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Transcript
Our transcripts are generated by AI. Please excuse any typos and if you have any specific questions please email info@digitalshelfinstitute.org.
Peter Crosby (00:00):
Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age. Hey everyone. Peter Crosby here at the Digital Shelf Institute. Technologists who work on D2C and retailer.com sites spend a lot of time doing things like building personas, creating customer journey maps and service blueprints, and conducting usability studies. But if you're a brand selling your products on a retailer's platform, you don't need to worry about that, right? After all, you don't control the user experience or do you? Well, it's true that brands don't control the user interface of retailer e-commerce platforms, their product, content, product, data, and advertising interacts with it to create a unique user experience and ultimately shapes the path to purchase. This is an audio rebroadcast of a webinar focused on just that, led by Lauren Livak Gilbert with guest experts, Amanda Wolff, board member and contributor at First Movr and CRO at Jenda, and Bailie Duncan Lee, product owner at Jackson Family Wines.
Lauren Livak Gilbert (01:15):
Thank you so much for being here today. I'm excited to talk with Amanda and Bailie about this topic. We are calling this the X Factor, and we are going to be talking about user experience and how to think about the consumer experience as you're working through content, whether that's on your retailer sites or your direct to consumer sites. And as all of us know who live in the e-commerce world, content is so important, but also the experience the consumer goes through is incredibly important. So we have some great examples that we'll walk through today. A few quick housekeeping items. This is being recorded. We will share it out afterwards by email if you're interested or interested in sharing it with anyone. If you have any questions, please feel free to throw them in the chat or in the q and a, and we will make sure that we either get to them during or at the end of the webinar.
(02:07):
If you need anything during the webinar, I will be moderating the chat so I can help there as well. So if we go to the next slide, just a quick intro for those of you who I do not know, my name is Lauren Livak Gilbert. I lead the Digital Shelf Institute. If you are a member, thank you for being a member. If you are not, hopefully you become a member after seeing all of this great content, and I'm super excited to be joined by Amanda and Bailie. So I will ask Amanda to give us a quick intro before we kick off.
Amanda Wolff (02:46):
Oh, there we go. I'm unmuted. Hi everybody. Yeah, so I am Amanda Wolfe. I am an dual capacity today, I'm Chief Revenue officer of Agenda, but I'm also a board member and contributor of First Mover. And I'm super excited to geek out about my background and all the things that I love about content and all the wonderful things about e-comm, but also I have a background in D two C and I know that my colleague today Bailie does as well. And in my background in D two C, I spent a lot of time learning about user experience and my partner is also user experience director and spent a long time running a business and user experience. And so I ruminate on user experience all the time. I kind of live and breathe that I hear it downstairs when he's in meetings. And so it's kind of always on my mind. And so it's been this little thorn in the back of my brain, why don't we think about user experience more when we think about retailer? And so Lauren was kind enough to let me bring this topic to you guys and I hope you like it and that you can maybe apply some of the things that we think about in user experience to some of your work. So that's why I'm here.
Lauren Livak Gilbert (04:05):
Great. And we have an awesome brand here with us as well. So Bailie, give us an introduction.
Bailie Duncan (04:10):
Hi everybody, my name's Bailie Duncan. I'm the lead MarTech product owner for Jackson Family Wines. If you're not familiar with Jackson Family Wines per se, you might know some of our brands like Kendall, Jackson and Rema we're very, very active in the retailer space, which is where I originally started in e-commerce for the company. But for the last two and a half years, I've been mostly focused on our direct to consumer business. And bringing both of those learnings back and forth to those different areas of our omnichannel strategy is really, really important to me. So excited to dive in.
Lauren Livak Gilbert (04:44):
Great, thank you ladies. And if we go to the next slide, just in terms of what we are going to cover today, we are going to define what user experience is because everyone might not be familiar with it and it'll be interesting to understand. Do you have someone in your organization who's dedicated to it, common deliverable in terms of the technology retailer e-commerce, so user experience on retailer sites, as well as some of the D two C sites. And my favorite part is the actual example of customer journey. So Amanda and Bailie are going to walk through what those could look like and how you could potentially make some changes and then key takeaways and questions at the end. So without further ado, Amanda, take us away.
Amanda Wolff (05:26):
Yeah. Okay. So what is user experience? So user experience is, and I've got references throughout this by the way, to Nielsen Norman Group. So for those of you guys who maybe have never really thought about user experience before or have maybe just barely heard about it, I highly encourage you guys to Google Nielsen Norman Group, go to their website, tons and tons and tons of free resources there for anyone who's deciding to dip in their toes a little bit in the waters of ux, it's really great resource to tap into. Highly encourage you guys to check out Nielsen Norman Group. So UX encompasses all aspects of an end user's interactions with your company, your services, and your products. And the reason I like this definition so much is there's a lot of myths around ux. A lot of people think of UX as a tech product, and really UX goes above and beyond technology.
(06:20):
Remember, it's all aspects of an end user's interactions online and offline. I know my partner used to always talk about an example from Kraft Heinz when Hez ketchup move to when they started producing for, I think it was for Burger King in the drive-throughs. They started looking at the ways that ketchup packets were used and not just squeeze ketchups, but also people were dipping their things in the ketchup packets. And so they came up with that ketchup packet where you could squeeze it and you could also dip it at the same time. And so he was like, that's a really great example of really thoughtful user experience, right? Because it's a product that's being used in interesting different ways based on customer use cases. And so even though that's not a tech product, that's a really great example of a user experience. And so it's interesting and I think it's important to think beyond just the technology.
(07:17):
The other thing that I think is often confusing about user experience is that it's just pretty designs. We often talk about that as UI or user interfaces or UX design, and it's really user experience goes beyond just design. We're going to talk about things like user research or user studies, and that's actually research. It's almost like many focus groups that you conduct with customers, and that really doesn't have anything to do with design interfaces at all. The other thing is usability. So usability again is a technology thing, and that's really about the user and how they interact with your product. It's really not about user experience itself. And really all those things add up together to create a good user experience. So UX isn't the same as usability or user interfaces and really think about encompassing all of those interactions online and offline. When you think about user experience, the other thing is that UX combines both form and function and really when a lot of organizations that specialize in really good design talk about form plus function, my ex-husband's an architect.
(08:34):
And so form plus function comes into play a lot when we think about architecture. And it's not surprising that in the technology space, we use the phrase architecture all the time, and it's because form plus function comes into play with technology and architecture as well. And on one end of the spectrum, we have the apples and the Googles where it's very simplistic, one little search box on Google, very form driven. It's very simplistic. And on the other end of the spectrum, we have the Amazons where it's obviously so much function and maybe not a lot in the way of form, not a lot of beautiful design happening there, but it's really, and some might argue against me on that, but there is a lot that's combined here to help drive that user experience. And a user's going to interact with that in a variety of different ways, but their overall experience is going to be driven partly by that design choice.
(09:34):
Now, at its core, UX is a practice that's going to involve intentional processes for a few core areas. The first is content. And by content I don't just mean PDP content, which is my background and passion of course, but it's all of the things that are chosen to be included on that. In this case website, it's all of the stuff that goes into what we choose to communicate and include on our technology and on our website. Then it's how we organize all that content. So does the advertisement goes here, does the navigation go here? Does the copy go here? What imagery goes here? And sort of like the page structure and all of that navigation, everything that's combining together and how we organize that content. Then it's shaping desired interactions. So it's actually being intentional about what interactions we want to have happen around the organization of that content. So think about those three things because that's going to come up a little bit later as we talk about we retailer e-commerce. And I'm going to hand it over to Bailie now because for those of you guys who have maybe never experienced UX before, or some of you guys, you might've experienced it for the first time in D two C if you have direct to consumer sites within your businesses. So Bailie, can you take it from here?
Bailie Duncan (11:06):
Absolutely. Thank you, Amanda. So it's really important, as you can see on the slide, a lot of CPG manufacturers who do have direct to consumer websites have built a customized user experience as part of their product. And we have technology teams, and we even have, we're currently hiring for a UX designer to be ingrained in our development both for our direct to consumer websites and then aid in our retailer strategy. So just to talk specifically about our direct to consumer business, a few years ago, I think we're on year three of this, decided that we needed to be more agile in our direct consumer e-commerce strategy. And so we started evaluating it and we decided to switch platforms, get onto a platform that we could be more agile and be more develop faster to allow ourselves to adapt to the ever evolving e-commerce ecosystem. And so we had multiple different ways that we wanted to tackle that.
(12:12):
Initially we thought that we could do this sort of multi-brand approach to where similar to websites like Oshkosh, Carter, skip Hop, et cetera, to where they have that you can jump between the different banners. There's a lot of cross-selling and things like that. We thought that that was going to be the way that we wanted to take this strategy, but unfortunately when we looked at it, we were hindering our ability to give our consumers that really customized experience of recreating, visiting the winery in person. It's so important because the wineries have a sense of place. We have a sense of wanting you to feel involved and loved and with us. And so we needed to lean into that. And so we shifted our strategy to, while we're still using the same code base that our developers and our development partners have written to allow all of these different websites to benefit from the additional development we do, we're giving our business users the ability to really customize and control each brand site to give that desired experience.
Lauren Livak Gilbert (13:23):
All right, time for a poll. We love our polls here on our DSI webinars, so would love to get a sense from the people on the webinar today. Do you have D two C? We will be covering D two C and retailer, but just to get a sense of where we are on the map. So if you could revisit your screen and put in a vote for the poll. Looks like we are getting a lot of responses. I am going to close the poll in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and okay, 64% say yes, they do have D two C 36% do not. So it looks like we have a good majority of people who are focused on D two C, which is great context for us as we continue to share out our content. So thanks everyone.
Bailie Duncan (14:22):
Got to get myself off mute. So customer personas, this is so important because customer personas are really how you can start thinking about customer personas and CPGs, like all of us included, can learn a lot from UX teams and their methodologies. Amanda and I are going to talk through a few of those now. But first we wanted to start with personas. Customer personas often remit, often a remit of UX teams but are broadly used throughout the organization. You can create these fictional characters that represent your target audiences for products or services in order to help you help internal teams empathize with the customers and how they're making their decisions. Direct to consumer websites and retailer websites often target vastly different customer personas. As I mentioned earlier, we recognize the need for a customized visual experience for each DTC website understanding that different customer personas would interact with our sites, but really it's beyond just the visual side.
(15:28):
You also have the experience. That's why we're here in the wine industry. Club members are super, super important to us to where they're essentially subscriptions for wineries and we have more than 4,000 for the Kendall Jackson website. We have more than 4,000 club members account for 55% of our total sales on that website. But if we look at our order count, it's our regular non-club members that are the 55% of our total orders. That's vastly different personas. If you're looking on the highest level, we can get even more granular if you wanted to. And that highlights the importance of ensuring that users in each group have the look and feel, have the feeling of that their experience on the site is valuable. Here on the screen, you can see two of our different websites. These are both, again, you're going to have some look and feel that's the same because we are using the same code, but the way that we talk about the products are different on kj.com versus your wine store, which is we have a lot of our brands on there.
(16:31):
It's our way to bring consumers in that maybe aren't dedicated to that loyalty to that one brand. And the way that we do product discovery and how you get to what you're shopping for is very, very different on those two different websites on kj.com. Usually the shopper there, they've purchased KJ before or they're discovering kj. And we have our tier, we have our vintners reserve, we have our stature, we have that more speaking to the different tiers of the product versus your wine store. You can't talk to the tiers of the product. Usually people are on this net new journey of white wine, red wine, what can I find out about it? And we use different product descriptions, different PDP information. We have videos of our education team talking about the wine, and that's so important as far as bringing the consumer to add that product to the cart is meeting them where they're at.
Amanda Wolff (17:26):
So the next tool in the user experience toolkit, I'm going to jump in and talk about, and I alluded to that earlier, it's user testing and essentially it's research. So usability tests are one of the chief remits of a lot of UX professionals. And they, depending on the size of the UX team in an organization, there may be dedicated researchers who are part of the organization. I've done usability, usability tests myself and conducted them. There are a lot of different formats and styles of different tests that you can conduct. Some are more just conversational. Some are actually watching users navigating different technological products, but it creates ultimately the opportunity to uncover problems in different design challenges and then help the organization understand better ways that you can craft your properties and design the technology in a way that helps. In this case, an e-commerce helps customers shop the way that they want to shop and buy the way that they want to buy.
(18:29):
And this is one of my favorites and one that we're going to spend a lot of time on in this particular webinar. And it's one that I think has a lot of application in retailer e-commerce and it's customer journey maps. So customer journey mapping is a process, and you can use it in a lot of different aspects beyond just e-commerce, but it's a process that provides a visualization around different customer experiences when customers are trying to accomplish a goal. And so it allows you as an organization to really uncover those moments where customers are encountering frustrations or where they're experiencing delightful moments with different interactions throughout their experience. And so you're able to address those moments of pain or really elevate those moments of delight by finding those opportunities to elevate or improve those experiences. And those journeys are really, you can't know what you don't know. And so it's really the opportunity to understand more about your customer. And I think this is an area where we have a lot of room to improve in our business. I think we all know that there's problems, but until you really start digging in and really looking at these at a granular level, you really don't know again what you don't know.
(19:48):
The next on the list, and this again is one where I think we have a lot of opportunity to learn from our UX counterparts is service blueprints. So where the customer journey maps really focus on the customer experience and mapping that, what this does is it kind of layers that customer journey and it layers in the organizational backend, front stage actions, backstage actions and any support processes that need to happen within your organization to improve that customer journey. So it really focuses on your organization and how you can fix those customer journeys. And I know especially for retailer, you might be saying, well, that's on them, right? That's for them to fix. And we'll talk about ways that you can think about that even though they own the tech stack. But especially with D two C, that's a really clear cut opportunity for e-comm for service blueprints to be done. But even in retailer, this is a really clear opportunity for us to be able to partner with our retailers and also work in our own organization to be able to fix some of these broken journeys.
(21:02):
And again, just like in D two C, all of the major online retailers have created their own user experiences and they've done it intentionally. We know just from content and from syndication that retailers have different requirements, they're leveraging different assortments, they have omnichannel versus maybe pure play. In-store dynamics content requirements are very different. I can talk at length about that if you ever want to. I can talk until I'm blue in the face about that. User interfaces are very different and interaction designs. So because they're trying to build these intentionally to differentiate from each other, it's sometimes easy to assume that they've got it under control, right? They got it. We don't need to mess with it because they've got the tech. But unlike in D two C, and remember this chart or this kind of three-pronged thing that I talked about related to UX from earlier, unlike in D two C retailer e-comm sites rely on you as a brand for a key component of their sites.
(22:08):
They're relying on you for a lot of that content. Now they're organizing that content and they're driving a lot of the interaction design around how they want users on their sites to interact with the content. But the content itself be that the advertising be that the product details, not just the detail pages, but even the products themselves that are being fed through product attributes or through the products that you feed through Salsify, all of that content is being fed in a lot of ways through you. So it's really important that you are a critical partner in thinking not just about that one myopic view of the product content that you send, but also the overall user experience that you're helping shape. And also unlike in D two C retailers are, yes, they're driving the interactions and they're shaping their interaction design, but they're doing it in the context of all products agnostically they want to elevate.
(23:16):
Now, maybe some might argue that they've got their favorite products based on who's spending the most with advertising or private label, and that's absolutely the case of course. But in general, they're not necessarily creating a hierarchy of products. You have to compete with each other. There's a layer of competition that's happening in the ecosystem by nature in e-commerce that's happening. That is not the case in D two C. And so there's a very different competitive landscape that's creating a lot of additional conflict for the users by nature around those interactions. So SEO as just a practice is not something that D two C really is a problem, right? You're not seeing Bailie trying to trump her own products with SEO on her own site. She may have her own levers that she can pull to make sure that her top product is ranked top in her own search algorithm on her site where she can force rank her own products.
(24:27):
But in the case of a retailer site, you're competing against everybody else to get your product ranked at the top. You're competing against products in other categories to outbid even in some cases tangential categories through advertising. So we're going to talk a lot about this in a little bit here related to some of these broken journeys. So what are the retailers doing to try to remedy some of these situations? One of these is retailer content quality scores. So retailers like Walmart, target, target, they're creating content quality scores as an attempt at ensuring standards around quality and consistency, GS one and image standards. Those are all good examples of ways that retailers and organizations are trying to ensure quality and consistency. And also I think Oliver might even be on this call, shout out to any organizations that are investing in UX and are doing it from the lens of retailer. There are some people who are championing using user experience through the lens of e-commerce, and that's a really good first step. We think that that's amazing and we want to see more of that in our industry. But despite these attempts, the disconnect between brands creating the content and retailers controlling those interactions are still creating a lot of breaks in the journey, and it doesn't take very long for you to run into those yourself. So with that, let's pause for a second and kick it over to Lauren for another poll,
Lauren Livak Gilbert (26:01):
And I'm going to launch the poll here so everybody go back to your screen. But one thing I want to add to that too, Amanda, is I think it's important to understand that these principles that we are talking through, you can also apply if you're a brand through how you create your images or how you think about writing your content. So there's a level of control that you have and then there's a level of influence that you have. And thinking about basic UX and basic design principles like more white space, bigger text, things like that, those are things that are in your control that create a better experience for you. So I think those are the things that you can think of as we're kind of going through and take those nuggets home with you to apply to your strategy. Love that. So back to the poll, does your organization have user experience employees? I'm very interested to hear this one. So if you have not voted, head back to your screen and I am going to close it in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. So it looks like 53% do not, 33% do and 15% I would say this is a bit of what I was expecting. I don't know, Amanda.
Amanda Wolff (27:14):
Yeah, I do. I do. I think it's on point. I do.
Lauren Livak Gilbert (27:17):
And I think if you don't know, ask your creative team or ask an agency partner if you use an agency partner and start talking about things like user experience and understanding how that can influence your overall customer journey.
Amanda Wolff (27:36):
So this is the fun part, and I promise I'm not trying to pick on anyone in this section. So remember, we are trying to learn from our retail partners. We are trying to learn from each other. I think you guys all know that it doesn't take long to hit walls. And so that's really what this section's about. It's starting to explore some of where those common barriers are. And these are really buckets that I tried to group some of those common themes where customer journeys tend to break. And by finding those common themes, it just allows us to start thinking through areas where we can start rallying our internal colleagues in those service blueprints and rallying our retailer partners around these common themes to try to start fixing some of these problems. So the first one we're going to talk about is omnichannel. One of the reasons why omnichannel shopping causes some of these breaks is that retailers are really including a variety of fulfillment options for customers pick up in store delivery from store shipped to home.
(28:45):
That creates a lot of complexity around assortment. And it means that things like aisle numbers, things like advertising can really throw off a lot of variables, especially when things go in stock and out of stock when you have Instacart coming into a store and picking stuff. So I know Walmart has a really complicated system called no picks, where maybe something goes out of stock online once it becomes in stock in store to prevent certain things from happening where people are in store and they try to find something and it shows that it's out of stock in store. So there's lots of complexity related to availability in particular. And so I don't want to oversimplify this, but I think I've got an example that I really love this story because it just shows the complexity of something that in theory should be simple, but it's really not.
(29:48):
So I'm in a Walmart, I'm at my local Walmart by my cottage that I like to go to, and in a rural town that I have a place and my partner, he's at home and he's working on a project at our property and he texts me, he knows I'm at Walmart, and he's like, Hey, I need crown staples for a project. And I was like, what the heck are crown staples? And he sends me a picture of them and says, they're in aisle, blah, blah, blah. Alright, so I go over to aisle blah, blah, blah, and it's like plumbing. It's not at all staples. So I was like, okay, clearly either you looked at something wrong or whatever. And so I looked and it didn't look like it was the same aisle. I got a different aisle also, and it also was not the same aisle.
(30:34):
So we were seeing different things. So once we got our act together and realized, okay, we were looking at two different stores, we got our store zip codes squared away, and we were looking at the right thing. One of the things that I realized is I was Googling, not Googling, but I was on the site and I was looking for crown staples. Notice that Arrow was advertising their regular staples instead of the crown staples. So by advertising the regular staples, it made it harder for me to find the crown staples that my partner was trying to send me. So already they advertising is trying to throw me off the track and trying to get me to buy the regular staples on the site when I'm trying to find the crown staples. So I finally get to the aisle number where it's actually supposed to be, couldn't find it in store, checked with the associate, they couldn't find the item either, but confirmed it was in stock, ultimately left the store, went to the local hardware store, purchased a totally different brand of Crown Staples. Ultimately Aero was the brand that sold Crown Staples, but I didn't buy those crown staples. So multiple breaks in that journey, were they preventable? In some cases, probably in some cases, maybe not, but which of those were due to brand side? In some cases there were some brand side responsibilities there, and in some cases there were some retailer side gaps. So there's multiple reasons why some of these kinds of things can fail, but if I'm Arrow and I'm selling Crown staples, that might be a journey that I want to be aware of, right?
(32:16):
Okay, here's another one. So another fractured customer journey comes around availability, particularly around three P sellers in marketplaces. So many of you guys know that three P sellers can be a really big pain point, particularly around when they're selling additional packaging configurations or they're selling multipacks or sometimes outdated products, you've already changed the packaging design on. And so that can be really tricky for customers who are trying to purchase maybe a trusted product. And so the retailer packaging changes can particularly add to confusion. So here's an example again on Walmart, when you have variations that often shows up on the site as options, those options appear in search results and are usually tied to different sizes, scents, flavors, et cetera. But when those packaging changes happen, sometimes the way that shows up is it shows up as a change behind that hero image. So for example, the hero image is a totally different product shot than what shows up later in the carousel. And so that creates confusion for me because I don't know what product I'm buying, right? I'm still trying to sort that out. Is it that product? Is it this old packaging? Which one is the new packaging? Which one is the old packaging? I'm not really clear here.
(33:50):
And then sometimes it shows up as an option that says it's available or that there are multiple options to choose from, but in reality there's not even another option to choose from. And so that's really kind of on a retailer side where it's like, it's telling me there's multiple options, but there's really not. So again, it just creates a lot of confusion for the consumer. So at this point, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Bailie, and she's going to talk about some of the fracture journeys that can happen from search and from navigation.
Bailie Duncan (34:24):
Thank you, Amanda. Yes. So search, it can be so painful to find what you're looking for. Sometimes I find myself, I am sure all of y'all do, is of typing things in six different ways to find what you're looking for. Just recently went down a major rabbit hole trying to find a Spider-Man and his amazing friend's comforter for my kid's bed. And it was like you have to be so specific he wants the little one, not the full blown. And so you can often end up with confusing or erroneous results. Here we have the suggested clicking on the suggested women's body wash, but out of the first two, four options, there's two that are very clearly dove. And then you keep scrolling. There's more Dove men's like We clicked on women's body wash. Why are we getting so many of these options right up front?
(35:19):
And maybe that's improper attribution or maybe not knowing what your retailers is using of the fields on your product to search for. We ran across that on our direct to consumer site. We were searching for Chardonnay and we were getting pinot noirs coming up and we're like, this is not what we searched for. We're very specific about our synonyms and things like that. But then it came down to in the product description we were talking about, this is a producer that makes Chardonnay and Pinot noir. So it was surfacing those products incorrectly. And you really have to know what your retailer is searching, what are those attributes that they're scraping in order to present those results. So for products with a lot of variations, that can be very confusing When you're scrolling through, let's say you're a very visual person, you've searched for blonde hair dye, there's this brunette men's, and if you're moving too fast, you may not see that underneath that link, there's three more colors.
(36:19):
I also want to call out that that's a sponsored post. So maybe that plays a little bit into it as well as far as Amanda's note to advertising. But if you're moving fast, you're not going to get somebody risk, somebody not clicking on that because they were very specific about looking for blonde hair dye. And then this one, I love that Amanda curated a lot of these slides. I'm just piggybacking and talking about them. And bug spray things can mean more than one thing. Bug spray is a repellent or insect killer. I like this. It's a little bit spooky for Halloween, but it's actually extremely scary. It is hard to tell what is safe for your kids and pets. There is some of this stuff like that item that's the second from the right. You don't want to spray that on your body. And do you need to be careful about spraying it around your house? Do you need to make sure that kids and pets are out of the room for 30 minutes after using it? There's so much nuance when you're dealing with nickname might not be the right word for bug spray, but it very definitely can mean two different things.
Amanda Wolff (37:26):
So this is definitely a newer area, particularly around ai, and I'm going to cover both Walmart's AI but also rufuss on Amazon. So in this case, I didn't expect to see these products when I clicked on great value blue lava candle, I clicked in here great value blue lava candle, and I did not get a great value blue lava candle. So there's clearly some bumps in the road with AI and trending search suggestions on Walmart, but not just Walmart. Rufuss is still struggling a little bit here too. So first off, I have never searched or bought women's pants at all. So that one really confused me a lot when I saw keep shopping for women's pants on Rufuss. But then secondarily, I was searching for baseboard heaters. I'm still in a search for baseboard heaters. I probably know more about baseboard heaters right now than more humans should. And the first result is actually a wall heater. So a little bit different than a baseboard heater, and that's the first result that Rufus served for me. Now the next one underneath that actually is a baseboard heater. So interesting that Rufus, who's supposed to be surfing, really, really honed single one to two example search results to really narrow that field didn't really get me there.
(38:58):
And also search suggestion confusion. So this is an example where I'm searching for dishwasher, it serves up dishwasher pods right away, but then immediately I'm seeing language like pods, packs, tabs. A lot of brands are using these interchangeably, and this is really kind of like a brand copyrighted term confusion issue. We've got a lot of companies trying to glom onto phrases that consumers are searching for that search suggestions are using, but some of these terms are actually copyright protected and can't be included in titles. And so it becomes pretty confusing. And I'll be curious, especially on Amazon now with dynamic titles using ai, how some of those copyrighted terms are going to really come to play. I mean, we've seen already even in Amazon's example that they talked about, I think it was at Amazon Accelerate, they used a copyrighted term from RayBan and the exact example.
(40:00):
So it's going to be interesting to see how those dynamics titles start playing out and then incomplete attribution. So I was trying to search for gluten-free beer. I talked to Bailie about this one because man, was I frustrated on this one because you can see just typing in gluten-free beer, clearly I was really struggling. So the very first one, I got a gluten reduced IPA kind of close, not quite gluten-free. And to be fair, gluten-free beer is not an easy one. But I did like that I could see filters that Target had available when I did a gluten-free search. They had dietary preferences, so I could do filters based on gluten-free, which was pretty cool. But there's also cut water lime margarita shows up in that search. It's not a beer hard cider, very kind of clear not beer products or surfacing in those searches. So then I did a search for just beer and tried to narrow that down. And then I thought, well, I'll go into the dietary preferences again and just filter those by gluten-free, but then that dietary preferences filter completely is gone once I searched for beer. So that was no longer a capability for me. So it just kind of shows incomplete attribution on both the brand side, but then also retailer limitations around attribution and filters can also make the navigation process really challenging.
Lauren Livak Gilbert (41:34):
And Amanda, one thing to add there. This is close to my heart. As someone who is gluten-free, I struggle to find pretty much anything gluten-free online, but I think it's important to call out. I've had a lot of conversations with brands lately where in their JBP or their joint business planning conversations with retailers, they're bringing things like this up to try and influence the category and influence the taxonomy. And so I bring that up to the brands on the phone because if you're experiencing things like this, and especially for your products in your category, how can you help the retailer and influence the retailer, whether it's large box retailers or smaller ones, having those conversations in JBP and bringing that knowledge about your category is a place to have these conversations.
Amanda Wolff (42:22):
Lauren, I love that, especially around attribution and taxonomy. That is, that's genius. That's a great place to bring that up. Thanks for that suggestion. Really, really good. And yeah, especially gluten-free. I use the example from spices all the time. So many spices are gluten-free and the vast majority of them don't include that as an attribute. So anyway, that's always a good example
Lauren Livak Gilbert (42:46):
Story of my life.
Amanda Wolff (42:48):
So one of the biggest offenders of fractured journeys and also one of the most correctable and is advertising because I think we're all guilty of this in organizations where we are trying to get incremental sales through advertising and we're, our agencies are doing everything that they can to drive incremental revenue at the SKU level all the time. And if that means keywords that you wouldn't normally expect that they can try to get some additional revenues for, they're going to go for it. And we want that, right? We want that roas. Everybody's running after roas, and we totally understand that, right? I'm not shaming here, I came from media, so I get it. I really do. But this is an example for apple cider. Most of us know what apple cider is.
(43:45):
These are four search results, the top four search results on target yesterday for apple cider, and there's not a single apple cider in that search result. And so there's a lot here that we can talk about. Now, some of these are sponsored results and some of these aren't, but to be fair, the sponsored searches here are really throwing off the game when it comes to brands who are actually trying to sell apple cider, but they're also just really kind of hurting the user who wants to buy these products. So I think from a category standpoint, especially some of these big category captaincy keywords, these big head terms like apple cider, what can we do in JVPs, Lauren, to your point, but what can we do in our own organizations to defend these really important head terms if we're apple cider manufacturers so that the apple cider vinegars aren't winning so that the immunity boost ginger and turmeric, which doesn't really have anything to do with apple cider, isn't winning that big head term for apple cider and isn't winning top positions for that. So I think it's really important for the incumbents and the category captains for these head terms to defend those head terms as best as they can. And I know that that's expensive, and I think that that ultimately also comes down to those JBP conversations and the partnerships with the retailers because it is a bad experience ultimately for the consumers.
(45:28):
And also these ads are interrupting the journey and not just food and bev. Here's an example for twin mattresses, again, did a search for twin mattresses and all four of those products are adjacencies, protectors, toppers protectors, and it becomes very difficult to find core, like I just want a twin mattress. It becomes very difficult to find those core products. The other thing to note about these ad units is they can also display the products differently. So as we think about things like hero images and titles, it becomes really important to think about the ad units and how they cover up what you're trying to present. So in this case, little movers are those little toddler type, and so it becomes very difficult to know that that's not a traditional diaper there. And I don't know that because that plus sign from Walmart is covering up that icon, and that happens all the time.
(46:29):
And Bailie's going to talk more about being mindful of user interfaces on each of the retailers and thinking about those hero images and what you choose, particularly around iconography on the different retailers and conquesting ads. Not every retailer allows you to conquest, but some do. I fell down a rabbit hole, Halloween candy, apparently kinder likes to compete with Twix. And so anyway, good stuff. But that can also interfere in some retailer scenarios too, if there's conquesting. So be mindful of that and make sure you may not necessarily want to waste your own media dollars protecting your own brand, but in some cases it might be worth defending. Okay, so for another poll, I'm going to turn it back over to Lauren.
Lauren Livak Gilbert (47:20):
Perfect. All right, here we go. Let's launch this poll. So just go back to your screen so you can vote, but how often do advertisers disrupt the customer journey for products in your categories? I am very, very interested in this based on a lot of the examples we shared and some of the chat that is happening in the webinar chat. So everyone just try to jump back to your screen to put your vote in, and I am going to give us a couple of more seconds, 5, 4, 3, 2, and closing the poll. Here we go. So 43% say occasionally 34, say most of the time 21%. They don't say they don't have visibility, so I was expecting it to be most of the time and occasionally. So I feel like that checks out based on the examples you shared. Do you agree, Amanda?
Amanda Wolff (48:16):
Yeah, I do. I do, yes. And I'm going to give you some tips on how you can get some better visibility into that, but also highly encourage you to shine some light on that with your media agencies.
Lauren Livak Gilbert (48:29):
Perfect.
Amanda Wolff (48:31):
Okay, and for the last fractured customer journey, it's content, my passion, but I'm actually going to turn over the keys to this one, to Bailie to talk about this one.
Bailie Duncan (48:41):
Thank you, Amanda. I know we're both super content people, which I think is why we get along so well. It's like I literally live and breathe it just as you do. I know, right? Okay, so we all know how important content is. I think that every single person on the phone has probably spent hours and hours either advising your creative teams or creating the content yourself as I used to do. And the thing is that one size doesn't fit all. We have so many different experiences between desktop, mobile, mobile, web, browser, the app that you're using, et cetera. It's can change what the content looks like. Look at this image on the screen. Walmart is applying these little try on buttons and all the different icons. It can cover critical information for you. And so you can do things like mapping all the hotspots a retailer might have and then create this sort of safe zone guide for your designers in order to avoid issues like this. Titles, they can create confusion are these, here's a search for razors for family.
(49:53):
Can you use the men's razors? Is that available? Is it safe to use on your family? What is this hair clipper? Is that also a razor? And so just mind you, there's also these are sponsored, so is it the title, is it the sponsor? Are you advertising based off of the search terms and the title, et cetera? So that can create a lot of confusion for your users. Hero image can create confusion. I love this example on the screen because you've got that venous razor to where it says you're getting a razor with two refills. What is the razor? Is it the blades? Is it the handle? Is called the razor? Are you getting a razor with a head and then two extra heads, or is it just the two heads that come in the packaging? Here you see an example to where it's a great illustration of exactly what you're going to find in the box, and that should make your consumer more comfortable that when they add that to the cart, they're getting what they thought they were getting.
(50:51):
And hero image, this is, I know a hot topic for all of us. You've got some great examples to where there's these Josh wines to where you're missing Sauvignon Blanc, you've got the add button over it, you've got buy it again, the little badging covering the milliliters, even the GS one on target. You've got part of that information getting hidden by the little heart. There's so many different ways that we have to design. And then there's this great example Decoy, which is not a brand of ours, but I saw this yesterday. I was like, wow, that's a great way to make sure that you're laying out and avoiding the hotspots on Instacart.
Amanda Wolff (51:29):
I want to jump in here too, just to give a shout out. I think the GS one images, I love that Target has started having those, and I know that this is, we've got a lot of debate on this topic, and I think it's a really important topic to continue having conversations around. I just think it's also one that to Bailie's point, retailers are not consistent about where they're putting their iconography. And I think until we get to a point where retailers are really standard with where their iconography goes, we have to also navigate some of this with nuance until we can make sure that our imagery isn't covered.
Bailie Duncan (52:09):
And last, but definitely not least, the image carousels can definitely cause confusion as well. If you have different variations that come in different packaging looks, this is a great example to where you've got the bag that's a 21 count. Maybe that bucket is something like 40 or 50 count that you see in the additional image. Not knowing what you're getting can lead to confusion, disappointment and uncertainty of committing to purchasing that product. If you are going through label changes, how do you make sure that the user knows that when they get something, it's not a surprise because even if they purchase it, the feeling of like, I bought this but it's not what I thought I was getting can lead to disappointment and maybe they don't buy your product. Again, we deal with that a lot with updating changes, et cetera. But again, being cognizant of this can help us reduce frustrations along the way. And back to Amanda for our takeaways.
Amanda Wolff (53:06):
So just to wrap up a couple of quick things. So one is that in e-commerce, a broken customer journey, it's really more than just a bad website because a bad website, yes, it's bad user experience, and there's a range of what a bad user experience on a website can do for your business. I'm not saying that a bad website doesn't hurt any business. It can have a lot of negative impacts regardless of what your website is. But in e-commerce, that broken journey is going to hurt conversion, brand loyalty, and ultimately revenue. So we want to make sure that we're continuing to drive that revenue. But before you can fix those broken journeys, you need to know it's broken. So my advice around this is really create your own customer journey maps. You can do that for each retailer, but you have to first understand where those journeys break.
(53:57):
And so you need to understand all those common paths to the retailer and that includes those paths that might start off the retailer. If you are a product that is driving a lot of business through TikTok, maybe start with a path that starts on TikTok and understand how that flow is going to work. You can even work with agencies to help you build these journey maps for you. Nielsen Norman has really great, very simple templates, not just those newly ornate ones I showed earlier on. And if you don't know what those user paths are, you can user test, do some research to understand what those paths might be. Then once you've identified where those breaks are happening, turn inward, do those service blueprints, start understanding how your organization cannot just work internally. For example, maybe with your media team to start defending some of those category keywords.
(54:50):
Become that category captain and own those head terms that you need to own so that those breaks don't happen, for example. Or you may need to work in your JBP conversations like Lauren was suggesting, and that could be part of your service blueprint. How do you collaborate better with your retailer to prevent some of the breaks? And then finally, once you fix the breaks, then you can start optimizing by your personas. That's when you can really start mapping. Take your own existing personas. Maybe you don't have a UX team, but your brand team probably has some personas. Take those personas, start thinking about those and then see if your retailer will share the personas with you and then see if you can map those. And if the retailer won't share their personas, that's okay. You can still start conducting your own research with some of your customers and build on your existing personas in your organization to understand, okay, how do my existing personas expand when that person's a Walmart shopper versus a seven 11 shopper? And you can really start to understand more about that customer and their journeys. So that's all I've got. Lauren, I'm going to turn it back over to you.
Lauren Livak Gilbert (55:59):
Perfect. Thank you so much Amanda and Bailie. That was fantastic. We are now going to take questions. We have three minutes. We have one question I thought I would throw out there because I thought it was quite interesting. So I was as a brand trying to drive influence of digital shopper experience with our retailer customers beyond PDP content and retail media activation. Curious if you have some on how to unlock those relationships or get connected with the correct UX folks at the retailer because it's difficult to be in touch with them. You touch the physical shelf one to two times a year, but not necessarily the digital shelf. I think JVP is definitely one option, but would love to hear Amanda and Bailie your thoughts on that as well.
Amanda Wolff (56:43):
Yeah, I love that. I think of course, JVP is your top opportunity, but when you're focused on omnichannel conversations, it can be hard to navigate that. I do think showing them some of these exact specific customer where there are breaks happening can help bring an example of some of these breaks to A JVP conversation, show them where the journey is just completely falling off, and I think it will help create that example and help unlock it in a little more tangible of a way. If you have a customer journey map that you've done in your hands, that's a pretty powerful deliverable to take to a retailer in a JVP conversation.
Lauren Livak Gilbert (57:26):
I think that's a great point. So this is a great question too. How long will retailers rely on CPGs for content versus using their own internal gen AI tools to create content and brands are only approving it? I like this question because I think Amazon just released a lot of capabilities that they said they would be writing titles as well as changing images, and I'm sure other retailers will take that into account as well. Any perspective there?
Amanda Wolff (57:52):
It's such an interesting cycle, right? Because I came from one space and there was a time when we were doing content for the retailers and the retailers were like, I don't want to deal with all of this. This is too much work. So we're going to hand it off to the brands so that the brands have to be responsible for their own content, and now it's time to pull that back. And we're seeing the retailers take back control of their own. I think there's going to be a lot of risk introduced, particularly around areas where they could introduce copyright violations, where they have over the counter health, where there's medical liabilities that can happen, and so as lawsuits potentially start to surface because the retailers are introducing errors into that content, I do think that there's some liability there, but it's happening faster than I expected, especially on Amazon. So how fast the other retailers will catch up. It's hard to say.
Lauren Livak Gilbert (58:55):
I completely agree with that, and I know we have a lot of questions. I'm sorry we aren't going to be able to get to all of them. If you have additional questions, please feel free to reach out to Amanda, to Bailie, to myself. You can access us on LinkedIn. I can also share any information. We will be sharing the recording out afterwards so you can watch and review. Thank you all so much for joining. Amanda, Bailie, thank you for sharing your valuable insights. This was a great conversation. One I think we need to continue to have and really appreciate everyone's time.
Peter Crosby (59:23):
Thanks to Amanda and Bailie for sharing their wisdom. There will be even more 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.
