Retail shopping and marketing trends in a post-COVID world, with Michael Osborne, Wunderkind

Gary Pageau of the Dead Pixels Society talks with Michael Osborne, president of Wunderkind about retail and marketing trends, how COVID-19 affected retail,  and why Precision Camera is his favorite camera store. 

Osborne is the President of Wunderkind. With more than 30 years of experience in marketing technology, he is an established industry leader trusted by major brands such as Bloomingdale's, Hilton, and Santander Bank. His work focuses on delivering excellent client experiences by leveraging multichannel data and profiles. He is also an expert in executive leadership, retail trends, and sales, having led Bazaarvoice to its IPO in 2012.

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Transcript

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Erin Manning  
Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. here's your host, Gary Pageau.

Gary Pageau  
The Dead Pixels Society podcast is brought to you by Mediaclip, Photo Finale and Advertek printing.

Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau. And today we're joined by Michael Osborn, the president of wonder, Ken. Hello, Michael, how are you today? Well, Gary, thanks for having me. Michael, tell me a little bit about wunderkind what the company does? And how you serve your customers.

Michael Osborne  
Yep, absolutely. So wunderkind is a performance marketing company focused on delivering phenomenal experiences for consumers on behalf of our customers who are primarily retail, travel, hospitality, financial services. So essentially, what we do is help them personalized tailor and deliver the right the best message to their customers at the right time, to obviously, you know, promote positive business results, but also to drive things like a phenomenal experience for that consumer and loyalty over time. You know, not just the standard marketing company trying to make $1. You know, we're focused on helping our customers deliver an amazing experience, which obviously, in turn helps them make dollars, but really, on behalf of wanting to be the best possible, partner engaged and most engaged party with their customers. So

Gary Pageau  
can you tell me some of the customers you have, so people may understand who you work with?

Michael Osborne  
We have large customers like Bloomingdale's Sam's Club, we have customers like Forever 21. Fashion Nova. So, you know, we've got some very large brands that folks will recognize across both the direct to consumer as well as kind of the standard mix channel, big box retailer online presence, retailers. Really, you know, really, it's a solution that's built for all of them. So if they if you're marketing to customers in any way digitally, or otherwise, we can help. And we do 

Gary Pageau  
You've been in the marketing business for 30 years. Tell us a little bit about your background specifically.

Michael Osborne  
Yeah, for sure. So I have I honestly started as an engineer in college, but as soon as that ended, I moved into the business side of things, and focused on companies that delivered both analytic solutions, but also digital marketing solutions. As well as my prior company to joining wunderkind smarter HQ, which was acquired by wonder Kim, in late last year, focused on a lot of the same concepts, personalization delivering the right messages, etc, we just we went to market in a very different way, and solved a very different problem, which is why, you know, when Ryan, the CEO, Ryan, urban CEO of Wunderkind, reached out and said, we should put these things together, it made perfect sense to me. So in my background has really been always on the martec side of of the house on the vendor side, if you want to call it that. But I've worked with retailers that are no longer with us, because they didn't make those transitions. I've worked with retailers that now we're huge, and we're very tiny back in the day. I'm certainly not trying to, you know, date myself by saying that, but there's some brands that I think most people probably remember fondly back in the day that aren't around anymore, and others that were so tiny, and now, you know, have grown to be such powerhouses in market.

Gary Pageau  
So you haven't had a 100% success rate is what you're saying?

Michael Osborne  
Well, no matter what we do as partners, if retailers don't have the right strategies don't adapt to what changes from a consumer behavior standpoint, there's not a lot any of us could do, right. And so that's actually a really important point that I talked about a lot, which is adaptation to consumers changing needs, right? today's world is obviously very different than it was even two years ago, obviously, because of COVID. But there are all kinds of trends over the last 20 years that certain retailers really figured out. Well, this is this is a trend, this is a shift, and I'm going to focus on that. And I'm going to make sure I meet my customer where they want to be, as opposed to try and stay with what they always did.

Gary Pageau  
When it comes to the retail experience. Like he said, that's changed a lot over the last couple of years, or even the last, you know, five or 10 years because you have basically an in store experience, maybe a catalog may mail order, and then the internet comes in and that comes into play. And that becomes more of a shift to home and then you get to ship to retail. Now our audience has been wrestling with with this for years. What do you see is the common thread among successful retailers who have managed to adapt over time? What what what is the maybe the internal or the external approach that they have?

Michael Osborne  
Yeah, I think it comes down to adaptability, flexibility, actually paying attention to what customers are doing. You know, retailers have gone through a number of different seismic shifts in the last say 15 years. I mean, think about it. 2007 was the introduction of the iPhone, and how ubiquitous that kind of technology is today, regardless of what platform you use, is a night and day change to the way consumers engage with brand, the way they want to shop. Amazon was tiny, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, it is completely changed expectations of the consumer. And I think the pattern if I were to go through and you know, do a TED talk on what it takes to make your your retailer last, or your brand rather last 20 3040 years, you would see the patterns of those that adapted to that change things that disrupted almost disrupted themselves, as opposed to allowing outside factors or a competitor to do it for them. And you can, you can see the brands that are still with us that are like that are absolutely doing great, versus the ones that have faded, because they clearly did not adapt. Some of them by sheer will. They wanted to make their customer do what they wanted them to do, as opposed to adapting to them, others by just missing it, you know, not not seeing the data the way they should, and not understanding how quickly consumer behavior changes in order to adapt to it and be able to flourish in that environment.

Gary Pageau  
I guess one of the things I think is interesting is how retailers either don't change, or, or they change to be trendy, but then they missed the boat. Right, right. And now, the example I'm thinking of specifically his Instagram, which is not necessarily a retailer, but they're an ad platform, but now they're, you know, they just came out with a their their CEO just came out with an announcement saying, you know, we're not about photo sharing anymore. We're about shopping, messaging video and celebrity news. I saw that. And I'm thinking, Wow, that is a little far from your core competency. And in my opinion, definitely, it's wrong. What do you think? What, what do you think drives that sort of decision making in a business to chase the shiny,

Michael Osborne  
I do think that retailers, like any business in a competitive environment must maintain the awareness and then take action on things that will make them differentiated from those competitors, right. And they're constantly looking for the next thing that will give them an edge over whomever else in market they're competing with. And you know, the the it's funny, you mentioned that about Instagram, because just recently one of our exec team members at wunderkind told me that he now has basically muted all of his friends so that he can see the ads as opposed to even worrying about what you know what dinner the his buddy had last night. He finds the algorithm so productive for him to discover new brands, new products, that he that's what he uses it for. And that that is to the CEOs a to have Instagram shift, and rather their thoughts. That's exactly what consumers are doing. They're using their social media channels to then discover what we would have done via word of mouth 20 years ago, right? And it's much faster. You know, when you think about it, if you and I hung out a couple of times a year, you might notice something that I'm wearing and say, Hey, where'd you get that shirt, but that's two or three times a year, right? If you're watching me on social media, you can see what I'm doing every single day. And you know exactly what's going on. Plus, you can see 1000s of others. I think what drives retailers to want to find that is that advantage that I want to catch the next trend. I think what drives them to fail at it is the inability to make the the philosophical, or the technology technological changes are that are required to do that. And I've worked with retailers for a long time. And the number of times I've had the Yes, but our board won't let us change like that conversation is sad. And those are usually the ones that don't work out. The ones that are you know, they brought in new talent, they brought in different talent, they they're willing to disrupt themselves. Those are the ones that get it and by the way, get it and try things and fail. But they just keep trying and they're willing to be open to it, they will find the success, they're willing to adapt. So I think those are the main factors that drive it.

Gary Pageau  
You know, trying and failing is obviously something that business leaders ought to be doing. But it seems to me like in the digital world, you can try and fail at lightning speed. And you have to be able to act quickly when this stuff happens. You know, you back in the day when a clothing retailer may don't they don't buy the hot fashion, they may get a hit, but they'll still have people in the store buying things. Whereas now I think if they they miss something, they've made a catastrophic mistake in some ways.

Michael Osborne  
Yeah, it's it's like the old example of a rebrand or restore redesign when when you are completely brick and mortar. A store redesign is a multi year project millions and millions of dollars, takes tons of time. And if you miss the mark, you're done. Right, you've really you've wasted a lot of time, you've wasted a lot of money. You can do a digital storefront redesign every day. And you can try out various angles and different ways rather of approaching your customers different messaging, different brand ethos, you can test all of that and you can actually get the data on what works, what doesn't and take the best parts of it and iterate again, where it's very difficult to do that in the physical. So I think it has given a lot of upstart brands that we now know of as absolutely powerhouses like a bombas or an old Burt's that started as just the website. They've branched into having products in stores and whatever but they've figured out About how to connect to their consumer through that testing and iteration over time. And those brands connect with the consumer very quickly and can be very disruptive, but you know, otherwise would have taken years to get the word of mouth would have taken years to figure out the right messaging, if it was only a physical presence. So it's just it's more tools in the toolkit for a marketer, it's kind of like if you have an entire suite of tools, and you're only using a hammer and a screwdriver, you're missing the boat, there's other things that you can try. The marketers that really get that are the ones that are making progress quickly and growing leaps and bounds.

Gary Pageau  
So let's say for example, you're a relatively small retailer, maybe you're a regional retailer, you've got two or three stores or something like that. How do you maintain that type of competitiveness, because the challenge you have is, for better or for worse, Amazon has defined the shopping experience. They have trained the consumer to expect easy ordering, always knowing where your product is in the in the buying cycle and the delivery process, down to a picture of the product on your porch when you deliver it. And so if you're competing against an Amazon, or an equally large or effective retailer, and you have 24 hours in a day to live in, perhaps you sleep at some point, how do you manage that? Does that mean if you're trying to compete against that you don't have those resources? What should you be focusing on?

Michael Osborne  
Yeah, so it's a great one, it's one that you know, I definitely get from smaller up and coming brands that either we work with or that I've worked with in the past. The best part about technology is that it's equally it's rather easily replicated. And it's easily tailored to various parts of the market sizes of companies, etc. And basically, every feature that's available on Amazon, every technique they use is available to a small retailer in some format, whether that be another vendor, whether that be technology that's been built in is literally free, there are capabilities that will allow you to get not necessarily the breadth and scale, certainly not the infrastructure that a company like an Amazon has. But the the go to market? Absolutely. I mean, if you look at the growth of Shopify, right, as a platform, there are so many plugins to that platform that will allow a retailer of any type focused on any customer, the ability to essentially replicate some of those better features and things that consumers want as part of their experience. So there's really no excuse for a, you know, retailer of two or three stores, retailer of 100 stores to utilize these capabilities. I think it's it's, it does come down to being technologically minded, it does come down to being worth you know, willing to take a risk. But there are lots of tools available to the to a marketer to a retailer to a brand of any size that allows them to compete. I also think it's important, though, to have the philosophical intuition around what your company your competitive nature is, or competitive advantage. Right? namely, don't try and be Amazon because you can't right, but what aspects are most important to your customer? Right? Is it delivery? Is it? Is it breadth of product in store experience? Is it an app that is amazing, whatever it may be, that you think is going to create loyalty among your target market? That's the area to focus on first. And I think sometimes to your earlier point around, why do people chase the new shiny thing, sometimes when you chase too many of those, you're not doing any of them, right? But have, you know, have the strategic mindset of saying these are the two that are gonna matter most to my customers. So I'm going to start there, get those perfect, and then I'll try other things,

Gary Pageau  
Focusing on your core business is vital, but almost more difficult than ever, because there are so many options,

Michael Osborne  
There's a lot there are a lot of distractions, right. And that that's where I think really good marketers know, to stay focused, deliver on the right components of the experience for their customers that matter the most, and then branch out, you know, like, let let success happen. Before you try more and more things to push it even further. Too often, you see kind of an obviously disparate strategy, where it's it's just they're trying everything, they're doing a bunch of different things. And it doesn't really make sense. When you on the other side of that spectrum, when you see folks doing only one or two things, well you think why are they doing the rest of those things, but you really like that brand? Because they're doing what you need them to do really well. I think that's that's actually some worthy advantages for very focused product lines, incredibly limited options at early days in some of the direct to consumer brands that we all know today really helped them you know, it really helped them grow get word of mouth become a brand others wanted to see more from as opposed to branching out and doing everything for everyone first.

Gary Pageau  
Yeah. And you see that sometimes with like, mattress companies now getting into furniture, right? They've kind of leveraged the, the idea that, you know, we've figured out how to make and sell mattresses direct to consumer, what other big bulky thing can you send to people and get that be a great experience. It's almost like the old the idea of the line extension, but it's almost like a business extension.

Michael Osborne  
Yeah. And I've talked to advise for and otherwise know of a handful of brands that have tried that there's one that I'll highlight Outer furniture company makes outdoor furniture, right, Couches, chairs, whatever. And relatively limited in colors and options and whatever but incredibly well designed, has features that consumers really want. And they'll deliver in a week, it's in a box, you can set it up, it's the usual story. They're very expensive. But they're incredibly popular. And they've done an interesting model where they've actually created showrooms of individuals homes. So as a consumer of their product, I can actually set up to allow people to come into my backyard and take a look at it. So they can sell virtually through me, I get a little benefit, great, whatever. But they don't need physical stores to worry about. That's an that's a new way of doing business. That's a new way of going to market. They're adapting to Yes, you can sell furniture online. But now consumers want a little something else. They want to be able to see it, touch it feeling great. Problem solved. I find that as an example, kind of interesting, because it's a completely different way of doing things. You most people, I think I would have been in that room saying that's never going to work. Right. It's obviously worked,

Gary Pageau  
Because anything you said, because that's always one of the things I've thought, you know, turning to the photo industry, I've always thought that was something that, you know, the local retailer has the opportunity to exploit is, you know, to make heroes of their customers, right, right to make heroes of the local photographers in their area, display their prints, do gallery showings and things like that, again, things that aren't going to maybe lead directly to sales yet, but will also embed themselves in the community and display just the type of things they can do.

Michael Osborne  
Yeah, it is interesting. It's funny, you mentioned that I am a photographer, you and I talked about this before. In my background completely just you know, for fun, as a call it a hobbyist. But there's a local photo store here that has a couple of locations Precision Camera, here in Austin, Texas, they do a phenomenal job of creating actual community around the photographers in the area. And I think what they've done really well it's been inclusive of newer photographers, right. I when I first started my photography habit, and enjoyed it so much, it was all film, very expensive, slow turnaround, difficult as an individual who wasn't doing it for professional gain, to really enjoy it digital has changed that camera on our phone is one of the most amazing pieces of technology in the last 15 years. And even on top of that some of the ability for individuals to approach the technology much easier, much cheaper, has allowed for a lot more photography photographers to be expressive of their artistic ability. The the shots like Precision, do a great job of making that community something that is local, something that is tailored to Austin, something that keeps it weird as we do here. And also but also make it enjoyable to explore other formats of the technology of the sort of the, you know, the art craft, right. And when I go in there, and I see literally a wall-size print that someone made from an iPhone picture, and it's amazing, I would want to own that, I'm immediately thinking, Okay, great. How do I use these services to do something like that for for myself, it's different, it's a different, again, addressing a different need of the consumer, the way they're going to market versus just having a really good website, or a really good app?

Gary Pageau  
Yeah, that's actually a really good example, because Precision Camera is viewed in the photo industry as one of the leaders and innovator, right, they have gone to the superstore type format, and when when a lot of people are scaling back, and they do a great job also, just with the breadth of product. I mean, I think you know, they gotten into you know, all kinds of different types of photography, not just focusing on like the advanced amateur the hobbyist, curious what keeps you loyal to them, as opposed to the myriad of other online opportunities that you have?

Michael Osborne  
Well, I'll I'll maybe say this in a bit of a kind of provocative way. I'm not, I'm actually not just loyal to them, I'm loyal to them for certain services, capabilities, certain aspects that I need. When I when I'm looking at sudden say, a printer technology, I want to go in and I want to see some results from that thing. And I want to see a couple of different kinds I want to know is 13x9 big enough, do I really need a 16? By 10? What do I need? Because I can guess and I can buy it online, and I can get it. But I want to talk to somebody who actually uses this stuff on a daily basis. Right? Yeah. When it's, I know that I want a canvas wrapped print. I've tried like five different online services, I've found a couple that are good quality, good price done, you know, it takes a week it gets to my house, it's cheaper than precision, I tell them that they're okay with it. Yeah, because they're not specializing in both large canvas print format. They're focusing on different aspects of what the consumer needs. So I am loyal to them in ways that they I know are the best, I am not in ways that they are suboptimal. And I they're okay with that. You know, they're looking at it like great, we're gonna take this into the market, we're gonna take these aspects of the photographer, we're gonna do really well for them. These other parts, we're gonna let it go to somebody who is you know, able to deliver a cheaper and still decent experience for whatever component of that service. Maybe

Gary Pageau  
You said that was provocative; I'm not sure that was provocative as much as reality. And I think that's one of the things in retail you have to cope with today is reality. There are other options out there, you know, you're not going to get 100% of a customer's business anymore, whereas, you know, I think 10-15 years ago, there was the assumption, you know, there are regular customer, I've got them.

Michael Osborne  
Right. And it's also a matter of Look, if the consumer is happy, they're going to continue to be a customer of yours. But if they're frustrated, by the one thing, you don't do very well, and can't get it anywhere else that may actually turn against you work against you. Right? I think, to your point, it's important to embrace the fact that the consumer can and will seek out their services and products from wherever they need to, and will be different buyers, I may be less price sensitive to someone else, if a certain lens is something I need to have sooner than later. And it's backordered online, but I can get it at precision, right? vice versa, I may not care at all, if it takes a sprint to take a month, if it's half the cost of what I would spend to get it done overnight. Right. So it just depends on what those needs are and making sure you understand what your customers really want optimize for that

Gary Pageau  
How much of your work is dealing with retail staff or customer communication? Because I think that's the golden ticket to a successful retail experience, how you communicate with the customer, how you fulfill the promise, when things don't go right, how you respond to that.

Michael Osborne  
Yeah, honestly, Gary, not as much as I would like, personally, just because I've kind of been a, you know, a retail fan for so long, just in general, right. And across all matters of verticals and sub verticals. Most of our business at wunderkind is focused on the digital side, we do have strategic relationships with our customers. And we are working with CMOS and CEOs and informing them of what we are hearing and seeing as either challenges or trends in the market. One of the roles we play is that of a connector, when we hear a problem that we know we don't solve, and they know we don't solve. But we also know three other executives who have solved that challenge with their businesses we connect, it makes for a very interesting relationship. We're really, at some point, some of the value we're really adding to these folks is just connecting them to others in the market that are facing the same challenges. We're delivering great service and what we do, but we don't deal with in store experience the same way yet, you know, we may, we've got all kinds of thoughts on how to drive more value for our customers today. But just getting them in touch with folks that have solved those problems, or have them today and are in the act of solving them can be very impactful. And it is just you know, it's a good business relationship as well. We want to see our customers succeed. And any way we can help them do that, whether we do it directly or not. We're happy to

Gary Pageau  
As we move out of COVID. Hopefully, what do you see as the big takeaway retailers of any size? Rarely, you know, independence could take away going into 2021. You got to you know, somebody we're planning for the holiday season now. What do you anticipate as the overall consumer vibe?

Michael Osborne  
Yeah, they're You're right, they are definitely planning for holiday today. That's standard. It's earlier and earlier every year, but they've got to get all kinds of things lined up in order to make sure they're delivering on the the most productive time of year for all retail, right? Something like 40% of sales are going to be delivered around the holiday time. And that's a big chunk to be done in a month. I think there are certain trends that are just here to stay the buy online pick up in store is that's a done deal. That is table stakes for most, especially big box retailers. Now even local I think more and more the discovery of the product and the availability of understanding the the details behind it to the comment earlier about the showrooms are more and more details on the website about the product itself. There's a lot of trends with consumers around sustainability and equality and issues that are more political or social but mattering to the brand's philosophy as part of whether or not the consumer wants to be a loyalist of that brand. And and that awareness is important to understand their consumers. I think app experience and just online presence in general has to be top notch, there's a huge difference between working with a retailer that has a really good app experience where it's so easy, it's seamless, I can do everything I need to right there. Even if I'm in the store, it benefits me Even then, versus others that you can tell have not invested in it or have not kept it up to date with consumers needs as of now, right? It's a turn off. And it makes those brands less likely to be you know, loyal to right from a consumer standpoint. So those are the trends that are those are they just were accelerated by coke. These things were happening already.

Gary Pageau  
Right,

Unknown Speaker  
You know, it's like a night and day shift where you had to have buy online pick up in store because you couldn't physically walk in the store. Right? You know, so you had to like get it at the curbside kind of thing that that's just gonna stick around. It's convenient. I know a lot of folks that have never done grocery pickup curbside and now that's all they do.

Gary Pageau  
COVID moved up the timetable about five years.

Michael Osborne  
Yeah, I totally agree.

Gary Pageau  
Well, thank you Michael for your time. I appreciate your your insight and expertise and hopefully you will continue to take lots of pictures and make giant prints.

Michael Osborne  
Absolutely Gary, that's never gonna stop.

Erin Manning  
Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at www.thedeadpixelssociety.com