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[Voiceover]: Welcome to the Checkout. We catch up with previous add to cart guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get through your Friday. Here's your host, Bushy.
[Ad]: Today's checkout features Danny Latouf, partner and Chief Strategy Officer at the General Store. The General Store are a multidisciplinary creative agency for retailers with clients such as Freedom, Rebel and Barbecues Galore. Danny, welcome to the Checkout.
Nathan Bush: We've had such a great conversation on our main chat around everything from your European retail study tour to how you've designed Rebel's 3,000 square meter flagship, to how Matt Newell will only go out for lunches and dinners. We're here to learn a little bit more about you. I've got five quick questions for you. Number one, what's the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
Danny Lattouf: A car.
Nathan Bush: A car.
[Ad]: What kind of car?
Danny Lattouf: It was a Mercedes, not an expensive one. It was about 11 years ago. No test drive. The car hadn't even existed. It was a new model and I never imagined I would buy a car online that I'd never seen or driven.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, so funny. Now it's like now it's not normal, but it's accepted. I think Tesla changed the game a
[Ad]: lot in that as well.
Danny Lattouf: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Nathan Bush: But yeah. And well okay, that's interesting given you know, we covered how much stuff that you do buy from retailers in your mystery shopping and rewarding retailers. So number two, I'm really interested in your answer because you see a lot of retail around the world. Who is your favorite retailer?
Danny Lattouf: I have to answer this one really honestly. I have a local grocery store in Belfield in Sydney and it's my favorite store in Australia.
Nathan Bush: Okay.
Danny Lattouf: I do my groceries in about 10 minutes. It's got incredibly fresh produce, amazing prices, highly efficient car park and racetracks, simple shopping experience. The staff are incredible. It's like the 10, 15 minutes of perfection in retail that I get once a week. And it's strange with all the stuff I get to see around the world that this remains a highlight for me. But they've just nailed what I need as a customer. And so this little retailer in Belfield called Nature's Best to me is just great. So, you know, without having to go to a global flagship Nike store or something epic. I'm just going to talk about this one little humble retailer that just ticks all my boxes for me.
Nathan Bush: You're not doing a good job of selling. Why brands need agencies to design the greatest experience.
Danny Lattouf: I know that's probably a really bad answer. I don't think an agency's come anywhere near that place. But.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, no, but you're totally right. If you understand your customer and obviously it sounds like they're really well embedded into the local market, they know what they want, they've designed for that customer, then the rest will take care of itself.
Danny Lattouf: Yep.
Nathan Bush: Number three, which E commerce practice do you wish was history?
Danny Lattouf: Would it be controversial to say that we stopped calling it e commerce?
Nathan Bush: Yes.
Danny Lattouf: Tell me why. Just because I think commerce is commerce now. And I just think the hard lines between the two as necessary as they once were and kind of leads me to the answer one of your other checkout questions. But I'll just leave it at that. I'll say it'd be good to just look at retailing as retailing and the channels that they operate in is one thing. But yeah, I don't know that they necessarily need such a defined differentiation by way of terms, let's say, you know,
Nathan Bush: that really screws up my podcast.
Danny Lattouf: So there you go. I've done myself out of a job with my store.
Nathan Bush: Done me out of a job with.
Danny Lattouf: Yeah, perfect.
Nathan Bush: I agree though, is that the lines are blurring. Retail is retail. Commerce is commerce.
Danny Lattouf: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. We do have to look at it holistically.
Danny Lattouf: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: Number four, can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Danny Lattouf: Add to cart. I mean the old. The old add to cart exists.
[Ad]: Get it now.
Danny Lattouf: Because the old add to cart. Yeah. The future add to cart that has nothing to do with E commerce is. Won't be worth listening to. Yeah. I'd just say a lot of my reading of late is. You know what I'd invite people to do, especially people in agency side. I would invite you to read some annual reports. I spend a lot of time reading our clients and other clients annual reports to understand where their pain points are, what's driving behaviors, what they're focusing on in the future, where growth is coming from. To recommend something, I'd say read the most important and influential annual reports across multiple sectors.
Nathan Bush: I think that's great advice because there is so much in there, especially from an E commerce perspective, where brands now we've got so many more listed brands like Adore Beauty, the Booktopias. And that if you're looking at it from an E commerce lens, while E commerce still exists, is that they give away so much even around customer lifetime value and average order values. And what they're seeing there, it's not necessarily all just commercial. It's there's a lot of customer insight in there and market intelligence.
Danny Lattouf: Yeah, absolutely.
[Ad]: But you gave a lot of really
Nathan Bush: good advice too in our main episode, which I'm not going to give away here, around how you stay inspired. You had three really good points around how you stay inspired. So even if it's not a book or a podcast, tune back into that because I think your advice around that was brilliant. Number five, last one, finish this sentence. The future of retail is contextual commerce, not contextual E commerce.
Danny Lattouf: No, not at all. And I say that because I think, you know, the only thing we know will happen with retail is that it will continue to change. It's such a strong reflection of the world we operate in. Retail is in everything as far as I'm concerned. And retail will continue to show up wherever you need it to be in the form most preferred by you. And so I just think that it will continue to evolve. You know, I remember even my time at Microsoft, we were talking about things like Smart Ink in shampoo bottles that when the shampoo bottle gets to a certain level, the shampoo bottle will just reorder itself. So in the sense of retail, your, your shelf in your shower becomes a retail shelf. So retail is contextual. And I think whether I'm standing in a store looking to buy something, whether I'm on my phone waiting for my kids to get dressed and jump in the car, I'm ultimately going to be shopping or contextually needing something at any point, any given point in my day. So I think the more contextual we connect retail to the world we're in, the more interesting and fun and wild it'll get. So I say future of retail is contextual.
Nathan Bush: I love that because I feel we're entering almost a second phase of contextual commerce with we have went through the phase of, you know, the dash buttons of put this next to your washing machine, press the button and your Tide will be delivered to you or add your shopping list to Alexa or whatever. But I think it overlooked the subtleties of shopping around. Some things are low involvement, frequent purchase, some are higher involvement. How do we incorporate all that into in a contextual way rather than just being I need this product.
Danny Lattouf: Yeah. And you know, we talked about contextual commerce years ago with those buttons from Amazon. We talked about conversational commerce with Alexa. Buy me white T shirts. I don't think there's any one bucket there. I just think we will forever in a day, no matter what we're doing, have the potential to buy something. And that could be why we're literally in the shower using our soap or standing at a shelf choosing something to buy, getting bugged by strangers next to you asking you why you did it.
[Ad]: I was about to say it's going
Nathan Bush: to be very dangerous for you if you can reward retailers wherever you are. So you're going to be a poor man.
Danny Lattouf: True. I am already.
Nathan Bush: Danny, thanks for joining us on the checkout.
Danny Lattouf: No worries. Thank you.
[Ad]: To hear more from Danny, jump back into episode 376 where Danny shares his insights when it comes to professional development choices. He also shares the most innovative technology he's come across lately. He gets very specific and trust me,
Nathan Bush: he's seen a lot from all his
[Ad]: trips around the world. Plus he gives his advice advice for e commerce retailers stepping their toes into physical stores. Danny and the team have so much experience here. We get the detail of the amazing redesign of Rebel's flagship store at Emporium Melbourne Open, top basketball court and all. Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep adding to cartoon.
