Episode 1

The Biggest Opportunities Brands Are Missing in E-commerce

Josh whiten

Josh Whiten

Partner for Digital Marketing Transformation at Digital Works Group, having worked in recent years with brands including The Body Shop, Teamviewer, Pantone, Cartier, Yell.com, and Fresenius.

Worked with many brands including

Cartier Logo
Pantone

Episode 1 Transcript

Dan: Josh originally went to Chelsea College of Art, then graduated from the Chartered Institute of Marketing. Back in the nineties, though, he looks much, much younger in real life. And, uh, I believe you’re a course leader at Columbia Business School on digital marketing and from an actual work point of view, Josh has worked across digital marketing for many, many years, as well as E-commerce, uh, and has worked for brands such as Cartier, TeamViewer, Pantone, which must be super interesting. The colour people and the Body Shop. So over to you, Josh, tell us a bit more about yourself, your background, and what you’re currently up to.

Josh Whiten: Yeah, Thanks, Dan. And, yeah, Pantone was a super interesting role. Most people seem to think of Pantone and think of mugs or colour of the year. But there is a lot more to it than that, but I’ll come back to that in a moment. So, yeah, as you mentioned Dan, I kind of started my career actually more broadly within digital marketing. That sort of client-side then freelance, that grew into a small agency. And then I was kind of, I always describe it as kind of aqua-hired to be on the board of a larger agency. And then about five or six years ago, um, and those of you who worked in agencies may recognize this kind of debate you have in your head around, around “Which side of the fence is better: agency life or client-side?” So I decided to move into more of contracting and consulting, working with brands on client-side, which has been really interesting seeing it from the other side of the thing. 

Yeah, as you mentioned, Columbia Business School, they run actually like a 12-week online digital marketing program. So I’ve been a course leader and still a guest lecturer on that program as well. So I think I approach e-commerce maybe slightly differently, which hopefully should give some insight for those listening in, um, in the community. But it’s because I describe it as a bit more of a holistic approach because of my background in digital marketing. I probably pay a bit more attention to the visitor channel side of things as well as obviously the nitty-gritty side of e-commerce for trading and conversion and et cetera, et cetera.

Dan: Makes sense, and so you’re currently at the Body Shop. Does that cover both sides of the things you’ve just spoken about?

Josh Whiten: So, Body Shop… It’s an interesting one. I started there at the beginning of April, and I’m in my third different role there since that time. So it’s, as many organizations, it’s going through a period of change. And I’ve been very, very fortunate that they felt that they, could do with my assistance or input in some different areas. So I’m now in the role of a global e-commerce director. So I’m kind of working centrally but managing teams in each of the markets. This is one of the points where I might come back to a bit later, that sort of relationship between global and market within an organization and also web experience team as well, so Yeah, it’s a really interesting role. Funny enough, I think it was in my second job, I worked for a company that made potpourri and scented wooden fruits, and we were selling them to the Body Shop. So it kind of feels a bit like I’ve kind of gone a full circle and am now back there again. 

Dan: You’re back to making potpourri again.

Josh Whiten: Yeah, it’s it’s a really interesting business. 

Dan: That’s great. So from all of that, I must give you a really, really good view of what is happening in, I guess, Commerce More broadly and specifically in E-commerce. It’s been a strange couple of years with the pandemic, which was kind of a peak period for some and a little bit of a lull for some right now, and others doing super, super well. When I talk a bit about the market as it stands and how you see it?

Josh Whiten: Yeah, absolutely. So obviously, you know, my, the brands I’ve worked with in the last few years I was sort of sitting at recently and thinking about, there are some really strong things that jump out, but a lot of them have in common as common challenges. Now, obviously, not every E-commerce brand is gonna have seen the same experience, but, overall, sort of top level, it feels like, some brands really struggled, you know, obviously, during Covid when some big macro world event like that happens, there’s always winners and losers, and some businesses struggled and others, the E-commerce channel within many businesses obviously benefited. But, it’s kind of like, what I’m interested in, is the period since then and how kind of brands have been trying to adapt to the changing realities of how people are shopping now. 

One of the first things I’ve really noticed across several brands is, since COVID, I’ve noticed one thing, again we might maybe sort of eye on on visitor channels, In particular, there is a decline in brand search in, organic search. Often many brands are targeting brand search with their paid search activity as well. But I’ve seen just this steady managed decline in brand search for many brands going on. That obviously presents the challenge because you’ve got a dwindling pod of users, and my hypothesis around it is maybe because of the distraction of during the Covid time or those brands that were really benefiting during Covid. I had a conversation a year or two ago with the CFO of a pretty large organization, who said for them, during Covid, they were literally shovelling money into a sack is how he described it. But I think I, question maybe whether some brands are taking their foot off the pedal a little bit around top-of-funnel brand awareness. I wouldn’t go so far as to say, become a bit complacent, but certainly, maybe, just not prioritising that area, and I think that has really had a knock-on effect and you see the evidence of that in declining brand search in particular.

Dan: That’s interesting. Do you think, for with the brands you work for, do you think part of that might be just people going back to shopping in the real world? Obviously, if somebody’s been into a store that day and bought what they need, they just don’t need to search online anymore, or do you think it’s something broader?

Josh Whiten: Yeah the relationship between physical and digital is an interesting one. I think that certainly has had an impact, we’ve seen behaviours change. I’ve seen across more omnichannel businesses, obviously, with that physical retail element, and it varies by market, but definitely, some behaviours are moving more to physical interactions. I’ve seen some brands kind of struggle to adapt to that. I was talking to a luxury, brand that, quite understandably, felt that E-commerce maybe wasn’t that important a channel for them. We’re talking about very high-value high-ticket items here, and realistically, people buying those things online is a less important part of the business as they saw it. It was really the physical stores which were the flagship stores. 

But they then explained that in the old days, pre-COVID often you’d have a queue of people outside some of their boutiques to get an appointment to see a consultant, and then I sort of challenged that. I was having a bit of a tour around one of the stores with the store manager, and I said, “Well, how does it work now?” And he said, “Well, you have to book an appointment in advance now after COVID, to actually come in the store and see a consultant and see the products.” 

And then I asked the big question, “Well, how do your customers do that?” And he’s like, “Oh, well, they do it online.” And I asked, “Oh, OK, so you’re kind of saying digital is not actually that important the channel when it’s the main driver of your physical retail appointments!” There was no tracking of that as a goal within the analytics, and no optimisation of campaigns to drive that behaviour. So that’s one example I’ve seen.

Dan:  But that’s quite crazy! Presumably that also gives an opportunity for new competitors to push in, if great traditional luxury brands like that are not paying attention as they should.

Josh Whiten: Exactly. Yeah, and I know it’s an easy stereotype to sort of fall into around “Oh, very well-known global luxury brand therefore, they’re probably a bit complacent and resting on their laurels a little bit.” Maybe there was an element of that, but actually, I don’t think that was the main driver. It was just I guess maybe it was an underrepresentation of a digital channel in the business. In this case, it was a very physical, retail-dominated business. But, you know, OK, I spotted it, but maybe if this is an internal cultural issue, maybe if the digital team within the business had been given more access to kind of what was going on in the business, I’m sure they would have spotted it too.

What it does highlight, and I was looking at some recent research just the other day around VOC (voice of the customer), for us in the e-commerce world, just how important it is to stay close to our customers and be looking at what they’re doing. Whether you’re looking at screen recordings or surveys, (and particularly people who’ve actually already converted) ask, how they found the process and what could be better. We need to collect that VOC (voice of the customer) to know how people are behaving and what they want to do. I think it highlights the importance of that in particular, listening to your audience and your customers.

Dan: And is that something you currently do in your role?

Josh Whiten: Yeah just last week I had someone in one of the teams present some really valuable data. You have to be a little bit careful as to how much influence you draw from it because it is qualitative and not quantitative, and it’s a very small sample base. People often try and do exit surveys of those people who are dropping out from a site and they can be valuable. But I think that example I gave of making sure you’ve got a post-purchase survey in place, I think that’s also equally valuable. Just saying, “how did you find it?”, “what would be better?”, “what was missing?” People might come back to you with feedback around, “your delivery costs are too high,” or “this part of the process was difficult.” Obviously, that’s a great bit of data to feed into your ongoing optimization work to improve conversion.

Dan: That sounds really sensible. Speaking about those luxury brands you’re talking about, if you have a really big purchaser who flags some specific feedback, then you can even get back in touch with that individual and fix whatever their problem is.

Josh Whiten: Yeah, exactly. It does create an opportunity. When I was working at Pantone, their audience is a slightly interesting one. We kind of behaved in, like D2C or B2C, manner with e-commerce, but the audience for Pantone is generally designers. So you technically could say it’s a B2B environment. Although the area I was managing, e-commerce and marketplace on Amazon was very direct, consumer-driven. Not everyone’s in this situation, but for them, it was mining the data of people who’ve purchased and saying “here’s a designer who’s actually in the design team of a major brand or organisation, and there’s a potential for the inside sales team to then get in touch and setting up an account for future. I suppose that’s a B2B example, but again it’s a broader example of the value of just mining that data and being close to your customers and seeing who is buying and finding where their pain points are.

Dan: That sounds great. Super valuable. So going back to what you were talking about before, how the market stands at the moment. We’ve talked about the market. What is it that brands should be focusing on more at the moment?

Josh Whiten: Well, I think there’s a number of things. I mean another big issue I find, it’s a hot topic in my mind at the moment (Maybe I’ve got a short attention span or something) But this is what I’m thinking about in my day, a lot at the moment. And it’s been really common in previous roles. This is around the culture within a business. There are two kinds of elements to that I’ve seen a lot of. 

Firstly, the fear of being ambitious or bold enough in what you’re doing with, for example, experimentation, testing new initiatives. Maybe it’s because I come from an ex-agency background. I think maybe that makes a difference, those of you who have or do work in agencies will be familiar with the ever-constant pressure to demonstrate results and innovate because that’s what your clients are looking for you to do. I guess when  I’ve worked within brands it’s always surprising just how cautious and risk-averse client-side within brands things can be. So that’s that’s one area. 

Then another trend I’ve noticed a lot, but I’m sure some of the listeners may be familiar with, is this ever-present structural or organisational thing around Global vs. Market. I think for the last four brands I’ve worked with this has been an ever-present issue. Taking some resource, say performance marketing, and managing that centrally, globally, but also ensuring that your local regional markets feel like they’re being well served by that global resource is a constant challenge, I would say. 

Moving on then, what do you do about that? How do you overcome that? This is probably the most important thing to think about. I think for the first point, with this cultural risk aversity, a lot of that just comes down to management. I spend quite a bit of my time at the moment in meetings with team leads, just encouraging them to go further, go faster, be bolder. It’s almost like giving permission. And so I think that is a responsibility that senior leadership within E-commerce really need to take on to really be encouraging their teams to experiment. Obviously, you need that framework of governance around it and ensure you’re hitting the numbers. 

Then in terms of the other cultural issue, which is how do you sort of resolve the Global vs. Market question? I was talking to an organisation in the past and they said “We think we need to bring in an external consultancy to totally rebuild the structure, what do you think?” And I was like, “No, I don’t think so. I think you just need to get people working better together.” I think, as I said before, that does start at the top with senior leadership within global and market leading by example and cooperating with each other. 

I had another example from a brand a couple of years ago, but the global team. I asked “When was the last time you actually asked the North American market what their big priorities were” and “What is your plan for the market?” They answered, “Oh, it’s been about a year, I think, or two years.” So they were serving that market with the whole performance marketing piece but were not really tapping into what that market is trying to achieve and what they need. 

Dan: That’s really unfortunate because they would automatically be gathering loads of data that they could use if they paid attention to it.

Josh Whiten: Yeah, and I think it just comes down to good old-fashioned communication – asking questions and ensuring markets feel listened to, and their needs are being taken into account. If you had to make a choice, I probably would err on the side of having a central global team purely because it’s just more, efficient, and cost-effective. You can have a central pool of expertise when it works well, rather than trying to build out separate teams in each market. But there’s gotta be that communication out with markets. 

Dan: That makes sense. And so you’re talking about brand search? How would you manage that from a global point of view if you’ve got a global team?

Josh Whiten: That was, as I say, a really common issue. I’ve seen, on quite a few occasions, this steadily declining brand search. Sometimes the drivers could be that new competition has come into the market, especially if you’re in a space where your brand performed pretty well in e-commerce during COVID-19. I’ve seen a few markets where there are new absolutely pure-play ecom-only digital competitors – smaller, leaner startups doing stuff better, particularly around web experience and conversion. Those challenger brands have really cropped up quite a lot. 

For example, in the beauty sector, you’ve got brands like Look Fantastic and Beauty Bay, and there are some things that they’re doing, I think they’re doing really well. With Beauty Bay in particular, I think they’re targeting a younger audience and you go on their site and their whole proposition is geared around that. Your top-level messages in your hero or above the hero in the pencil banner are “pay with Klarna,” “Make sure you use your uni days discount” and “Have your order shipped to a collection point.” Those are 3 really powerful messages for that younger demographic. 

I have tested this because one of my daughters is 21, and she actually buys from Beauty Bay! I said to her, “Why is that so powerful? I mean, why wouldn’t you go by and have an order just delivered, for example, or collect in-store?” And she was like, (this is why I do my impression of my daughter) “Oh, my God, Dad, I don’t wanna sit in waiting for something to be delivered.” It’s like she wants that convenience. And also I don’t wanna have to go out and actually go to a store and collect it. For her, the convenience of having it delivered to the premier store around the corner to go and collect it when she wants (because obviously, she’s got such a busy schedule) is really powerful for that particular audience. 

Dan: Yeah that’s really interesting. You were you were talking about brand awareness. For that audience, do you need to approach that differently as well? 

Josh Whiten: Yeah. I think so. Generally speaking with new things that come along, I’m not always the early adopter; I’m a bit of a late pragmatist. I have been that way, I guess, around TikTok as an example. But considering the channels you’re using to acquire traffic, I think is really, important. Going back to the wider brand awareness piece, I think new competition is one of the reasons why brand awareness might be declining, but also I think it comes back to the brands themselves. 

In answer more directly your question before, “What can I do about it?” It comes down to a lack of investment at the top of the funnel. But I want to make a clarification there because again, I’ve worked with brands who say “Well, but what do you mean? Because we’ve invested millions and millions of pounds or euros or whatever in some major high profile sponsorship,” for example. But I’m talking about digital brand awareness, so it’s a big leap to invest in brand awareness offline, and then the next step is for people to go online and then come and visit you. I find it’s more cost-effective and efficient and drives faster results if you’re targeting your audience where they are already online. Whether that’s through tactics and channels like, for example, native advertising where you’re sponsoring your content rather than your product. If you’re trying to reach a new audience or raise awareness, you gotta do that education piece and native ads can be a great way of doing that. I’ve done several trials with previous clients of testing that in specific markets, along with paid social, along with some programmatic, and we actually tracked a fairly rapid uplift in their organic brand search volumes in those markets, which I was, I’ll be honest, quite relieved about because I’d come up with this hypothesis of “we’ve got a gap here these channels could fix it.” 

Dan: And the native, would be an example of that?

Josh Whiten: Native ad companies build a network of third-party media sites, often kind of media content-rich sites. When you go on those sites you often see a section where it’s a sponsored and there’s a little tag saying sponsored or supported by the brand name. The advertising takes the form of a snippet that links to an article. So it’s like the editorial snippet, the little synopsis of your bit of content. 

Dan: So like Taboola or Outbrain? 

Josh Whiten: Yeah, those are kind of like the self-serve platforms. I’ll be honest, I see those panels here on site, and it’s supposed to be targeted and ideally contextual. Sometimes, you know, if they’re self-service, that comes down to how well the advertisers set up the targeting, so I see those panels and think that’s not really relevant. But there are other, more established networks I’ve worked in the past with one called, ADYOULIKE, and you can do all sorts of targeting. You can share your first-party data and profile off the back of that and kind of do look-alike or retargeting. I see it more as a top-of-funnel sort of acquisition type, awareness activity. 

But it’s like everything with marketing. I mean, if you’ve been working in marketing as long as I have, which is a horribly long time, you will know that just doing one thing in isolation, never works. Before digital, I’d speak to clients, and they’d be like, “Oh, we did direct mail, but it didn’t work.” I’d answer “Well, it was just done in isolation.” So you do need that joined-up approach, an integrated campaign with several different channels and follow your audience wherever they go across different platforms and bring in paid social as well. 

I think if you take that joined-up approach to a specific audience you want to target, then you can start to build that awareness and then also belt and braces. Putting exclusion audiences around your past website visitors is a good tip as well. Or upload your first-party data of your email subscriber base and exclude that audience from your campaigns, and that way you really make sure you are only spending your money to reach new people.

Because I found, you know, new customer acquisition is another common issue alongside the decline in brand search for two go hand in hand, I think.

Dan: And with brand search, do you think some of it is or some of that search moving across to things like TikTok? You often hear that, or certainly, in particular, audiences like beauty, that TikTok search itself has grown. 

Josh Whiten: Absolutely. Obviously, in the beauty space, the role of the influencer, like them or them, they are kind of here to stay. Leveraging influencers is massively important with those social channels as well.

But again, there are different ways to approach it, and I’ve seen it done in various ways. I’ve seen often this is where you used to get a PR agency with a big list for top influencers and pay them a ton of money to talk about your product. But even a smaller brand can do it at a lower level because there are ways to use affiliate relationships with tier two, and tier three influencers as well and start getting that exposure and driving that if that’s where your audience is, 

Dan: That sounds great. And presumably, that’s a big focus for managing things internationally as well, with a global team that might not be as close to influencers in particular regions, but regions they should know who they are they’re working with.

Josh Whiten: Actually, yeah, that raises going back to my point earlier, which is a bit of a bugbear of mine about making that global vs market relationship work, that that’s a great point to highlight. When it does work, it should be a two-way relationship with two-way communication, and that market can play a really important role. In identifying social chnnels and influencers locally. 

I’ve also seen another example, I think this was Germany a couple of years ago, and we were working on E-commerce, with quite high-value purchases. Um, I’m struggling to recollect the exact details, so if you’re listening and really active in Germany, forgive me if I don’t get this quite right. But I think there’s a cultural difference in Germany where a lot of people will expect to pay in a couple of steps or actually pay offline as part of the online conversion.

Dan: Yeah, it’s actually very strange. So, I actually used to own or co-own a German e-commerce business, and it’s called Krankenversicherung, so essentially payment after delivery, and that is one of the biggest payment methods. If customers buy through that, they treat it a bit like they’re taking an item to a fitting room or something, rather than actually buying it. So it’s a very different kind of buy.

Josh Whiten: Firstly, that’s one of those fantastic German composite words by the sounds of it, isn’t it? But it’s a great name for it, but yeah, exactly and what a great example. But if we were sitting in our global e-commerce teams and you know, Germany is an important market, but it’s just another market and we make our assumption, everyone’s gonna behave the same way globally, but that’s a really important trend in that market. You need to on your local market team to be telling you this stuff, so yeah.

Dan: And go back to the safe space bit because you were talking about having moved from agencies to client-side. You feel that there’s some sort of reticence of trying things out. I wonder is that does that affect the influencer thing? Because I know every time something goes wrong in the influencer market, it’s a really, really big story, and I guess the biggest one I can think of and we won’t talk about the reasons behind it. But there was the issue with Bud Light where they’d worked with a particular influencer and it blew up into a story that was across the Daily Mail and everything like that. Do you think that part of the reticence is through fear of things like that?

Josh Whiten: I mean yes, absolutely. There’s an element of risk, if you’re attaching your brand to an individual and you know what they then may go off and do, or and so on, that you need to kind of put some due diligence and governance in place around. But actually, I find kind of this risk-averse attitude more kind of widespread and risk-averse. Maybe it sounds a little unfair and a little harsh because every e-commerce team I’ve worked with in every brand, I hasten to add, is doing a fantastic job working really hard, and they really want to see the improvement in results. And often I found in some past organizations, maybe people have suggested improvements, but they’ve just not been listened to as much. 

I think it’s more as you mentioned, creating that safe space and that environment where your teams who are at the sharp end doing this stuff day to day where they feel appreciated, that’s just a given of any kind of management, but feel listened to and encouraged to speak up. Sometimes I’ve gone into brands and maybe I undersell myself a bit, but I’ve kind of gone in and said that I’m not gonna always just be able to identify some magic, silver bullet. Huge change in the strategy if it’s gonna turn around results overnight. 

What I do find, though, is mostly the teams that I often inherit or take over managing (because I do a lot of interim work) they kind of know this stuff. They know what’s broken. They know what we could be doing better. We know they know what someone suggested before, and maybe, I’m not going to finger point at I or finance, but maybe they were pushed back by another team in the business that said, “Oh, no, we can’t do that.” And sometimes you just need to revisit all of that and really encourage people to speak up, which I think is a really important part of e-commerce management.

Dan: That sounds very, very sensible. So far, we’ve spoken about a couple of things. We’ve spoken about the market as it stands. Then we’ve spoken about what brands should be doing. And then we spoke about the management of E-commerce. How about the next couple of years? Where are things going in the future and what should be people? What should people be putting in place now?

Josh Whiten: Well, I’m gonna put this out there because I’m sure all of us who work in the digital space are bombarded with invites to events about how AI is gonna transform this and AI this and AI that, so let’s just deal with AI head on. 

As I said earlier, you won’t find me queuing outside the iPhone shop for the latest phone. I kind of wait a year for it to be debugged first. And I’m kind of like that with Marteh as well and the new kids on the block in the tech stack. So I’m being pragmatic about AI. I think people sometimes overlook that it’s been kind of present in a lot of stuff that we’ve been doing anyway for quite some time. 

I’m looking for real practical applications, and I was looking at one recently that actually overlaps a bit with that whole global market thing. If you’ve got a lot of local markets, obviously you want to localise your image assets, for example, and that can be a pretty clunky process in most organisations. Very time-consuming, very manual. I was looking at this AI solution, it was like primarily a bit like a DAM (digital asset management) solution. They have this really clever AI element that with video in particular, you can upload, your video clip, and it will use AI to do intelligent cropping to then crop that one asset into all the different formats you need for Tiktok or Facebook or Meta or whatever it might be or whatever the specifications are for your PDP if you’re showing videos on there. 

So you set up the specs for all those different formats, and it will all use AI to do all the cropping for you by analysing the image and identifying where the focus areas are in the video. And it’ll just do it with one click of a button rather than someone sat in a creative services team having to sort of manually over and over for every single video. 

We all know that generally speaking, it’s a good idea to try and bring video onto your PDP. It’s going to engage the audience more and can drive conversion. But often a big blocker is the internal resource in doing that and getting the content and getting it in the right format and using it. If you want to scale up to tip-top, what content have you got? So, for me, that’s just one example. I think that’s quite an interesting example of AI coming in a quite useful and practical way. 

Dan: That sounds quite sensible, so don’t necessarily use it to try and do completely new things, but use it to do the things that you’ve been trying to get done much faster.

Josh Whiten: Yeah, absolutely. For those of you listening who work within larger organisations, we’ve all got our pain points in those organizations whether it’s in certain areas or processes. I’ve seen it very often, there’s a bit of a blocker sometimes around content creation, around creative image assets for e-commerce. That’s where I’d be looking. “Where are our pain points and our blockers in the organisation now that’s slowing down our pace of releases or blocking off certain channels?” And then use AI to try and improve those.

Dan: That sounds great. So in the future, use AI to try and speed up what you’ve been trying to get done. Anything else that people should be paying attention to or focusing on? Over the next few years, 

Josh Whiten: I’m gonna call out something that’s been around for a while and we all know about it. But I think if we will hold our hands up. We don’t all do it perfectly. And that’s around personalisation. I think there’s still such a huge opportunity for personalising the Web experience for different audiences. 

For example, going back to something I was talking about earlier – new customer acquisition. I’ve been looking at this concept recently of really targeting new customers at a campaign level at the paid media channels you’re using. And when that audience comes to your website, really ensure you use explicit personalisation cues to customize that whole experience on the website to reflect the needs of that audience and what’s gonna interest them. Whether that’s highlighting certain product categories or certain products or certain key messaging, such as the ones I said about with Beauty Bay earlier around the banner or whatever it might be. I kind of try and call it that end-to-end personalisation which is something we could all probably work a bit harder to try and achieve. 

But even on a more simple level than that – how many of us as E-commerce brands are just customising the experience for new versus returning audiences? Just really basic stuff. If someone is coming and logged in to an account they’ll be seeing exactly the same experience as someone who’s totally new. We’ve got their history. We know what they’ve looked at before. We’ve got their purchase history. We should be trying to use that to build that single customer view and use that as the basis to personalise their experience is something longer term. 

As I say it’s been around for a while, obviously, but there’s still lots more opportunity in that area in the next couple of years. 

Dan: Yeah. Do you think that’s just technology that’s held it back? Or do you think it’s people too focused on the day-to-day? 

Josh Whiten: Yeah, it’s a number of reasons it could be the technology. I mean, there are obviously great platforms out there, and experience platforms which will allow you to personalise or great plugins you can put into your tech stack to allow you to do it. But these things are only as good as the people you’ve got internally to actually leverage and use them if you’ve even got people or the resource to use them. 

So it’s partly the technology, partly comes back again to an internal question: do you have people in your teams really thinking about this and looking at it? And it’s just about trying some, going back to my point earlier, let’s just give it a try! I’d come up with a hypothesis, set some basic rules roll it out and see what impact it has.

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