Turning Warm Fuzzies into Performance: Courtney Wachs, Digital Commerce and CX Executive

Transcript

Justin Burrows: Hi. Welcome to Commerce Chats today. I'm Justin Burrows I'm joined with Courtney Walks who is a digital commerce and consumer experience executive. Hello, Courtney. How are you doing?

Courtney Wachs: Hi, Justin. Doing great. Thanks for having me.

Justin Burrows: So we were we were talking a little bit about warm and fuzzies. I like warm and fuzzies. Uh, but what is what does warm and fuzzies mean to you? How does that fit into digital commerce and the consumer experience?

Courtney Wachs: Yeah, it's a great question. And I feel like it's we don't really talk about warm fuzzies enough when we're talking about digital commerce. We're typically very focused on the transactional. And I think to have a successful digital business, it's all about relationship building, right. So you have to figure out how to build those warm fuzzies in. Um, and how do you do that? Um, well, I think it all comes down to really listening to the consumer. Right. Having an understanding of the value that your business can bring outside of just that sale. How does the consumer want to engage with you? What value can you offer beyond, say, just a discount to them? Do they want a peek behind the curtain? Do they want special product? Do they want an early release? So I think figuring out the warm fuzzies is a figuring out what your consumer is looking for beyond the transaction, and then telling the consumer who you are as a brand. Like what is your mission? What do you stand for? Who are you as a brand and as a company? Besides somebody who just sells them products.

Justin Burrows: You don't necessarily know how that's going to impact your relationship when when you begin there. It's testing. It is, going through trial and error, I would imagine.

Courtney Wachs: Absolutely. I feel like there's there's really never a magic bullet when it comes to digital commerce or more broadly, marketing for that matter. Every company is different. Technology is changing rapidly. The way that consumers consume and engage is changing rapidly. And if your goal is to be a disruptive brand, you need to be able to experiment. You need to try things that no one has tried before. And not everything is going to work right. So I think a big piece of being successful in the digital space and as a marketer as well, is really freeing yourself from fear. Fear of failure. Right. Listening to the consumer throughout the process, they're going to tell you on social in reviews, or maybe just in there engaging in purchasing behaviors if what you're doing is on track. So keeping a bead on that and being willing to pivot and even sometimes acknowledging when you didn't get it right is it's all important. And I've definitely worked for companies before where a failure was not an option and it held us back. So you talk to anybody in Silicon Valley and failure is worn like a badge, because failing and learning is really the only way that you can find a disruptive path that ultimately works.

Justin Burrows: So let's say that just theoretically I have failed, uh, like, let's just say I've really. That's okay. Great. Not great. I don't have my badge, but it's around here. Trust me, I failed. What now? What do I do? I had something, it didn't work out. Do I just forget about it? Do I put it all away? Throw it. I mean, I assume not, right? I mean, what do you do in the rare moments that where you just really kick the pigeon or whatever euphemism you want to use? What do you do?

Courtney Wachs: And I wouldn't say they're rare moments. I mean, look, I fail all the time. Um. And I would expect my team to fail all the time. I mean, I think the first step is, is ideally you try to read the tea leaves before things get really bad and you try to pivot quickly. Again, you're probably going to hear me say, listen to the consumer a million times. But like really listening and looking for changes in behavior. And if those changes in behavior are not going the way that you want them to, figuring out how to pivot, and maybe you're not pivoting in the right way, like, I think, you know, I've, I've run many campaigns where maybe the creative wasn't hitting hard enough. So you go back to the drawing board and you make some small tweaks to messaging. You make some small tweaks to creative and you see what works. You see what sticks. And maybe sometimes along the way I'm thinking about like paid media and CRM specifically. You find something that works for a specific target audience that maybe doesn't work for another segment. So that's another learning. I think the win here is anytime you fail is what are you learning along the way and how are you applying that to future campaigns and future initiatives?

But but I think being able to take that type of learning and create a more personal experience, whether you're creating a more personal experience based on how the consumer is behaving or, you know, regionally the dialect that they're using or, you know, if it's another, if you're looking at launching globally, like if it's a different language that they're using or a different spelling, the more that you can recognize that and react in kind, the more that the consumer is going to engage with you and going to be more likely to consider purchasing from you because you're showing that you care enough to learn about them. You care enough to speak their language to like, meet them where they are. And I think that really goes a long way in terms of, you know, listening to the consumer and figuring out kind of the right channels to go through. Social is obviously a really great place to go. Um, in prior lives, one of the things that we found, which was really interesting, is that we saw a lot of positivity and brand rah rah from TikTok, which was great. We love seeing that. We love going to TikTok to see what people are excited about. But then there was quite a bit more negativity from Instagram and that, you know, as somebody who puts like a lot of effort into marketing campaigns, into digital initiatives, like seeing the negatives is not always a great thing. But honestly, we got a ton of great learnings from Instagram because that was where people would really be honest with how they felt about a product, a campaign, a message, a piece of creative. We'd get a lot of great insight there. I think customer care, I mean, your customer care leaders are your best friends when you're going through product launches. We got a lot of insight into what was and wasn't working operationally. Um, we would get a lot of insight into, you know, challenges that consumers were having with product application that maybe we weren't really thinking of before. Um, so customer care is a great vehicle, and then there is so much that you can glean and infer from consumer behavior on your website and your app. Right? You can you can out based on how long they're spending on your site, how much they're scrolling, um, you know, kind of the speed at which they are adding things to cart and transacting if they're really in a hot state, if they're really interested. Um, sometimes you have to dig in further to see, hey, are they really interested in engaging or did I just create a messy experience where they're lost and they don't know where to go? Like, sometimes you have to dig a little deeper and get into those details. But I think that combination of direct consumer communication from your social channels and from customer care, and then really looking closely at those behaviors on your on your site, on mobile. Great ways to really get that Intel that you need, as well as how they're responding to, of course, your paid media campaigns, all of those combined give you that insight into what the consumer is interested in.

Justin Burrows: So are people on Instagram just like, is that segment surlier or did it like a tick tock? It's more kind of. Like they're older.

Courtney Wachs: I think they are maybe, maybe a more seasoned crew. And you know, it's probably different for every brand but seasoned. Right. I personally am well seasoned. Yeah. Um, but I think on Instagram you do tend to get, I think a slightly older, more skeptical crew. At least that has been my experience. And that's probably different for every brand. But we get a little bit more truth telling and less rah rah from from Instagram for sure.

Justin Burrows: You've worked with some direct to consumer, uh, entities out there that have grown really quickly that were like digital native, that's really interesting because you get this community but do you have the product you've got the people who love you or that they're excited about it. They're jazzed about it. But can you sustain that? Without having like that plan, like that ongoing conversation, because I would imagine that doesn't last forever.

Courtney Wachs: Yeah, exactly. So just to give you kind of a peek behind the curtain a little bit little bit into kind of who I am and my background. Um, so I, I've been lucky enough over the past 20 years to work in many different industries in music, in CPG, in consumer tech, uh, toy, most recently beauty, uh, at beauty. I oversaw their digital commerce business. So all DTC, Amazon and Com as well as CRM and loyalty channels. Um, but I spent the bulk of my career in entertainment and really kind of the majority of that journey was within home entertainment. So the wonderful world of DVD, Blu ray and eventually digital sales and rental. Um, and during that time, you know, obviously within the past 15 years, consumer consumption has changed drastically, right? Um, and as a marketer within that space, not only was I having to figure out, you know, kind of what are the different nuances that I need to create for this campaign for a particular title, because the way that you might market a title like trolls is very different than you might market an R-rated action movie. So really putting your hat on and figuring out, who am I trying to reach? What am I trying to say? How do I position this film? And in some cases, how do I position this film differently than how it was positioned theatrically to give people a reason to own, a reason to buy, a reason to rewatch? Um, but I also had to think of those changing consumption habits, like, what makes a person want to buy a movie on Blu ray versus digital or DVD versus Blu ray? And then how do I cater to, you know, those changing consumption patterns over time? Um, so it was a really interesting exercise in this constant, very quick evolution in how we were targeting and positioning and then kind of looking at those changing consumption patterns. And I kind of developed a reputation for myself. And I didn't realize this until somebody I really respected at Disney actually said this to me. Uh, she literally passed me in the hallway and she was like, high five. It's the parachuter. And I was like, what? Like what? What does that even mean? And she was like, you're the parachute shooter. And I was like, what? What? What are you talking about? What does that mean? And she said, well, you're the person who kind of like parachutes in to a chaotic situation, and you figure out a way to create order and take quick action, and you do it all quickly. Like, oh, like, I'd never, like, thought of that before. I'd never considered, like, what that could mean. But I feel like I've been kind of wearing it as, like a gold medal ever since. And because of that experience and being able to kind of parachute, um, I made a pretty big transition from working in this home entertainment space to working at a high growth beauty company to working for elf. And, um, you know, I entered the business at business at an interesting time, like there were some big challenges that were happening with with digital. And the DTC business in particular was was on a decline. The overall digital business was was flat. So being able to parachute in and really looking at all of those things helped me figure out a more successful way to move forward and make sure that, you know, hey, this this high growth company. Like, we can't have a flat digital business. So figuring out like how we can ensure that digital is accelerating just as fast, if not faster. Ultimately, it actually went faster than the company. And I think, you know, two of the things that really helped with that, you know, aside from making sure we had the right folks in the right roles, were we started thinking of digital as an ecosystem. So instead of thinking about DTC competing with Amazon, competing with retail marketing, we started thinking about the different roles that each digital channel can play. And if we can define those roles strategically and put the right, you know, plans in place for each of these channels, the whole digital ecosystem as a whole can rise. So thinking about Amazon as the channel where we can pull in the most new buyers, and treating DTC as the place where we nurture those relationships. That was a game changer. And what happens when you think about nurturing relationships? Well, you move away from just focusing on DTC as a sales channel and really thinking about it as a brand hub, a relationship builder, a loyalty engine. And so we really started transforming not only the content that we were putting on the site, but really emphasizing the value that we could add to loyalty. Outside of discounts. and that was a game changer for the business.

Justin Burrows: Yeah. And I think that I mean, first off, chaos, right. Chaos. Chaos. Chaos can be a good can be a good thing. Chaos creates. Create. Chaos destroys. Sometimes chaos just kind of messes up your room. Uh, but being tolerant. Some. Sometimes you have to be. You have to be tolerant of of ambiguity. You have to be tolerant of chaos. I think being able to come in and decide, it's like, okay, how do I see. What can I glean from this, this information and kind of just embrace the chaos to a degree? I would imagine now when you talk about loyalty, what I find really interesting is that you're not talking about a five punch card. Get one coffee free. This is not about discounts. This is about that nurturing you were talking about, right? Uh, and I think that's really interesting, especially because if somebody finds your brand and like, right now, everybody's just terrified of marketplaces. Brands are terrified of marketplaces. Uh, you know, of, you know, what do we do? Are we are we cannibalizing? But that reach is so huge you can't ignore it. And I think one of the interesting things that you say is that, like, they can find your store on Amazon, you can have a branded experience on Amazon or Walmart or wherever. Uh, but once they buy that, they didn't. They bought your product. They bought the elf eyelash thing, you know, uh, eyelash brush.

Mascara. Well, no. Don't you have, like, a brush for just your eyelashes.

Or for eyebrows? Yes.

Justin Burrows: For eyebrows. Okay. All right. Yes. I used to have eyelashes in the, you know, whatever. So. But, uh, yeah, you should check out my Halloween video, I just did. I did a pretty good job on my. Oh, I can't wait. Okay. Yeah, but, uh, I was Michael Stipe in the video electrolyte from New Adventures in Hi-Fi. Nobody cared. Nobody knew they could have got a mug.

Courtney Wachs: My husband is my biggest fan. Oh, really? Had his head would explode.

Justin Burrows: Yes, please. Please have. Nobody got it? I generally make jokes for myself. We would get. We would get. Okay. All right, all right. So, uh. So, no, but when you talk about loyalty, you have people. So it actually kind of has this. You mentioned the, the site as being somewhere you nurture, almost like an incubator of these relationships that they buy something from Amazon, but they're buying it really. They're buying that brand. The relationship is not with Amazon, although there's certainly a lot of sticky stuff there, but especially for, you know, items that are part of an experience that kind of you mentioned that warm fuzzy. They come to your site for the warm fuzzy element of it, right?

Courtney Wachs: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when we think about loyalty, specifically, loyalty is not synonymous with discounts. And I think when a lot of people think about loyalty programs, they're thinking about that. Buy four, get one free. Like whatever it is that is very transactional and and yes, like should discounts and offers be part of a loyalty strategy? I think so, absolutely. But that can't be the core of it, right? There's got to be more because again, you're looking at building long term, authentic relationships. And you can't do that if all you do is transactional things. So like how do you look at more than transactions. Well, I think number one, you want to think about how you bring the consumer closer to the brand. Right. This is the the warm fuzzy piece of it. Can you give them a peek behind the curtain? Can you give them a special product or an early release that is just for them? Like that was very like that performed very well for us at elf. Um, can you take their input and apply it to a future campaign or a product launch and then take them on that journey with you? So don't just, like, take their idea and then push it live. Like, tell them we listen to you. We heard you. And these are the things that we're doing to try to make it happen. That becomes a story and a relationship builder into itself. And then thinking about again, listening to your consumer, you'll hear me say it a million times. What kinds of things do they value outside of savings? Like ask them. They will tell you, um, surprise and delights. I would say that's another area that is really, really important, right? Again, it can't just be you do X, I'll give you y, um, surprising them with something free or a little note, like when they get their order. That goes a long way. And I think the final thing I would add is what are you doing to make your experiences engaging? So can you gamify your loyalty program with badges and leaderboards? Can you engage with quizzes or other helpful tools that you're giving them just because they're a valuable consumer? So really thinking about the behaviors that you want to incentivize in addition to purchasing.

Justin Burrows: Yeah. And I think part of that and again warm fuzzies but fun like we don't we don't give ourselves permission enough, I think, to be fun. Uh, and just even if it's kind of weird or quirky, like sometimes just weird is good. It's a little bit. I was thinking about. Because what? Because elf came up when we were looking at, uh, we were talking about liquid death. Yeah. And they. You had a death metal? Uh, a death metal set that was like, paired with, like. That's great. That was like. That was really fun. I got a chunk out of it. Like, I felt good about it, you know? Yeah, yeah.

Courtney Wachs: I think I think Elf and and Liquid Death are very much kindred spirits in terms of being disruptive brands. I mean, I, I have a lot of respect for the leaders at Liquid Death for the way that they think about turning campaigns and products on their head. Um, and one of the things that's really stuck with me, um, that their CEO, Mike Sisario, has said in a few different interviews, is that they like to think like when they're trying to come up with a new campaign or a new product. One of the ways that they go about brainstorming and ideation is thinking about the absolute worst idea first. I mean, you can you can see it in their name, right? Liquid death. Yeah. Who who in their right mind is going to drink a water that sounds like poison? But that was actually that was the point. They they didn't have, you know. Oh. Oh, look at that. Oh, excellent product placement.

Justin Burrows: Well done. Mango Chainsaw today.

Courtney Wachs: Oh, mango. Mango is my favorite.

Justin Burrows: I've been New England, so we gotta have our seltzers. Just any type. We gotta have all the sparkling waters. I went over this with Karthika as well. I was cherry obituary that day, but yeah.

Courtney Wachs: I love it. Sorry. Go ahead. No, no, but I think but I think taking taking that is, is brilliant because, you know, you're taking a bad idea that the notion, the approach to this is you take a bad idea and then you poke at it and you take a why not approach.

Like.

Why not liquid death? What would the problem be with that? Like, you know what? What do we need to consider? And who would that actually appeal to? And then you dig and you poke and you ask why a million times. And then you ultimately get to something that is meaningful and truly disruptive. Memorable. Disruptive. Meaningful. So figuring out a way to zig when others zag. And that was one of the ways like through kind of this disruptive thinking that, you know, a company like Liquid Death and ultimately like elf as well, was able to cut through the clutter without spending a lot on marketing, creating headlines instead of really spending a lot of money on paid media dollars.

Justin Burrows: So I'm at the top of the funnel, I've got sunshine, I've got warm fuzzies. I got these really, like, big kind of persona things, you know, it's like I feel kind of free. I feel in control of, my own, facial maintenance routine.

You come in, you come in with a kind of a vibe. Uh, but you've got a ton of stuff on your site. So how do you change those vibes into through here? You're getting the next level. How do you continue talking to them?

Courtney Wachs: Yes I do. Um, it's a balancing act, right? Because not Anything that makes for a really great awareness campaign makes for compelling, engaging content when you get to a website. So I think really being thoughtful about what your consumers want to consume and engage with when you know, in every stage of their journey is really important. So I think, you know, maybe a good example of this would be, um, the first Super Bowl commercial that, uh, elf ran, which actually was our first foray into TV. Uh, that's a story for another time. That was a campaign that was done in about four weeks. No joke. So that's a story for another time. But, um, you know, kind of what we learned was the content that was really effective in engaging people in upper funnel channels eventually needed to be modified. By the time that people got to the website, we needed to have enough of a through line with the creative and with the messaging that consumers knew that they were in the right place, right. We were giving them giving them the right breadcrumbs along the way, but by the time they get to the website, they've really raised their hand and they've said, I'm really interested. Right. Like, they want to maybe learn a little bit more, but they are about ready to, to buy. They are about ready to tip over. And if all they see when they get to the site is Jennifer Coolidge and we're not giving them, you know, some little hint of a product, that's probably not the right approach. So I think timing things correctly. So you're still giving the awareness campaign love. You still have those through lines. But when the consumer gets to your website in a hot state or gets to your app in a hot state, repositioning the creative slightly so you are getting that product in front of them, giving them that compelling benefits led message, urging them to make that purchase is really important because again, by the time they've got your your site, they're in a different phase of the journey.

Justin Burrows: The conversation that you have changes as you go. You get more and more specific, you get the, the big impression, but as you go, you start again. You, you can see the continuity in the creative, you can see the continuity in the content, but it's geared more and more towards, you know, uh, individual products or individual applications or whatever, you know, segment that they might find themselves being a part of. On a side note, my kids have recently started doing Jennifer Coolidge impressions, and I'm not happy about it. I'm really not. It's a lie. I think this needs to be.

This needs to be your next podcast. I gotta see this. I gotta experience this.

Justin Burrows: No, I'm not my kids. It's like, hey, dad, dad, dad, dad! Oh my goodness. No, no! Stop! Uh, no, I think that I. I think that's real. No, but I, I think that's really interesting. Uh, about how, uh, basically you're having to make these reevaluations all of the time when you're having conversations with your customers, whether or not you're doing the right thing or the wrong thing, or maybe a little bit of both, or maybe doing the right thing, and you thought it was the wrong thing. You don't know why. Uh, but you're doing that over a period of time. But also when you're doing the right thing, you still have to evolve and think of it as as as, like a process. Uh, and you talk about pivoting, uh, which I think I mean, it's not necessarily you say, you know, well, failure is a gift or it's good, you know, because you can learn or you can figure out. But sometimes it's a question of part of it's wrong, but part of it's right. Uh, and thinking of how, you know, to kind of maybe refactor, you know, during the course, of a, a life cycle. Are there moments that you look for that? It's like like a kind of a cadence of let's take stock real quick or, you know, do you have a cadence that you use or is it like a continuous everything, you know, let's review everything all the time.

Courtney Wachs: Yeah, it's it's continuous. But it's definitely not a let's review everything all the time. Right. Like I think it's easy to go from being an insights driven company to having analysis paralysis because you are trying to look at everything all the time. Um, there was a company where I worked where, you know, when I first kind of entered the role, I saw that they were kind of doing these data dumps on performance on a daily basis, and it was just an email of numbers, and it was a lot of work to pull together. And there was no context. It was just, here's the numbers for the day. Here are the here are the sales numbers. And not only was it, you know, busy work for the team, but nobody was reading it. It was filling up inboxes. It wasn't helping people. So I think being selective in how you are not only kind of looking at the data, but you're curating those insights is really important. And so we shifted to a model where instead of these daily data dumps, we were reporting weekly and on specific metrics and insights. So no longer was it just here's the raw data. It was what did we learn. How did the performance benchmark, you know, against what happened a year ago or, you know, even last quarter. And why do we think the performance was better or worse than what it was last quarter. Did it meet our expectations? If we had a specific campaign running in a period, how did the campaign perform? You know, what did we learn from that? So it might come down to the email being just, you know, like 5 to 8 bullets and then like a little graph. But it it communicated so much more than, you know, just the data dump. And I would say that even though this was for a D to C specific business, having those insights on consumer behavior in context was valuable to everybody, including like our sales folks who could then take, you know, kind of the high level story that we were telling and they could better inform their retail partners. So, you know, we might learn first, hey, a consumer is really responding to this particular shade, or the consumer is really responding to, you know, this particular product. And our sales team can have a conversation with retail and be like, hey, like we think you're going to need to order more of this. Or hey, maybe we under forecasted this and that's helpful for everybody.

Justin Burrows: Yeah. Yeah. That that's really interesting. I always love the idea of like, uh, what is it like, uh, shades, like, certain colors just become like the thing, like it's cerulean or, uh, there was pink. I think pink was big for a while.

Courtney Wachs: Yeah. And then it was like, sky blue, and I don't know what it is now. I should actually Google that. Like, what is the Pantone color of the year? There's always like a color of the year, I should know.

Justin Burrows: I'm still trying to figure out the whole brat green thing, but I'll get there.

Courtney Wachs: It's mocha mousse. I'll have you know, is the color of 2025, which. Hey.

Justin Burrows: Courtney, thank you so much for joining me. For this chat today. It was absolutely delightful. Courtney Wachs is a digital commerce and consumer experience executive. Uh, I really appreciate you talking to us about loyalty and about that kind of that ongoing conversation. Uh. Really insightful. Uh, the ongoing conversation with your customer and how dynamic that is of how not only how you proceed in your own plans, but how you proceed in that journey with the customer, how that conversation changes to become more granular and effective. Um, but thank you very much for joining me.

Courtney Wachs: Thank you, Justin, I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.