A Direct Route to Customer Hearts, Wallets, and Stomachs

Posted on by Antony
BORN Views
A Direct Route to Customer Hearts, Wallets, and Stomachs

Presented by BORN Group and Shopify Plus

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) food and beverage sales have come full circle from the days when farmers sold fresh eggs, meat and produce or prepared items such as jams and pickles from his farm store or a stand to his regular customers. He knew their names, he knew where they lived, and he knew how they were going to use those products to prepare a meal.

What better way to respond to customer needs and their long-term buying behavior than to have regular and direct contact with them? Consumers who are well-versed in shopping from their increasingly connected homes on online marketplaces such as Amazon globally and JD.com, Pinduoduo, and Alibaba in Asia are also irrevocably turning to them for their food and beverage needs. 

Amazon responded with initiatives such as Amazon Fresh grocery delivery and Subscribe & Save. The fracturing of the food and beverage landscape by digital-native vertical brands such as snack brands UnReal and Rxbar in the US, non-alcoholic apéritif brand Seedlip and noodle brand Mr Lee’s in the UK, fitness food brand Foodspring in Germany and snack brand Three Squirrels in China are chipping away at traditional brands’ business – and margins – with products that are special, authentic and transparent, and cater to conscious eating trends. Now consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies and brands are taking their lead and following their customers online to stay competitive.

This propensity of consumers to shop online and on mobile has led to beverage company AB InBev’s DTC sales touching a figure of US$1 billion a year1. AB InBev, whose stable of beer brands include Budweiser, Busch, Corona and Stella Artois, says they have made 250 million DTC customer connections across stores, popups and websites. Like many other companies dipping their toes into DTC, they used Asian countries as a test market – AB InBev’s China DTC business is booming – before launching them worldwide. 

Nestle is another DTC pioneer. Earlier this year, they announced that British consumers could get the brand’s snacks, candy and coffee delivered to their doorstep via delivery service Deliveroo. In addition, Nestle’s KitKat Chocolatory offered customers the opportunity to order custom chocolate through a website and popups first before opening standalone stores first in Tokyo before rolling them out around the world. 

While newer entrants such as the plant-based food brands Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are going the DTC route offering bulk, trial and combo product packs, even brands that have been around for a long time are joining the bandwagon. Maille has been selling its mustard products through retailers since 1723. Since the company’s acquisition by Unilever, they are now available directly through their own website, while household name Heinz is bundling products such as beans and spaghetti for home delivery. Pepsico, another staple brand, set up Pantryshop.com within a month to allow users to select specialized bundles of products such as Quaker oats and Gatorade under categories such as ‘Snacking’ and ‘Workout & Recovery’ with free and fast delivery. 

Why Go The Direct-to-Consumer Route?

CPG brands – traditionally sold via sales channels such as retail stores or third-party eCommerce sites – are sensitive to any changes to those channels. Besides, brand growth for CPGs are slowing on regular channels, if not going away entirely. The Centre for Retail Research predicts, for instance, that more than 20,000 British shops will close in 2020, a 28% increase on 20192.

In an uncertain retail environment, Lindt Canada, historically a brick and mortar supermarket and high-street staple in many countries, went online using Shopify Plus in just five days and enabled curbside pickup at its stores before Easter 2020 and the start of the company’s second-largest annual sales period3.

Another way to growth – build it or buy it

In 2020, eMarketer forecasts that DTC as a percentage of eCommerce sales will grow by 24.3% to US$17.75 billion, rising to US$21 billion in 20214. The share of ecommerce in F&B is also expected to grow to 15-20% in 20255.

Credit: LEK Consulting

CPG companies are investing in DTC models and platforms, alongside their traditional sales channels, to enable direct contact with their end-customers. 

In doing so, they can also:

  • Own the customer relationship
  • Build trust with their customers
  • Gather first-person data
  • Offer loyalty programs and run promotions
  • Personalize the experience across all channels. 
  • Extend the customer experience into different channels such as events and experiences 

Another route is to set up internal innovation labs to develop products specifically for DTC. AB InBev has its ZX Ventures. Ocean Spray is another brand trying to expand from its cranberry juice association to move into new products such as water enhancers for dogs, a line of herbal tonics, and an oral supplement to help protect the skin from the sun. 

Acquisitions can be yet another way to grow. HelloFresh, which has built a leading position with its meal kits subscription service is extending its brand by acquiring Factor 75, a company specializing in health ready meals geared towards health and wellness. Besides bringing with it offices, production and fulfillment facilities, this newest addition joins other portfolio brands such as EveryPlate, which offers affordable meal kits and Green Chef, which offers healthy meals6.

How to Go DTC?

Defining your goals and strategy at the outset of your DTC transformation journey is important. Things to consider include infrastructure support, supply chain networks, frameworks to underpin orders and data as well as the product mix.

The main components for CPG brands considering a DTC transformation, just like with other products that are sold direct, are a robust eCommerce infrastructure that offers speedy set-up, access and can scale quickly, a supply chain and logistics providers that can provide on-time, hassle-free fulfillment, and robust customer data platform and great customer service. Free and fast shipping is part of the deal on most DTC platforms.

Customer Experience is Key

With DTC as a new model of business, customer experience becomes paramount and the brand owns each and every touchpoint. Customers want not just convenience and easy intuitive UX, but they are often looking for the product to improve over time. DTC turns the sales process into a two-way street taking customer feedback to tweak current products or even develop new products. User-generated content is also a common feature. An easy-to-access and centralized customer record is also an essential tool for personalized and intuitive customer service. 

First Person Data

First person data is exclusive to your company and its origin is completely transparent. DTC models use data platforms that can gather first-person data not just from buying behaviour but also from channels such as ad campaigns, emails and social media. AI and machine learning can be applied to get deep insights as well as find influencers7. 

Building customer relationships and community

Aside from being data protection regulations compliant, the best backends crunch through data on engagement metrics and create a funnel for constant reviews and feedback from customers to power loyalty programs that keep said customers coming back for more. Allowing customers to take advantage of small perks, like free shipping, free returns, or access to exclusive SKUs, gives customers a reason to shop with you.

A big opportunity with omnichannel strategies is to connect customers with an experiential program, be they special events or experiences, with rewards for participation.  Alcohol brand Campari, for example, hosts happy hour Zoom chats, while MyKitKat workshops can be reserved at KitKat Chocolatory stores. Another example is Mondelez’ Toblerone, which offers custom printed sleeves for travel retail.

R&D

By leveraging first-party data and your community, you create a two-way relationship in which community members collaborate with you to co-create new products. You can also test products quickly and get customer feedback before investing in large production runs. Unilever not only sells ice cream flavors on its online store for Ben & Jerry’s, but also their latest Pint Slice innovations, T-shirts and merchandise. The data showed that cereal flavors were a popular concept so new flavors such as Fruit Loot and Frozen Flakes were created.

Brand Control

Instead of relying on other retailers to get your messaging right, take control over how your brand messages its products, creating consistency across all brand-owned touchpoints. By maintaining your brand identity and relationship with the consumer throughout their purchasing journey, you open up new opportunities to connect, achieve a personal touch and create value in unique and meaningful ways.

Marketing to Drive Sales and Cross-selling

The first-person data gathered can also be used to tweak marketing strategies, such as tailoring the messaging and sending out promotions or contests at the right time of day, week, or month. The larger share of millennial customers also means a different marketing mix such as more below-the-line marketing or social media in general9.

When taking a retail-only approach, you can miss out on opportunities to resell, upsell, and cross-sell. Going DTC allows you to test upsell and cross-selling opportunities, not only on site but also through social and email campaigns.

Profitability

DTC enables you to create a more efficient distribution and sales process and helps to retain revenue that would usually go to intermediaries. It also allows for better inventory control, allowing you to scale supply levels based on insights from data.

Channel diversification

Shoppers in four major markets surveyed – US, UK, Germany and France – are increasingly going online to look for CPG products10.

A diversified growth strategy allows you to test additional channels to see what works best with your audience, as each channel will bring a specific value. Further, such a strategy can result in benefits such as:

• Improved brand awareness and recall

• Measurable engagement

• Precision targeting and retargeting

• Direct communications via email

By owning the entire supply chain, you receive data gathered during the whole customer journey. This gives you the agility to test new advertising channels and digest results quickly.

Choosing a global platform such as Shopify Plus means you can use it to sell across 20 channels in over 175 countries in multiple currencies and languages. Of course, an omnichannel strategy also means that customer service should have the right technology and business tools to move across channels and offer personalized service regardless.

The KitKat Chocolatory store concept discussed above also includes other KitKats flavors from other countries as well as digital innovations such as printing photos on KitKats. 

Subscription

One way to keep customers coming back is the subscription model, which works well for food and beverage items such as pet and baby food where there is a regular incentive to purchase.

While subscription can help companies improve forecasting, smarter cross-selling is also possible. The best baby food companies not only offer products for babies as they grow but also customized pouches (Little Spoon), organic purees (Once Upon a Farm) and solid and finger food for growing children (Nurture Life, Yumble Kids, Tiny Organics). Arla’s Baby&Me concept in China, on the other hand, seeks to foster connections and develop trust with parents through a direct approach.

All in all, the sale of food and beverages direct to consumers online is a trend that is here to stay. What we are seeing now is just the tip of the iceberg. Many of the newer brands may  not be able to sustain current growth patterns, but we are without doubt in an era where brands pivot to become their own retailers, bringing DTC to the forefront of a new normal. 

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Footnotes

1.  Inside Anheuser-Busch InBev’s $1b a year DTC business, Digiday.com, March 2020 https://digiday.com/marketing/inside-anheuser-busch-inbevs-1b-year-dtc-business/

2. The Crisis in Retailing: Closures and Job Losses, Centre for Retail Research, 31 March 2020 https://www.retailresearch.org/retail-crisis.html

3. Lindt opened its first ecommerce store in 5 days to serve customers in a COVID-19 world, Shopify.com https://www.shopify.com/plus/customers/lindt

4. Direct-to-Consumer Brands 2020: Growing Pains Hit Disruptor Brands on Their Path to Maturity, eMarketer, March 2020 https://www.emarketer.com/content/direct-to-consumer-brands-2020

5. Online Food & Beverage Sales Are Poised to Accelerate — Is the Packaging Ecosystem Ready?, LEK Consulting, February 2019 https://www.lek.com/insights/ei/ecommerce-packaging-food-beverage

6. HelloFresh acquires meal producer Factor75, RetailDetail, 24 Nov 2020 https://www.retaildetail.eu/en/news/food/hellofresh-acquires-meal-producer-factor75

7. How artificial intelligence is influencing Unilever’s marketing, Digiday, April 2019 https://digiday.com/marketing/artificial-intelligence-influencing-unilevers-marketing/

8. Inside Anheuser-Busch InBev’s $1b a year DTC business, Digiday.com, March 2020 https://digiday.com/marketing/inside-anheuser-busch-inbevs-1b-year-dtc-business/

9. Reinvigorating growth in the consumer-goods industry, McKinsey.com, August 2020 https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/reinvigorating-growth-in-the-consumer-goods-industry

10. CPG Goes Omnichannel: Shoppers Grasp the Digital Opportunity, McKinsey.com, March 2018 https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/solutions/periscope/our-insights/surveys/cpg-goes-omnichannel-shoppers-grasp-the-digital-opportunity

Insights, Trends, and Predictions for 2021

Posted on by Antony
BORN Views
Insights, Trends, and Predictions for 2021

The next few months should see us at the cusp of a post-pandemic economy – with multiple vaccines looming over the horizon, there is a light at the end of the tunnel for another tumultuous year globally – a new US President and people adjusting to a post pandemic world. There’s a few trends born out of the disruptions over the year to note when considering the state of eCommerce moving into 2021, and I’ve decided to highlight what we believe are the five most important trends. Of course, I hasten to add, every single one of my predictions could be wrong. I have learned at a very young age that I have no orbuculum at my disposal and my scrying is a game of dice!  

Each trend connects with a greater cluster of users, from the consumer all the way to the integrity of the digital economy, so understanding each pillar of these predictions can go a long way in preparing for future disruptions and innovations ahead.

Hyper-personalizations: Considering the Consumer Alone

As buyer profiles grow more and more distinct with the aggregation of big data and the development of machine learning, hyper-personalization is a vital component of building modern customer experience. The world will move from broad segmentation to one to one marketing as the technology to further target content to the individual advances. We’ve begun to see this already to great effect in social media eCommerce as platforms like TikTok and Instagram have mastered the endless scroll via tailoring content specific to the individual, and now we see clear opportunities for early adopters in both B2B and B2C spaces to capture significant growth. Marketing to broad segments like Millennials or Baby Boomers won’t do. Everyone in these segments is unique so think about how you deliver 1:1 personalization. 

The Elastic Enterprise: Reevaluating Business Models

With demand and supply becoming global, business models will change. We will see more Direct to Consumer (DTC) and composite hybrids – B2B, B2C and B2B2C power the digital economy. Both DTC and B2B2C are now proven business models that have challenged conventional wisdoms in eCommerce and thrived in the wake of their disruption. Throughout the pandemic, DTC models have transformed household essentials into subscription based services that are tailored to one’s needs and personalized to their wants. B2B2C models on the other hand have allowed businesses to specialize in providing services to other smaller businesses who you may engage – like an air conditioning supplier (B) who works with the small business contractor (b) you (c) trust. 

The Longitudinal Book of Record: Understanding Connected Data Science

So I know your name and email. Over time I get to know your preferences.I keep building the small stub of information I have on you- like building a longitudinal book of record. Omnichannel has long been an established pillar of the digital economy, but going into the next decade, connected channels and the data science behind them will only skyrocket in significance. Companies will rely on building an infinitely extendable longitudinal book of record by collecting and compiling data from various channels – connected channels will be the next big thing. Efficient and effective CRMs, OMS’, and ERP solutions will help ensure that a business has that central node by which all customer interactions can connect towards. Building that book of record is the key piece in accumulating and executing the data to accomplish the sort of CX transformations like hyper-personalization that distinguish one commerce practice from another.

The Speed of the Human Mind: Powering Mass Consumption Instantly via 5G

Infrastructure across nations, cities, homes and businesses will upgrade to 5G to cater to mass consumption of information, instantly, everywhere, and as a result, the consequences to the digital economy will be staggering. Already we’ve seen brick and mortar rapidly erode from its conventional use-case as the nexus of shopping into a portal of customer experiences and tailored moments to match robust eCommerce solutions. 5G and the ensuing wave of digital infrastructure will only accelerate those trends further as it becomes even easier to search, engage, and purchase via any electronic device. Furthermore, that digital infrastructure can capture new consumer markets globally, putting more emphasis on useful technologies that can ensure fulfillment and tax liability across the world. So are you ready to deliver rich media. Chips, computers, phones, infra and 5G are ready to deliver it. 

Resilience: Safeguarding Your Business and the Digital Economy

All it took is one pandemic to change the nature of business irrevocably. Companies will seek to protect themselves from such events – a mindset to be battle ready in all circumstances has emerged. Both digital security protocols and multiple routes of fulfillment will be top of mind for businesses as the world moves closer to a pandemic vaccine. Tools to ensure credit monitoring and ID theft protection will find more and more value as we tilt even further into a digital first economy.

All in all, these insights reveal a commanding trend towards leveraging new technologies to heighten CX in the space. Between personalization, distribution, speed, and safety, disruption comes in many waves that each elevate a business towards the most efficient and effective commerce experience. We’re excited to implement these insights and heighten the brands we work with over the next years, and capture our onwards and upwards sentiment with the changing digital economy. In short: is your business capable of change. Rapidly. 

SMOC: BORN’s Strategic Headless Framework

Posted on by Antony
BORN Views
SMOC: BORN’s Strategic Headless Framework

Connecting the cornerstones of headless commerce for a secure and robust solution.

Having taken over the digital world by storm, headless commerce has provided marketers the tools to merchandise and personalize the customer journey. The innovative architecture behind headless decouples the front end and back end of your eCommerce shop to empower more effective content distribution while maintaining rich back end solutions. We’ve broken down the four major benefits of headless; Speed, Flexibility and Adaptability, Customization and Personalization, and Omnichannel in the diagram below.

The Benefits of Going Headless

Headless has changed the way we implement commerce solutions and manage content, and that’s why we at BORN have developed the SMOC framework to help break down how we approach a headless implementation. SMOC relates to four concepts; Security, Microservices, Omnichannel, and Cloud-Native that we structure our headless implementations around.

It’s critical that we consider security during a headless implementation when there are so many pieces being connected to one another. Securing both sides of content and commerce data in your solution is one of the processes we don’t find adequately covered in traditional frameworks – for us here at BORN, it remains our number one priority.

Ensuring effective cybersecurity for your commerce begins with effective fraud and cart solutions to prevent hackers from abusing your eCommerce functionalities. Headless solutions also conceal CMS functionality via layer abstraction, affording a level of privacy not found in a more traditional approach. The unique uniform data approach also ensures a more easily monitored system, given that features are not bound together where they can potentially bloat another. Other benefits of a secure headless solution is in its read-only APIs – with your solution decoupled, most APIs are processed in a read-only mode and therefore tamper free.  For potential security breaches of the backend, we advise a cloud-native solution so that support can be delivered at a much higher rate, and security protocols are standardized and up to date.

The next component of our framework is microservices which consists of a single application composed of many loosely coupled and independently deployable components. Microservices are bound by APIs and serve as the various use-cases in a build. In exchange for demanding a more expanded team of many experts, a microservice based implementation strengthens an offering by offering a wider array of functionalities that are not bogged down together in bulk as one might find in a traditional implementation. As these functionalities are maintained more independently, they can be reviewed and updated at a much faster clip than when these services are not bundled together as each microservice manages its own data and is self-developed. APIs in turn help exchange data between bundled microservices to quickly adjust and calculate throughout channels.

Next comes omnichannel, which is the ability to deliver a cross-channel strategy that improves user experience and ultimately, drives customer retention. An example in action is to consider how a customer ought to have the ability to switch from an in-store interaction to online, and then to a call-center with the consistency of a single cart and account recognition. Omnichannel solutions have taken the CX world by storm – by connecting multiple touchpoints with a single customer experience, brands widen their sales funnel to capture a far broader customer base. We’ve seen exceptional success in powering omnichannel solutions for brands like iShopChangi, Diesel, and Paul Stuart – with ample case studies that illustrate the success of omnichannel efforts in commerce.

However, legacy eCommerce systems can suffer when handling all the inputs and requests of the many channels available. Omnichannel solutions greatly benefit from strong headless solutions due to the nature of the decoupled CMS. Having a myriad of assisted channels to utilize your effective front-end will deliver exceptional user interest and a more seamless experience. By decoupling the two layers, developers can focus on specific channels when needed with far more precision.

Finally, we have Cloud-Native – this refers to the ability to scale your commerce solution infinitely, through holiday rushes and other events that would cause an increased number of users. Where Cloud-Native excels is by ensuring you do not need to rely on local devices, servers, or any particular machine in order to access the files that power your commerce solution. A cloud solution as Cloud Native ones both command a much stronger sense of security due to the cloud enabling support to assist any breaches much faster, along with scaling dynamically based on site traffic. As a result, Cloud Native empowers your eCommerce to be exceptionally nimble – able to navigate demand, disruptions, and any data breach.

Above you’ll find how these pieces come together under one SMOC layer highlighted in yellow. The swappable architecture above yields advances in security and omnichannel, while utilizing microservices bound by API managed in the cloud to deliver an exceptional service. Having a headless environment that is mindful of all of SMOC’s components is the foundation for any successful implementation.

For more information on BORN Group’s headless offerings, please reach out to Mackenzie Johnson, [email protected].

Best Practices: CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote)

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Best Practices:
CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote)

Use CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) Wisely!

In recent years, businesses have adopted to CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) systems to provide configurable products as a personalization option for their customers. CPQ systems provide the flexibility for a customer to mix and match options available for a product they are interested in while simultaneously delivering a personalized end-to-end buying experience. Its also important to be mindful of launching the right strategy for CPQ functionality for your end customer, with a well thought out roadmap based on an array of factors including, customer behavior, business needs, and market trends. 

With that said, the adoption of CPQ isn’t necessarily for everyone, but it’s critical to start by answering the broad question, ‘Will this offering really accommodate and help the customer to make their buying decision?’ As we keep the customer at the center of everything we do, it’s critical to make the path to purchase completely seamless while simultaneously empowering the user. 

In most cases, the adoption of a CPQ strategy will have a direct impact on conversion rates and revenue. If the right CPQ strategy is not rolled out for the market segment that you are targeting it could spell disaster on conversion rates. Also, the longer it takes for the customer to complete the buying journey could directly impact the revenue. 

The broader considerations can be split further into more granular aspects as listed:

Customer Behavior

  • Age of the customers interacting actively with the brand.
  • The cultural background of the end customers.
  • Existing brand engagement metrics.
  • Market sentiments towards the brand.

Business Needs

  • Challenges in maintaining Product data.
  • Challenges in materials procurement.
  • Challenges in stock allocation.
  • Challenges in production for pre-configured items with demand.
  • Challenges in the maintenance of pricing for pre-configured products.

Upcoming Market-Trends

  • Trends are driven by social media and networking.
  • Innovation or market disruptions related to the product lines.
  • Transparency on pricing options.

It has become essential for businesses to strike a balance on having the right mix of options, messaging, and possibly gamification of the customer buying journey for a configurable product and also make it responsive enough to be delivered to any digital touchpoint where the customer interacts with the brand. Also, in addition to rolling out a product personalization feature to the customer, it is also important to monitor the interactions of the end customer with the CPQ feature. This provides valuable insights to allow you to improve upon your offering to ultimately enhance customer experience and conversion rates.

Apart from the major business considerations, it is equally important to choose the right CPQ product and eCommerce stack that can work well with your backend systems (ERP, CRM, etc.).  

All the above-mentioned considerations, analysis and decision making can seem intimidating. Here at BORN Group we specialize in CPQ and can help you to navigate a rollout strategy along with ongoing maintenance. Please feel free to reach out to Mackenzie Johnson, [email protected] for more information on our service offerings. 

How NetSuite Empowers The CFO

Posted on by Antony
BORN Views
How NetSuite Empowers The CFO

CFOs are indispensable in today’s ad agency landscape, serving as crucial pillars of the executive team. They are expected to possess foresight and execution in economic planning, budgeting, and investment, along with important expansion efforts that account for not only financial but also the geographical growth of an agency. An effective and integrated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution is critical for enabling and navigating such growth, especially when agencies plan to expand across borders. 

Interconnectivity

Now more than ever, industry trends demonstrate an emphasis on expansion across national and international borders leading many agencies to follow suit and establish multiple subsidiaries around the world. Gone are the times when an agency needed to track only a single time zone. Instead, we’re witnessing a new global era in which agencies are feeling the imperative to expand their resources internationally and open outposts across borders. 

A CFO will generally view this kind of expansion—and rightly so—as a critical stage of an agency’s development. Expanding internationally allows an agency to increase its market reach while also growing their strength and financial achievement. A kind of chain reaction is also possible wherein the increase in revenue yielded from geographical expansion can enable further expansions into more and more remote locations. 

Global Flexibility and Modality

Mobility and flexibility are also important parts of the global expansion process. Agencies face changing processes that include tax and legal codes, financial regulations, and cultural differences, which shift across international borders. CFOs are encountering a need to move between such environments without the hindrances of yesterday. No longer do executives sit in a single office location while awaiting that elusive deal. So, what are the characteristics of this kind of flexibility? 

Agility is the keyword here. Today’s agencies are feeling the effects of a business landscape taken over by short-term agreements. No longer can organizations rely on Agency-Of-Record (AOR) relationships that at one point had been standard. This trend received the designation from Forbes as the Agility Era, a term that defines the increase in flexibility and streamlined production over stable relationships with agency clients.1 This kind of agility demanded is coupled with a drive toward globalization, thus ushering in an era of global flexibility and mobility. 

CFOs are therefore seeing a movement toward more cooperation with international partners since opportunities open up for working with more businesses through global expansion. Yet there are also important implications around such trends, which includes a heightened state of global competition. The stakes are now higher, especially for CFOs. There is indeed more pressure than ever to appeal to wider audiences while maintaining relevance across an increasingly international audience. CFOs have observed that growth is occurring today in multiple directions: horizontally, in physical space; vertically, in financial terms; and, diagonally, with agencies increasingly called up to open up across genres and other cultural divisions. So, what does this mean for CFOs and their infrastructure toolkit? 

How Netsuite ERP Solutions Empower CFOs

We’ll be exploring three different areas in which CFOs can gain a significant advantage by utilizing a truly global and integrated ERP solution. First, we’ll look at the global features afforded to CFOs in NetSuite’s highly competitive global ERP solutions. These features include valuable scaling tools that foster important financial growth schemes, built-in automation and accounting for international tax code variables, and, finally, tools for navigating financial compliance issues. Next, we’ll touch on some of the ways that, with its fully cloud-based functionality, NetSuite saves valuable resources by avoiding on-site upgrades and IT maintenance fees. Finally, we’ll take a look at NetSuite’s core CFO functionality that drives financial decisions critical for the growth of competition in agencies worldwide. These include Key Performance Indicator (KPI) tracking, multiple levels of visibility into financial transactions, and visualization tools that help you make decisions with unprecedented financial foresight. 

AN ERP for the Global CEO

As your agency grows, CFOs will need an ERP solution that can accommodate genuine international expansion with its global challenges. NetSuite is used in more than 100 countries and across over 190 currencies. It supports upwards of 19 languages and tax reporting in 50 different regions. This creates a centralized “version of the truth” that is accessible wherever you, as the CFO, may be viewing it.

Furthermore, managing tax codes and compliance across international borders can be challenging. However, with robust automation tools, many of the most vexing global hurdles can easily be overcome. NetSuite can further enhance such international features. It’s noted in Oracle’s own site that “a strong global ERP system should handle multiple tax schedules, be updated with the latest regulatory requirements, and automatically update currency conversion rates.” In other words, a truly effective ERP solution needs to handle the complicated terrain of international tax code filings. Multiple languages and currencies also come into play when considering international expansion. Your global ERP solution should facilitate—and indeed automate—such processes, rather than getting in the way of their smooth functioning. Oracle also notes that “because such systems can generate receipts and invoices in multiple languages, your customers can be assured that the documentation and information they receive always reflects the latest tax and/or currency updates for their location.” This allows agencies to scale back human processes and focus on what matters most: business outcomes. 

An Ownership ERP that Lowers Costs

One of the crucial aspects of obtaining and managing the use of ERP software relates to maintenance costs. After the initial purchase of an ERP solution, there are multiple questions that should be asked; how much will it cost to maintain? What kinds of services will be required on a yearly or even monthly basis? How frequently will upgrades become available? And how complicated are such software updates to install and become acquainted with? 

These are important considerations that every CFO should be aware of before purchasing an ERP solution. These considerations turn on cloud-based functionality versus on-premises solutions. With a cloud-based solution, software updates are done entirely remotely, with little if anything for the end-user to do in order to take complete advantage of new features and functionality. With a cloud-based ERP solution, there is no longer a need to schedule costly on-site upgrades in which an IT is tasked with costly physical work. Thankfully, NetSuite provides a complete cloud- based solution that contributes to lower IT costs for the end-user for updates. Similarly, installation is easy, with any station equipped with a web browser instantly becoming an ERP client – one can log on anywhere to access critical financial data. 

CFOs can even access powerful business information from mobile devices, an important feature that supports the imperative for agencies today to be constantly on the go. Can’t wait to finish your next game of golf to view some of the latest company financial trends? Need to send an urgent memo to the rest of the financial team? How about alterations to resource management that need to be done in transit? With the power of cloud-based mobile-friendly ERP, NetSuite facilitates the always-on-the-go CFO to access your data wherever and whenever you need through your mobile phones. 

Multi-subsidiary KPIs

An effective global ERP solution brings together important data points across multiple subsidiaries. Metrics, analytics, and KPIs provide invaluable insights that CFOs will become regularly tuned into. Interested in viewing figures from the Sydney subsidiary and comparing them to the New York office’s performance? What about utilization costs from the Singapore subsidiary? A CFO can access each of these data points through a customized login replete with dynamic KPI graphs and visualizations. One can see data displayed as a graph and view shifts in performance for any time window. Agencies in the process of expansion will find these features essential to their success. Toggle between time windows, and compare results in revenue. CFOs can drill down into multiple data points to reveal specific client information such as geographical and location data. This kind of insight is critical for CFOs managing competitive agencies in today’s global era. Achieve genuine foresight with lucid KPI data. 

We’ve seen then how NetSuite empowers CFOs through a genuinely global and integrated ERP solution. Global features and scalability allow crucial financial growth, while international tax code tools and financial compliance automation also solve some of the most difficult international issues. With its cloud-based functionality, furthermore, NetSuite is a truly economical choice because it avoids on-site upgrades and related costs incurred by IT. Lastly, NetSuite’s KPI tracking and financial visibility drive financial decisions and foresight that are critical for an agency’s growth in this global era.

Deck The Site: How to Approach and Market Holiday Shopping

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Deck The Site: How to Approach and Market Holiday Shopping

Despite a troubling job market and looming election, according to a report from Deloitte, sales this season in the US are expected to grow between 1% and 1.5%1.This push is expected to be driven by increased spending from high-income households with fewer avenues for consumption, now that experiential spending on dining and travel have been curtailed2. Wealthy households are expected to have an impact of between 2.5% and 3% growth on sales.

It’s less about the 4Ps of marketing – product, price, place and promotion – when targeting online shoppers. One analyst called the new strategies “prepare, perceive and then pursue”3. During the course of this year, it has been proven that retailers that already had invested in omnichannel capabilities were better equipped to pivot to the change in customer shopping habits. This meant providing full omnichannel capabilities, like curbside delivery to accommodate the current conditions. However, there are a few things to keep in mind about approaching and marketing this season in particular.

A Longer Season 

Getting into the holiday spirit early is going to be the mantra of most people. Analysts expected that the holiday season would be extended this year and start early October4. Amazon’s Prime Shopping Day that took place October 13-14 – pushed back from its usual July dates – kicked off the season, though other retail brands such as Target, Walmart and Best Buy were offering deals in advance of that. Amazon said its independent third-party sellers alone clocked up US$3.5 billion worth of sales, an increase of 60% from last year’s Prime Day5. Retailers and logistics partners are  also pushing for shoppers to start their shopping early to avoid last minute delivery issues, while many shops are closed on Thanksgiving Day, making Black Friday less of a landmark date than it has been previously. 

Logistics, Last-Mile and Fulfillment

With an increase in online shopping comes added strain on the logistics industry. Salesforce believes that shipping surcharges will be imposed between November 15 and January 15 globally6. Retailers are beefing up their call centers and warehouses with more workers, investing in additional warehouse space to accommodate extra stock or converting brick and mortar locations to serve as delivery centers. Others such as Target, Staples and Walmart have partnered with solutions like Shipt, Instacart and Postmates to offer same day delivery. Others are preparing to be able to handle an influx of orders7. Logistics companies are recommending that shipping cut-offs for a delivery by Christmas Eve be brought forward to an earlier date. Keeping the last-minute rush in mind, retailers such as Macy’s are talking about keeping in-store and curbside pickups and returns to bolster online shopping in case of shipping bottlenecks8. 

Gift Ideas

The nature of gift-giving is also expected to change with more people gathering online or virtually. Even if they meet in person, the groups are expected to be smaller than usual. The nature of gifts exchanged are expected to change with fewer people gifting experiences and more practical and useful gifts, especially those that support the stay-at-home lifestyle such as consumer technology. Always popular, gift cards are expected to be featured prominently on shopping lists this year as well.

Clear Communications and Engagement Strategies

Morning Consult’s research has revealed that Americans are more likely to buy from brands whose ads are realistic or optimistic and explain how they’re keeping shoppers safe or provide gift ideas9. Even in stores, not just the adoption of Covid-19 health precautions to keep customers and employees safe but good signposting about them is key to allay customer fears. 

Managing customer expectations through clear communications about delivery options, status and timelines are crucial to retaining customers and building loyalty10. Aside from contactless mobile wallet transactions to allow for reduced contact between employees and customers, SMS texting and push notifications from retail apps at various touch points in the customer journey are key to building customer relationships11. Bloomreach advises retailers to ensure that product discovery and personalization are used to help customers find fun and interesting gifts, while making product availability clear to view while searching and browsing12.

Advertising

Retailers can leverage online advertising to reach their customers and direct them either to their online or brick and mortar stores. Data from Zenreach shows that click-through rates for online advertising are at 2-3%, about 20-30 times pre-COVID13. 

There’s one caveat though, the increased numbers of shoppers online is bringing with it online shopping scams, thereby shining a light on site security.

Even if dogged by uncertainty, the shopping season has gotten off to a great start this year, and these tips above can help retailers deploy ‘prepare, perceive and pursue’ strategies so that they and their customers both have a happy holiday.

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Footnotes

1. Deloitte 2020 Holiday retail survey

2. Holiday spending will hinge on how much the rich splurge and the poor cut back, Deloitte says, CNBC.com

3. Holiday shopping 2020: the three P’s for retailers, Kearney.com

4. 4 ways shopping for the holidays is going to be different this year, CNBC.com

5. Amazon Prime Day 2020 Marked the Two Biggest Days Ever for Small & Medium Businesses in Amazon’s Stores Worldwide, Amazon.com

6.  Biggest Digital Holiday Season Ever Will Strain Shipping Capacity According to Salesforce Forecast, Salesforce.com

7.  Nearly a third of 2020 US holiday sales will occur online, Salesforce forecasts, DigitalCommerce360

8.  Macy’s prepares for a holiday season like no other, CNBC.com

9.  How COVID-19 is Changing the Holiday Shopping Season, morningconsult.com.

10. 2020 Holiday Retail Forecasts and Predictions, Retail Info Systems

11.  In a COVID-19 world, holiday shopping is all about mobile engagement, Campaignlive.com

12. Bloomreach Commerce Pulse Data Indicates an Early and Record-Breaking Holiday Shopping Season – Surge Could Leave Some Last-Minute Shoppers with Empty Stockings, Bloomreach.com

13. How Retailers Should Address Covid In The 2020 Holiday Shopping Season, Forbes.com

Cloud Content Unleashed: Exploring Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as a Cloud Service

Posted on by Antony
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Cloud Content Unleashed: Exploring Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as a Cloud Service

Excellent customer experience (CX) is the holy grail of marketing. It’s critical to enable brands to reach their customers across every touchpoint. Brands are offering more immersive and engaging, physically and digitally enabled CX across all channels, and for good reason – a recent stuudy from Gartner says that a whopping 89% of companies expect to compete against its competitors mostly on the basis of customer experience in the next 3-5 years1.

The events of 2020 have forced more customers to complete their purchases online. ‘As more people work remotely and interact digitally, there are all sorts of digital customers that weren’t there before this year,’ says Justin Stayrook, Principal, Customer Experience at BORN Group. ‘You might be selling cars, you might be selling widgets, you might be selling movies…it doesn’t matter, the customer experience is what is going to differentiate you, much more so than price or availability of the product.’

At BORN Group, Customer Experience is at the heart of everything we do: we’re all about creative content that drives online commerce to engage customers across borders in a connected world.  We’ve tried to simplify what customer experience really means in what we call our ‘CX equation’, where CX = Brand Experience + Behavioral Experience + a Book of Record Experience. Our Stella framework sees each of these aspects layered to ultimately make up the customer experience. Simply put, your brand expression is delivered through different channels and behavior is recorded to further improve the brand experience.

As we deliver technology evaluations or look at building stacks – solutions and infrastructure – to take care of our clients’ needs, we know how integral content management is to all of these aspects. In the image below, you’ll find where these pieces come together – think of experience management as a result of delivering commerce, content, and creative.

The Consumption of Content is Only Accelerating

The content management world has seen a lot of ebbs and flows over the last two decades. Developments with AEM as a cloud service are not just intriguing but important to consider as you scale your business. 

Key disruption in the content management world revolves around the consumption of content and the acceleration of that consumption. Billions of pieces of content are being produced and consumed every day. To compete in such a saturated world, brand messaging must be highly effective to be able to target individuals with that content. Where content management systems (CMS) such as AEM have come in hand is to be able to create and manage content and amplify it through various channels. There have been a few notable hurdles, however. ‘As technology evolves, it’s important to be able to stay on top of that but also have best-in-class systems that can grow at a low cost,’ says Stayrook. ‘To make it a place where you can feed your customers out of a central repository through this exponential curve of technology performance that grows each and every day, [is absolutely critical].’

What is the Real Impact of Experience-Driven Content?

Channels for Content Delivery

If you talk to anybody in the business of content be it a creative producer right up to the CMO, business is booming. It’s not hard to see why;

  • Incredibly cost-effective: Compared to traditional marketing, content marketing costs 62% less and generates three times as many leads2.
  • Offers amazing ROI: On average, conversion rates are six times higher for companies and brands using content marketing (2.9%) than those that aren’t (0.5%)3.
  • CMOs are investing in content: In 2014, roughly 740 million euros were being spent in Europe on content marketing. That figure is predicted to increase to 2.12 billion euros in 20204. 

The ability to target customers has improved exponentially in recent years but the weak link is getting that content to market. It’s important to identify individual groups of customers based on their behaviors to understand how they interact with your brand, so you can follow up with them with pertinent emails or offers. However, if you don’t have content to maintain this communication, those messages will fall on deaf ears. Worse, that messaging will fall into the quagmire of content that people are inundated with every day.

True Personalization Requires Integrated Services and Tech Across Multiple Platforms

Personalization allows you to communicate with customers more effectively through content. For true personalization, you need to have tech and services integrated across a variety of functional areas. These range from customer data platforms that are used to differentiate audiences, segments, and track behaviors to traditional content such as websites and eCommerce sites. Personalization or optimization allows you to converse with individuals based on their preferences or interests. 

Every brand is working in these functional areas to varying degrees depending on how they want to progress your maturity model in those areas. CMS systems like AEM can help you build your technology stacks in these areas because it touches all of these areas. Please see below for an example of how AEM sits at the center of your digital stack.

The Full Adobe Stack

Personalization Factories

Our goal at BORN is to deliver what we call personalization factories or data-driven customer engagement that is fully personalized to your brand. We create strategic flywheels with the following aspects;

  • Customer experience vision: A clear vision and strategy of the role experience play in customer value. 
  • Data & decisions: Real-time data and the ability to optimize experience through insights.
  • Technology: Integrated technology stack that delivers content and creative across all channels.
  • Content & creative: Content and creative factory with the ability to scale and deliver variations to new audiences. 

If you go back 10-15 years, personalization was a creative and content strategy based on primary research of what you thought your customers would want, what they wanted to hear. Quite often, because it was a creative exercise it missed the mark when it went to market. We would see companies that would implement an eCommerce site, and they would have a dip in conversion. Or, in other circumstances, they would have a new brand, and they would see a dip in engagement. This was because we didn’t have data and insights or the technology and the ability to adapt in real-time. A CMS is vital for those personalization factories as they serve as the container or repository for your global content. They also end up producing content – lots of websites still produce pages that are directly pulled from CMS systems.

However, there are a few challenges of getting content to market quickly to support personalization.

Why AEM for Content Management? 

The Key to ‘Customer Delight’

Adobe does a tremendous job of focusing on all these digital channels when it comes to content. Not only have they been around for a long time, they rate highly in almost every category when it comes to digital experience and campaign management. If you look at how they’ve progressed customer roadmaps, they’ve exceled by acquiring many technologies over the years such as AEM, Magento for eCommerce and Marketo among others. The integration of these platforms were not simple – one had to hire expensive solutions and cross-platform architects.

Any time you want to produce content for various channels, the experience manager is going to play a role in that.

The Experience Manager has so far been the outlier in the Experience cloud because there have been so many ‘on-prem’ – previously called cloud – installations. There was a real limitation on how you could integrate all these platforms to deliver real-time personalized content.

Total Cost of Ownership: Industry Average vs. AEM as a Cloud Service 

The above model is useful for organizations who have AEM installed or those who are looking to move to a more modern platform like AEM away from an existing platform. On the left is the typical cost of ownership profile for a CMS system. In year 1, you have a large implementation cost. The costs go down in year 2, but in year 3, you get a surprise because there was a product upgrade. In year 5, you get another surprise. AEM as a cloud service really flattens that TCO curve. Of all the reasons for moving to AEM as a Cloud Service, flattening TCO curves are one of the most important ones. The implementation costs do not change much but everything you do to improve the functionality of your site through customizations, optimizations, or adding new functionalities, among other things, does not increase cost and does save revenue.

Anybody that’s gone through CMS upgrades or different types of hosting arrangements over the years knows that this can be difficult as you cannot stop marketing or take your website offline during those transitions. AEM as a Cloud takes away that pain. You can put your dollars towards improvement and less so on maintenance and upgrades.

Having AEM in the cloud reduces those aforementioned costs. One is able to do continuous integration and delivery, automatic and scheduled deployments, all through the Adobe Cloud infrastructure. Anyone who has spent time optimizing from a traditional AEM standpoint knows how cost-effective and efficient this is to offload it into the Adobe Cloud which provides user controls and test results as needed.

Shorten Test Cycles and Ensure the Highest Code Quality Through Continuous Testing in Cloud Manager

Some core rules in ensuring the highest code quality include:

  • Code implementation based on engineering best practices. 
  • 100+ rules combining generic Java rules and AEM-specific rules built into test automation processes. 
  • Non-production pipelines available to conduct additional code testing.

One can perform automated testing that can be managed through cloud environments – reliance on third party experts is not necessary. Once this is set up, you can have ongoing performance improvement by being able to get this into the market and pre-production. There are a lot of clients who use the old methods of development and operations on AEM and it becomes a day-to-day conversation on how to be able to manage them. To be able to do so effectively is a tremendous savings to your total cost of ownership.

Scalable and Global

From a global standpoint, brands want content in one place and for that content to be easily accessible. Historically, that has always been a challenge. However, AEM as a Cloud Service can help scale up content quickly in a centralized way.

  • Auto scaling: Automatically detects the need for increased capacity and scales dramatically.
  • Vertical scaling: Adds additional memory or processing to current systems.
  • Horizontal scaling: Adds compute capacity or nodes as needed during high performance.

Cloud Service: Asset Processing Through Microscaling Architected on a Global Scale

Content Delivery Networks (CDN) has always been a topic of discussion and scaling it through microservices is an effective and popular way to run a global operation for content services. 

Using a built-in CDN allows you to manage content, while also allowing you to use it globally without having redundant DevOps systems and the varying deployment costs that go with them. All of the headaches of scaling content contributors globally and deliberating on partners for DevOps tend to go away when you migrate to AEM as a Cloud Service.

Backup and Recovery Strategy

Any book of record system requires frequent backups, fast recovery and encrypted storage. This can be very costly and difficult to manage at a global level. AEM offers:

  • Highly frequent data backups: Daily snapshots stored up to 7 days.
  • Fast and in time recovery: System restored to any point in the last 24 hours.
  • Encrypted storage: Data in transit and at rest encrypted.

As you dig into the total cost of ownership spreadsheets that we have developed at BORN in conjunction with Adobe, we focus on these individual levers such as the savings from being able to decrease the amount of your backups and restores.

Many of our clients work in multi-vendor environments where one works with several agencies in the same instance of AEM. Such a scenario is difficult to manage and AEM developments will help all clients as they migrate to the cloud servers

Timelines

Implementation times on a typical AEM as a Cloud implementation do not change significantly from a design, development and build standpoint. You have to look at the total cost of implementation over five years. AEM implementations can span anywhere from 6 weeks to 18 months depending on how creative you want to be with the user experience, how well integrated you want your channels to be, how you want your site to evolve over time, and how global your branding is.

Key Takeaways of AEM as a Cloud Service

All in all, AEM is a powerful resource in delivering the most cutting-edge cloud services, with four main pillars to sum up its strengths:

  • Always current: New capabilities are seamlessly validated and live instantly so that teams can focus on innovating instead of planning for version upgrades. You never have to worry about costly upgrades and releases, which usually gets consumed in your first year so you can enjoy the benefits in years 3-5.
  • Modular, scalable and global: Optimal performance for customers and employees based on autoscaling and microservices architecture. Lots of the scaling issues that used to be in play if you operate different countries have gone away.
  • Performance resiliency: Redundancy and monitoring to provide mission-critical service level availability. 
  • Secure by default: All environments are pre-configured to Adobe-backed security rules based on enterprise-tested best practices and security frameworks such as ISO 27001 and SOC-2.

When considering how to distribute and manage your content moving forward, consider AEM for its excellence in content management, security, and delivery and reach out to Mackenzie Johnson, [email protected] for more information around our Adobe practice.

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For more information on Adobe AEM, please refer to The Importance of Migration to AEM as a Cloud Service, the inspiration for this piece.

Footnotes

1 Gartner Research, Create Powerful Customer Experiences, 30 May 2019. https://www.gartner.com/en/marketing/insights/customer-experience

2 Content Marketing Infographic, Demand Metric. https://www.demandmetric.com/content/content-marketing-infographic

3 Crossing the Chaos: Managing Content Marketing Transformation, Aberdeen Research. August 2013.

4 Content Marketing Expenditure in Europe 2014-2020, Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/628774/content-marketing-spend-europe/