%. So it was more than half of the people using curbside. But for millennials it jumps up 23%. It's actually 80% using curbside and equivalently for delivery. So they're all both jumping up to around 80%. So you look around and going, when we first look at those numbers, you're going, yeah, about half the country uses curbside and local delivery. But when you go to millennials, it's around 80% because they're looking around going, I don't have time for this. I'm not dragging my kid out of a car seat, especially at night or when it's raining or when it's cold to go buy diapers when someone can put it in the car for me or it can be dropped off at my house when I get there.

(43:41):

Buy again or reordering. That number was originally 65. So we see that jump up just over 80% and subscriptions jumps up to 76%. So you're talking about subscriptions, which was just under 50 for the general population is more than three quarters for millennials. So consistently we saw this where it's not that Gen Z isn't embracing these things too, but not at this rate. Millennials by far in the us, in Canada, in the uk there's a couple of countries like this where millennials, it's a little different with some of the other European countries. You get to Spain, you see Gen Z actually being the more dominant play. But here millennials are the ones adopting these convenience features at the highest rate and it's not even close. And when we looked at the future stuff, if you remember those numbers are around 33 and 38%, they jump up dramatically.

(44:33):

We're talking about close to 60% or over 60% for these three things. So when we talk about testing out, this is really important. We start talking about testing out. I'm going to test out a chatbot to see how well it works for someone to, for example, look up information about my products when they're shopping in the store or in a pantry or wherever. This is the group you need to be looking at when you look at the numbers. If you look at the numbers overall, you may go and say the adoption rate's, okay, even your advertising for getting 'em to use it may be okay, but if you look at it a little closer and you look at this generation, you might find that they're really embracing this stuff. They really need it, right? They want this stuff. They're much more open to technology, they're much more open to things being easier for them.

(45:15):

And then the last thing on this is that this group is also quite sensitive. So too many steps after clicking on an ad or finding social media, that one a pretty high number and this jumps up almost 20%. So it's about 60% of millennials saying, if you give me too many steps, I'm walking away. I'm just not willing to more than half by far poor brand experience, quality of product, images and videos as we talked about before, that was also a pretty high number. Jumps up 16 percentage points and even the checkout process and ability to reorder that inpatient thing, which you see that number go up. So we just wanted to highlight, these are just a group that I think is often overlooked. We get, it's not that Gen Z is not important, gen Z is actually very important, but we need to understand the role of Gen Z, which is what are they experimenting with?

(46:03):

But this is the group that's adopting it and as Gen Z gets older, they'll move into that pressure cooker of life and then we can actually use them again as going, okay, who's really good? This is the group this millennials right now who will continue these behaviors into the future. You really don't know where Gen Z's going to be in 10 years. Millennials, they're showing it to you right now. So wanted to end on that one. We think it's a really important group that is often overlooked. And I think as you do your analysis on what works and what doesn't for, especially as you're trying to pull stuff on campaigns, this is a group you need to pay attention to. Alright,

Lauren Livak Gilbert (46:41):

I can attest to every single one of those stats. Jeriad, less time, more convenience from a millennial perspective. Thank you so much for sharing all of these great insights. If you want to get in contact with Jeriad, please do send him an email, connect with him on LinkedIn. He has a lot of great insights there. So another way to get in touch with Jeriad as well. So two things I wanted to ask you, Jeriad, one person asked to clarify the survey results. Was it a survey result? Was it behavior measurement? What was actually behind the data that you're sharing? How did you actually quantify the results? Well,

Jeriad Zoghby (47:15):

It was a survey, it was a study done and we did it in 13 countries. We did a thousand people in each country. What we did is we made sure to not slice. That's one of the reasons the demographics is in the categories. And if you notice, we try to be careful about how far we go down in that don't go category and demographics so we don't get too thin. And we did do, I think even though we only showed eight of the categories, I think we did 14, 13 or 14. This is the first year IPG has run this study. So we do not have year over year yet. That's what's coming this coming year, which I'm quite excited about because again, I have the fortune of working with some wonderful people over the last couple of years who were working with me on this. And so I know the historical dimensions of this, but getting to see it next year, especially now that we're in this really stable place, it's be really interest to see what pops.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (48:08):

Perfect. Thank you. And one question was if you had it from the EMEA standpoint, so if someone had a question about that, could they reach out to you if you wanted specific country data? Okay, great.

Jeriad Zoghby (48:17):

The five in Europe I have are uk, Spain, Italy, France, Germany. I really want to get into the Nordics next year. I'd like to get some of Eastern Europe next year. We don't have it yet, but that's the five we have. And that's usually kind of where you start and they are very different. It's so interesting because the UK looks very similar to the US and some of the adoption rates, in fact even higher than the US and some of the more interesting ones. But as you move, especially Spain and Italy often are a little more similar Germany, very different France and especially because of the influence of CAR four and other stuff. But yeah, we do have that. Happy to discuss that with anybody interested. One note too, for anybody who hasn't scanned that QR code, I've known the DSI now for a very long time, been very fortunate and I would say if you aren't a member, I would tell you I watched, especially as people were first coming out of covid and the sharing and the community that's there to help people navigate stuff, it's so valuable because this space is not, and I mean this with all due respect, we have great leaders across this industry, but you do not have the support you need yet.

(49:25):

You do not have the budgets you need that and you need the community to help build things like this data so that it really, and Lauren, myself and Peter recently reported a podcast, which we'll publish soon. This is very relevant to the ceo. It just needs to be framed up in a way that the CEO E cares. And I promise you, having worked with a half dozen CEOs on this very topic, they do care when it's framed the right way. So this community is so powerful for helping to build the leveraging need to do the right things to reach the success you need to reach.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (49:59):

Thank you. Jeriad, can I bring you to every single event I ever do? Just so you can say that That was unscripted. Thank you so much. We got a bunch of thank yous in the chat. And then I do have two questions that came up. So from a click and collect perspective, if there's an organization or brand that's trying to get into that space and offer that as an option, but they don't have the budget necessarily to support the logistics, what are your thoughts on how they should think about click and collect or if they should maybe move towards the more subscribe and save kind of methodology versus changing delivery model?

Jeriad Zoghby (50:37):

I'm assuming we're talking about a brand that has strong direct to consumer and they're trying to add click and collect because, okay, so two things to note. What I've been seeing recently, and I'm stealing this question to ask it answer a little differently initially, is we're seeing some of the brands who are starting to wake up to this to say, should I not be building campaigns? Should I not be pulling in my creative teams to build a campaign just to enhance my buy my product? I think I can increase buy again rates by 20%, but I need to work on a campaign that I can run through retail channels and other advertising forms to get people to get it in the basket and then lock 'em in. So that's what's interesting. I'm seeing that on that side. As for the logistics of doing it on a direct to consumer brand, that's a tough one.

(51:23):

I will tell you, it's kind of like what we saw in the data. It's an expectation now, kind of like the autofill. If you don't have it, it means you're going to lose some customers just period. Because of the attrition of saying, I don't have time, especially if I'm a millennial. Maybe I don't come into your store, but a lot of us are going, I just don't have time for that. If you can't make that a little more convenient for me, I'm not doing it. I would argue that click and collect is such an interesting question.

(51:51):

If it's local delivery, you can obviously partner. Click and collect is tricky. I would say I saw it with the telcos early. They did a great job the at TSO world trying to figure out how to address that. They were doing that foremost with buy online pickup in store. I would have to get back to them. I got to be honest, it is a complicated thing. It's much more about the logistics and then of course building the awareness. I would say that's don't just build the logistics and then not tell the community about it. If I drive up to the store, it's too late, right? So I need to know before I can that this option exists.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (52:24):

Thank you. Okay, so then the second question was around the social media aspect that you were talking about with some of that data. When we say social media, what is it? Is it TikTok? Is it Instagram? Is it all of the channels? Was there a specification?

Jeriad Zoghby (52:37):

We had to give examples and we did. So what we were trying to do is Instagram, TikTok in the us, but every country we had, especially marketplaces, same thing. Dominant marketplaces, are we talking about coupon and South Korea, that kind of stuff. So we had to kind of tailor it based on the market, but what we did is we gave them examples so that we weren't limiting one social media platform versus another.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (53:02):

Perfect. Thank you. All right. I think Jeriad, we are out of questions now, but great engagement, great questions, fantastic data. Thank you so much for sharing it.

Peter Crosby (53:12):

Thanks to Jeriad for sharing his data and wisdom. There will be even more data and wisdom live and in person at the Digital Shelf Summit in New Orleans in April. Go to digitalshelfsummit.com for all the details and to register. Thanks for being part of our community.