#156: The nightmare of American shoppers, practical AI for marketers, behind the scenes at Lululemon + please vote!
Hello! I hope you’re great.
Hey, got a second?
Upvote our SXSW panel before Thursday 8/26! I’ve invited the heads of:
🔥 Global activism for Ben & Jerry’s
🥃 Whiskeys at Diageo
📈 Research at Porter Novelli
to join me and break down woke-washed marketing, allyship, and brand activism. Your vote helps this be part of SXSW2022.
➡️ VOTE here before 8/26. And thank you!
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Programming note: No, you’re not missing anything. I’ve been enjoying a bit of a hiatus from regular posting. Call it a vacation. We’ll be back to our normal cadence come September. Go outside!
In this edition of The World’s Best Newsletter:
Experience TV #12: Practical AI for the Modern Marketer
Calabrio: Closing the Gap Between Marketing + the Buyer
3 Ways Every Marketer Can Be More Inclusive
American Shoppers Are A Nightmare
In These Uncertain Times, I Come Back to Guest Host
BLM at Lululemon - Behind the Scenes
Quote of the Week: If you only hire people who have done it before…
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1. Experience TV #12: Practical AI for the Modern Marketer
In episode 12 of Experience TV, a series I host in partnership with Oracle Advertising & CX, I shared some very cool uses of AI in customer experience and sat down with Chris Penn, founder of Trust Insights and Stephen Streich of Oracle.
Stephen explains where AI adoption among marketers is:
Vendors have woven AI into common jobs to make them easier, faster, and better—and that value is always on and continuous. For example, it’s being used to optimize the send time of an email and running A/B tests. You can see the benefits right away.
At Oracle, our customers are benefiting from some form of machine learning or advanced algorithms that are driving mechanisms inside of Oracle Eloqua, such as making orchestration decisions on the canvas or more complex scoring algorithms.
From a maturity level, pretty much all of them are benefiting from it, whether they realize it or not!
Where adoption has been slower is on less obvious benefits, such as understanding your ideal customer profile. Trust in AI is a big issue here.
Chris warns:
AI is like a blender; it’s a tool. If you’re making steak, it’s not going to be helpful. It’s all about the ingredients, the recipe, the person, and the outcome you’re after.
100% of marketers use AI today, whether they know it or not. Where people are missing out on the value, though, is in the customized implementation of it.
There’s a whole slew of great data, like behavioral data, that nobody’s doing anything with.
Check out the full episode recording + my recap here on the Oracle blog.
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2. Calabrio: Closing the Gap Between Marketing + the Buyer
There’s such a huge opportunity for all organizations to be better prepared for what customers need, especially as those needs change as rapidly as they have the past 18 months.
One untapped source for guidance is voice-of-customer insights, especially if you’re an organization with a call center.
Listen to my conversation with Dave Hoekstra of Calabrio about how Contact Centers + Marketing are working together to make marketing better.
“It makes Marketing more effective. It makes us more relevant. It makes us more useful. It’s Nirvana for a marketer.”
We answer:
1. How can the marketing department and customer service co-exist?
2. What is the fundamental role of marketing?
3. How has our understanding of the voice of the customer changed over the last 10 years?
4. How call center data makes marketing more effective, and vice versa.
LISTEN HERE: Episode 5 of Season 3 of Working Smarter - How to Bridge the Gap Between Marketing and the Contact Center
Or, read my summary blog post on the Calabrio blog, How to Close the Gap Between Your Business and Your Buyers.
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3. Three Ways Every Marketer Can Make Digital Experiences More Inclusive
Read the full article at Perkins Access.
COVID accelerated an already-rapid move to digital experiences.
The number of remote workers will be 3x pre-pandemic levels by the end of this year, says Forrester.
2022 is predicted to be the first trillion dollar year for eCommerce spend, according to Adobe.
Companies have accelerated the digitization of their customer interactions by 3 to 4 years, according to a McKinsey global survey of executives.
In this rush to digital, many marketing teams still have a blindspot regarding consumers with disabilities (61M Americans!) Our blindspot not only excludes potential customers, it is also a legal and financial risk for the brands we’re responsible for.
In the age of digital transformation, we can’t afford to overlook, exclude or forget these individuals.
Read how to be more inclusive in my guest blog post for Perkins Access, a fantastic organization for digital accessibility consulting and training.
To see how two organizations, America’s Test Kitchen and Wunderkind brought this advice to life, you can check out this on-demand webinar.
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4. American Shoppers Are A Nightmare
I recommend this piece from Amanda Mull in The Atlantic from earlier this month for many reasons, one of which is the context in which it puts woke-washed marketing:
In the 150 years that American consumerism has existed, it has metastasized into almost every way that Americans construct their identities. Today’s brands insert themselves into current events, align themselves with causes, associate patronage of their businesses with virtue and discernment and success. For some of them, this is now the primary way they market their products to consumers.
Dove, for example, wants you to buy its soap because the brand has the right opinions on gender and body image. Companies such as Toms, Warby Parker, and Bombas have built businesses in part by promising that for every product you buy, they’ll give one to a person in need. If you’re sick of all the lefty virtue signaling, there’s always Black Rifle Coffee, for those who support the military and hate political correctness.
The crux of the article tracks the state of employee abuse by consumers and is really really really worth reading.
For generations, American shoppers have been trained to be nightmares. The pandemic has shown just how desperately the consumer class clings to the feeling of being served.
American workers deserve better.
5. In These Uncertain Times, I Come Back to Guest Host
I was guest #1 on episode #1 on season #1 of Derek J Horn’s COVID passion project, a great podcast named In These Uncertain Times.
In episode 20, I returned to guest host the season one finale.
A short preview:
We discuss Derek’s journey over the past year, including the creation of this very podcast, how empathy can conquer, body image standards, how we were impacted by lockdown, and the opportunity beneath our fear of uncertainty.
Listen to episode #20 of In These Uncertain Times.
6. BLM at Lululemon - Behind the Scenes
Subscription required for this Business Insider piece from Bethany Biron and Caroline Hroncich, 'Privileged white wellness': Lululemon corporate employees speak out on the culture of racial insensitivity.
As I study the ways in which brands respond to social justice movements (Woke-Washed is under development) I appreciate behind-the-scenes stories like this.
Notable / condensed excerpts:
In spring 2020, days after the murder of George Floyd, a high-level Lululemon manager told a team of designers and copywriters she wanted to put "all lives matter" at the top of Lululemon's website…
Over the course of the afternoon on June 1, the company put together a task force to develop copy and graphics to present to top brass and quickly publish to its website.
The team of about 10 employees had spent hours mocking up a version of the homepage featuring "Black Lives Matter" as the headline.
That's when they were interrupted by a manager, according to four former and current employees close to the matter…
"We are not writing Black Lives Matter. That's not where we're at," the director told the group, according to two employees present in the room.
After significant debate, the employees — several of whom are Black, Indigenous, and people of color — agreed to create two designs to present to leadership: one with "all lives matter" and another with "Black Lives Matter."
While "Black Lives Matter" was ultimately selected, an employee who was involved in the homepage project said they felt "triggered and traumatized" and described it as "one of the most disgusting moments" in their time at Lululemon.
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Many corporations stumbled in their internal and external communication after the murder of Floyd. But even before spring 2020, "all lives matter" had been widely recognized as a phrase that downplayed the Black Lives Matter movement.
The article goes on to note a variety of policy / cultural realities that stand in stark contrast to the statements made in the company’s Instagram post above, and what the brand has been doing in the months since with its internal DEI efforts.
My takeaway is best summarized by the closing quote of the piece:
“It just seems like performance activism."
7. Quote of the Week: If you only hire people who have done it before
h/t Sara McNamara on LinkedIn:
Oof.
Have a wonderful week ahead. There’s some exciting stuff happening this fall I cannot WAIT to tell you about :) As always, let me know if there’s anything on your radar I should know about.
Sending good vibes.
Katie
Katie Martell
Twitter | LinkedIn | Website
Upcoming webinar:
Integrated and Own-able: A New Approach to Virtual Events feat. Hitachi
Tuesday August 31st at 2pm ET // Register here.
In the B2B space, in-person events play an essential role in customer engagement, partnership development and pipeline growth. So when the pandemic hit, brands had to scramble to find virtual solutions.
Unfortunately, most 3rd-party virtual event applications weren’t especially exciting, innovative, or integrated. Experiences lacked engagement, data was siloed, and the environment felt generic.
Hitachi wanted none of that for their upcoming Social Innovation Forum. So they, along with their trusted partner Qualified Digital, set out to create an own-able branded virtual event experience – not something they just rent for a few days – an experience that would connect all the way across the marketing ecosystem and customer journey.
In this webinar, hear from Qualified Digital and Hitachi’s own Creative and Digital Marketing teams why they chose to build out a custom solution and how it:
Elevated the Brand and experience
Integrated into their martech stack
Enhanced their business intelligence & operations
Spoiler Alert: It was a massive success!
We’ll also discuss the future of this hot new channel and how it can enable brands to create & collect valuable first-party data – especially significant as we stare down the ominous dark cloud of the cookieless near-future.
PLUS (as if you needed more reasons to attend): We’re giving away a $500 Amazon gift card to one lucky attendee!