Nathan Bush: This episode of the Checkout is brought to you by E Suite. Whether you're a retailer looking to grow your team or you're an E commerce gun looking for your next role, E Suite are here to help. At E Suite, we connect fast growing retailers with the best Australian e commerce talent. We're working with some of the best in the business including Accent Group, Incoo, Aushair and Beauty and Black Mill. So if you are in the market or interested in where the E commerce market is at, reach out. Visit esweettalent.com for all the latest job list or contact me directly on Nathan sweettalent.com au now let's get into today's checkout.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous add to cart guests and ask them five quick
Nathan Bush: questions to get to know them better
[Voiceover]: and leave you with a little extra
Nathan Bush: inspiration to get you through your Friday. Today's checkout features Chris Brinkworth from Civic Data. Chris is a media and marketing technology executive and his consultancy, launched earlier this year, offers solid advice on how Australian enterprises can prepare for what many predict will be the most significant and rapid changes to data protection regulations that we've ever seen. Chris, welcome to the Checkout. We've learned a little bit about you in our primary episode.
[Voiceover]: We're going to learn a little bit more.
Nathan Bush: Number one, what is the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
[Voiceover]: So the PG version I think would be, and it's actually based on, it's based on all of this COVID pandemic, right? So at the moment you'll see that I keep looking down here and I keep looking up here because that's where my camera is. So I spend a lot of time researching the frame rate of small spy cameras that I could then attach to a solid piece of small rod like a piece of coat hanger that this time next week when it arrives, I'll be looking directly in the screen where you are so I can look you in the eye when I'm talking to you. So I bought a spy camera, but not for spying. It's so I could actually look in the center of the screen instead of keeping looking up at my camera. I would say that is the. It sounds smart, but it's also a weird, I would say it's definitely a weird recent purchase. If you were to look at the fact I've got a daughter. There's other weird stuff, right? When you search for magic wand on some retailers, you get completely the wrong result and you follow around with adverts you don't really want to be getting but I think real stuff I bought that would be number two.
Nathan Bush: Who is your favorite retailer?
[Voiceover]: I I've got to say and I hate, I hate to say this, I am a, I am a go to on Amazon at the moment but there are also because I assume we're talking about online. Yeah, at the moment and the only reason, the only reason I'm doing that is because again I mentioned my daughter I've got Prime so I use them for Prime. I also given that I lived in the US I'm also conditioned and also access to my US account sometimes if I want to very different and I'm lazy so I've not changed over and I know that there's other solutions out there, your catches and everything else I've not looked at and I should but generally it is Amazon From a data
Nathan Bush: perspective, how does Amazon stack up in terms of protecting customer data?
[Voiceover]: From a data perspective? Well, they'd be very silly not to protect the data. Their entire model is based on customer experience. So using data to create a better customer experience, whether it's pricing, delivery, whatever it is and it's sometimes fun just to call up Amazon helpline and complain about somebody just to see how nice they bloody well are as well. So I would say that there's no way they could fall foul from the way they've set it up. Especially if you've got AWS where a lot of other companies, including financial institutions, use those services. Because if there's one kind of one tiny breach or one kind of distrust that happens, then it's going to impact an entire entire ecosystem as well. And that comes back to what we were saying in the main primary podcast, that the consent and trust is so important. And it also plays back in that primary podcast where we're talking about zero party data versus first, et cetera. If I don't trust someone like a bank or a telco that I have to deal with no matter what because my damn mortgage is there or whatever, if I don't trust them, I'm not going to give them any additional data other than what I have to. So that impacts the entire product team, the research team, everyone else. So trust impacts the entire business. Because if they don't trust you, you don't have their consent to get other business. They're not going to give it to you freely. So ask your question about the Amazon stuff. I just don't think that they'd. It just would ruin their business.
Nathan Bush: It's too core to their business. Number three which retail fad do you wish was history?
[Voiceover]: Am I allowed to have two?
Nathan Bush: Yeah, sure.
[Voiceover]: So I absolutely, absolutely loathe the notifications in browser. Those things are just becoming still like, you know, would like to, you know, accept this notification. That's just silly. Worse than a pop up. Get rid of those, get rid of those browser notifications. That fad definitely go. I think the whole personalization and this is, this is going to be topical. Is it topical? Controversial. I think the difference between personalization and experience is important to understand. So I'm big on a terminology and I've written an article about this I'll share with you called Compliant Growth. So if you are compliant in the way that you do business, in the way that you collect data, in the way that you collect consent, if you're compliant and you're doing everything prim and proper, then growth will be very easy because you've got your business into a position where it's kind of stacked up properly. But also consumers trust you, no issues, blah, blah, blah. So if you were to look at personalization and experience, they all come as part of that stuff. Now I would say that personalization is a subset of experience and you've got to focus on experience first. Because everything we've talked about in that primary podcast is if I get a bad experience from this particular browser, pop up consent, whatever it is, page speed, then no matter how cool you are with your personalization, I may get a really bad experience from that personalization you've given me.
Nathan Bush: That's right. So personalization isn't necessarily the path to good experience.
[Voiceover]: Exactly. So I think the experience, understanding the experience is more important than personalization. So focusing on personalization and one to one personalization, the whole we want to get one to one that is gone. Anyone that wants, anyone that talks about one to one, they yeah, just forget
Nathan Bush: it's a pipe drain.
[Voiceover]: Forget it, forget it. It's not happening anymore. It never, never does happen. We're all spending a fortune on tech and tech and everything else to make it happen. We're chasing it. Not going to happen. Just cohort planning to get the best experience for someone, understand what that is. So when they arrive at your website, you know it from a UTM perspective, deliver that right experience based on what they're interested in. And actually one thing we didn't touch on in the primary that is also relevant to this is contextual relevance. I think the experience that you get is also based on context. If I'm searching for your store while I'm in your store. It's a very different experience to when I'm searching for your store, when I'm actually at home. So contexts, if I'm moving at a certain speed down the highway looking for your store, then maybe I'm heading in your direction or I need to make a phone call to make something happen. It's very different, again, to my experience, if I'm actually sitting down somewhere static as well.
Nathan Bush: It's a good call out.
[Voiceover]: So, yeah, so I think context is really important. What platform they're on, what device they're using, is it raining all that stuff? The context is just so important.
Nathan Bush: It's a really good point.
[Voiceover]: I love it.
Nathan Bush: All right, fourth question I've got for you. Can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
[Voiceover]: How much time? So I would say so. There's a super smart guy, one of the OGs of analytics of America, called Jim Stern. S T E R N E. Now he wrote a book and I got it. There we go. I made a note of it here. Artificial Intelligence for Marketing Practical applications. Now, it's about three or four years old now, I think maybe a bit more, but it's still everything that I read in there. The relevance is extremely important because you'll hear a lot about artificial intelligence and everyone's talking about machine learning, artificial intelligence, it's going to change the world. But as practitioners, retailers need to understand that the data they're collecting, if they're collecting shitty data with no consent attached to it, if you're feeding that into a machine learning model, then that machine learning model will go off kilter as well as one example of that. So understanding how it all plays together is extremely important. So, yeah, that would be, I would say, a book that's definitely worth reading. If we're talking about data, then that is one where you're going to have to learn what machine learning is and artificial intelligence is. But understanding the practical applications, but also what goes into that is extremely important.
Nathan Bush: Brilliant. All right, and last one I've got for you, Chris. Finish this sentence. The future of retail is
[Voiceover]: Bitcoin. Bitcoin. It's not, by the way, I don't have any crypto investment.
Nathan Bush: This is not financial advice.
[Voiceover]: So look, I would say. Oh, can I get very esoteric? Sure. Because I'm all about social connection at the moment. I think the future of retail is all about engagement. So there's some fascinating studies out there that I've been reading and listening to around. There's one great one around an Auto company who they've developed an app and that app will have people. We're not going to do this in Australia. Australia is too small for this. Right. But they've actually got a whole lot of people in a showroom of different sizes. You've got a six foot five person, you've got someone that's rather wide, someone that's really small and you sit there in your dressing gown or your jammies on the couch. You use the app, they can't see who you are, but it then gives you a salesperson and they say what you'd like us to do? Well, I'm six foot five, can you put him in the front? How's your knee? And it's the engagement metric. So they've had to come up with new metrics to understand how long have they engaged with this person. And if you've engaged with this person for so long on this particular app, how many of those then come back to actually get a real test drive? So the engagement, I think is a really interesting metric, but I find it such. If you look at before online retail, I'm sorry for everyone who's online retail, if you look at how we've all been in lockdown, one of the highlights of my day is when I get to go to a coffee, get a coffee with my mask on, right? And I get to go and I get to nod to people, but I get to talk to that person who's sending me a coffee. And it's a community thing and it's the same with, the same with the local store as well. So I think that engagement and connectivity is really important. So people who lose sight of that when you've got all the chat bots and everything else, I think that that's something that they're missing a trick on.
Nathan Bush: Chris, thank you for joining me on the checkout.
[Voiceover]: No worries, no worries. Been a pleasure. It almost became the primary, didn't it? Sorry.
Nathan Bush: That's good, that's good. Plenty of follow up there. There's a whole world of data out there. To hear more from Chris, jump back into episode 119 where Chris discusses the move from cookie based targeting to cohort planning and what that means for e commerce retailers. He explains the importance of permission and reveals the data protection rabbit hole he went down during a recent episode on the dating app Tinder. I promise you, like there's some really good data stuff in there. It's not all about Tinder. It's just one small story, but it's mostly about data and customer Data.
[Voiceover]: Data.
Nathan Bush: It's really good. Promise. Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep adding to cartoon.
