#13: How Ecommerce Neglects 40% of Society with Janis Thomas

~ This transcript is automatically generated so may contain some errors ~

So while we have this long journey to purchase that we really invest heavily in, it pays off. It means that we win much more engaged customers rather than having to spend a fortune on winning them back or acquiring more new customers.

Welcome to Statements of Intent. In this 20 minute episode, we're addressing how eCommerce has lost sight of the people at its very heart. You, the customer. It's a chat that's optimistic, it's casual, it's probably slightly ranty in places, but that's okay. But it's a place where I talk to senior eCommerce marketers.

And share their statement of how they're looking to change the status quo of eCommerce, adding more care, being more considerate to those very people that they're selling to - the customer. I'm your host, David Mannheim, the founder of Made With Intent. And we're going to jump right into it. Have fun

Hello,

everyone.

Welcome to Statements in 10. I'm your host, David Mannheim, and we are going to spend 20 minutes with the bold, the striking Janis Thomas, Managing Director, Look Fabulous Forever. And Janis, I was doing a little bit of research before and just looking at your experience. Uh, Playboy stood out.

Marketing at Playboy, at Birchbox, at the Wedding Shop. It seems like you have I've seen there, done it all and got the t shirt.

Yeah, that's fair to say my career has been very diverse. I spent a long time in media and entertainment and then kind of segwayed that into kind of e commerce subscriptions and then kind of pure play e commerce, but yeah, it's been long and done some amazing things from organizing Hugh Hefner's 80th birthday.

Birthday party to building one of the first streaming platforms in the UK. So yeah, I've done a lot of stuff.

Well, whilst we're here to talk about how e commerce neglects 40 percent of society, I'm not going to let you skip over the Hugh Hefner 80th birthday party comment. That's amazing. So any gossip for us, anything you can tell them, tell me.

No, I mean, to be honest with you, my main memory of that night was, um, I was looking after the various, um, kind of, uh, Playboy girls at the party. And it was a little bit like herding cats that you get like four of them out of the green room and circulating. And then, you know, four more would have, you know, circulated, you know, kind of gone up there and trying to hang out with and, you know, kind of all this stuff.

And it's like, no, no, just. You know. Yeah. So that was, that evening was mainly, I seem to remember running up and down stairs after scandal clad women .

That's funny. Good cocktail party story. Um, how on earth do you go from that to the world of e-commerce, you know, a heavily commercialized entity, uh, and now running look fabulous forever.

How, like what does that journey even look like for you? Where, what, what drives you? To create that journey, to create that path for yourself.

Yeah, I think I have always worked in very commercial, um, organizations. I started my career many, many years ago, uh, Dixon stores group, and very much that discipline of, you know, numbers and the Monday morning trading meeting and kind of all of those things.

So I've come from very much, um, marketing as, um, a kind of sales lever and then kind of layered on actually the kind of brand and kind of awareness side. And then that kind of whole full funnel thing, which I now really advocate advocate for that because I have had this really wide career, I see the value of kind of every step from that big brand and awareness piece down to that very basic.

Detailed, you know, direct response, digital, you know, kind of all of those things.

That's a really good point. I never saw that connection actually, because obviously you did start in, in marketing and it's almost feels funneled might be the wrong word or niche might be the wrong word, but down into, um, Uh, a very specific, well, a, a very specific sector would look fabulous forever, but also be a position or a skillset within e commerce.

What are your learnings across those two chasms of the big bad world of marketing and the big bad world of e commerce?

I think, you know, kind of the principles of marketing, you know, about understanding your customer and serving them. And e commerce is a tool to do that, to provide a better experience, to delight your customers.

I think the themes are exactly Exactly the same. They're all of the things that we should be doing. We should be listening to our customers and understanding them and creating delightful experiences.

So your statements on the show, we talk about these, these statements of intent. Okay. These little personal promises, these little guiding principles that.

Is your stake in the ground to say, no, you know what society, you know, what world, this is what I believe this is how we should be treating customers or measuring them or approaching them.

Your statement of intent is that e commerce neglects 40 percent of society. That word neglects really interesting, but I'd love for you to.

Dovetail into what that means for you. Why, why is that the case?

Yes. So for me, I find it quite frustrating when I talk to people, you know, particularly in e commerce, but I think it's much, much broader than that, that you, you look at organizations where you have people who are. Who are very concentrated in that 25 to 39 demographic and people 25 to 39 are only 20 percent of the population.

So if we concentrate our organizations with people in that age group, how can we possibly ever hope to understand and fully represent the remaining 80%? Of the population and the most dangerous assumption we make is, Oh, my customer looks like me and thinks like me and behaves like me. And by doing that, we close ourself off.

And for me, particularly working at Look Fabulous Forever. So we, um, create makeup and skincare for older women, but by older women, I don't mean what the rest of the beauty industry does, who, which is literally anyone over 25, as far as they're concerned, our target audience is particularly is specifically post menopause.

So it's particularly women in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. Now people over 50 are 40%. Of the population. But if we don't speak to our customers and listen to our customers and include those kind of people in our organizations and kind of steep ourselves in their life experience, then how can we possibly hope to understand them, to reach them, to communicate with them?

I have so many questions. One of the first questions that I had that I wanted to ask is if e commerce neglects 40 percent of society or that specific demographic. Given your experience in marketing, do you feel marketing neglects 40 percent society as well, or is it just e commerce?

I think it is marketing as well.

I think if you look at, um, you look at advertising, um, you look, um, you, you look everywhere, you see the people that are represented and. Older people, particularly over fifties, even more so over seventies. You just don't see them being portrayed as a typical customer, an average customer in the way that I think brands have become much better at looking at other kinds of.

Diversity, but age is still a bit of a barrier. That's not 100 percent the rule that, you know, kind of Airbnb recently ran a really nice campaign with an older couple and kind of portrayed them have enjoying a holiday in the same way as everyone else would. But actually, the fact that that would be remarkable shows how unusual it is.

Yeah, I guess would, would you consider Dove and the Real Beauty campaign under that banner as well? That concept of, uh, we're going to focus on. This thing and that sets us out and that makes us remarkable. Um, is that like a, an intentional, purposeful inclusion policy or is it a marketing led inclusion policy?

I think it's very difficult to say. I've personally, I think

either was liable here. So yeah,

I think any kind of. inclusion and accurate representation is a good thing, whether it comes from a genuine place of purpose or a cynical commercial point of view, it's, I don't really mind. Um, I just want to see that representation full stop.

Interesting. Yeah, I can, I completely agree. I'm really fascinated by your use of the word neglect because it, it, It feels negligent to some extent. It almost feels like purposefully neglected. It's such a, it's quite an aggressive term, if anything else. Um, you're not saying like they only focus on the 60%, you're saying they neglect the 40%.

Do you feel like it's just an age representation, or do you think there's more than that?

I think There is more than that. I think, I think there is a bias in organizations towards that idea of, Oh, my customer looks like me. Um, and if organizations aren't diverse, then it's not just ageism that is going to creep in.

And I think that, Neglect word, I do think is true because the assumptions that I encounter every day, when I talk about what we do, so, oh, um, all that audience online, how do you, how do you market to them? I was like, Yes, they are online. And yes, I market to them in the same way that you market your product.

Strangely enough, they're not some alien species. And when, like, particularly when I talk about our core customer is typically a woman in her seventies. And when you say that so many people have a stereotype in their head of, Oh, a woman in her seventies, she's a gray haired granny and a gray cardigan. She might walk with Stick or something.

No, women in her, in their seventies, um, are the generation of the Beatles and Mary Quant and the mini skirt. They are colorful, vibrant women with rich, interesting lives. And they're interested in fashion and travel and finance and all of these things, and I find it very frustrating when brands make assumptions about.

So, so I couldn't agree more, but I would assume that there are certain attributes or parameters that make look fabulous forever, for example, semi unique. So, uh, if I were to make stereotypes or assumptions, it would be perhaps a slightly more heavier weighting towards a desktop audience rather than a mobile audience.

Are there any considerations that you have in order to ensure you are including your audience? Um, that 40 percent of your audience in how you optimize or how you operate as a company.

Yes.

I think there are lots of things that we do and kind of quite a fundamental piece, which, you know, to be fair, I bought from the rest of my career is not to make assumptions about customers to.

Work on dates, collect dates to understand, um, behavior. So we do a lot of things at Look Fabulous Forever. We, um, do a formal quarterly customer survey to everyone who's bought from us in the last three months. And we benchmark things like, do they know about our very generous, um, returns policy and things like that.

But when we have questions as a business, like for example, should we introduce pay later services. We ask our customers, do you use these? Which ones do you use? How often do you use? Would you be interested in us providing this service? Are you on TikTok? Um, you know, we, we ask these things rather than make assumptions about what they might be.

do. And alongside that kind of very formal, um, kind of structured survey, which is both a quantitative, but we also do qualitative stuff, um, particularly around, um, when we're, when we're developing new products, we ask our customers a lot of questions about what they, what they need from that. But alongside that, we have a private Facebook group, um, where our customers come together and I would say 95 percent of their discussion is not about our products.

They share pictures of their gardens or their holidays or their grandchildren, but they also share deeply personal things like, you know, they've got a medical appointment that they're worried about. They might lose a. Partner, you know, very, very emotional things that they share with each other and us that gives us really rich insight into their much wider lives beyond their pure transactional reactions.

Uh, interaction with us as a company, as a, as a brand.

I find that really interesting, um, for, for, for a couple of reasons, as you was talking, I was thinking, God forbid, no, you don't ask your customers questions. Do you almost in a sarcastic way for every other company in the world? I mean, just on that point of all the companies that you've previously worked at and or know, or have relationships with, do you feel like asking customers questions?

Whilst it might seem sensible, it's fairly unique.

I think, it's not completely unique, but I think most companies have data blind spots, or feel like it's too hard within the organisation to get the information that you need from the client. Customer, but

perhaps it's inherently biased, as you say, from those assumptions, a stereotype, like confirmation bias.

Yeah,

indeed. So for example, when I was at Birchbox, we provide a person, we provided a personalized beauty subscription. So we had this really, really rich data about our existing customers. We would know very granular things like, do you have. Curly hair or straight hair, blonde hair or brown hair, long hair or short hair.

So we kind of made a lot of decisions based on this data we had about existing customers, but in comparison, we knew virtually nothing about the people who weren't our customers. So we did a proper nationally representative, um, And we discovered that, um, we had two key target audiences and one we were serving very, very well.

She looked like the women who worked in our office. She was a young urban professional with a bit too much month at the end of her money. And the research showed us that there was another target audience that we were serving less well, that she was a bit older. She was more likely to live outside London.

She was more likely to have children. And in particular, she was more financially mature, which meant that she was more likely to buy from our e commerce offering and not just our subscription box, which made her a more valuable customer. So by collecting that additional data, we were able to shift our strategy.

So not to abandon the customer that we was already serving well, but to be more inclusive of this other customer who we were serving less well. So I think that's a great example of, you know, I was in an organization that had fantastic, rich data, but there was a, And by filling that in, we made, we managed to massively accelerate the company's growth just by collecting that data.

Yeah. I, it's about challenging those assumptions. Like you say, that's what I'm hearing from you. Um, and you know, when you, when you talk about neglect of. A demographic within society. Um, I feel inherently that e commerce as an entity, as a, as a, as a whole neglects the vast majority of users period, because they assume as though everybody is ready to buy, I mean, you know, you have what you have your, your, uh, your targets to hit your weekly trading meetings, your monthly P and L, your quarterly forecast and targets and your annual budget, and then you're abided to Shareholders on a quarterly and annual basis.

So you have both those short and those long term, um, pressures that influence specifically you, right, as managing director, but also your team. But let's be candid here. It is the short term that is often more focused on because you have a job to keep, especially in this economy, you have targets to hit.

That are somewhat arbitrary at times. And as a result of that, I feel, my almost statement of intent, is that we neglect 98 percent of users. We, we assume as though everybody's ready to buy, which is often 2%. Conversion rate is a, is a sweeping statement. And we neglect the 98%. You don't have to agree with that, but I'm curious as to your thoughts.

I've extended your statement. It's from 40 to 98.

I think you're absolutely, absolutely right. And I think

in some ways we're very, we're very lucky as a business. So we're a hundred percent direct consumer and not only are we going after a different, you know, Market, but literally every single one of our products works completely differently to how a mainstream product does.

So for example, typically if you buy a blusher, you'll either buy a powder blush or a cream blush. But as you get older, if you wear a powder blush, it sits in the fine lines in your skin, and it's not very flattering. But if you buy a cream. Blush, older skin is very absorbent. So you put it on in the morning and you look amazing.

But by lunchtime it's completely disappeared. So our blusher is designed as a cream to powder formula. Mm-hmm. So it goes on as a cream. So it goes on smoothly, but then it dries as a powder. So the color sits on your skin and stays vibrant all day. So because of this, we are, we can't just put a picture of our blusher on Google search.

You are never gonna buy our. Product. You need to understand about it and why we exist. And the fact that our founder, Tricia Custon started the brand 11 years ago when she was 65, because she faced the same issues as our customers do. So we know the only way we're ever going to get a customer is to take the long view to say, Oh, actually, do you know what, how you apply eyeliner?

When you're 75 to make it look good is completely different to what you would do when you're 25. So we want to provide you with a video tutorial that you find helpful, even if you're buying your eyeliner from Superdrug at the moment. And over time, we'll build a relationship, we'll build trust. You'll realize why our product is designed for you.

To be more flattering to you. And over time, once we've built that trust, you'll then convert. So our whole business and rationale is built on actually, how do we provide useful and helpful content? How do we build a relationship with that 98? To create the 2%. And by doing that on average, most of our customers come back.

So more than 50 percent of our customers come back and make a second purchase. And if we can get them past that second purchase point on average, they go on to buy at least seven times from us. So while we have this long journey to purchase that we really invest heavily in, it pays off. It means that we win much more engaged customers rather than having to spend a fortune on winning them back or acquiring more new customers.

I love that. And it'll definitely be clipped up within, uh, how we, how we promote this on social media. Those last two points were, that was a beautiful, um, Passionate statement, uh, that you provided. I couldn't agree more. I can imagine it's, it's a particular emphasis for your audience because makeup is more than an aesthetic view.

It's a feeling, you know, and you're trying to give your customers who you very clearly care about, uh, a feeling of, uh, empowerment and, and strength and confidence more than anything. So I completely understand why you've taken that long term view and good for you.

Um, Janis, we are out of time. I feel like I could speak to you for another 20 minutes, but thank you so much.

Is there anything that you would like to part us with, be that challenging assumptions or taking the long view? Uh, how would you like to advise the listeners of, of this podcast?

I think my main advice would be go out and talk to your customers and don't assume that they look like you think like you make decisions like you

do.

Lovely. Janis Thomas, thank you so much. I appreciate

it. Thank you for having me.

There we have it. Thank you so much for listening. Please do like, subscribe and share on whatever platform it is that you're listening to on today. This show comes from the team behind Made With Intent, the customer intent platform for retailers. If you are of course, interested in being more profitable, whilst being more personal.

And please feel free to check us out at madewithintent. ai. Thanks again for listening and joining us on our mission to change how eCommerce sees, measures, and treats their customers. I've been your host, David Mannheim. Have a great day.

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