Multichannel Success Podcast series

Episode 5 - Trading Effectiveness - Transcript

#### David Kohn

Hello, and welcome to our podcast series on how to drive multi-channelsuccess.

I'm David Kohn, founder of The Multi-Channel Expert, and I'm here today with David Worby and Mark Pinkerton of Prospero Commerce, one of the leading independent digital consultancies in the UK.

A warm welcome to both of you, David and Mark. Hello. Hi. In this podcast series, we've been exploring a range of issues that you and your business are faced with every day. The three of us have many, many years of experience and expertise working for and with retail and customer brands, and we brought this together to come up with a set

of practical suggestions and ideas that will help you deliver greater success

in your e-commerce business. We really hope you find our discussions useful,

and we look forward to your feedback. In today's episode, we're going to

explore the subject of trading effectiveness. I'd like to start by asking you

both, what do you mean by trading effectiveness?

#### David Worby

I think for me, this slightly unusual category called trading effectiveness is simply to try to get a measure of your output relative to your input in terms of results. We all know the climate of today is challenging and businesses more than ever are examining how much they're

spending and what resources they're utilising to drive the results they

expect. And this category is something that we felt passionate about, would

give businesses a measure of how effective they're being at driving the kind

of results they expect. And that can be done at a campaign level, but it can

also be done if you roll it up at the very top line business level. So it's a

true measure of whether you've got one person in your team or 101 people in

your team, whether or not you're driving the kind of results you would expect,

benchmarked against your competitors.

#### Mark Pinkerton

And at a practical level, we're talking about trading for the digital channels

that you have as a business, not the offline channels, although the

interrelationship with them will come too.

#### David Kohn

Thank you. Now, that sounds to me like just day to day work. What is it that

makes you say that it's particularly important now? Has it changed over the

last few years? Why the focus on this subject?

#### David Worby

I think getting more from less is an increasingly important subject,

particularly for retailers and for brands as well. Trying to ensure that every

ounce of energy or budget or resource you spend is delivering against your

expectations. And as business owners, you deserve to understand the results of

those efforts and energies. And sometimes it's about technology, sometimes

it's about people, sometimes it's about skills, but ultimately if you're

ploughing resources into a business in order to grow it, whether that's

growing sales or growing profits, you need to understand the correlation

between that input value and the output you get against your expectation. And

it comes in many forms, and I'm sure we'll talk about them. There's onsite

optimization, whether it's marketing or merchandising, there's data in terms

of product. We'll talk about all those subjects, I'm sure, later. But at the

top level, it's about giving business leaders the opportunity to understand

that if I plough in 10% more effort, what energy results do I get at the back

end of my organization?

#### Mark Pinkerton

And at a holistic level, I think, you know, it is pretty much about e-commerce

growing up. We've gone through many years of being a natural growth for

e-commerce, you know, pick a number, 10, 20, 30, 40 percent a year, being a

natural growth rate, to the last couple of years when actually minus eight

isn't too bad a result post-COVID. And that has changed the mentality

associated with e-commerce. So, you know, e-commerce has become more important

to businesses, maybe as they've closed shops, but actually as a result of the market

expansion in digital. And that has changed the way that you can look at these

things from an overall business point of view. It is now more important simply

because digital has become a greater part of the total.

#### David Worby

And I think extending that point, we come to the concept that businesses that

were formed as offline businesses that became digital for whom Mark has said

now become dominantly digital, the tools that are now available in order to

optimize your business are very different from the tools that existed when you

were principally an offline business. So the tools that existed, I think, when

I was in retail 30 years ago, were generally strategic tools. On a Monday

morning, we woke up, we discovered three new things we needed to do that we

didn't really have to renew last week. And they were blunt instruments. They

were generally about price, they were generally about promotions, they were

generally about product. But today's world is so much more complex than that.

And e-commerce and digital has data that allows many, many, many more

incremental decisions to be taken, sometimes without human intervention that

give you the opportunity to optimize your business. So it becomes more about

marginal gains and less about big, clunky, Monday morning strategic decisions.

#### David Kohn

Yeah, that's very interesting, David. And what you're talking about there is

more of a philosophy, if you like, than an actual set of actions. which is relentless improvement, always looking for change. Are you also looking at a change in what you might have called a top down approach to trading, which would have been driven typically

by the buyers or the product merchandisers to maybe something that's a little

more bottom up or a little more channel specific?

#### David Kohn

Is that something you're seeing?

#### Mark Pinkerton

Yeah, very much so. And I think, as you say, it is bottom up, looking at the

data that covers everything. And we'll come on to data measurement in a little

bit. But there are many more points of data available to somebody doing a

merchandising role or a trading role. And the nature of that trading role has

really changed over the years. So that actually having somebody who is

effectively an optimization engineer within the sphere of trading is probably

the right skill set or capability that somebody, an organization now needs

going forward, rather than somebody who is a product merchandiser.

#### David Worby

or indeed, whose experience qualifies them to make strategic decisions. And I

think today, as you pointed out, those incremental micro decisions are

collectively more powerful than some of those traditional senior leadership

decisions that were often made on gut instinct, experience of the past

sometimes than than they were then. So I think the world of work has changed

in that sense. And the people that have the data are not the CEO. And

therefore, the people who are empowered to make decisions are not the CEO. And

organizations that empower their individuals who have the right data and can

make the right decisions are arguably in a stronger position than those exist

from the top down.

#### Mark Pinkerton

Yeah, and so you're right, it's very much an inverse way of looking at an

organisation. And it's not unusual within the digital world for that to be the

case, but it is new, relatively new within the merchandising sphere. And we

have done a number of programmes over the years where I can say with a

reasonable degree of certainty that by automating and using systems and tools

to do the job, rather than gut instinct, there will be, you know, at least a

20% improvement of performance through using a piece of technology.

#### David Kohn

Fabulous. Well, thank you for that. And I think just to reiterate what David

said, I think we're all aware of the HIPPO principle, the highest paid

person's opinion. The only time in my experience that was correct was when I

was the highest paid person. Now, obviously you started to touch on day-to-

day, you started to touch on questions. I know you guys are doing a lot of

work with multi-channel companies, with e-commerce businesses. Where do you

start? What are the sort of questions that you're asking these businesses to

try and get a picture of where they are and what they need to do?

#### David Worby

Yeah, that's a good question. Because our model is built on sharing of data,

asking of questions to all the relevant individuals. And as a subject within

our eight sector wheel, trading effectiveness has questions around it that

allow us to get under really two things. One, how mature is the organization

in using technology to allow good trading decisions to be made? And secondly,

how naturally curious is the organization in wanting to know something in

order to be able to optimize it? And I'll give you a couple of examples. One

of the questions that we love to ask is, what analysis have you done of your

online returns? And how does that compare with your offline returns? Now,

there's three parts to that question. The first is, do you know what your

online return reasons for returns are? And some people do, and some people

don't. Do you know what your offline reasons for returns are? And there's less

people know the reasons for offline returns, for obvious reasons. And then

thirdly, have you done any correlation? So if someone's able to tell us that

they understand the reasons for online returns, and they understand the

reasons for offline returns, and their analysis suggests these are the points

of difference, and these are the hypotheses as to why, you know they're in a

fairly mature state in terms of being curious about what's going on. And

that's the best position on which to determine future actions.

#### Mark Pinkerton

Yeah, and we were talking before offline about the situation that a fashion

retailer would have with bodycon dresses, where they might have a 40 or a 50%

return rate in store, but online an 80% returns rate is not that unusual. And

in that case, for that category of product, it may well be just a better

customer experience and a better trading decision to emphasize the fact that

the customer can try the product on in store, which will take cost out of the

entire process as far as the retailer is concerned.

#### David Worby

One of the other questions I know Mark particularly likes, but I'll just

outline it and he can maybe talk a little bit about it, is do you trap

availability? Do you understand availability? You probably understand demand,

but do you understand lost demand, i.e. opportunity that you're not taking

advantage of, and what reporting is in place to give you that sense? I know

that was something you were interested in.

#### Mark Pinkerton

Yeah, so the availability one is one that I've worked on in the past, whereby

you can track the viewed availability of a product on a product details page on a website, so

that if there is fragmented stock available of that product, you've got five

sizes for making the math easy, you've got five sizes and two of those sizes

are out of stock, then you actually only have an availability of 60% of that

product. And it is possible to set up your analytics to track that every time

the page is viewed, and then correlate that with the conversion rate of that

product. So you get a very clear view of the impact of availability on product

sales, and very few retailers do that.

#### David Worby

Very And let's not forget that if you're a customer who wants the size that's

unavailable, you are 100% unavailable.

#### Mark Pinkerton

Correct and also if you are a size medium and you go to that product and that size is

not available that is just not going to get tracked because there's no

interaction with the page that would track you unless you have like Bowden

always used to do on their fashion website where you have my sizes and

therefore a product is not presented if it isn't available in your size.

#### David Kohn

Thank you both. Those are really good examples. What I like about the approach

is it's helping you to get an understanding of the performance itself but also

to understand the organization mentality and almost their natural curiosity

for trying to get underneath the skin of the statistics and understand why

things are happening. Now let's move it on a little bit here and look at some

of the aspects of trading and trading effectiveness that you would look to

optimize. I guess one of the first things or the main things is the funnel,

the customer journey, is trying to get your customers to get from their first

interaction with the business through all the way to basket and checkout. Why

don't you talk about some of the areas that you would be looking at if you

were looking at a client?

#### Mark Pinkerton

Yeah, well, the first area would be around marketing optimisation. So how

effective is the organisation at spending its money to drive traffic to the

website? And clearly, the cost of Google, either specific product or generic

terms, the cost of Google is going up constantly and the returns involved are

generally dropping. We know that e-comm conversion rates have dropped this

year. However, at a practical, pragmatic level, there's a degree of de-duping

needed across the various parts of the organisation to make sure that you're

not offering both an overall campaign and a special offer simultaneously. So

it's not that unusual. but you de-dupe that, but again you don't want to offer

too many conflicting messages to customers at a time. And the other one is to

make sure that the promotional calendars that you have, both from an overall

brand strategic level but then also from the more tactical product-led

promotions and then website-based promotions, don't conflict with each other.

So you need quite a well-tiered promotional calendar visibility within the organization to make that work and that has to be available to everybody from marketing director or

e-commerce director all the way down to the individual traders and

merchandisers.

#### David Worby

We tend also to think in the marketing optimisation world that

those organisations, and it's a generalism, so it's kind of true mostly, but

not necessarily always, that those who see a delineation between customer

acquisition and customer retention tend to be slightly more sophisticated in

how they tackle it, simply because in one sense you're doing a very different

thing from what you are in the other. Customer retention's a very different

skill from customer acquisition. And blindly trying to acquire customers that

you, to Mark's point, will have to de-dupe you already own is a foolish

pursuit, and it ends up costing huge amounts of money. So one of the things we

will do is try to help you work out the degree to which you are retaining

customers, and therefore, consequently, the degree to which you need to

recruit them in order to hit your sales targets.

#### David Kohn

Yeah, I mean, my guess would be that many of the digital marketeers listening

to us are all about optimization. It's one of the areas that's probably more

ripe for development would be the whole area of on-site merchandising, what

do you put on the website, what you put on your PLPs, what's on your product

pages. What do you think the audience can learn about these areas that would

be of use to them?

#### David Worby

Well, this is where I think there's good news for merchandisers, because the

world of optimising product listing pages has moved on tremendously. And there

are a huge plethora of tools available, whether they're embedded within your

platform, whether they're bolt-on applications that you can acquire to

effectively turn your page into an algorithm-driven world. Having said that,

I'm still very surprised how many businesses we talk to who still insist on

having all the red dresses together and then all the green trousers together.

That still is a requirement for some businesses, but the vast majority who've

now drunk the Kool-Aid I think have moved into a world of being able to say

the engine can do a better job than any human can do, and on-site

merchandising can be algorithm-driven rather than driven by an individual.

#### David Kohn

One of the questions I've got, maybe Mark can pick this up, is what are the

sort of measures, what are the metrics that on site merchants should really be

focusing on to try and improve performance?

#### Mark Pinkerton

Well the classic sort of analysis that I've been involved with in the past is

one where you're looking at the efficacy of each product, and it may be across multiple product pages, product details pages depending on the structure and nature of the

site, is to look at the number of times a product has been viewed versus the

number of times the product has been bought and then you can map that out on

effectively a two by two matrix and then you can end up with a whole bunch of

products where you either need to drive more traffic to it because they

convert very effectively, or the opposite of that would be actually to have a

whole bunch of products where they don't convert therefore they they're

performing much worse than the rest of the site and you have to look

individually properly at those products and look to improve them in some way

and work out is it product imagery is the product description because let's

face it the template of the overall page is not one that's going to differ

across PLPs or PDPs.

#### David Worby

But I think this is an area of the website that has advanced much more, as I

said before, in terms of technology. So here I would expect you to be more

curious to explore tools that can help optimise the success rate of a customer

arriving on a PLP and then clicking on a PDP. Clearly the goal here is to get

customers to look at product detail pages and then add to bag. But if you

strip it back, it's trying to move from a PLP to a PDP. And I think advanced

organisations have now set targets for individuals who manipulate the

algorithms and drive the algorithms to set targets for them in terms of the

degree to which their customers can do that. In the old days, it was a bit

layout and hope. These days it's a much more active pursuit with tools that

even prevent people clicking on the X button or the back browse button. There

are ways of you ensuring that you achieve a higher level of click through to

the next stage than ever has been true in the past.

#### Mark Pinkerton

I wouldn't honestly approve of removing the ability to press a back button but

there's dark patterns that would fall into in my book. But very much, you

know, these tools now can access lots of data sources across the organisation.

So we're talking search and merchandising tools where they can be

algorithmically driven but they will, you know, unlike a human which will

probably take in two or three different sources of data to make a decision

about the layout of a PLP and, you know, if you're doing that manually and you

decide like one of our previous clients has done to change the order of the

PLP at three o'clock in the afternoon every day and that is a manual process,

that's an awful lot of work for nothing. Whereas if you have an

algorithmically driven tool, that change should happen automatically a number

of times through the day. But also they go from taking two or three data

sources to being able to include, you know, an understanding of current trends

and changes of those, best selling performance, promotional activity,

inventory levels, margin levels, weather, all of those sorts of things can

then start to get played into the mix which means you get a much more sophisticated output.

#### David Kohn

Excellent. I mean, Mark, I know one of your passions as well, and one of the

things you see as a big driver of trading effectiveness is the quality of the

product data that you're able to surface to the customer. There's quite a few

dimensions to this, I guess, but what do you see happening in this area? Do

you see it improving?

#### Mark Pinkerton

Yeah, I think both going back to the bottom-up, top-down analogy, I think at a

more sort of strategic level, there's been a change in the levels of the

organisation responsible for product data. I mean, historically, the econ team

used to have to get their hands dirty because it was the way to make the

website work, but now you're getting with tools like product information

management tools, PIM tools, you're getting process flow with stage gates set

in them so that if a product doesn't meet the required standards, it doesn't

get published to the website and therefore the merchandiser will get told, you've got 10 products this week that haven't met the criteria. they haven't gone live. Therefore,

they have to go and sort them out. So you ensure the quality of what goes live

in the first place.

#### David Kohn

And I guess speed to websites is also...

#### Mark Pinkerton

Oh absolutely and one of the questions we always ask

is how quickly can you publish a product to the website from when it comes

into the warehouse because that tests a number of different systems in the

background but it you know it I think the fastest we've seen is about 10 or 15

minutes and the slowest is you know somewhere in the region about three weeks.

#### David Kohn

I could probably show you slower than that, but let's not go into that right

now.

I'd like to switch a little bit here. I mean, one other aspect of trading

effectiveness is how you manage your channels. Now, many of the people

listening to this will be trading through multiple channels. They could be on

Amazon, they could be on eBay, could be on Next. How have you gone about

looking at how a business optimises the way it trades through its different

channels?

#### David Worby

I think if you wind the clock back a bit, maybe five years ago, the effort was

100% trying to achieve retailing through different channels. It was about the

process of doing it. That took everybody's effort. That took everybody's

energy. It wasn't easy. It was cumbersome. There were tools to help, but they

weren't particularly helpful. And I think what that did is it relegated the

important subject that is about the nature of customers and the different

groups of customers that exist in different channels. So if the effort was

100%, let's just expose our catalog to Amazon or to Flipkart or to one of

these other third-party businesses, then that's where your effort went. Today,

identifying differential catalogs as a result of differential customer

profiles is where the optimization world cuts in. So your customers on your

website are unlikely to mirror the customers on Amazon. So understanding the

dynamics of Amazon, and there are plenty of tools that they will provide you

with and share you with if you ask enough times, to finesse the catalog and to

some extent, for some businesses, the prices that are relevant in that

channel. So it's another version of your world, but with different customer

groups, with different expectations. You all know, using Amazon example, it's

a very fast, almost browse-free world. It's a one-button checkout. It's quick,

it's fast, it's zooming. That's often not what retailers think of their own

website to be. It's more of immersive experience where their brand is the

center of the universe. That defines the fact that customers are going to be

different and their expectations are different and you need to treat them

differently.

#### David Kohn

One of the questions I'm interested in and this may be a little difficult to

answer but how do you measure things like cannibalisation? Surely if you're

selling something through Amazon and you're selling the same product on your

own website, surely you're going to cannibalise. How do you measure things

like this? Well, I mean, historically I've done that.

#### Mark Pinkerton

I mean historically I've done that in a very simple way which is to say you

know assuming the products don't go live simultaneously then you can look to

see if when it goes live on Amazon assuming it's gone live on your own website

first which would be what we would always recommend but if the product has

then gone live on Amazon how has that affected your own website sales and okay

taking one product in isolation you might not come to any conclusions but when

you do that over a portfolio of a range then you can get a reasonable view of whether or not

cannibalization has occurred and we have had clients in the past where we

have thought there would be cannibalization but the data absolutely does not

prove hypothesis disproved.

#### David Worby

Differential ranging is one of the ways around it, but on the basis that a lot

of catalogue is core, particularly for brands, you do want Amazon to be

selling the same things as you. Mark and I have had

this experience at least twice, to kind of tell a story of the home of the

brand. There are many things that Amazon will never be able to do for a brand,

treat it in the way that the brand owner wants it to. But equally, we've seen

some really bad examples where businesses take their catalogue, give it to

Amazon, and assume that just because they've got their catalogue, the job is

now done. We would recommend that you identify the unique nature of your own

business and boost that. Amazon will never be the home of the brand, because

the only brand it's the home of, is Amazon.

So make your website the home of the brand.

And if customers who want the rich, immersive experience of your

brand are true to it, they will come to you. Amazon will be an expedient,

quickly satiated thing, but if they actually want to really immerse themselves

in all of the elements of your brand, whether it's your great product

information, whether it's your great content, whether it's your great warranty

service, whether it's your fantastic return service, make those your USPs,

which is unlikely to ever be the USP of an expedient business like Amazon.

#### Mark Pinkerton

But I would also argue that you don't necessarily want to put all of your

bestsellers onto Amazon because that does risk some cannibalization and if

you don't do all of them then at least you've got a comparison that you can

look at to see whether or not all of your best-selling products are being

cannibalized or not. Sorry I was going to say but also you've got individual metrics that Amazon offers like owning the buy box which gives you

a very clear view of how well you're doing versus other people who are selling

your product, particularly products or brands that go via wholesale route as

well.

#### David Kohn

I suspect channel strategy is a subject that could occupy an entire podcast,

and we may come back to it later in the series. I'd like to move on slightly

here. I guess people listening to this maybe think, well, this all sounds a

little tactical. How much difference does it really make? You know, what if

the brand I'm working for is going backwards? What if the pricing strategy is

wrong? What if the product range isn't right? I mean, how does all of this

feed into those strategic questions that really do need to be addressed?

#### David Worby

Well, it's a really good question. I've personally always been of the view

that your digital business can almost do everything for you. It can test

almost anything you want to test. So in extremis, if your brand is suffering

with potentially a pricing problem, its prices are too high, it isn't really

very difficult to establish an alternative route to market under the same

brand and experiment with pricing. Experiment is the important word. I'm not

suggesting you change everything on your global website to be 10% cheaper

tomorrow, but you can experiment with geo-regions, you can experiment with

certain parts of the world, you can experiment with certain parts of the UK,

if that's relevant to you, to understand the impact, the net impact of

bringing prices to a new level. You can also do that with ranging. So, you

know, many of you will have online exclusives, albeit that that's only ever

going to be 10, 20, 30% of the range. You can experiment with that in a way

that gives you a sense of what would happen if your business became that.

#### Mark Pinkerton

Yeah, and similarly you can actually use a website as your endless aisle so

you can have a much greater range available on the website because actually

stocking or listing more products doesn't really cost you any more. And there

are clients that we've worked with in the past where there have been products

that have outlived their usefulness in stores which have gone on selling

online for several years as a result because, okay, it's a dwindling audience

but it's still material enough to warrant having the product listed.

#### David Worby

So I think if your business has at its heart a kind of natural curiosity and a

thirst to learn more, putting the web to use in a variety of more strategic

ways will help you do it. I remember a slightly connected story when I was at

Harrods a few years ago. Harrods were clearly concerned about the negative

consequence of opening a second store. The first store is what it is, it's the

only store, there aren't any others. So we were very active in using the web

in other parts of the world to understand the extent to which there was

thirst, demand or interest for some of the brands that Harrods sold. And that

was a very risk-averse way of dipping our toe into the market and certainly

much more risk-averse than opening another green and gold store and finding

that it damaged the mothership.

#### David Kohn

Yeah, nice. I think what you're describing there is almost like a digital as a

strategic spearhead, somewhere where you can do things that are far more

difficult to do through other channels, a slightly less charitable way of

recording it, the budgie in the cage, where you can really test things. And

that leads on to my next question, which is, how does this affect the people that work in digital? Does it mean they've got a wider role? Does it mean they've got a role of more influence? Does it change the sorts of jobs that we do? What do you think about the impact on the organisation here?

#### Mark Pinkerton

I think that it has changed or if it hasn't changed in many organisations

it needs to change. And you know it doesn't actually matter whether we're

talking retail or whether we're talking a brand owner because the problem

is true at a CPG level as well. the merchandisers or the people who buy, sell,

create the product effectively now have to take ownership of the sales of

their product or service through not only the retail store but also through

the website and that's a fundamental change. They've kind of offloaded that

responsibility onto the econ team who then ran online merchandisers because

they understood the technology but now people have grown up with digital

sufficiently that that should no longer be that sort of split within the

organisation and as David said earlier you're going from merchandisers who are

there to make it look nice, put this dress next to this pair of boots, a point

where actually they're becoming the optimisation engineer for their range of

products. I mean you look at Amazon and we've used it as an example of

merchandising but they will have one person merchandising up to a million

product lines and the algorithm and the machine is what you know implements

their decisions. Now for a brand where you're being the home of the brand

clearly you want to curate things a lot more closely but what you're going to

end up doing is controlling and managing the algorithm that the search and

merchandising tool that presents the products to consumers is able to display

in the right order the right product.

#### David Worby

And I think if you, a slightly more strategic level, if you kind of chart back

the evolution of retail from being product-led businesses to being arguably

brand-led businesses, and I think the kind of current nirvana is a kind of

customer-led business, then the notion of seeing your business in its

component parts is less relevant than seeing it as a journey for a customer.

And the best place for that is online because you can map that journey. You

can see it from start to finish. And I think the engineer's role is to ensure

that the customer can move seamlessly from this page, that page, that page.

They can follow the ‘scent of information’ and they understand it and it's

logical. There are no barriers in the way. And that kind of customer focus

follows. And I think those that are maybe slightly more progressive than

others will see that journey as their success. If you can make that journey

easy and simple from start to finish, then you are likely to have less sticky

pages, sticky in a negative sense, and you're likely to have a better

net result. And you're likely to be more efficient in your trading

effectiveness.

#### David Kohn

Very nice. Well, that's a good place to almost finish. You've got one more

task in this session, and that is to try and come out with the one gem that

our listeners should take away.

#### Mark Pinkerton

The one thing that I would take away from this is that there is a plethora of

data available to you to do analyses of what's going on and to try and do that

analysis in a more I'm not sure strategic is the right way, but in a more

intelligent way than many organisations have done so far. But then also being

able to have confidence in the systems that you should have in play, whether

it's a PIM or whether it's a search and merge tool, or both, that then allows

you to actually implement the decisions that you take.

#### David Worby

Well, my point was going to be also around the top-down, bottom-up, but I'll

switch it to not forgetting the true nature of your organisation, i.e. we're

teaching a story here or preaching a story here about the use of technology

and the conversion of traditional jobs into engineering. For some businesses,

that is too far away from the very DNA that they have. And that's not a bad

thing. I think what you have to do is you have to take this and apply it in a

way that's logical to the nature of your business. Don't try and bet the cart

tomorrow that this can be your way of working if it never has been so far. I

think you've got to use it intelligently and use elements of it that are

relevant, not try and swallow it all whole.

#### Mark Pinkerton

So you mean if you've got a very creative lead brand that you don't want to go

down to the data engineering route because it's just not applicable to the

brand.

Explore it and experiment but don't bet the shop on it. So it comes back to

being an appropriate home for the brand. Well thank you.

#### David Kohn

Well, thank you. I really like the comment you made earlier about e-commerce

growing up. I think this podcast has demonstrated how e-commerce is growing

up, the sort of impact it can have on your organisation and some of the

specific things that you could be focusing on.

Many thanks to both Mark and David, and I hope you join us for our next podcast.