Digital Front Door

Ep. 4 - How To Organize Around The Consumer

• Scott Benedict • Season 1 • Episode 4

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Stop treating e‑commerce like an add‑on. We unpack how to rebuild your organization around the way people actually shop—across search, social, marketplace, curbside, and aisle—so strategy, incentives, and execution line up behind one number and one customer. With Lauren Livak Gilbert, Executive Director of the Digital Shelf Institute, we dive into fresh research across sales, marketing, supply chain, IT, HR, and finance to reveal why the “where does e‑commerce sit?” debate holds companies back and what to do instead.

We get practical about breaking silos with shared P&Ls, common goals, and pod‑based workflows that put the right people in the room at the right time. Lauren shares examples of agile and dynamic shared ownership models that let large teams move like startups, plus an AI‑enabled structure where human owners are amplified by agents for content creation, data synthesis, briefing, and consumer feedback. We also tackle the messy human side: incentives, change fatigue, and the reality that what gets measured gets managed. Education becomes the force multiplier—rotating digital talent into low‑acumen functions, coaching store leaders on online drivers, and building true generalists who can pull the right lever across the full journey.

AI hype meets real value as we walk through use cases that free teams from keyboard work to do higher‑order thinking—demand planning scenarios, data hygiene, and rapid content iteration—while raising a crucial question: if AI eats entry‑level tasks, how do we develop tomorrow’s directors and GMs? Expect clear takeaways on talent strategies, operating rhythms, and annual (even quarterly) org reviews that optimize without whiplash. If you’re ready to align your structure with today’s shopper and accelerate growth, this conversation is your blueprint.

Enjoyed the conversation? Follow the show, share with your team, and leave a review to help more leaders reinvent for omnichannel success.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, hello everyone, and welcome to the Digital Front Door. I'm Scott Benedict, and today we're having what I believe to be a very uh discussion on a very timely and critical topic, and that is the reinvention of the Omnichannel Retail Organization. Now, to explore this, I'm thrilled to welcome longtime friend and colleague Lauren Levack-Gilbert. She serves as the executive director of the Digital Shelf Institute. And Lauren has spent over a decade shaping a lot of what's going on in terms of digital commerce strategies at companies like Johnson ⁇ Johnson and Salsify. And today she leads DSI, which is a community dedicated to advancing the future of commerce through research, content, and education. Now, for those of you who may not be familiar with the Digital Shelf Institute, the organization really brings together leaders across retail agencies, technology partners, and the like to share best practices, to generate insights, and to help organizations thrive in what is an increasingly complex retail environment. Their mission is to elevate the entire industry by fostering collaboration and by equipping teams with the knowledge and the tools they need to be successful in the omnichannel world. Part of the reason why I wanted to have Lauren on today is BSI recently released what I believe to be a very powerful report titled Reinventing the Organization for Omnichannel Success Beyond Where E-Commerce Sits. And I think that is such an important topic. This research that the team has put together is based on surveys and interviews with dozens of leaders from across sales, marketing, supply chain, IT, HR, and e-commerce, and highlights both the challenges and the opportunities facing organizations as they adapt to consumers' rapidly evolving shopping behaviors. And Lauren, thank you so much for joining us today and for uh allowing us to talk about this really compelling report.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm also very passionate about this report, so I can't wait to dive into it.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, let's kind of start by maybe framing up uh a little bit of what the report is trying uh to tell us. Uh the report opens by noting that leaders are still, in the view of the team, asking the wrong question about where does e-commerce sit in my organization? And I think instead the report really indicates that it's really about transforming the whole business around how consumers shop. And I'm wondering if you can kind of explain why you think that shift in mindset is so essential, both for retailers and for consumer brands.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, of course. I mean, I think it's interesting because it's an age-old question, right, Scott? I mean, I've been asked this question for almost every year I've been in this industry, right? Like, how do I structure my team? What does success look like? Where does e-commerce sit? And I went into this research and these interviews thinking I would ask that question. Like, where does e-commerce sit? Is it in sales or marketing and like what works well and what doesn't work well? And coming out of it, I really was like, wow, that's the wrong question to ask. And I was like, wait a second, we're asking how to fit a square peg into a round hole. We're saying, how do we fit e-commerce into an organization that was built for in-store and that hasn't fundamentally really changed the way that they work? And so I came out of it really to your point, saying, we need to think about how we structure to meet the consumer needs, and we need to think in a channelless way. And that's not the way organizations are structured today. Um, and there's pieces of operations that might match that, where brands are trying to be more nimble, they're trying to have faster decision making, they're trying to bridge silos. But the fundamental piece of this report is that we need to totally rethink how these brands were built and organized and operate moving forward. Because if not, many of them are going to get left behind by the small digital brands that started in someone's garage yesterday.

SPEAKER_00:

You know, it it that's absolutely music to my ears because I think some of us that were involved in e-commerce in the early days, and in the case of my career, I went back and forth between physical and digital. And many of us uh thought, well, at some point this can't be two separate things. This needs to come together. But I think that one of the things that this report really underscored is the urgency and the need for change now, not as some down the road, we'll get to it eventually, type of priority, but just uh some of the examples you cite, it's got a local angle for us here in Northwest Arkansas. 68% of Walmart's recent growth came from digital channels. And that kind of underscores just how central e-commerce has become in retailing total. And I'm curious, why do you think that some brands are still maybe a little bit hesitant to fully invest in an Omni channel? And what risks in your mind do these brands, and again, whether it's a retailer or a consumer brand, what are some of the risks that they take by not moving quick enough?

SPEAKER_01:

I think to answer your first question, a lot of organizations are maybe in the double digits for e-commerce sales, right? So maybe 10, 15% when we're thinking CPG, I'm broad brushstroking, right? So a majority of their sales are still in store and you have leadership that may not have grown up in digital, right? So they are using the playbook that they've used for the past X number of years. And that makes sense, right? Because that's what they know. But the playbook is changing. And just because the majority of your sales doesn't come from e-commerce does not mean that there aren't digitally influenced sales, that you're not driving discovery, that you're not building brand. And I think the challenge is it's not as tangible as the metrics that we've used for the past 150 years to measure in-store shopping. And so it can be hard to explain to people that don't fully understand it. And that's why, even a big piece of this research, I underscore the need for education at every single level of your organization. I think we're starting to see organizations that have leaders that were grown up in digital that truly understand it. And so they can have a different approach when they're building out their strategies and they can say, I understand this is a huge piece of the puzzle. Let's think about the consumer journey from end to end. And let's not think of the in-store team and then the online team and then the social team separately. Let's think of them holistically. So I think that's the to answer the first part of your question, that's what I would say. In terms of what they risk, I mean, to your point, this question has been around for a long time, but right now is such an inflection point because of the amount of change that is happening. I mean, if we think about, you recall this from your retail days, like planogramming, right? You maybe change the in-store planogram twice a year, maybe more, depending on the store. Amazon changed their requirements for what was needed for items being set up online 244 times last year alone. Think about that. That's a significant increase in the pace of change. And now that we have a gentic commerce, and now that retailers are demanding more personalized content, you have more assets that need to be created, more data that's required. So that pace of change is going to exponentially increase. But what we haven't changed is how we operate to keep up with that change. So that's why I think this is such an inflection point right now. You have those smaller digital brands I mentioned that are popping up in people's garages that are ankle biting at these long-standing brands and they can be more nimble, they can make changes more quickly, they think differently. So, I mean, there's that, there's the pace of change, there's the fact that organizations were built for in-store, their supply chain, RD, everything. And it takes a long time to move a big cruise ship to the left. It doesn't take a long time to move a tiny speedboat to the left, right? So I completely understand we can sit on a podcast and say, you need to make all these changes. And it's it's quite difficult. But those organizations that don't at least start to have different mindset shifts and think differently about how they're operating are going to have a really hard time catching up.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And it's interesting because part of that hard work, part of the heavy lifting, if you will, is breaking down existing silos. I think one of the strongest themes that I got out of your report is the need for cross-functional alignment. So sales teams, marketing, supply chain, finance IT working together under a unified PL that's all rolls up to one big number instead of these kind of siloed reporting and uh siloed metrics, if you will. I'm curious if you've got some examples that come maybe top of mind of brands that are really successfully breaking down those silos and creating a bit of shared uh accountability, whether they're here in the US or maybe in other markets around the world.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm glad you got that theme because it's one of the most important ones. And before I answer your question, one thing I want to add is when I went into this research, I specifically went to all of those other functions too. I feel like a lot of times when you do research around e-commerce orgs, you just stick within that org. But I did, I went to HR, procurement, legal, finance, because they're all such a critical piece in this puzzle. And I think when you look at cross-functional collaboration, the number one thing that makes it easier is shared goals. If you have a sales team, so let's say you have a Walmart sales team and they only have an in-store number, and then you have an e-commerce team that has the e-commerce number, why would the Walmart team, whose bonus is probably attached to the in-store number, want to help the e-commerce team because they're not being measured against it and their compensation, what they work for, is also not being measured against it. So why would you work together? The silos and the way that goals and objectives and bonuses and just ways of operating are built in these larger organizations, are so that everybody kind of stays in their own lane and in their own silo. And that worked in a world where we just shopped in store and it was easy and everybody had the same metric. But there's a level of complexity now with the way that consumers shop that we need to adjust the way that organizations operate. So, one of the examples in the report, and there's actually a visual of this that shows what shared goals could look like, this organization chose three goals. And they said across every function, you're all responsible for these three goals, and actually outlined, okay, supply chain, here's how you touch this. Legal, here's how you touch this, RD, and so on. And so it was very clear for the person sitting in the seat to say, I know the value I'm driving towards this one unified North Star. We are all working together. Here are my partners, and here's who I work with. And the research shows in the data, those who have shared goals have a higher percentage of e-commerce sales. It logically makes sense, right? If you're working towards the same goal, then everybody's doing it together. And so you have more of that collective to achieve your overall results.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I think that makes total sense. And I witnessed that within my own career when uh a role, a very critical role like a store manager, got uh measured and compensated based on online sales that go through their store or that are in their local market. It totally changed the dynamic of the collaboration between the physical leaders and the digital leaders and and and really being focused on the customer instead of on their individual areas of the business. And to your point, that kind of changes the dynamic uh of things in pretty significant ways, right?

SPEAKER_01:

The underlying theme in all this is change. And I think we forget that we're all human, right? Like change is hard. Humans don't really like change. And what gets measured gets managed, right? We are doing our jobs to make a salary. We have a bonus attached to it, we want to achieve our goals. And if you can change the human behavior to fit the overarching goal of the organization, that all makes sense. So I just encourage everyone who's going through these transformations right now and thinking about how to operate differently differently. Remember, every single thing you're talking about when you're talking about org structure is around human nature. So there's a lot of ways that you can tweak it. And that's what I tried to focus on in the report, because I can't sit here and say, hey, brand, here's a beautiful org structure on a piece of paper that's going to solve all your problems. Nobody can do that, right? Like that's just not how it works. So instead, I focused on what are the mindset shifts and what are the actions that you can take, no matter what size org, no matter what level of maturity. And you can start doing those now. And some of them have a high level of effort, some of them have a lower level of effort. So just figuring out what makes sense for your org.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and and start down the road in start now. Yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

Start yesterday.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. And you know, one of the things you touched on earlier, and I uh and I think this is a shared passion of mine, and that is uh the development of talent, whether that is the leaders of today or the next generation of leaders. And you and I met when uh I was uh teaching at Texas AM, and one of the things that we were wrestling with in academia, and I think it extends uh into industry, is uh some of the findings in your report is that HR and talent development and leaders in an organization have got to rethink talent development, creating, I guess we'd call them generalists who understand both in-store and online rather than very siloed specialists that it feels like we've had for most of the last 20 years, which this is the digital team and these this is the store team, and their expertise uh was focused just on one part of the business instead of looking holistically at the whole business. And I'm curious, based on what learnings came out of the report, do you have a view of what kind of skills and leadership traits that really are going to define the commerce leaders of the future, whether they are existing leaders that are in the business today or future leaders that maybe are in uh uh getting their education right now and will come into the industry here in the years ahead.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, this is one of those things that came out of the report that I wasn't necessarily expecting, but then became such a kind of red alert moment for me as I went through this. Talent, we are going to have a talent problem very soon in our space. And to your point, Scott, I think it's really important to identify what are those characteristics that make a commerce leader successful, and how can you educate for them? How can you train on them? How can you develop them? And a lot of them are softer skills. They're being agile, they're being comfortable with change, being flexible, uh, having a more entrepreneurial spirit, right? Being willing to test and learn and figure things out and being collaborative, working cross-functionally, not staying in your lane, being a being comfortable in white space. So being given this problem of like, hey, how do we solve the consumer journey and just figuring it out? And to your point, I I talk a lot about generalists in the paper because the way that traditional talent development exists in most of the CPG companies today is you go up through sales, you go up through marketing, you get X number of experiences, and then you can be a general manager. And you know, there's like specific rotation programs. One of the challenges I had when I was on the CPG side was I was in e-commerce. That was a new category, that was a new function. They didn't know what to do with me, if I'm being quite honest. Not in a negative way, but they gen genuinely didn't know what to do because I didn't follow a traditional career path. And I think that's a struggle for a lot of people that are in e-commerce roles in organizations today. They're probably the trailblazers. They probably don't know anybody else in the org who is doing what they're doing. So they need to kind of navigate their own path. But I do think that the future leaders of tomorrow are those that started or rotated through e-commerce in some way. Because if you are ever in an e-commerce role, you have to understand almost every single function. And you have to see from a much higher vantage point across the entire organization, across the entire consumer journey, and be able to pull the right levers at the right time to be successful. And so it gives you that strategic thinking where you can say, hey, I'm sitting here, I understand the weeds, but I'm leveling up to say, here's what I think the strategy should be, because I understand all these different players on the chessboard. And so I would say to the HR teams, one, like developing your people and training them. So every single new person that comes into the company, they should be educated on e-commerce. Add it to your rotational programs, whether you have a leadership development program. One of the best and coolest takeaways from the research is I was interviewing a brand and they said their way of being able to infuse digital into the organization was that they intentionally rotate people out of the e-commerce team into functions that don't have a lot of digital acumen, whatever that function is. And so through basically like osmosis, right, they're getting that digital education pushed throughout the entire organization. Because if not, you have a team of maybe five people educating a hundred thousand people, and that's just sustainable. So, how can you ingrain that more into how you actually educate and and really put digital into the DMA of the company?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I love that intentionality in uh in rotating people through assignments that I think in many cases consumer brands do better in some cases than retailers do. And I also found a lot of folks who grew up with an e-commerce uh apparently never set foot in stores. And it it kind of highlighted the point that you're making and that the research brought forward is this this cross-polonization, this the the this intentionally putting people in development assignments that strengthen their weak areas is really it's always been important in retail, no matter what area you were in, or whether you were a brand or a retailer, but it just feels like it's taking on a whole nother level of urgency today because of the way the business is evolving and the consumer is evolving, right?

SPEAKER_01:

And I think you make such an excellent point, and I'm glad you brought it up. The same applies for in-store, right? Like e-commerce team needs to understand in-store, in-store needs to understand e-commerce. It is a joint collaboration. So every side of the coin needs to be, it needs to have more education around the broader consumer and how they shop. So I love, love, love that you called that out because it is the same on the on the in-store side as well.

SPEAKER_00:

One of the other things that I noticed in the report that probably should not shock us is that it calls out the fact that AI is truly a game changer in our industry, which is not late breaking news. We hear about that all the time. But what's interesting is the different roles of the different areas of the business in which AI is a bit of a game changer. It's not just in customer discovery of products when they're dealing with a digital interface, but it frees up teams and a lot of different areas of the business from some of the repetitive tasks. And I'm kind of curious how, in your view, based on what you learned through this process, do you think retail organizations should balance the hype of AI versus the real, practical, everyday applications of things? Because it just feels like, and you probably see it too, there's a lot of chasing shiny objects instead of kind of a thoughtful path of how do I use this wonderful technology to drive innovation in the customer experience and in every different area of the business. What do you think?

SPEAKER_01:

I completely agree. I mean, I see a lot of shiny objects chasing. And what I would say about AI in general is it's it's sticking around. Like I would think of like the metaverse as a very shiny object that has less shine, right? Like AI is going to continue to be shiny. Uh, and I do think we'll revolutionize like how we work and how consumers shop. What I would say is anchoring on the problem that you're trying to solve. Don't just bring in AI to bring in AI. Like there needs to be an actual foundation and problem that you're trying to solve with it. And when we're thinking about actually like getting work done and organizational structures, I would think about how it can take away more hands-on keyboard type work to open up more of that strategic thinking, kind of like you said. So one of my favorite examples is demand planning. If you were ever on the brand side and you went through demand planning, it's a lot of Excel sheets. There's a lot of complexity to it. Yes, you'll still need to have conversations. Yes, you will still need a human in the loop, but you can automate a lot of the work that gets done there. And I'm sure there's so many different elements of that throughout the organization. So starting small, making sure it's actually solving a problem and providing value and just kind of testing and learning. We're all figuring this out together. Like Scott, you and I can sit here and like say all these beautiful things, and then in two weeks it's going to change, right? Like, so I think a lot of people are trying to find some concrete evidence or just some very, very clear clarity on AI, and they're not going to find it because we're at a really cool time where we're seeing the technology evolve. And so everybody's figuring it out and learning. And even in the report, I build out like an example of an AI-enabled org that can look different in the next one, two years. But the main thing is have the conversation and start thinking about it. And I forgot to mention this in the last piece about talent, but I want to bring it up. Also think about if AI is going to take away some of the hands-on keyboard work, how are you going to build the future leaders in your organization? Because Scott, you and I got to do those analyst like beginning jobs where, you know, it wasn't glamorous, but we learned. If you take that away, how are you building the director, the VP, the general manager of tomorrow? I don't know the answer to that question, but I think it's a big, big flag for companies to think about, for our industry to think about, because AI is going to superpower us in the most amazing way and help us scale in ways we never could in the past, but it's also going to change how we recruit and hire and how we bring up the leaders of the future. And I think we need to call that out.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And it's interesting because I've seen a lot of stories in the news recently about retailers and brands investing in what I'll call AI education for their associates, for their people, not just how am I going to use this tool in the business, it's how am I going to develop the people who will leverage those tools to drive whatever area of the business and I'll ultimately serve a customer. And I think that's such a forward way of thinking about it, is that when you bring technology to bear, you've got to make an investment in people and in training and how to leverage those tools, not just the tools by themselves, because as it turns out, humans still have to use all the tools, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. We're not going anywhere anytime soon. Humans are still sticking around. And I think before I got into the mindsets and the in the research, the kind of two main concrete things that every single org needs is education and change management. Because change is a constant. It is always going to happen, especially in our industry. So if you are not getting your organization ready for change and you're not measuring how your organization actually responds to change, then it's going to be really hard to implement new technology moving forward.

SPEAKER_00:

You know, an early uh manager in my career said or told me that if you don't like change, retailing may not be for you. Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh my goodness. Well said.

SPEAKER_00:

And that was a while back, and that was based on what was happening in the industry then. I think that that uh admonishment is is, if anything, more timely today uh than it was when he told me that.

SPEAKER_01:

So yeah, I mean, open AI announced what, like four things in the past two weeks that were revolutionary.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. And between now and the time that this uh this episode airs, they'll they'll launch a few other things. Uh I'm curious, one of the things I really found compelling what uh in the report was uh business models uh of the future. I I guess maybe it's organizational models is maybe a better way to put it. And the report outlines four potential organizational models: the agile, the pod-based, uh, the dynamic, shared ownership, and AI-enabled. And I'm I'm curious if you can walk us through maybe some of the way that these models differ and maybe what factors might lead a company uh to pursue one of these models versus another.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So I remember how I said that there's no org structure I can give you on a piece of paper. But I wanted to give some examples of what could work and take pieces that make sense for your organization. There's a similar theme across all of them, and that is that you need to have agile decision making, one unified strategy, and you need to think about each function across the entire consumer journey. So, for example, if you're a marketer, you're just a marketer who knows digital, social, and in-store. You're not a digital marketer and in-store marketer and a social marketer. So those I would say are like the key themes across the board. When you think of the agile and the pod model, it's really about kind of bringing all of the players together. So if you look at the visuals in the report, and hopefully you download it and look at it, you can see that there's like a generalist who sits in the center, kind of like a GM, and you're pulling in all the right people to make the right decisions about a specific problem. So, for example, you have a marketer who's attached to that specific need state, then you have your legal team, then you have like your commercial strategist, and they're all sitting in one, it can be virtual area, but you're working together as a pod for your specific brand. Dynamic shared ownership for me is really interesting. Bayer talks publicly about this, please read about it. Please watch all their webinars. The way I describe it, and this is not the official way, is kind of like an amoeba. So if there's like a problem that happens, they put together a strike team, and you as an employee have a home team, like where you sit in your function and an away team or a working team. If you're pulled into one of these problem teams, like let's say, for example, uh ChatGPT instant checkout, right, for Walmart. Maybe you really need to get optimized for that. It pulls all of the right players, and then that becomes your sole focus for the next X number of days in that sprint to go and solve that problem. So they're moving with the flexibility of what's happening in the market while still having core business take place. That to me is really the way that larger organizations can work within the confines of a lot of how they've built themselves, but still be agile and flexible. And the same kind of goes for the AI enabled model that I mapped out, where there's a lot of agents that are supporting the humans doing the work. So, for example, one arm of the AI enabled org, you have a brand strategist who's the human who's looking across the brand, but they have five agents supporting them. They have a content creator. Creation agent. They have a data agent that's pulling all the data and insights. They have a briefing agent that's writing all of the briefs for the content to get it created. They have a consumer research group, which is like an AI-enabled group of people that are similar to their personas, which is reacting to that content. So the real theme here is flexibility and more of a holistic view of what's happening from a consumer perspective.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And this concept of kind of reinventing how the org is designed and how it reports, I think feeds into the this last question I want to pose to you. And it's this concept of continuous reinvention, which really we shouldn't think of as new in retailing, because if you're a student of the history of retailing, that's effectively what retailing is, is it's continuously updated and refined. It's just happening a lot faster these days. But I'm I'm curious, one of the things that I took away from the survey and from the research was that most companies really don't regularly reevaluate their organizational structure, even though the most successful ones do it perhaps quarterly or annually. And I'm curious if going through this process of creating this report, do you have a perspective on how leaders can build a culture of continuous optimization, but doing it in such a way that maybe doesn't give their teams whiplash or doesn't make too much uh uh of a crisis mode that overwhelms their team? I'm wondering what what what thoughts occur when when you think about that.

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, that's really where the change management comes in. I think that you need to get your entire organization comfortable with the fact that their org structure is not going to be the same for the next five, 10 years. And that's a different way of thinking, especially for people who didn't grow up in digital, who've been at these organizations for 15 to 20 years. So I think it has a top-down kind of perspective where the leadership needs to be very clear like, hey, we need to adapt to our consumer who's buying our products and set the stage to say, we are constantly going to be optimizing and thinking about how we can work differently, how we can operate differently, and have a change management plan in place that helps people understand the why and then how they can have a piece in that change. And I think that starts there. Then there's also the bottoms-up approach, right? Where I think it's really empowering the employees in any function to say, hey, if you have an idea about how to do this differently, or you want to try and you want to test things, like let's do it. I had the opportunity to see Andy Jassy from Amazon speak once. And what I found so interesting, and I think really speaks to the culture of Amazon is that they measure people on how many experiments they've done and how many of them have failed. Do retailers and brands do that? No. Right? That is a totally different way of thinking. It's more focused on like needing to meet the number, to meet my goals, to get to here. Like encouraging that experimentation and starting to create that culture makes the change not as scary. And I think every organization should review their org structure every year. I mean, I think it might be hard to do it more than like on a quarterly basis. Some people said that they did. I was like, that's pretty impressive. But it was more of just like a review and looking at roles and shifting job responsibilities. But I think there's also a level of what you need to do. I'm not saying like break your org structure and redo it, but it could be rewriting job descriptions. It could be understanding where an agent can supplement and how you can think about that role differently. So I think it's just being more open to really investigating how work is getting done and if there's a better way, and if the brands and the retailers are still focused on the consumer and not getting stuck in the endless swirl that can happen internally.

SPEAKER_00:

Indeed. Lauren, this has really been incredibly educational. I've really enjoyed it and I appreciate you sharing these insights. I think one of the things I find so powerful about this report that you all put together is that it reminds us uh that OmniChannel is not just about adding e-commerce as a bolt-on to an existing retail or brand organization. It's really about reinventing the way organizations in our industry think, uh, how they collaborate, how they go to market, and by always putting the consumer at the center of what they are doing, which you should you feel like you shouldn't have to remind people about that. But occasionally I think it does all of us good to rethink uh what the customers' needs are and build your go-to-market strategy, no matter what type of organization you are, uh, based on that. So I really appreciate you sharing that that information, Lauren, and have really enjoyed our conversation today.

SPEAKER_01:

Same here. Thanks so much for having me, Scott. I love this topic.

SPEAKER_00:

As do I. And for those of you that are watching, if you would like to download your own copy of this report, and I encourage it, uh, you can visit the Digital Shelf Institute's website at digital shelfinstitute.org. Uh, we'll put a link on the screen there. I really do encourage you to check it out because, in my view, it's a roadmap for any brand or any retailer who is serious about evolving and preparing their organization for success uh in the future. With that, thanks again to Lauren for joining us today, and thank you for tuning in to the digital front door. I'm Scott Benedict.