Educating the Organization

Evana Oli, manager of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing at Georgia-Pacific, cites the above quote from Louis L’Amour when asked about the need to educate the organization internally on e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. While brands and retailers have made great strides in integrating these disciplines over the last few years – according to the agency executives interviewed here – constant changes in technology and a need to justify spend beg for continual education. “Seeking and proactively sharing knowledge is one of our guiding principles and integral to the culture at Georgia-Pacific,” says Oli, who nods to cross-functional leaders taking an active role in industry events and share groups and circulating their learnings throughout the organization.But how else are brands educating internally? And what are they learning? Shopper Marketing edited a virtual roundtable discussion on the topic with multiple brands and agencies.How do you educate (or help a brand client educate) the organization?Marjorie Dufek: We conducted a digital boot camp last year. A one-day immersion into digital for our marketing teams – both corporate and people in the field of marketing. It was getting everybody on a level playing field. It was digital marketing in general, and e-commerce was part of the discussion.Steve Kinsey: We use an array of formal and informal techniques: ad-hoc “swat teams” that meet with potential new vendors and ad tech partners; lunch-and-learns; attendance at conferences and share groups; internal councils that share and distribute best practices; a robust test-and-learn framework; and whatever else we can think of.Brian Cohen: For clients, we’ve conducted work sessions, training sessions and direct and indirect size-of-prize models. We’ve built crawl-walk-run roadmaps that allow the organization to not feel overwhelmed by the road ahead.Angela Edwards: I think the most effective services that we provide are our day-to-day e-commerce advisory services where we share best practices as they are developing, and our sales support services where we actively manage our client’s e-commerce presence on Amazon and other key e-commerce sites.Lisa Klauser: In addition to proprietary insight research – our study, “Influencing the E-Commerce Trip: Results from a Landmark Study,” was presented at the Path to Purchase Expo – we conduct digital boot camps. We bring our agency’s top digital thinkers across strategy, creative and technology and cover topics such as trends, omnichannel shopper journey planning, measurement and analytics, and new digital platforms.Why the need for camps and educational tools?Dufek: Like many organizations, we had a digital team. And that worked fine when digital was an offshoot of everything else that the brand did. But now digital has become so pervasive in every marketing channel.Cohen: The landscape changes every day, so education is super-important. It’s what makes this arena so exciting. You only get to be called an expert if you read the trades that morning.Kinsey: Programmatic buying and creative development, artificial intelligence-based advertising solutions, cookie-less digital targeting, the Internet of Things and other digital trends all require a brand new language and knowledge base. Keeping on top of this requires a constant focus and, we believe, great partners.Oli: It is critical to have an experimentation plan, with clear hypotheses and KPIs, to learn about new tools and tactics and build confidence within the organization.Tina Manikas: Some of the challenges are pre-existing organizational silos and where control of budgets currently lives, as well as a lack of a C-suite champion. The speed of change and new marketing technology opportunities is never-ending. Without leadership, it is treated as less critical to shopper and sales success.Where do brands and retailers need to improve?Jordis Rosenquest: We still see a lot of thinking that e-commerce and digital shopper marketing are bolt-on afterthoughts. Brands still default to shopper insights relating to in-store versus the acceptance that our shopper lives their journey elsewhere on demand.Curt Monk: Developing the right talent is an area to improve. They are hiring for roles that never existed because shopper marketing is digital. Integrating digital into the physical world to make solutions more frictionless is another. One thing we know is that a shopper’s last best experience is the expectation for his next experience.Rosenquest: There needs to be a safety zone in which brands are urged to try new things and embrace the idea of failing to succeed. Sharing information is part of education, but applying it is actually when education works.Klauser: Brands and retailers are in the nascent stages of reinvention to address the challenges of “connected commerce” and the convergence between online and offline shopping behavior. Brands must do a better job of understanding human behavior triggers and barriers that enable what Google refers to as “Buy Moments” – those moments when people want to know, go, do or buy something and turn to their smartphone or other device to enable it.Kinsey: Better, more comprehensive ROI models for the world of shopper marketing that better capture secondary, historically intangible benefits.Edwards: Recognizing the importance of e-commerce as a media channel and adjusting marketing plans and spending to accommodate that. Many brands are moving away from those outdated ROI hurdles and myopic KPIs that kept them under-indexed in e-commerce in the past.Dufek: Brown-Forman’s category is complex because rules are different in every state and every country. In the United States, we can’t sell direct-to-consumer because of the laws, so what’s important to us is working through the people who are allowed to sell alcohol to consumers, and there are a couple of different models. We’re looking to improve at the basics: Making sure we have good product catalogues and are easily able to share that with retailers.How do you continue the education?Dufek: We still conduct boot camps for people who are new or haven’t had a chance to participate in it. We are developing smaller modules – a one-hour or two-hour session with a brand team, a workshop on digital media or digital strategies, and documents, which are playbooks. Here’s a tool, when you would use it and how you would use it.Kinsey: Ensure that we include teams and functions that may have historically been absent from the learning agenda. IT, R&D, legal, supply chain, etc., all have a role to play in how effectively we leverage some of the latest and greatest e-commerce and digital marketing vendors.You’ll never be able to effectively take advantage of the full potential of Amazon as a sales and marketing opportunity if you haven’t figured out how to keep them in stock. You’ll never be able to take advantage of the IoT at retail if you don’t have somebody who can help the team understand hardware platforms.Rosenquest: Set aside resources for the future. Some brands do a great job of this, but it’s more the exception than the rule, particularly among shopper teams.Klauser: Lean on your agency. They should be on the cutting edge of all things digital and how to develop integrated plans in this new shopper ecosystem. Build your metrics and analytics capability to develop an entirely new, integrated analytics approach in order to accurately measure the effectiveness and ROI of digital and e-commerce activities. And senior management needs to be fully invested in digital. We’d like to see more senior client leaders carrying the flag for digital and advocating for the necessary change within the organization.

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