Interview: Innovations and Best Practices to Accelerate Digital Commerce, with Mert Damlapinar, Principal, CPG Digital Commerce Acceleration, EPAM Systems

Transcript:

Peter Crosby :
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. As digital commerce enters its maturity phase, simply because it must, figuring out what the opportunities are to optimize and streamline key processes is a critical part of your growth strategy. Mert Damlapinar, Principal CPG Digital Commerce Acceleration at EPAM Systems, lives on the front lines with his clients who are on that maturity path. And he joined Lauren Livak and me to share insights and wise counsel from those experiences.
So Mert, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. We're really grateful.
Mert Damlapinar:
So am I. Thank you for hosting me.
Peter Crosby :
From the work you do, creating solutions for CPGs at EPAM, you've really had a front row seat to the biggest changes in e-commerce. From changing shopper behavior, the rise of retail media, brands are dealing with more and more challenges and opportunities to be successful in the space. Consumers looking to stretch every dollar in our current economy means that brands are maybe adjusting some of the ways in which they're implementing some of those solutions or how they're thinking about their investments. And does that ring true to you? And what shifts are you seeing that are coming up in this current period?
Mert Damlapinar:
Yes, it definitely rings true. And when we look at the ongoing trends, when we look at the consequences of what we've been through the last couple of years, in today's landscape with the ongoing global trends and their impacts to the CPG companies, our team here at EPAM, we identified a few key priorities. And most of those are driven by their impact to the CPG brands.
And to your point, I think the most important one impacting the massive population, not only in the US but globally, the value-conscious consumers have been forcing CPGs to optimize their pricing and the promotions. This way it'll lead to a more effective revenue growth management execution, and those trade promotions and digital commercializations are flaring topics in our conversations with our clients recently.
Second trend I can speak to is about marketing budget shifts. Those marketing budgets are, I would say, 2 to 3% points lower from five years ago where they have been, and the following record lows was in 2021. So the marketing budget rose to 9.5% I think according to Gartner this past year in 2022, but still way below the pre-pandemic levels. And this has implications on CMOs. They're having really tough conversations around allocating those resources, prioritizing the marketing spend and investment to drive impact, which they're responsible for the growth for the brands they're managing.
And another most important trend that I'm working on with my team, and we see impacting a lot of CPG businesses, the convergence of offline and online channels, which has been going for five, six years now. But omnichannel shopping journey has been moving into a channel-less state. And when I say channel-less state, I'm putting in from the consumer's point of view because they don't recognize those channels we operate on a day-to-day. And they're looking for the best assortment, most convenient shopping experience with the lowest possible price.
And the convergence of online and offline commerce has a couple of practical implications. For instance, the biggest digital medium today search, and four is retail media, they're equivalent of the store aisle today. So instead of walking in a store aisle and offline setup, we're browsing through the search and the retail media panel. Product detail page on the retailer side or marketplace platforms, which is abundant content, information sourced for the consumers, now is the equivalent of the product packaging on the shelf. And also, dynamic programmatic display campaigns and capabilities much more effective and much more scalable than onsite display. So those are the things causing the omnichannel commerce acceleration. And the digital capabilities required to execute in this domain is playing a crucial role to increase the ROI and impact shopper journey, and that's what my team is working on recently around those three trends.
Peter Crosby :
And Mert, I love that list of four that you just gave. I mean super clear and it seems perfectly right to me. And when you're having those conversations, so often they run up against, and you tell me if this is true, against the silos of budget, and I don't know whether this is the right term or not, but it's the one I'm thinking of right now, the prejudice of, well, e-commerce is only X percent of, and therefore we can't spend that much. Are those barriers? And what barriers are being put up in place of these kinds of issues being a addressed?
Mert Damlapinar:
True. We hear those opinions and barriers also presented to us in our conversations. But the reality is both on the statistical side and the business reporting side, e-commerce is the number one growth driver in the last few years. And the digits are incremental to the account management teams, key account managers, and the large portfolio managers when they talk to the industry leader customers, like Walmarts of the world, Targets of the world. And e-commerce driven growth in those accounts is sometimes above 60%, 70% of the total growth generated year-over-year.
So once we explain how e-commerce is driving this growth and how online commerce and digital influence sales impact the offline brick and mortar sales, which is 59% in 2021, 60% in 2022, and digitally influenced sales is slated to be 70% of overall retail in 2027, when we present those cases and we put an analytical insights behind it, then conversations go much smoother.
And to the budget limitations you mentioned, another driving force behind this is retail media because now it's one of the most interesting topics around the retailers and the CPGs. And retail media today surpassed some other traditional advertising sources in recent years, and now it's number four largest advertising media across the whole digital platform, right behind search, social and linear TV. And in three years or so, it's also forecasted to pass linear TV to become number three in the digital medium spend. So when we put all these together, this kind of fast growth of e-commerce and retail media presents a set of challenges. That's another topic we're talking around budget and all the other barriers you mentioned.
Number one, growth and budgeting, because one of the key challenges for the CPGs this year, beyond the rapid growth of retail media and budgeting issues, will be how many platforms to prioritize, how many clients to invest in and what proportion. So retail media is the most lucrative revenue stream for retailers. And with gross profit margins up to 70 to 90% with onsite media and somewhere about 20 to 40% with offsite media, therefore, retailers will continue to invest in this domain and retail media capabilities RMNs, because there is no way to gain this kind of gross margins from the traditional categories. And brands are expected to invest more money into retailers and media networks with the spending projected about 22 to 23% with a remarkable growth over the next few years. Therefore, budgeting and the response to the retail media growth is number one challenge.
But of course it comes with another challenge, measurement, measurement and transparency. Because each platform, whether it's retailer or marketplace pre player, each platforms offers different level of ad capabilities with different solutions and placements, and each runs on a different algorithm and different category hierarchy sometimes. So these inconsistencies in measurement also present a big challenge.
And third one is the targeting, because one of the biggest benefits of the retail media is the first-party data now with the cookie application is on the horizon next year, brands are looking for solutions and stopgap solutions to get their hands onto the first party data because effective messaging in this new contextual marketing era is not going to be a one size fits all. So the retail media network and the first-party day-to-day present should be scalable and avoiding some of the redundancies.
So those are the challenges we talk around mostly how we're going to fuel e-commerce growth, why it's needed for omnichannel performance, how we can drive more traffic and convert on the offline as well because obviously the offline commerce will be still in the majority in the forthcoming years and how brands are strategizing around this building their tech techs to measure the performance of their retail media investments and how they can feed the first-party data needs of their marketing teams. Those are the topics happening around the growth needs and the budget discussions of the e-commerce.
            Lauren Livak:
And Mert. I'm glad you brought up TV because I think a common question that e-commerce leaders might be talking to their marketers about is a marketer might say, "Hey, I can run a TV ad, and I know that I get X amount of ROI back and it's easy and I've done the motion and I've gone through it and I know it works." E-commerce takes more time. It might need a process. You might need to coordinate cross-functionally. It's a different set of skills for a traditional marketer. And to your point, it doesn't necessarily always have a what goes in comes out kind of ROI. So have you had any of those conversations specifically with marketers around how they choose where to spend their time, not only their budget based on traditional channels like a TV versus an e-commerce or a retail media? Is that shifting from the traditional ways of thinking now?
Mert Damlapinar:
Yes. And there's also another debate happening right now with some of our peers and some of the industry contacts I have. They're asking about the roles and responsibility across those four teams. So standard account teams, e-commerce teams, marketing and media teams and agency partners. Okay, who's going to lead the initiative? Who's going to decide on the strategy and who's going to manage the budget? Who's going to be accountable for measurement and reporting? And then at the end, who's going to go in and negotiate a JBP with the retailer partner? To your question-
            Lauren Livak:
Million dollar question.
Mert Damlapinar:
Right. I see a shift moving towards the e-commerce teams when it comes to owning the strategy and prioritization of the decisions, even though budgets are still distributed between shopper marketing, brand, and trade. So even with the growth of retail, we see the buckets are still being in the motion. So trade dollars are being shifted into retail media investments still coming from shopper brand, but e-commerce teams should be able to make the final say and decision while they explain the increase or decrease on the investment to the retail partner while they continuously grow their strategic business objectives and hopefully reach those objectives.
Peter Crosby :
And Mert, do you feel like that's the right choice for every organization?
Mert Damlapinar:
No. No.
Peter Crosby :
So what is it that should drive that decision of where it should live?
Mert Damlapinar:
It's still in evolution, I would say, because to your point, every organization has structured differently and every relationship across their portfolio has different central of gravity. Some organizations CMO are wearing a second head chief marketing and sales officer, and suddenly we're looking at these conversations happening holistically in a more effective way. One example being Mondelez. So Martin Renaud is Chief Marketing and Sales Officer of Mondelez, and e-commerce operation heavily integrated into the marketing decisions, so therefore they can move faster and agile way.
But some organizations have different tactics and some account managers or account teams are directing into the CDMO, chief digital and marketing officer. So every organization will be different. And of course, there's no right or wrong answer to that, but I see e-commerce teams are not being seen as only a sales function anymore. They're heavily included in digital marketing brand and media tactics conversations. Therefore, there's an ongoing evolution on the e-com team structure. So we don't see those silo structure anymore where the e-com sits only in the sales or marketing. So it's getting more decentralized, and it's getting more democratized across different functions still with the support of a COE or central of excellence.
But marketing teams, again, it's going to take, I think, a few years until they know how to measure attribution in those investments because all the big promise of retailing engage closed attribution. Okay, we're going to fund these increased as from our retailers, and we're going to continue investing in those platforms. How are we going to measure it? Existing SaaS solutions have different challenges, and many brands are looking into holistic platforms to bring those tools together.
To your question, Lauren, marketing teams and sales teams are still experimenting with different team structures with different strategy methodologies to figure out how they're going to catch up with the retailers because retailers are ahead on this race. They keep building the RMMs, they keep building the placements and add tools. So brands are asked to invest in those, and we'll see how it goes in the next four or five years until it's reached maturity.
            Lauren Livak:
So Mert, to your point about one size doesn't fit all and it's not a one structure that could help any organization, do you see that the one thing that has to happen to be successful is that the regions have to have the budget to execute versus the global team? Because I know you work globally, so I'm curious what you're seeing from a global versus regional perspective and what is the key ingredient to be successful no matter if it sits in sales or marketing or who owns what piece of it?
Mert Damlapinar:
That's a really good tactical question. And I've been in that boat twice, sitting in a global center of excellence team working with all business units around the world. But my answer and the brands I worked for, their answer would be around let's enable local teams with the data and tools available to them, and let's just bring their skill and resources up as high as possible to the more maturely advanced markets like either Northern America or Western Europe. Because some markets are experiencing rapid growths like Southeast Asia. If you go six countries around Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, or if you come to the South America, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, some portions of these markets are experiencing tremendous growth, but dynamics are totally different. If you are investing in social commerce, there is not much enough maturity in the Northern America, regardless of the size of the market regard, regardless of the abundance of the data and tools in place, there is no way to accelerate in social commerce because laws, the platform, the data availability is not there yet.
But in Southeast Asia and Latin America, there is tremendous opportunities similar to what China has been doing like five, six years ago maybe. So these are the things we were experimenting with, local teams, local markets, what data and tools are available and what maturity your teams are on. So what we can accelerate in those and strength, because if we try to bring a global perspective to each market, then it's not going to work and it's just going to slow those fast markets down and it's not going to bring their business objectives in reality. And budget allocations are different for each market, depending on the market maturity as well. So this is another reason they should choose wisely when the budgets are really limited in those developing markets or emerging markets, that's what we're doing. Localizing the market strength and investing in those. Sometimes it might fall off the global strategy, but give advantage to the local region.
            Lauren Livak:
And now Mert, when we think about kind of the future state vision and we think about not only people in process, but also technology, what are you seeing from a portfolio perspective for companies and how they're thinking about that holistically?
Mert Damlapinar:
Yes. My future vision for this, since I'm coming from sales management roles and I worked in account management, sales management for quite some time, then I made a transition towards digital marketing and then analytics, I've seen the power of actionable insights or really, really robust analytics in engines in use, in practice, especially feeding sales marketing. So my personal answer would be actionable insights across business functions help account teams to grow business faster, and therefore they also enhance their relationship, nurture their relationship with their retailer partners.
So today, if I remember the stat correctly, e-commerce businesses need to make eight decisions per minute to keep up with the competition. And this requires robust automation interoperable platforms. And instead of working in silos and using this joint and tech solutions, cross-functional teams can use and collaborate those integrated analytical insight platforms where they can get recommendations for their next actions. They can operate in an agile way to save time and increase efficiency while driving their business goals. And in this context, sales teams would use same prescriptive analytics tools and dashboards with marketing teams, media teams, and even supply chain teams. So not HKPI will apply to those teams, but majority of these KPIs will have an overlap and therefore they'll be getting the same notifications, same actionable insights, same prescriptive recommendations at the same time, saving tons of email threads and days of work hours.
So one example, digital shelf solution, I'm sure you will be glad to hear that digital sales solution also should be integrated into those functions, sales, marketing, media and supply chain, and those views feeding a broad set of users because the set of KPIs provided by digital shelf will be impacting many of those function core KPIs in these functions.
And day-to-day with siloed reporting and email chains, those decisions and actions would take up to five, six days easily. But with an integrated actionable insights engine like this, it would take 15 to 30 minutes to inform related parties and take an action and communicate to reasoning or consequences of those to the retailer partners. Therefore, it really drives business growth. That's my future vision from one slice of view. Of course, when it comes to strategy, when it comes to supply chain, when it comes to digital transformation, there might be a different set of future visions, but on tactical point of e-commerce, I think analytical insights and prescriptive recommendations will make the difference.
Peter Crosby :
Did you say eight decisions a minute?
Mert Damlapinar:
Yes.
            Lauren Livak:
I had the same reaction and tried to think of my old life, and it actually makes a lot of sense because I was always putting out fires and every retailer is changing requirements. I feel like that makes sense. But when you quantify it's really horrible.
Mert Damlapinar:
Think of an e-commerce team, then users in compassing an e-commerce teams, like key account managers from e-commerce side, marketing manager from the marketing side, media manager, content teams from the digital sales side, demand planners from the supply chain side. They all are looking similar set of KPIs in certain times of the day when they're looking at account performance preparing their weekly meetings and when they're preparing the next PO when they're launching a new innovation, and this team literally needs to take more than five, six decisions per minute and take action on those. I mean, wow.
Peter Crosby :
Yeah, no, I mean it makes perfect sense. It's not shocking. What is shocking is one, just how challenging that is. But two, the potential for technology automation, and sorry to use the buzzword at the moment, but AI, to be able to help make those decisions, be able to happen faster with better information so that people can be freed up to then move on to the strategic stuff rather than your whole day is a set of tactical decisions. So I mean, I love your future state vision and I think it's coming within the bounds of possibility now in a lot of ways,
Mert Damlapinar:
Let me share another firsthand experience. Regardless of the size of the businesses we work in, regardless of the level of advancement they might have, regardless of their market position, sometimes everything comes down to, so what question, right? So what question meaning that, okay, what are we supposed to do? What's the next step? What's the action here? We understood the result, we understood the drivers, we know the reasons, we know who is responsible. Okay, what are we going to do? And it's suggest three steps, standard operating procedure. We diagnose something, we know the driver and what's the next step? And these three steps could be a lifesaver in this context because when you get those insights, having insights are great. We all love to share those sexy reports, dashboards, charts, et cetera. But we get into stalemate mode, okay, who's going to do it? Who owns this decision? What's next?
And these are the benefits or analytical insights engine or interoperable platforms telling four teams at the same time, what can be done, what options are, and choose one wisely. And these are the recommended actions with data driven models behind it. It's not just guesses or personal choices. And I've seen in action, that's why some of the brands are really, really growing their category without any comparison, just expanding the gap. And meanwhile, some categories like food and beverage are more mature, more difficult to grow category and competition is more intense, like operate cosmetics, personal care, toys, these are the categories really, really benefiting from this kind of engines because of the category profitability, because of the funds available for teams to invest in those POCs and put them in action on scale globally, hopefully we'll see them more in use and more brands will start using them. We're here for these kind of integrations. That's my passion lately obviously. I'm getting even goosebumps.
Peter Crosby :
I can tell. I know. When you talk about it, there's some goosebumps here too because our customers are all looking for this. Our members at the DSI are all looking for this and it's been talked about for so long. And so the complexity of all the pieces that you're talking about has continued. And so trying to be able to put that all together at scale is isn't, is a really great.
Mert Damlapinar:
I'm happy to be an ambassador of digital shelf in those conversation, promoting in every occasion to be implemented in those functions automation platforms, because I believe also digital shelf will benefit brands in a massive way when they're trying to build those insights. Because digital shelf insights will impact more than three, four functions at once. And it's not only assortment or online in tech availability metrics here and there, many divisions will benefit from digital shelf robust digital shelf reporting tools in the coming years.
Peter Crosby :
Well, I was on your LinkedIn. I Definitely follow Mert on LinkedIn. He's always posting great numbers, great stats and cool strategy thoughts. And recently you had a fantastic chart about the Forester numbers you were talking about by getting sent to 70% in 2027. (Link to post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mert-damlapinar_ecommerce-retailmedia-digitalshelf-activity-7029056543278911488-Spcm?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop) And you have this graphic that shows the offline sales, the in-stock availability, household penetration, purchase frequency, purchase size, and also a graphic which sort of says how digital plays a role in these in-store experiences and putting it all together in a chart like that, I hadn't seen it before, but also I think it's so important that people have an expansive view of what the digital shelf is, because then that reminds you to make sure that your data is helping across the whole business and not just being reserved for the use of the e-commerce team.
Mert Damlapinar:
A hundred percent. And let me ask you something, because that was my observation. Let's say 2016, 2017, when we start hearing digital shelf more and more on the mainstream first initial reactions I was hearing were about digital shelf is infinite. Oh, we can upload thousands and thousands of skews and everybody will flock to our product detail page and sell off the shelves like there is no tomorrow and today my conviction and the mainstream belief is digital shelf is not infinite at all and it's way more competitive. But I want to hear your point of view on this. What were you hearing back then?
Peter Crosby :
No, well I think in comparison to that was the point that needed to be made, I think at a time when you needed to shift people's point of view from the limited assortment in store to essentially an infinite assortment online. And that in order to deal with that complexity and that scale, I saw it so often at customers who all of a sudden retailers would be asking them for merchandising things, content, which was unprecedented. And it was happening because at least at that time it was Zappos saying, "Come on, I want every shoe you have, and I can't afford to write the content in Singapore for all of that, so you have to do it."
So that was a moment on the digital shelf evolution where it was like, wake up call. Here's a challenge and an opportunity. I think now we're at a place where we realize that the places where you can actually close the sale are less than that, and to focus your resources on where the sales are going to close and invest there, and then make sure you have coverage everywhere you can, and automation can help with that and things like that, but it's where can you close the sale and make sure you're making the most of every pixel where that lives, which is, that's sort of what we're hearing and advising members of the DSI today.
Mert Damlapinar:
Exactly.
            Lauren Livak:
And I think gone are the days where you can start a brand in your garage and put it on Amazon and then become a sensation overnight even if you do everything right. I think there's just so many other channels and ways that you need to think about brand building and a broader, more connected strategy where you could do that maybe in 2016, but that world doesn't exist today, and you really need to focus in on the core principles of what it means to build a brand rather than just, "Hey, here's a great product and we want to make it number one on Amazon."
Mert Damlapinar:
True. And of course, every robust paradigm shifting platform comes with its challenges when it's getting closer to its maturity. Now we're getting to that level now all the CPGs figure it out. Now everybody knows what to do. But I see three major challenges, and I want to hear your opinion about those. Number one challenge I see about digital shelves, that they're not standardized across retailers because product detail page set up and all the relevant requirements have tremendous amount of customization with each retailers.
And second one, those requirements are rapidly evolving across platforms. They're changing, it's not stable, it's not mature anymore. And also assortments online are really, really harder to manage compared to offline assortments because in stock sell through rates are challenging to manage when selling online across multiple retailers. From a Verizon fulfillment method model, as you mentioned that I see, those three challenges are really, really making hard to any newcomer to the field, any new category to gain a good solid position in this category in a meaningful time unless they have ages to compete.
Peter Crosby :
Well, and especially because money's not free anymore. So you could borrow against your potential and make those things happen. And I'm not sitting here saying it's the death of a challenger brand, but the business is different these days and large organizations have a little bit more space to move and also maybe more ability to drive towards profitability in a way that challenger brands may not. So it's a challenging time for challenger brands. And so the tables have flipped a little bit as we move into this new era, I think.
Mert Damlapinar:
Sure. And let me tie again, my passionate topic, digital self to the future vision I set for the CPGs, which we can build this interoperable integrated analytics insight engine, hopefully, which I'm working on. And so digital shelf measurement plays so importantly, crucial role integrated and enhancing the performance of three other functions, sales and ops, marketing, media, supply chain, and even executive level reporting.
So one of the main problems CPG is trying to tackle nowadays is clarifying which one of those variables correlate to their business performance and which omnichannel tactics they deploy, they should prioritize more, invest more to drive business growth with different retail partners, because target strategy, starting from the assortment to pricing, starting from tactics to measurement, will be way different than Amazon or Walmart or even some of the other partners. So I think if digital shelf can help them to identify those variables which is relevant and connected to their business performance, then it's becoming a closed loop. So the market solutions out there today has very, very great opportunities, very, very great methodologies behind it, but at the end, it's teams using those solutions and hopefully these teams will be able to interpret the results they see and the insights they see entire to their business objective, therefore the digital self measurement will be meaningful for their day-to-day. And the more automated it is, the more integrated across business function it is, its impact will be hopefully triple or quadruple.
            Lauren Livak:
Mert, to your point about integrating the analytics piece, I always find that the challenge a lot of brands have is they might have a lot of great data around content, they have great data about potentially pricing retail media, but it's very hard to connect from a digital shelf perspective what you're doing on the PDP and what changes you're making directly to sales. Have you seen any company, brand really do that effectively? And how are they pulling in that sales element to the broader content on the PDP?
Mert Damlapinar:
Yes, yes. I cannot phrase L'Oreal enough in that effort. They doing a tremendous job bringing digital shelf insights, combining it with sales and marketing, and therefore creating those next step actionable recommendations. The way they do it, of course, it's proprietary. So I will be limited in my sharing in that regard. But one example could be, which is publicly more published and shared in the industry would be, let's look at their beauty tech portfolio. L'Oreal has developed a tech products portfolio called Beauty Tech for R&SNinnovation and coming up with all these high innovative solutions to meet the consumer at the contextual spot where they're consuming their content and they have a similar set of portfolio of products for this kind of digital commerce and this kind of building products with kind of integration helps them to grow the category leads the innovation in the category, therefore have very, very meaningful and robust relationships with the retailer partners because retailers also love this kind of traffic conversion new to the brand, new to the category shoppers driven by the brand to their platforms. So I think my best example in that regard would be L'Oreal.
Another one, of course, it'll sound like I'm tuning my own horn, but on the personalization side, on the marketing brand collaboration and tying it to the sales performance with hyperpersonalization Mondelez effort called empathy at scale. Mondelez Teams, brand teams were able to optimize 1 trillion data points in Google Cloud, 1 trillion data points to make sure any product content for any campaign, regardless of its origin and activation location. It could be South Africa, it could be North America, it could be Asia, can be personalized at the time and location of consumption, which when the consumer is engaging with that content tied, get closer and closer to the point of sale, to Peter's point, therefore driving sales. So I've seen those projects in action, I've seen those teams in operation and they're doing tremendous jobs. Hopefully I'm looking forward to meeting more brands, investing in developing capabilities in those areas, and hopefully more tech solutions in the market will be the meaningful components to their tech tech because that's what we're aiming for. That's why we're working towards.
Peter Crosby :
Mert, those are a couple of great stories, and I can sort of channel my listeners here and wonder, is it only possible for the L'Oreals and Mondelez's of the world? Can this be democratized in some way for a broader set of brands to be able to take advantage of this capability?
Mert Damlapinar:
That's a really great point because I've seen couple of them, but I'm sure there are more than couple. Some digital native brands who is really focusing on the digital channel and all the capabilities and data coming through this channel they're investing in back to their business, and therefore they're capitalizing on those solutions. But the thing is, they're not leading the category or they're not disrupting the consumer habits or making the waves. So we might not be hearing them as loud and clear as the L'Oreal's and Mondelez's of the world, but I'm pretty certain that there are many digital native brands doing similar activations on their own domain, capitalizing these kind of insights, capitalizing this kind of innovative thinking and activations. Hopefully, as you pointed out, it's democratization of these tools and how it's been delivered, how it's been presented to the consumer.
I see consumers are not loyal to their retailer or marketplaces like five years ago. They easily shifting between platforms if they don't find the right color, right variation, right price of the products they're looking for. So those kind of brands up and coming emerging digital native brands has more opportunities, more channels to reach those consumers where they might be shifting on the journey. And that's one of the reasons omnichannel measurement, mapping out the shopper journey, bringing the first party data in and reaching out those audiences in a contextual way at the right time at the right place will make difference for those accelerating brands or the brands are on the growth path.
Peter Crosby :
So a reminder to me not to be counting out challenger brands right now because they have different ways of challenging.
Mert Damlapinar:
Exactly.
Peter Crosby :
And they can cut through the noise. I love that Mert. And so I know we can't hold you much too longer because you have to go back to your basement and continue building your analytics workbench. But to close out in that sort of mindset, how are you seeing brands really try to accelerate some of the changes they want to make in the organization? Because they're often the tail that wags the organizational dog that they don't own everything, but they are a big influencer. And so what is it that they should be focused on to help make those changes happen?
Mert Damlapinar:
There are two trends I've seen happening that relevant to what we're discussing today, what those brands should be doing. One trend I see is about martech because of the era we live in today. And I'm biased in that because I studied in this domain data analytics era that requires a very, very continued evolution of marketing, operations, talent, organizational capabilities, because now suddenly everybody needs to be, there's a term for it, we call it citizen data scientist. So not everybody has to be a data scientist or data engineer, but at least most of these cross-functional team members should have a citizen level understanding what data analytics mean for their day-to-day. So this require having some familiarity with data models operating under the hood of the dashboards they're using. This requires some level of understanding what bidding strategies, what measurement capabilities are being deployed by their agency partners or their teams.
So this is one thing, and in this centralization of martech era, CMOs are under pressure increasingly centralizing their martech functions because the martechs in use today are unnecessarily complex, redundant, fragmented. So there are so many tools in their tech, some tech's I've seen like 60 solutions, some tech tech's I've seen 15 to 20 some tech's I've seen 50, 60 separate solutions.
So not to mention countless data sources feeding into those platform and content and digital asset management platforms. So I'm sure you understand where it can go. So this is one of the trends that martech teams are being centralized, reducing the redundancy, increasing the organizational effectiveness, and get everybody up to speed in their understanding of data analytics and technology behind those teams. Second trend relevant to this and related to this is e-commerce team structure. On the opposite side, e-commerce teams are getting decentralized because traditionally we see e-commerce team reporting to the VP of sales, VP of marketing, and sitting in this tower. But now e-com roles are distributed across the organization supported by an e-com center of excellence, and which is slightly on the rise, which was reported by, I believe Mike Black talked about it a couple weeks ago.
Peter Crosby :
Yeah. We recently did a great report on it.
Mert Damlapinar:
So those trends will have impact in the organizational structure, how we strategize our teams and how we hire new talent. So to win the digital shelf and overall omnichannel commerce, I think three tactics would become useful and necessary around those two trends. One, a clear strategy. So clear strategy choices are essential for these cross-functional teams because they tend to get lost if there's no clear strategy, if there's no clear messaging. Second, let's continue breaking down the silos. Let's continue integrating teams together and let's build integrated platforms for them to operate in a cohesive manner. And let's accelerate automation. Let's accelerate automation to save meaningful hours of our day and give some time back to people who they can really think about big strategic decisions, big difference maker ideas instead of doing redundant manual work. I think those three little tiny tactics might help us while we get adapted to martech centralization and e-commerce team decentralization.
Peter Crosby :
Well, Mert, I mean, I'm a little disappointed you aren't more passionate about what you're doing, but ... Seriously, thank you so much for sharing both this vision and then what you're seeing out in the wild that's starting to form these paths toward greater efficiency and greater return and more coherent, cohesive, omnichannel approach to just drive growth and market share for the people that are able to pull this off with help of folks like you. I also let our audience know, I found the link to the LinkedIn post I was talking about where you have that view of impact on offline sales. So we'll include that in the show notes so that they don't have to search for February 8th to find their way to that.
Mert Damlapinar:
I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I love that.
Peter Crosby :
So, got that done. And just Mert, thank you so much for joining us. It's really been a pleasure to talk to you.
Mert Damlapinar:
It was mine. Pleasure is mine. And thank you very much. Lauren, Peter, I'm looking forward to next episode of the podcast as well.
Peter Crosby :
Oh, thank you.
 Lauren Livak:
Thank you, Mert.
Peter Crosby :
Thanks again to Mert for all the wisdom. Product content is always in motion is a phrase that I am definitely going to steal. Head on over to digitalshelfinstitute.org for more of this kind of wisdom. Thanks for being part of our community.