Total Growth Accountability in Ecommerce With Molly Schonthal and Chris Perry - Episode 200

INTERVIEW WITH MOLLY SCHONTHAL AND CHRIS PERRY

DESCRIPTION

In today's episode, we are talking about Total Growth Accountability. “Shift to Total Growth Accountability” represents a research report developed by The Total Value of Retailer Ad Platforms co-authors: Molly Schonthal, founder of The Digital Shelf Institute Executive Forum, and Chris Perry, Chief Learning Officer & Co-Founder at firstmovr.

It lays out the barriers that stand in the way of maximum growth for brands and then posits the four shifts that are needed to maximize market share across all channels. Total growth accountability is a set of new practices that allows brands to achieve success in digital commerce. Make sure you tune in to find out more!

Molly has been a pioneer in connecting technology to business growth including the first-ever mobile email solution (NOKIAOne), and one of first 30m + fan Facebook pages in the CPG industry. She has also built the first cross-functional (sales + marketing), cross-segment (confections, pet, food) global demand technology roadmap @ Mars, tripling central funding for these initiatives in just over 3 years. She now leads Salsify's customer, executive and industry communities.

Chris Perry is on a mission to help empower first movers - both people and brands - to win in a disruptive marketplace. He is also the Chief Learning Officer at firstmovr, eCommerce empowerment fueled by Community of Practice. As a CPG eCommerce practitioner, executive educator and advisor, he has led eCommerce at Reckitt Benckiser, WellPet and Kellogg’s and was most recently VP of Executive Education at Edge by Ascential.

“By creating exclusivity, you don’t have to worry about the price matching to the same level, but this requires some new approaches because you’re not going to suddenly have completely unique item portfolios overnight.”

— Chris Perry

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Molly hosts a group of executives that they call The Digital Shelf Institute Executive Forum, there are about 150 of them and 30, to begin with. They meet to discuss what's top of mind in terms of growing digital shelf presence and eCommerce expansion, and all of the other stuff that comes along with the shift from the way things used to be for big brands into the future.
There's a lot of growing pains and one growing pain is profitability, a lot of brands struggle with profitability but there are also some brands struggling less. Molly and Chris started to notice that there were patterns emerging of the people complaining versus the people succeeding, and they started to name those patterns.
The idea of Total Growth Accountability is the practice of measuring and considering all of the aspects of the omnichannel shopping experience, and making holistic decisions and investments that drive overall business results, versus keeping strategy and goals separate by marketing, sales, online and offline.
Inside modern organizations now is the separation of marketing versus eCommerce and the separation of an online and offline business, when in reality, there are so many connections between functions, and between those worlds of online and offline.
An industry today is this idea that everything affects everything because whether it's functional silos or channel silos or online versus offline.
All things are being matched and monitored, acted and activated in real-time, often without human intervention anymore because of algorithms and machines. We as shoppers, a sample size of one or a few here are living influenced by many things and behave and activate somewhere else.
Molly and Chris have found four core best practices or beliefs that will get you going long term:
1. Price-Matching Proactivity
In a world where pricing is visible to everyone, and all algorithms are actually matching in real-time based on, rules that are in their system, there's no human buyer or merchant making a lot of these decisions. Now, pricing is at the sole discretion of the algorithm, even though that algorithm is owned by the retailer. So that creates a lot of interesting complexities here.
There's an impact to what we sell, not just what price it sells out. The functional integration, and merging of sales and marketing, as the line between those no longer exists that same way. When you have a price matching issue in the marketplace internally your retailer is causing this problem. Assume the lowest price somewhere will be the new price everywhere. The lowest promoted price that's enabled is not going to be sustainable for anyone to keep selling.
2. Dynamic Portfolio Management
Optimize the portfolio across product, pack, price, and profitability for both shoppers and retailers. Agile development and testing of products that capture a moment. A form of creating exclusivity. If brands don’t do this, the retailer will do this with their private label brands, and niche digital brands. Pushback from brands on constraints, but the imperative is a competitive one.
3. Marketing and Sales Integration
Functional integration is about bringing sales and marketing together. Nestle recently announced that commerce and operations teams have merged. Moving from ROAs to SOV by channel as a primary KPI. Focusing on category and brand dominance, inclusive of both media marketing and eCommerce tactics. Your spend thresholds have to be different or will be different depending on what's happening with the retailer, what's happening with the category etc.
4. Budget Fluidity
Having 2 buckets of budget, one longer-term horizon to realize results. Another budget that allows them to dynamically move budget between retailers in an allocation process (2 or 6-week allocation process, can range from 5% to 25%).
Even if you know that an organizational transformation is not in your near future you don't need any approval from someone on an org chart to just do good work like that.
Sales and marketing integration and common goals would actually tee up all the other things.
The digital shelf on a retailer destination has a long way to go in terms of preserving brand integrity, appealing to different types of people.

Total Growth Accountability in Ecommerce With Molly Schonthal and Chris Perry - Episode 200

INTERVIEW WITH MOLLY SCHONTHAL AND CHRIS PERRY

DESCRIPTION

KEY TAKEAWAYS

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE