How digital channel optimization enhances the customer experience

Staying ahead of the competition — or even just keeping pace — might well mean AI. But artificial intelligence is far from the only tool in the toolbox. Optimization of digital channels, perhaps through the use of marketplaces, is key.

“To stay ahead of the competition is to start thinking, ‘What else selectively can we do?’” says Neel Grover, CEO of Shop Premium Outlets. Since COVID, he has seen brands focus on their own direct-to-consumer, he says, “as they should.” A next step, however, could mean being on another site like his, or adding additional products and categories on their own site.

Grover has been involved in building and running marketplaces for more than 20 years, including Buy.com, Rakuten North America, Best Buy and Bluefly. Simon’s Shop Premium Outlets, he says, is really “Simon Online,” a shop-in-shop for premium and luxury brands to sell on-sale and outlet products.

He joined Ellie Quartel, chief digital officer and head of direct-to-consumer, Fossil Group, and Jon Reily, president, McFadyen Digital, on-stage at NRF Nexus; the trio talked about enhancing customer experiences through digital channel optimization.

Quartel touched on different kinds of “bets”: some are volume-drivers and money-makers, even if they’re not the most innovative ideas, while others are smaller and more about innovation and insights.

“You can’t really plot which one of those is going to work out sometimes in the way it does,” she said. She pointed to the company’s social commerce efforts in Asia, for example, a “massively successful bet,” now almost one-third of its digital business in that region. The same bet in North America has been small, but has provided important learnings around content.

The other piece, Quartel said, is the importance of thinking cross-channel. One of Fossil’s digital strategic pillars is to “meet the consumer where they are. And what I think that means for us is, try as much as possible to be channel-agnostic and to let your consumer shop in the channel that they’re most comfortable shopping in,” she says.

“It means that we do have to work on experiences and opportunities, not just in owned dot com and in stores, but also in marketplaces and in wholesale dot com. We’ve found that to be really helpful as a diversification strategy.”

It begs the question of how brands can drive innovation on channels that aren’t their own. Quartel said it often can be easier to innovate on middle to smaller marketplaces “because they’re better partners.”

Shop Premium Outlets has helped Fossil innovate across its channels, she says, such as doing livestream events from Fossil’s Simon property stores. SPO also has a partnership with Tmall, so it selectively livestreams into China.

As for bricks-and-mortar, Quartel said she has been surprised by store associates who think of ecommerce as hurting the business, or even Amazon as “the big bad.” She shared the possibilities marketplaces can provide, and said there may be need for education around “how you can think creatively about leveraging the assets across channels.”

Though many equate Fossil with watches, she says, it is a portfolio company, owning and or/licensing roughly 15 brands in the watch, leather and jewelry space, selling them across a variety of channels.

Practitioners all have specific KPIs within various divisions, Reily says. But consumers don’t really care where stuff comes from. They just want the stuff. “I will frequently advise brands: If your customers can tell when they’ve crossed a business unit in your company, you’ve failed,” he said. “And that happens all the time.”

Whether in-store or online, continued innovation — and testing — is paramount, the panelists said. They also recommended organizing for desired innovative outcomes; at Fossil, pulling together the marketplace and DTC teams was a “massive organizational unlock,” Quartel said.

“Be selective and test and learn,” Grover said. That might mean expanding into different marketplaces, or even delineating by product set or subset. The good news is that no retailer has to go it alone; as the field has grown, so has the number of experienced people who know how to make it happen.