[VISIONS] Episode 5: The Role of Commerce in Society

Future Commerce Podcast: eCommerce, DTC and Retail Strategy

Show Notes

• “Being a retailer of a brand, there are a number of different pressures that I think they have to address, but in doing so, it will only make them stronger companies. It'll only make consumers want to shop with them more.” - Miya Knights
• When it comes to sustainability, are consumers really adhering to their convictions or are convenience and practicality leading to incongruent behavior there?
• “Retailers are going to have to be a lot more transparent and a lot more in the same way that they've had to cope with the diversification of channels, the complexity of just selling in terms of transparency and choice when it comes to sustainability, particularly around fulfillment, they're going to have to offer a lot more choice than they currently do.” - Miya Knights
• “It doesn't matter if you're 100 plus year old brand or if you're like a six month DTC brand. If you don't have that {sustainability}, it's going to be like trying to be a brand now without an eCommerce offering. It's just you're going to be missing out on so much opportunity.” - Michael Miraflor
• “My experience of people and how they spend their time with digital products is that they diligence them a little bit less, but classify them as generally bad, much faster, just to say, "They have all my information, so they're probably doing something bad with it, but I don't have as much intensity to scrutinize them." Yet, we interact with those products way more often for the most part.” - Grace Clarke
• “Fifty-one percent of our study said you have to fake it till you make it. Forty-nice percent said authenticity at all costs. And I think that that is that's actually the undercurrent of tension that we have in the world, even in our own businesses, is that we have to project outwardly like we are doing everything because we've got to fake it till we make it. When it becomes operationally efficient for us to do it all, we'll really do it all. Maybe. But there's the other side of that which says, "I just want you to tell me the truth. Just tell me the truth.’" - Phillip Jackson
• “Folks that care about the purpose of the business, where they want to work and customers that care about who they want in their dollars with you can't sandbag those things. And so it's a very fine line between under-promise and then failing to compel versus pitch the best pitch you can come up with right now in this room and fail to think through whether you can do that the next 52 weeks of the year.” - Mike Lackman
• “If we're 100% outcome-focused, I think that leads to insincerity.” - Brian Lange
• “Tthere is sort of like the old saying, "People don't buy from companies, they buy from other people." And it's sort of democratized like it's bringing a face, not just one face, but individual faces to a brand and bringing that brand to life in a similar way that we've seen influencers drive sales and be the face of a brand.” - Kiri Masters

Guests

• Miya Knights, author, and retail analyst
• Kiri Masters, Head of Retail Marketplace Strategy at Acadia
• Michael Miraflor, Chief Brand Officer
• Grace Clarke, brand and omnichannel strategist
• Mike Lackman, CEO of Trade Coffee

Associated Links:

• The Visions Report is a 100-page report with deep insights, created by Future Commerce.

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