Transcript:
Speaker 1:
Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf, where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age.
Peter Crosby:
Hey, everyone, Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. We are in an era where some of the tactics of the past, around supply chain efficiency and promotions may be losing their ability to achieve growth and profitability on the digital shelf. Sometimes shifting focus on the digital shelf metrics you are trying to move can lead to creative strategies that create demand and greater profitability. But what metrics?
Gregor Murray, VP of strategy at Digital Commerce Global joined Lauren Livak and me to share their CSMART digital shelf metric framework, that can help you turn digital shelf metrics into action. So Greg, we appreciate you being on the podcast today. Thank you so much.
Gregor Murray:
Hey, it's great to be here. Really pleased to finally get the chance to do this.
Peter Crosby:
Well, you're bringing so much experience to the show. You have 10 years of digital commerce experience. You've been on the brand side. You've sat in that seat, so you know the pressures of winning on the digital shelf.
Gregor Murray:
Yes, 10 years in digital commerce, 25 years in FMCG in total. I've worked with a number of manufacturers, number of retailers. I know many of them will be listening and will be quite surprised to hear my voice, but that's really cool. Hi, everyone.
Peter Crosby:
Exactly. Exactly. No, it's wonderful. The reason why we were drawn to have you on the show is, you worked on a really great piece of research focusing on measurement of the digital shelf, which can be very challenging and really confusing and there's so many metrics that brands can use to measure performance on the digital shelf. But it's choosing the ones that really have impact and those that actually provide a real perspective into their performance. And so, you developed a new framework, it's called CSMART. And so, tell us what that acronym stands for? And how the framework that you put together advances how brands approach digital shelf measurement?
Gregor Murray:
CSMART was born because of one of the clients that came to DCG. They basically said to us that, "All of our markets are at very different stages of maturity. There is a wealth of information available to them. It's not always necessarily consistent across all of the different markets. We could measure so many different things. What we want to know is what should our markets be measuring? What should they be reporting on? How do we go about getting consistency across our business?" Now, I know that there are at least 100 different measures out there when it comes to digital shelf, digital commerce metrics, some of which are widely available, others which are unique to different retail platforms, different retailers.
So what we did was, we went away and we spoke to our network of digital commerce leaders and experts, and the vast number of different parts that we worked with at DCG. We asked them what they were reporting on in different markets, what they're measuring, what they're monitoring, what is it to them. And when the information came back, there was some really consistent people coming. So what I did was I took them and I broke them into six different buckets and those different buckets have become the CSMART framework.
The buckets are, Content is the C, and then Search is the S. The M is marketing, the A is availability, the R is robustness, which is the financial health of your business, and T is around trust. And within CSMART, there is a number of different metrics listed in each one of the different buckets, in each one of the pillars and we don't say that the brands should monitor and measure all of them. It's about finding the ones that are available to you in that market, in that channel, in that retailer, and using them to advance your business and to help you make decisions and help you create competitive advantage at digital shop, which is what role.
Peter Crosby:
It's always great when the words you choose add up to a great acronym too. So CSMART, very handy, very clever, but it also works. And so I was wondering, you spoke about having lagging and leading metrics. Can you talk a little bit about how you think of those two categories and how people should think about them and when to use what to do what?
Gregor Murray:
Well, firstly, I like that you liked the name. It did go through several iterations before we eventually stuck with CSMART. And yeah, the reason why financial health is called robustness is because it works better with CSMART.
Lauren Livak:
How many words can you make out of CSMART? Like one of those scrambles?
Gregor Murray:
Yeah, exactly. And yeah, we had to call financial health robustness in order to make it work, but it does do exactly what it's meant. With the leading and lagging measures, [inaudible 00:05:19] in FMCG and in digital commerce, we've almost been trained by retailers to think about the past. So we're trained to look at our sales value, our sales volume, our availability, our rate of sale, our distribution, all of which are historic measures and it's really important for the health and the robustness of our business that we monitor them, that we measure them, that we keep on top of them. But sales doesn't necessarily mean that customers are hugely engaged in your business, in your brand. It doesn't necessarily mean that your brand is particularly healthy into the future. And so with CSMART, what we wanted to do was not only look at past and those historic measures, we wanted to look at the future as well.
And we know a number of digitally native brands are very focused around leading measures. So if you look at Airbnb, they're constantly tracking the average number of nights booked in every given day, week, month market that they're in and it shows them the health and the robustness of their business. The same with Uber, its total trips completed. With Netflix, total hours watched. With Facebook [inaudible 00:06:39] monthly active users and the amount of time people are spending on the platform.
Digital commerce for FMCG and CPG shouldn't be any different. We should be looking at the leading measures as well and understanding is our business healthy into the long term, even if our sales are technically in growth. And if you took a snapshot of most markets right now, and most manufacturers say you'd look at them on a sales value perspective and go, "Hey, they're growing. They're up year-on-year, it's great." But what that lacks is the context that tells you that actually a lot that's due to inflation, it's due to prices rises and when you look at volume, that's not necessarily going in the same direction. So what the point of leading measure is about is actually the long-term health of the business, not necessarily how much you sold in the last month or quarter or year.
Lauren Livak:
And one of the things Gregor that I really like about the CSMART framework is it's not only measurement for the sake of measurement. So you had said in the beginning there's no way to measure everything and you shouldn't be measuring everything, but you've made it so that it's also actionable. So can you talk a bit about from the framework's perspective and the way that you chose those different metrics, how you think about actionability with each of them?
Gregor Murray:
Yeah. So, there's no point in measuring anything unless you're going to actually do something with it. Okay. Otherwise, it's just a number and I can give you a whole load of random numbers now, and they'd be just as good as the ones that you get from a retail platform, if you do. With DCG, what we're trying to do is firstly help manufacturers understand the metrics that matter for their market, their channel, for the retailers their work. Some of them are consistent, some of them... We want to help them understand those metrics and then to help them ingrain them within their ways of working and their decision making processes so that they can then use them to create competitive advantage on the digital shelf and on the physical shelf as well because at the end of the day, that's what we're here to do.
So, what we're trying to do with all of the measures is get manufacturers to a point where they can create competitive advantage [inaudible 00:08:54], and whatever data you've got, that's what you should use. We always want more data. We always want more measures. We did a benchmark quite recently where we asked manufacturers, what additional data points would you like in digital commerce? And they listed 53 additional measures. Now, if we gave manufacturers all of the data, they would just be blinded by that additional data and they get lost. But much rather, manufacturers pick six or seven core metrics are really important to them in their business. Some lagging, some leading, and be really good at measuring and monitoring that and taking decisions based on than collecting lots and lots of data that they then do nothing with.
Lauren Livak:
So from a leading metrics perspective, so you talked about how it can help showcase the future health of the business, which is something that in commerce changes quickly and you really need to be able to monitor. So let's dive into one of the leading metrics. So average weight of purchase. Can you talk about what it is, how brands can use it, and any kind of examples of what you've seen from a measurement perspective?
Gregor Murray:
So average weight of purchase isn't a new metric. So that's the first thing to say. It's been around for a long time. Cantar have been monitoring and measuring each one of their core measures for a very, very long time, long before I was in DCG. So most manufacturers should know what way to purchase is, but it is effectively a measure of how many units and how much customers spent every time. Now, you would assume that there's a minimum of one unit, and therefore whatever your price is, that's it. But actually some people will buy two or three or five or 10, some will spend $1, some will spend $15 and so it's an average of all of those different transactions over a certain time period. How much have people actually bought in terms of weight or in terms...? The reason why this is an important metric to measure and to report is because while it will fluctuate over time, we'll have periods of seasonality.
We will have periods of bits. Over time if it's moving forwards, if it's moving upwards, you are creating a more healthy brand, you're creating a much more sustainable business for your organization. So what we want to do is start tracking it, look at it historically, look for the periods of seasonality and training, and then set goals for it going forward, and then start using all of the levers that are available to us points in order to start trying to draw that growth. So my average way to purchase [inaudible 00:11:40] is three, and I want to get to four. There are certain things that I do, so I can start looking at premiumization because if I can premiumize my product, I can make more in return from it. Therefore, my average weight packages increases. If I can add different features to my product, like personalization for example, again, that can help increase my average weight packages. I can do [inaudible 00:12:11], I can do cross-selling, do cross category activity that again will increase my average weight to purchase.
There are things that I can do with my media in terms of my shopper journey, in terms of the media that I'm using in order to attract my customers and drive them to a point of purchase. It can increase my average weight of purchase. And effectively what it says is if I can increase my average weight purchase, and for every new customer that I can generate as well, I'm also going to be making more for my business. The average way to purchase as a leading measure is absolutely fantastic in showing me just how strong my business is, but also gives me opportunities to [inaudible 00:12:53] those who are really trying.
Peter Crosby:
So Gregor, another leading metric is average selling price or average transaction numbers. Tell us a little bit more about that and how you've seen brands use that successfully to drive the right behaviors.
Gregor Murray:
So again, average selling price isn't something, well, yeah, average transaction numbers. It's not a new metric. Asda in the UK have been tracking average selling price ASP for a long time. Amazon, it is the number one thing that they measure and that they hold their vendors to. They want to see average selling price progression from all of their vendors over the course of the year. Average selling prices effectively, what's the total amount of money that you have sold divided by the total number of units that you have sold through and it gives you a number. This is the average price at which you have sold every unit that you have sold. And the simple logic is that as long as average selling price is increasing, as long as your costs remain the same, you are making more money, you're creating a more profitable business.
Now, there is a great example of this that I heard from earlier in my career. I won't name the product or the brand that I was working for, but we had a product that we sold 52 weeks of the year in the supermarket trade. We promoted it 12 weeks out of the year, went from £2 to £1 for 12 weeks out of the year. And in those 12 weeks, we sold round about 85% of our volume at a £1. And the remaining sort of 40 weeks out of the year, we sold it for £2 and we sold the remaining 15% of our total volume. So when we looked at the average selling price over the course of the year, it was around one £1.11 for every single unit we were selling. That was our average selling price.
Now, there are things there, and that clearly is not a massively robust or healthy business and unsurprisingly, actually our volume was going backwards and we were making less money and it was becoming more expensive to create the product. So what we did was, and this is going to sound counter intelligent, but we put in more promotions. So we still stuck with the £1 activity for 12 weeks out of the year, but the following year we put in some £2-3 activity. We put in some save 25% activity, we put in some save a third activity, and as a result, we started selling more volume on deal, but at a higher price point. And so over the course of the year, we managed to shift from 85% at £1 and 15% at full price to about 60% at £1 around about 30ish percent and on other price points, and then about 10% at £2.
But what that did was it moved our average selling price up from one £1.11 to around about £1.26. Now that's a 15P increase, which actually because our cost of goods remain the same is incremental profit for the retailer, it's incremental profit for the brand that I was working for and you would think, the customers weren't like that 'cause they're going to be paying more. Well yes, but they can also buy it on deal more often throughout the year and because of that, they're actually happy too. So everybody wins and everybody makes a bit more money. And that's the benefit of something like tracking average selling price and you can do it in digital commerce as well. You don't have to sell everything at full price or on promotion. You can add in additional things into your sort of total product mix that people will pay more for.
Personalization is a wonderful example of it. Lots of manufacturers have done standard product but with a sleeve on it that you can print somebody's name on it there. There's a great one from Toblerone where you can print your dad's name on it for Father's Day and stuff like that. Quality Street do it as well where you can personalize on your tub of chocolates with somebody's name. The standard tub is like £3 or £4 at Christmas, but the personalized one's £15. Yeah, that's a massive premium for added value of personalization, and that is increasing your average selling price. And so there's lots of things that you can do in digital commerce that you can't do in a normal physical store, but because we can offer that sort of flexibility, that sort of mission flexibility for our customers, you can charge a premium for it and the customer will still be happy to pay it.
Lauren Livak:
I'm getting custom Oreos made for my wedding, so that personalization really sticks out for me and I'm willing to pay the price for it.
Gregor Murray:
Yeah, I mean when my sister got married, we had personalized M&M's done for and you know what, they're not cheap, but they were great and people talked about them. There's lots of opportunities to do stuff like that in digital commerce. We need to move past this mindset of we're selling product in digital shelf and digital commerce and start moving towards actually we're satisfying consumer needs, customer missions, customer journeys. How do we go about doing that in the best possible way? And if we can satisfy that sort of need mission journey, you can deviate from the price point that you would ordinarily offer in a physical store, and as a result, you can increase your average selling price.
But then there's also things that you can do with multi buys. There's things you can do with your media to drive more premium traffic to different locations and different sites. There's lots of things that you can do in order to progress your average selling price, but the first thing you've got to do is decide what it is at the moment and then decide where you want to get to and then start working to make it happen.
Peter Crosby:
That's so interesting. Oh, sorry.
Lauren Livak:
Go ahead, Peter. No, go ahead.
Peter Crosby:
Yeah, you talked about Oreos. Let me in. No, I'm kidding.
Lauren Livak:
Okay.
Peter Crosby:
Thank you. No, I was just thinking about the power of a metric to unleash creativity because once you choose the metric, decide then where you want it to go, then the conversation becomes about what are all the ways in which we could pull that off and it might bring solutions or like you were talking about different ways of approaching it to the four that wouldn't have come up if you'd started with I want to do a discount. But instead, if you're thinking about what is the end point that we want, which is this isn't like a revelation that metrics do this, but it's a really compelling way to create creativity cross-functionally even because everyone's focused on the same thing and that can cause I would imagine a lot of cross-functional alignment that you might not get without that being the point.
Gregor Murray:
I completely agree with you. I mean the last 10, 15 years of most manufacturers, maybe a bit longer than that, they've been hugely focused on supply efficiencies. So drive supply efficiencies as a way of creating incremental profitability and that's worked. But 15 years on, there's only so many more supply efficiencies that we can create. We've got to get to a point where we are back to creating demand again and using created demand to increase profitability through increasing the average price at which we are selling our products. So I completely agree with you. If you take average selling price or a lot of digital native brand use customer lifetime value as a brilliant leading measure, it does create a huge amount of creativity and creativity of thought of, okay, this is where we are at the moment. This is where we want to get to. How do we go about closing that gap? What are the levers that are available to us? How do we go about attracting more customers? How do we convert more customers once they're on a retailer website? How do we create more loyalty?
And when you start looking at the opportunities in those perspectives, there's a lot of things that you can do that actually if you're just stuck in that supply efficiency or that we've got to do a promotion in order to drive volume mindset, you're never going to achieve.
Lauren Livak:
From a average selling price perspective, when you're looking at that metric, would you suggest that people look at it by retailer or as a whole for each SKU? I'm just curious, what do you think would be more impactful?
Gregor Murray:
Well, average selling price is one that almost every retailer you can get to. Okay. Now, yes, there are still some retailers who don't break out digital commerce sales from their total retail sales, and that's frustrating, but that's just the situation that we're in. But with every retailer, we should know the total volume that we've sold. We should know the total value that we've sold it into them at or that they've sold it out at. So everybody can track average selling price and everybody can then go, okay, well we've worked out and it's $5.19. How do we get to $6? How do we get it to $6.50? How do we get it to $7.50? What is our plan? What's our map? And at that point, if you are progressing your average selling price and your cost of goods go up, well, they're going to compensate for each other.
Now okay, cost of goods increases are difficult. The difficult conversations nobody really wants to have them with retailers at all. But if you've shown them that you are making them more money already by progressing your average selling price with them, and then you go into them and say, "By the way, our cost of goods is increased," we've already made them more money. We're going to carry on that journey of increasing our average selling price with you. Our cost of goods are going up, but we're currently at $7. We want to get to $8, we want to get to $9, we want to get to $10. This is how we're going to do it. These are our plans, this is what we're introducing. We're bringing out packs. They're going to be our higher price point. We're creating bundles, we're creating virtual bundles. There's so many things that we can do in order to increase that average selling price that don't necessarily involve putting through a cost of goods increase.
So it can create collaboration with the retailers as well. It can create a huge amount of engagement with retailers and at the end of the day, that's what we want to do. We want to create engagement with them, sell product to our customers, gain competitive advantage, whatever you want to call that. That's what we're here to do. So not only can it unlock creativity within a manufacturer, it can unlock creativity in that relationship with the retailer as well. Every manufacturer should be able to do it with every single retailer. I would suggest doing at a market level as well or a brand level as well, because you can, and you can set different targets, you can set different challenges.
Some brands are going to want to increase your average selling price a lot more quickly than on others. Some retailers you might want to prioritize for your investment as well. But it's a great measure to show you exactly where you should be putting investment, where you should be putting resources, where you've got opportunities and where you don't. Where you got great relationships that are collaborative and which ones aren't. And it gets different functions within an organization, talking to each other, working with each other in order to create solutions that are going to push that average selling price forward.
Lauren Livak:
We talked a lot about being your retailer's best partner, and I mean, this is a great opportunity to find mutual profitability on both ends for both the retailer and the brand to be successful and have a win-win situation. So that's a great call out for that metric. Gregor, you talked about customer lifetime value as another really great metric. Let's talk about that. So it's more and more important these days, especially with the world that we live in and just the nature of the economy. So how are brands looking at that metric and how is it helping them?
Gregor Murray:
So a lot of digitally native brands focus around customer lifetime values. So if you look at Harry's and Dollar Shave Club and Pastor Evangelist and some of the really big digitally native, FMCG CPG style product offerings. Customer lifetime value shows you how long are people sticking with our brand. How frequently are they purchasing? How much are they buying every time they do? How much is our acquisition cost for them? And then how much are we making from them on an ongoing basis? With CPG and FMCG, the way that it has historically been done through retail stores, it's very difficult to get to that metric. While you got loyalty data for some of the big supermarket chains and they've got loyalty cards and what have you. It's very hard to actually build up a view of how much a customer is worth, an individual customer is worth to you, how much it's cost you to acquire them, how frequently they're buying, things like that.
But there are other measures that are available to manufacturers that can get to a very close approximation. Again, Cantar have been measuring this for a long time. If you take your average weight to purchase and your frequency number from Cantar and multiply the two together, you effectively get a customer lifetime value over a set period of time. If I know that my customers buy £5 on average every time they shop and they shop 3, 4, 5 times a year, I can work out what the value of a customer is to me over the course of a year. If I then know that I'm getting £25 back from them in every year, but it's costing me £30 to acquire them, I'm going to be losing money. That's my marketing cost. I need to do something about my marketing. I need to do something in order to create more value out of my customer.
If I know that it's costing me £2 to acquire that customer and I'm then getting £30 return from them because I've multiplied my average weight of purchase and my frequency together, that's a good relationship. And that's something that you can then say, okay, we are going to set a target around that. At the moment it's 35, we want to get to 36, then 37, then 42, then 48. What is our plan to go about doing that? How are we going to increase frequency? How are we going to increase our average weight of purchase? We can then start looking at different levers that come underneath each one of those different measures, and we can start looking at how we can influence them and how we can drive more traffic? How we can drive more conversion? How we can drive more loyalty, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So these are fantastic measures for looking at our business, looking at the robustness of our business, and then saying to ourselves, okay, what levers can we pull in order to make this even more robust? And it doesn't matter where you start from, is the other great thing. There is no, you've got to start at 10, if you don't start at 10, then your business is disaster. It doesn't matter. Just start and then start thinking about, okay, we've set a target for where we want to be. How can we go about influencing it? What levers can we pull? We're going to bring in the guys from marketing, bringing the guys from supply chain, bringing the guys from finance and HR and legal and everybody, get them all in a room and then start talking about what you can do in order to go from where you are to where you want to be at the end of the year to where you want to be at the end of next year to where you want to be at the end of the year after and then start working through it.
You get to a point where for the CSMART, for example, yes, there are lots of different measures in them. Some of it are leading, some of them are lagging, but all of them can work together if your organization chooses to work together to influence those measures. And when they do start working together, you start building momentum, you start building cross-functional working, and you start building competitive advantage.
Peter Crosby:
And Gregor, to that point, do you find that when you are brought in, is it with an awareness that the organization wants to build these muscles or is it often for, there's a metric I'm not happy with? What do we do about what? And then what do you often find that, how to drive that organizational shift through this work? I'm just curious about where this usually starts and when the framework comes into use.
Gregor Murray:
It usually starts from a point of confusion. It usually starts from a point of we can't see the wood for the trees. We've got so many different measures, so many different metrics and what we want to try and do is consolidate them and pull them together and use them to engage across our business. And what most manufacturers in my experience have tended to do is pick a lot of different metrics and try and influence all of them individually as opposed to picking one or two that collectively all of the measures and metrics can influence. So yeah, average selling price as an example, or customer lifetime value, all of the different measures and metrics that set within CSMART will positively or negatively influence customer lifetime value or average selling price. But it's very easy to engage an organization around one metric, two or three. It's very difficult to get an organization engaged around five or 10 or 20 different measures.
It's like with your personal development plan when you work for a manufacturer. If you are targeted to go in your own sales, if you are targeted to go from 10 million in sales to 11 million in sales, and you get your bonus for hitting 11 million in sales, you know what it is you've got to do, get to 11 million in sales. If you are told that you have to do X, Y, Z, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H in order to get your bonus, but if you don't do all of them, you're not going to get it. It becomes really difficult in order to achieve your goal and it becomes a disincentive more than an incentive.
One or two very clear metrics drives positive action on all of the ones that influence that metric. So what we tried to do with CSMART is bring clarity. First and foremost it is lots of measures, lots of different levels of maturity in different markets. How can we show everybody that it doesn't matter what you can measure, you can measure something and then secondly, whatever it is you can measure, you can use to positively influence this one overarching leading measure that shows you how robust your business is, but then can easily engage across your organization.
Lauren Livak:
When you put something like the CSMART framework to work in an organization, what do you suggest as the cadence to review the data? Because I know that's also another challenge where sometimes there's a dashboard and they check it weekly or biweekly or monthly, or what do you suggest or what have you seen to be the most impactful cadence for reviewing the data, assessing and then making changes?
Gregor Murray:
I mean, that comes down to the organization in itself. Some organizations are hugely data focused in which, because they're going to want to be on it all of the time, others lesser. So some measures you can get at a huge cadence if you want measures from Amazon, you can get them minute by minute if that's what you want. Although I don't know anybody that makes decisions based on Amazon data minute by minute. But if you want to look at it weekly or monthly or quarterly, you can do. I think it comes down to the different levels within the organizations and also what challenges your organization faces. If you've got supply constraints, for example, you probably want to measure stuff more frequently than you would do if you didn't have supply constraints. If you've got great relationships with your customers, all of them, which would be utopia for me, then you don't need to measure as frequently, you do if you have retailers where your sales are going backwards, your distribution is declining, whatever your availability's mission.
So it comes down to the organization. But what I would say is for this to work, it needs to be cross-functional. So you need to bring together all of the people into a room that you need in order to be able to make decisions and action those decisions in your accounts. And you need to do it at the frequency that is going to be relevant to your organization. As a minimum monthly for that big cross-functional team but actually, ideally, I would like to see the senior leadership team within an organization be reviewing that [inaudible 00:34:30] metric, that leading metric on a monthly basis and reviewing progress towards a target, and then filtering down actions that are then discussed and implemented either on a fortnightly or a weekly basis by the appropriate people across the organization.
That sounds like a lot of hard work for a lot of manufacturers, I do appreciate that. But if you want to create that step change growth that most people expect from digital commerce but actually has started to slow down quite a lot recently, it's going to require that level of effort. And I was talking to one manufacturer a few weeks ago, and they were saying to me what they're seeing in their market is a slowdown in a lot of different metrics, traffic and conversion in particular. And ordinarily when traffic starts going downwards, conversion would go up because the core consumer that you are keeping is typically more loyal. They are going to be converting more often and usually a higher value. But what they were seeing is that actually both were going backwards and they were really concerned. And with something like CSMART, if they had been using it for a period in the run-up to that, they should have caught it before it became a problem.
Engaged cross-functionally, created an action plan, gone away and implemented it and the impact of that trend would've been a lot less than it took in order to catch it, to become aware of it, to discuss it to agree what they were going to do about it, to then go away and implement it, by which time the problem has cascaded and they've lost a lot more than they could have done. So doing it more frequently prevents negative as well as accelerates positive. If you do it less frequently, then actually, you'll still hopefully get the positive, but if you do get into a negative, it will exacerbate that issue. So more frequently means you can cut the negative shorter, quicker.
Peter Crosby:
Do you find that the users of the framework and the folks that you work with tend to start trying this out at kind of, let's pick a market, let's pick a brand, see how this works, and hopefully they pull it off and they become sort of stars and then they share that knowledge out across the organization?
Gregor Murray:
Yeah, I mean, there's always an early adopter with everything. There'll always be one, when we're talking through stuff like this and with lots of the stuff that we do as an organization. There'll always be somebody that kind and goes, "Oh yeah, no, I get it. I can see how this would work for me. I can see how it'll work for my organization. We'll go away. We'll implement it, and then we'll share it back with the rest of the organization." Digital commerce is about test line, it's about experimentation and with everything, whether it is a measures framework or a new way of presenting content on Amazon or Alibaba or Walmart, you have to experiment. You have to trial it. You have to see whether it works and then if it does, scale it and scale it quickly and if it doesn't, take the learnings from it and iterate again and do the next thing and move on to the next experiment.
So yeah, I don't expect that I'm going to present this to some organization and the next day they say, "Right, we're rolling across every single one of our markets. We want you to stand up. We're having an all hands meeting and you're going to present 10,000 people and explain CSMART to them, and then they're just going to go away and do it," because it wouldn't work. I would be 100% positive that it wouldn't work. But I'm also 100% positive that CSMART will work if implemented in the right way and that's the approach that we take to it is find some people, let them test it out, let them get used to it, then let them take it to their colleagues and explain how it works and how it's benefited from them and on what they need to do and then let them iterate it and iterate it and iterate it and iterate it.
And the thing that I really look forward to is at some point in time, I'm going to go to a conference and a manufacturer it is going to stand up and start talking to me about when they implemented their leading measure and how they've gone about doing it and I'm going to sit there and know that it came through us to them. They've gone away, they've run with it, and now they're so proud of it, they're standing up talking about it. That's success for me, and I really look forward to that day.
Peter Crosby:
Well, that's what a tremendous sort of vision map to have for what you've developed here and I'd love to have you back when that happens with that customer to talk it through, because I really do think when you're able to conglomerate learnings into something that can help people organize their thinking in a way of working, it's a cool addition to the industry. And so I want to direct our listeners to dcg.ai/csmart, C-S-M-A-R-T, and that there can find more details on the framework and play around with it. So those of you that were leaning forward, well, I guess not forward if you have AirPods in, but are really listening closely, I want to know more about that. Again, it's dcg.ai/csmart. Gregor, thank you so much for joining us and sharing this thought leadership with us. We really appreciate it.
Gregor Murray:
It's been an absolute pleasure. I loved doing it.
Peter Crosby:
Thanks again to Gregor for sharing DCGs framework. For more research and guidance, become a member of the DSI by going to digitalshelfinstitute.org. Thanks for being part of our community.
