[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 you through your Friday.
Nathan Bush: Today's checkout features Mark Bartzer from Mark Bartzer Consulting. In his own words, he is the outsourced Chief Marketing Officer. Before consulting, Mark led the growth for leading fashion brand Showpo and has worked with clients including Katch, Menulog and Officeworks. He's been awarded the top 50 CMOs in Australia, top 50 people in E commerce, and is a regular contributor to publications like Rag Trader and Inside Retail. Mark, I've got five quick questions for you. We've talked a lot about performance, marketing and customer lifetime value. In our main episode, we want to learn a little bit more about you. Five questions. Number one, what's the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
Mark Baartse: I've bought chicken helmets to keep chickens safe and I'm not going to answer any more questions on that one.
Nathan Bush: Can I have one question?
Mark Baartse: You can, but I won't answer it. The chickens were safe, if that's the question.
Nathan Bush: Chicken. But why?
Mark Baartse: Safety.
Nathan Bush: Safety first on a chicken.
Mark Baartse: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: What are you protecting it from?
Mark Baartse: No, no, no, no, no. No more questions. No more questions.
Nathan Bush: Can we Google chicken helmets?
Mark Baartse: You can. I don't know what will come up.
Nathan Bush: I've got so many questions. You can't do this.
Mark Baartse: You said, what's the weirdest thing you bought online? I have answered.
Nathan Bush: Oh, my goodness. All right, well, I'm going to come back to that later. Number two, who is your favorite retailer?
Mark Baartse: Look, it's asking me who my favorite child is. I can't answer that.
Nathan Bush: Nathan, we've all got favourite children. Don't try and get around it.
Mark Baartse: No, no, no, I'm not answering that one. No. I love all my children equally.
Nathan Bush: What about an international retailer that you admire?
Mark Baartse: International retailer? I don't know. It's the nature of my work. For everywhere I go, I just kind of see, oh, they could probably do that bad or whatever. It doesn't look right. So there probably is someone, but there's no one who stands out for me. Sorry. I know it's a cop.
Nathan Bush: All right, we've got a chicken helmet, fence sitter here so far. All right, number three, which e commerce practice do you wish was history? Yeah.
Mark Baartse: I'm going to touch on stuff we spoke about in the main bit, which is ignoring customers or saying that you're customer centric. If you haven't spoken to customers, you're not Customer centric. I'm going to say it right there or at least watch videos and recordings of customer sessions. You're not customer centric. If you ever do that and stop
Nathan Bush: saying you are, I reckon that there's a product that you could make to put on your website. Little A4 prints that people can print out saying, bullshit your customer centric or bullshit your data centric, so people can put it up behind their monitors and always remind themselves to our challenge, whether they truly are.
Mark Baartse: Yeah, yeah, just a little. I'm actually working on a product to help people be more customer centric. That's a whole nother story. Beautiful.
Nathan Bush: All right, number four, can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Mark Baartse: Yeah, I can. And I always keep a copy of this right next to me. This is audio, so I won't show it to you. I always keep it next to me and bring out all the time. It's a book called How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp. It is the bible. It upsets a lot of marketing theory, though.
Nathan Bush: Okay.
Mark Baartse: There's a lot of marketing books out there and there's a lot of podcasts out there. The difference between this one is it's evidence based. And by evidence based, I mean published, reproducible, peer reviewed. And the findings like. I'll give you an example. There's one core finding in that book about how customers buy that was developed in the 1950s. I've gotten their models and applied it to pure play e commerce companies in the 2000 and twenties. And those rules hold. So if something's good in an environment that was not even imagined in the 1950s, it's a pretty solid marketing rule at that point, I reckon. Yeah, brilliant.
Nathan Bush: We'll put a link into the show notes for that book.
Mark Baartse: Good. Link off to Booktopia.
Nathan Bush: I will. All right, number five, finish this sentence. The future of retail is it's exciting and ever changing. Beautifully put, Mark. Thank you so much for joining us on the checkout. I'm off to do a bit of Googling on chicken helmets.
Mark Baartse: Good luck with that. Thank you, Nathan.
Nathan Bush: To hear more from Mark, jump back into episode 158, where Mark and I deep dive into performance marketing, which I know is a big point of contention for many of you right now. We also touch on customer lifetime value, how to use performance channels for branding and getting yourself into the shoes of the customer. Not literally, of course, just metaphorically. Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep adding to car.
