Veteran ecommerce & DTC executive Bill Bass has been part of the ecommerce industry since its inception - from an analyst at Forrester to leading teams at Lands’ End, Sears, Orchard Brands and now at FULLBEAUTY Brands, where he’s bringing this turnaround group of companies into a new era. In this episode of Conversations with CommerceNext, join me and my co-host Veronica Sonsev as we catch up with our long-time friend and colleague and delve into his backstory - starting with leadership lessons learned in the U.S. military though FULLBEAUTY Brands’ journey in the pandemic and beyond.
Welcome to the Conversations with CommerceNext podcast, I’m your host Michael LeBlanc, and this podcast is brought to you in conjunction with CommerceNext and presented by Wunderkind.
Veteran ecommerce & DTC executive Bill Bass has been part of the ecommerce industry since its inception - from an analyst at Forrester to leading teams at Lands’ End, Sears, Orchard Brands and now at FULLBEAUTY Brands, where he’s bringing this turnaround group of companies into a new era.
In this episode of Conversations with CommerceNext, join me and my co-host Veronica Sonsev as we catch up with our long-time friend and colleague and delve into his backstory - starting with leadership lessons learned in the U.S. military though FULLBEAUTY Brands’ journey in the pandemic and beyond.
As FULLBEAUTY’s CMO, Bill talks about sustaining the momentum that the pandemic has brought this direct-to-consumer company and he shares his insights on the company’s resilience, the evolving role of the CMO, the value of strong leaders - and about lessons learned about building a strong team.
Thanks for tuning into this episode of Conversations with CommerceNext. Please follow us on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music or your favorite podcast platform where we’ll be sharing career advice and marketing strategies from eCommerce and digital marketing leaders at retailers and direct-to-consumer brands each and every episode. CommerceNext is a community, event series and conference for marketers at retail and direct-to-consumer brands. Through our online forums, interviews, webinars, summits and other in-person events, we harness the collective wisdom of our community to help marketers grow their businesses and advance their careers. Join CommerceNext events to meet other industry leaders and learn the latest ecommerce and marketing strategies. You can find upcoming events at CommerceNext dot com
Have a fantastic week everyone!
ABOUT US:
Scott Silverman
An ecommerce veteran, Scott Silverman has been active in the industry since 1999 and is passionate about digital retail and the innovation driving the industry. Scott Silverman is the Co-Founder of CommerceNext. Previously, he spent 10 years as Executive Director of Shop.org where he launched the Shop.org Annual Summit. Scott co-invented “Cyber Monday” in 2005 and was the founder of Cybermonday.com in 2006, a shopping site that has generated more than $2.5 million for Shop.org’s scholarship fund.
Veronika Sonsev
Veronika Sonsev is the Co-Founder of CommerceNext. She also leads the retail practice for Chameleon Collective and is a contributor for Forbes on how to grow retail and ecommerce in the age of Amazon. Having spent the last 10+ years working with some of the largest retailers and direct-to-consumer brands, Veronika has intimate knowledge of the challenges facing retail and ecommerce today. She is also an advocate for women in business and founded the global non-profit mBolden, which is now part of SheRunsit.
Michael LeBlanc is the Founder & President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc and a Senior Advisor to Retail Council of Canada as part of his advisory and consulting practice. He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience, and has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career. Michael is the producer and host of a network of leading podcasts including Canada’s top retail industry podcast, The Voice of Retail, plus Global E-Commerce Tech Talks and The Food Professor with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois. You can learn more about Michael here or on LinkedIn.
About CommerceNext
CommerceNext is a community, event series and conference for marketers at retail and direct-to-consumer brands. Through our online forums, interviews, webinars, summits and other in-person events, we harness the collective wisdom of our community to help marketers grow their businesses and advance their careers. Join CommerceNext events to meet other industry leaders and learn the latest ecommerce and marketing strategies. You can find upcoming events at https://commercenext.com/commercenext-webinars/.
Michael LeBlanc00:05
Welcome to the Conversations with CommerceNext podcast, I’m your host Michael LeBlanc, and this podcast is brought to you in conjunction with CommerceNext and presented by Wunderkind.
Michael LeBlanc00:13
Veteran ecommerce & DTC executive Bill Bass has been part of the ecommerce industry since its inception - from an analyst at Forrester to leading teams at Lands’ End, Sears, Orchard Brands and now at FULLBEAUTY Brands, where he’s bringing this turnaround group of companies into a new era.
Michael LeBlanc00:29
In this episode of Conversations with CommerceNext, join me and my co-host Veronika Sonsev as we catch up with our long-time friend and colleague and delve into his backstory - starting with leadership lessons learned in the U.S. military though FULLBEAUTY Brands’ journey in the pandemic and beyond.
Michael LeBlanc00:44
As FULLBEAUTY’s CMO, Bill talks about sustaining the momentum that the pandemic has brought this direct-to-consumer company and he shares his insights on the company’s resilience, the evolving role of the CMO, the value of strong leaders - and about lessons learned about building a strong team.
Bill Bass01:00
And it goes when you're in combat, your success is completely tied in to the people around you. So you might be in the bigger fights, but you're with the better people and your survival rate is going to be better. He did that as a, as a risk seeking behavior. He saw, actually this risk reduction behavior by surrounding himself with really competent people. And I remember going yeah, that's exactly right. You know,
Michael LeBlanc01:28
Let's listen in now.
Veronika Sonsev01:30
Welcome to Conversations with CommerceNext. Bill, thank you so much for joining us. I am joined here with the producer and co host of Conversations with CommerceNext. Michael LeBlanc.
Michael LeBlanc01:41
Bill, we're here to talk about FULLBEAUTY but we've come full circle, you and I were introduced by Scott Silverman in the late 90s on the notoriously named Tire Rack committee, internet retailing Advisory Council for retail, the NRF. So, it's Listen, it's great to see you again and really looking forward to our chat.
Bill Bass02:00
Yeah, it's fun when you sit there, you go, wow, that was a long time ago. We're old now.
Michael LeBlanc02:06
And wiser, wiser.
Veronika Sonsev02:09
Experienced.
Bill Bass02:11
More battle scars. I don't know if I've gotten wiser. Definitely, more battle scars.
Veronika Sonsev02:15
Well, it's so nice to have a familiar voice and face from the DTC community join us, Bill for those who might not know you or your background. Tell us about yourself and your role at FULLBEAUTY brands.
Bill Bass02:28
Yeah, I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at FULLBEAUTY, which is a little bit of a misnomer title because I have a couple of, like, IT reports into me. So, there's not a lot of Chief Marketing Officers that have to deal with people's desktops not working and things like that, but uh, yeah, so FULLBEAUTY we're about a billion machine sales and have catalogs we focused on inclusive sizing. So, we deal a lot with plus size women and big and tall men, is our, is our focus, about 75% of our sales come in through the internet. We send out a lot of catalogs to get those sales to come in through the internet. So, that's, we don't have any retail stores. Which when COVID hit, that was dumb luck that we were not in the path of that asteroid. So, we didn't have to deal with, you know, a bunch of store associates and what do we do and we went to real estate out there. So, that was nice.
Bill Bass03:25
Before that I bounced around a lot of different ecommerce companies. I was at Forrester Research started some of the very first research into, into internet advertising and ecommerce. I got to be on the team. I was at Boston.com when we put the Boston Globe online. I got to help design the very first banner ads, we had to figure out how many pixels are there going to be in a banner ad and we worked with Yahoo there was only like three or four companies selling advertising at that time.
Veronika Sonsev03:51
You probably work with them on my AOL colleagues too because they were one of the few that was, was selling ads at the time.
Bill Bass03:56
Yeah, although it was a little bit different because AOL wasn't doing stuff on the internet, right, so, they had their a well, you're kind of walled village thing, that was a big battle back then who was gonna win was AOL going to win or was the internet gonna win.
Michael LeBlanc04:08
Right. The walled garden and all their custom sizes that used to drive us crazy back in the early days, right.
Bill Bass04:14
Yes, yeah. And then, and Michael was talking earlier about Scott Silverman, you know, we were on the internet retail advisory committee and then that became shop.org, there was a merge. And then I was actually in the room with, with Scott and Layne Rubin and the folks coming up with the idea to do this. What I thought at the time was a crazy idea called Cyber Monday. And they said you can't just invent a holiday. Again, like Hallmark did it with, with Mother's Day, but I don't think any press person is actually going to buy that the industry, coming up with a new holiday called Cyber Monday and I was wrong, wrong, wrong.
Veronika Sonsev04:53
And then the whole week like little by little Giving Tuesday, everything it's, it's amazing.
Bill Bass04:57
Oh yeah, then everybody said it all started the expansion on that
Michael LeBlanc05:02
It's for good or ill I mean, it's a separate discussion, but I think there's a lot of retailers who would like to wind that clock back a little bit on Black Friday, Cyber Monday in terms of what it does, but the whole separate discussion maybe for a bit later.
Bill Bass05:14
Yeah. So, let me, I'll do a little bit of a discussion right now, if you let me because it was interesting, when we got to, so, FULLBEAUTY was a, was a turnaround, they, kind of, lost their way. And me and a couple of other folks have done this a few times before came in to, kind of, help get it back. But I remember, we got there, and that Cyber Monday, I had people running around going, Oh, we need to go to 75% discount, and free shipping and all the rest of that to drive top line sales. I was going are crazy. You know, the idea here is to make money not to have revenue that you lose, you lose money on everything that you're doing. But they're gotten to be this whole, you know, we got to be lower than every, kind of, this race to the bottom, I guess in terms of race to have the biggest promotion and get the most excitement and things like that. No, no, no, no, no, no, we're gonna stop with that.
Bill Bass06:10
We did a lot of testing on free shipping, it gets to be a lot of the industry with conventional wisdom is you have to offer free shipping, or you have to offer two day shipping because Amazon's doing it. And when we were going, No, you don't actually and if you actually test it. For us, we found free shipping is a money loser. We make more money when we don't offer free shipping. And so we only offer free shipping in a handful of cases, like new customer acquisition, it tends to be effective there. But for our current customers, when we offer free shipping, you know, because what happens is everybody gets free shipping, not just the people that care. Everybody.
Michael LeBlanc06:49
Listen, Seth Godin has often said, the problem with the race to the bottom is sometimes you win.
Bill Bass06:55
Good luck.
Veronika Sonsev06:56
Yeah. And I think that's one thing that you, kind of, mentioned, Bill, it's so important to understand the value drivers and the metrics of your business. You mentioned that your role includes IT, talked a little bit about, you know, what you're doing as the CMO of FULLBEAUTY brands.
Bill Bass07:11
Yeah, so, we have, kind of, call it 10-ish, 10, 12. The number keeps changing a little bit. We're in the merger and acquisition mode, we're out acquiring people we picked up Catherine's recently from Ascena. And so we had these, call it, 10-ish independent brands that were operating kind of independently on their own websites. And so, the first thing we did was we said, okay, in marketing, you got to go out and spend a lot of money with Google or send catalogs, we send a couple, we spend a couple 100 million dollars a year in catalog costs, So I mean, it's a lot of money going out in catalogs, we get spend money with Google's for money with Facebook, we realize that and we've done this now across three separate companies that we've been at, if you have multiple brands, all targeted to the same customer segment. So, for us, it's plus size, if you put them into a common shopping cart, when people cross shop, it's free marketing.
Bill Bass08:12
And it's an idea we stole back when GAP did it back in the, in the mid 2000s. It was like, Wow, that's a really good idea. I talked to some of the people that worked in the GAP warehouse back then, they said about every third package went out with multiple brands in it and so that's ad cost free. You don't have to know if I can sit there and just build the site. And then somebody shopping one, one within which is one of our brands, and they click over and shop from Romans or shop from Catherine's and put it in their basket, I didn't have to send a catalog to do that I didn't have to buy a Facebook ad, I didn't have to buy a Google ad. And so, the profitability of those sales is dramatically higher. And so that's what we've really focused on. And the good thing about having IT under me is I could go Okay, you guys could you go build this website, so that you can do these features and functions and they have to, kind of, do it. I don't have to convince the CIO, that this is a good thing to do.
Michael LeBlanc09:10
Just look in the mirror and have that discussion with yourself.
Veronika Sonsev09:15
That's awesome. That is it sounds like you've been really kind of focused on streamlining the business, helping cut out the costs and create some efficiencies across all of the marketing. That must have been an interesting challenge.
Bill Bass09:26
You know, let's talk about lessons learned over the COVID era. You've said listen, we're in a great place. We didn't have stores. I'm wondering if you were planning to have stores at all, or maybe you're thinking about having stores now that there may be some real estate but is there, is there anything that that happened or that got you through, continue to grow, you're in acquisition mode. So, things are going well that you've learned that you've wanted to share just from the past weirdness of the past 18 months.
Bill Bass09:53
And it's interesting for COVID. So, when COVID hit, if you if you looked at our sales, it gets a bit, a little bit hard because the company had gone into bankruptcy in early 2019. And we got there in the summer of 2019. So, we were making a bunch of changes to the company. And so you have these external forces going on, you have internal forces going on, and you're trying to figure out, well, how much of this is a COVID bob, how much of it is just because we got smart about pricing and sourcing and, and you know, cross -hopping between the brands and things like that. So, there was a lot of moving parts at the same time, which makes it hard to isolate any, any individual impact. What we found was for the first, kind of, six weeks, kind of that mid-March of 2000, to, kind of, end of April, early May, big drop in sales. And that's when we were doing the lockdowns in New York, we were doing all the new kind of really hit, everybody was kind of panicking, and everybody was kind of pulling back.
Michael LeBlanc11:00
Right.
Bill Bass11:02
Then from, kind of, May on sales took off. Part of that was because stores that closed some of it was, you know, people say, Oh, I'm stuck at home. So, well, I'll buy a bunch of home stuff. And we have a home business and that business, shot up our swimsuit business cratered, because all of the, nobody was going to hang it out at the beach,
Michael LeBlanc11:25
Right.
Bill Bass11:26
We were all under blocked out in our home, you had a bunch of people, they weren't buying special occasion dresses with everybody on a bunch of athleisure, you know, hang around the house and be comfortable clothes. So, there was a bunch of stuff that was being bought, and you didn't have the store competition. And so the internet became the place that people went to shop. And because everybody was working from home, just like we're doing now on zoom, the internet became the place that people started conducting, you know, day-to-day life, you know, you're running your business here, my high school buddies, my high school classmates started doing and every other week happy hour would never have happened, you know, without having to kind of force this adoption of technology. Right now, it's completely natural for us to hop onto a zoom call or Google meat or you know, any of these things. But you know, if you go back, that was like, really not normal. You had the phrase, kind of early adopter people were doing it.
Michael LeBlanc12:25
Yeah.
Bill Bass12:25
FaceTime was helping, you know, so Apple was getting it in everybody's hands. But she still didn't do a lot of FaceTime things unless you were like, well, now I'm old. My kids did it all the time. You know, now all of a sudden, all the old people were starting to adopt this. So, there was this rapid adoption of technology, forced by code. And what's going to happen coming out of this, you know, stores are opening back up and all the rest of that, but our sales are still going really well. So it's not like sales, were in stores shifted online, and they're going to shift back to stores. That's not happening. What happened was sales were in stores shifted online. And now people are going, Wow, we're not going back to where we were before. I've seen studies people said the curve of adoption of online and ecommerce and shopping and stuff like that. And it always been going up. I think what happened here was we just leapt forward five years on the curve. And we're that, we're not going to give that five years up. It's not going to be like okay, now we're gonna go back to like, what it would have been,
Michael LeBlanc13:28
It's like the water line, right, the water, water line up.
Bill Bass13:30
The water line, and now we'll still keep going up from here. It had a huge leap. It was time compression.
Michael LeBlanc13:39
Now, how is that affected your loud-, it's funny when I think about, in your marketing mix, I think about okay, everybody's at home that can read a catalog if you're in a big catalog-ers. Okay, good decision there. Did it change any other elements as you're thinking forward, like, you know, live streaming, more Instagram, more social media, kind of, marketing is a chan-, do you see any changes coming to your marketing mix driven, by the way, people are interacting online today?
Bill Bass14:04
We were already in most of the places we wanted to be. The thing, the big changes that we saw well, so let me give you a couple of things. One of the reasons that FULLBEAUTY ran into its problems, and this has happened a lot of times with private equity backed companies, private equity comes in and buys a company with particularly catalog companies. So, I've worked at Lands' End, and I've been the, kind of, in the catalog-y world for a while. And their, catalogs are expensive. I mean, they're expensive to produce, they're expensive mail out, and your response rate is really low, right. So, let's say you get, if you get a 5% response rate, you're really happy. Well, that means 95% of the catalogs you sent out didn't matter.
Michael LeBlanc14:48
Direct, direct marketing numbers.
Bill Bass14:50
with next customer that comes in, I got my MBA, whatever Fancy Pants school in, in, it come in and they go well, you just need to stop spending in catalogs, and you'll be wildly profitable
Michael LeBlanc15:01
You'll be, you'll be fine.
Bill Bass15:02
Yeah, if that happened to Sam Taylor when he was at oriental trading that happened to him, and he's trying to it's not because people are making these bad decisions. Well, same thing here. It's like the company had gotten into this: catalogs are bad, and we're gonna stop doing catalogs. And no marketing channel is bad, you just need to be smart about how you do it and look at the return that you're getting. And it's math. You know, it's great. When people were getting into religious discussions about, you know, ecommerce is inherently good, catalogs are inherently bad. internet advertising is a way to reach people, catalogs are a way to reach people, televisions a way to reach people, we've never been able to make television work for us. But you know, there's a lot of people that make television work for them.
Michael LeBlanc15:48
I had, I had television work in one line of business because it drove branded search for my search terms, more than anything else. So, you know, that studying that synergy, kind of, made it work like people were, would and I was in the weight loss industry. So, people, you know, trying to buy, you know, lose weight or weight loss is a very difficult proposition and search but as a branded term. Anyway, we saw that some nice intersections I love what you're talking about it is that intersection of the marketing mix.
Michael LeBlanc16:18
Let's switch gears a little bit. A lot of what we do on this podcast is talk about careers, the people, you've had such an interesting career, I want to start at kind of the formation of your career, you and I've been on the mic before you've talked, you've had served in the military had a great career in the military. And one thing you said to me was, you know, if I was going to be in the military, I was going to do military stuff. Which is, kind of, like, orientation, like, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it big. And you know, when I look at that commitment, how has that, you know, how has that level of commitment impacted your career, you're very busy have a lot of irons in the fire, is that, kind of, mental discipline of all in, you know, is that something you'd advise everyone to be, as opposed to cherry picking opportunities? Talk about that a little bit and how it's influenced your thinking in your business career.
Bill Bass17:03
Yeah, that's an interesting question. So
Michael LeBlanc17:06
We'll be right back with our interview with Bill Bass right after this message.
Michael LeBlanc17:10
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Bill Bass17:47
And so I joined the army when I was 17. I wanted to pay my way through college. And the way that I figured I could do that the best was to if you join the army, you've got an army scholarship, they pay for college, and I wanted to go to an expensive college, and I didn't want my parents to pay for it, because I happen to have a college, a certain college I wanted to go to. And so, so I joined the army purely as an ends to a means. And I thought it was going to be, all my friends thought it was gonna be a disaster, because I don't, I don't follow rules really well and the military is, kind of, a little bit about, you know, kind of, follow-
Michael LeBlanc18:24
Rule oriented. Yeah, they're a little rule oriented.
Bill Bass18:27
But I got in, and I found it was tremendously, the army is really good about if you're going, if you're good at getting, getting bad guys, they kind of leave you alone to go get back guys. When you're going to get bad guys, you got to be kind of creative. I mean, you got to make decisions, kind of, on your feet. There's not a lot of calling back to headquarters and saying, hey, what should I do here, you got to be making decision about a way, which, which I found just really fun. I went through, I got a slot in flight school. But before I went to flight school, I asked to go to train as an infantry officer, because I wanted to understand what the people on the ground who we were going to be going in support of, I wanted to live their life because then when they're asking you to do something, you can understand, you know, okay, this is why, I've been there, and I've seen it, I can kind of understand what's going on.
Bill Bass19:19
So, I'm going through Infantry School, this is 1984. I have a classmate who was a Vietnam vet. And he was in Vietnam, and had been a ranger in Vietnam, and the Rangers are a special operations unit, operating behind enemy lines, things like that. They're always in the middle of the battle. And I was asking him one time, I'll never forget this. So, he'd been an enlisted man in Vietnam, come back, gone to college now. They've gone through ROTC and now was, you know, becoming an officer. And I said, he, he chose to join the Ranger Regiment while he was in Vietnam. And so, he didn't go to Ranger School. He actually just became a combat right from the beginning. And I said, Why didn't you sign up for that, because you're going to be right in the middle of everything. And he goes, I'm there with the best people. And he goes, when you're in combat, your success is completely tied into the people around you. So, you might be in the bigger fights, but you're with the better people and your survival rate is going to be better. So, he didn't see that as a, as a risk seeking behavior. He saw actually as a risk reduction behavior by surrounding himself with really competent people. And I remember going, yeah, that's, you're exactly right. You know, the better people you have around you, the more success you're gonna have.
Bill Bass20:40
And so go where you're gonna find the best people, you know, you were asking about, you know, how to get how do I do all this stuff, I don't do all this stuff. I do this stuff with other people. And, and once I find, once I find really good people, I try to hold on to them as long as possible. So, I have a woman that's worked with me for 20 something years now she, she's followed. I've, she hasn't followed me. I've dragged her from Lands' End, to Fair Indigo to she's, she's did, with us at FULLBEAUTY now. Yeah, they're just outstanding people. And so if you get really outstanding people, you can you can, I don't know if it's like, its not like you can leverage yourself. But it's like,
Bill Bass21:26
The team operates at a level beyond what each of us as individuals would be able to operate. And I gotta tell you, you show up a place like FULLBEAUTY, which had gone through bankruptcy, but the reason they had gone through bankruptcy was kind of some bad decisions at the very top of the company. The people that work at the company are some of the best I've ever worked with. I mean, it happens like, you're normally, it's like a football team, you know, you show up where, you know, it's like, okay, this team's bad because you got bad players. Like, what no, we actually have really good players.
Michael LeBlanc21:26
Right.
Michael LeBlanc22:00
We need a new coach.
Bill Bass22:01
Strictly a new coach. The players were outstanding coaches matter. Yeah, I read a lot of uh, when I got out of the army and went back to business school, you read a lot of stuff about, well, the CEO doesn't really matter. They only add a certain amount to the stock value and things like that. But every place I've been in the companies that I personally, like, I can tell you, my best companies have the best general managers and my worst companies have the worst general mangers. The coaches matter a lot.
Michael LeBlanc22:32
If you're enjoying this interview, you may want to join us for CommerceNext IRL on September 28th, 29th. At the New York Hilton Midtown. Some of the speakers you'll be seeing including: Noam Paransky, Chief Digital Officer at Tapestry, Ekta Chopra, Chief Digital Officer at ELF Beauty, Matt Gehring, GM of eCommerce at Everlane, Alex Waldman, Co-Founder and Creative Director at Universal Standard, Jennifer Patrick, Global Branding and Packaging Director at Patagonia, and many more. CommerceNext IRL will cover themes such as the resurgence of brick-and-mortar retail and its impact on eCommerce, and how to prepare for a cookieless future. We can't wait to get the CommerceNext community together in person. And hope you'll join us. Learn more and register now at CommerceNext.com.
Bill Bass23:10
So, the, kind of, some of the academic research that's been done, and maybe, maybe it's different when you talk about your kind of big establishment, like American Express or something like that, that's sure to kind of this big battleship that's already going in a certain way. And it's not going to move that much no matter who's at the top. But when you're talking about small companies, small companies, the person at the top will make or break that company. There's no doubt in my mind about that.
Veronika Sonsev23:33
I want to shift gears for a moment, because we've kind of started talking, we talked a little bit about the CEO role just now. But let's talk about the CMO role. Specifically in the retail industry. It seems like sometimes it's a high wire act, the average tenure for retail CMO is 41 months, according to Spencer Stewart. So, what is driving this turnover? Is it you know, being able to understand consumer change, or is it a short attention span, what do you think?
Bill Bass23:59
I think a couple of things. So, I'm in retail clothing, right, so if you're in retail, if business is going good, the merchants are always convinced it's because they're great at designing and building products. And if business is going bad, it's the marketing people's fault. So, there's this little bit of this element of you never get credit for when things are going good, but you take all the blame when things are going bad so that you know but that's part of being in marketing, you know, and if you're not willing to put up with that, go be a merchant.
Michael LeBlanc24:32
Right on.
Bill Bass24:32
So, so, there's absolutely an element of that. The other thing is, marketing is an interesting one. So, I came up out into the world of direct marketing where it, it's it's math, you know, if your mail this many catalogs, you get this response rate you get all the rest of the stuff, a lot of marketing people come up through the world of brand marketing where it's, it's about the funnel, right, everybody wants to talk about the funnel. So, you got awareness and all the rest of this stuff. I, my head starts to explode when you start getting into this, a lot of hand waving brand advertising stuff, because I always feel like that's ad agencies just trying to get in my pocketbook. And trying to, you know, well, you have to do that you have to pay us millions of dollars, because otherwise, you know, your brand won't be perceived as this, that or the other. I, just my head doesn't work that way. My head works, if I mail this many catalogs, I get this flux rate, I get some amount of sales, you know, it's a, let's test this catalog cover versus this catalog cover, this catalog cover does better. Therefore, let's send out the catalog cover that does better, not the one that does, doesn't do as well. So, I think that here's an element of, within the marketing world, you got, your kind of direct marketing accounting kind of types, you get your creative, kind of, types. companies don't always know which one of those they want, or they pick one, but they really want the other one, or they want to have both. But it's hard to have both all wrapped up into one person. Plus, it's easy to sit there and say, Okay, we're going to make a change, get rid of the marketing person.
Veronika Sonsev26:15
Yeah.
Michael LeBlanc26:15
High profile, makes a dent.
Bill Bass26:18
The board you're doing something. Well, we're not just, you know, we're making changes. We're making changes. Yeah, yeah. That got me merchants. My suspicion is, I'm not sure that marketers have less, like, your CMO. Your Chief Marketing Officer has a shorter tenure than your Chief Merchandising Officer. It'd be an interesting study to, kind of, do.
Veronika Sonsev26:41
Yeah, to compare those two roles.
Bill Bass26:43
CIOs kind of come and go too. I think what happens is, anytime you get to the top of the pyramid, the weed whacker kind of comes through a lot more frequently than you would like.
Veronika Sonsev26:54
Absolutely. And I think, you know, like some companies are really good at, you know, being able to build a culture to like data, but still, kind of, still push into brand. I've definitely talked to some companies about doing that. But it's always a delicate balancing act between those two. And I think also, to some extent the top leadership, kind of, leaning into one or the other or feeling like they need to change or maintain their audience,
Bill Bass26:54
and there's some good examples of, like, Duluth Trading, Duluth was a, because that was just up the street from us when I was working the Lands' End. And, and Duluth, you know, they came up with a really clever, from an ex- Lands' End guy. Really clever marketing thing. That's fun, right, it's funny to watch the Duluth. And then they started doing television commercials. And Duluth was one of those that went from being a kind of a classic direct marketer to being more of a brand. I mean, I feel differently about Duluth now, than I did 10 years ago, before they started doing the funny ads, like Geico commercials. They're hilarious. But you know, you sit there with a lot of commercials aren't hilarious, but try to be hilarious. But Geico is consistently fun as they go through and do their stuff. But it's hard. Those are hard. Then people, kind of like, why can't you be more like Duluth, and it's like, well, that's a hard, like Duluth has done it. But other people haven't been able to pull that off.
Veronika Sonsev28:12
Well, I want to. There's one other aspect of your career that I think is so interesting, you recently went back to school and got a degree in machine learning. You know, talk about what prompted that decision, and your overall perspective on continuing education, I'm so interested in that.
Bill Bass28:27
I got lucky. It's just, kind of, when you're born, you don't choose when you're born, I got to be born at a time that I came of, kind of, business age, just as the internet was getting started. And I just dumb luck, ended up at a place that I got to be involved in it, right from the beginning. And I remember when the internet was coming along, going, oh, this is going to change things. And an ad was in the newspaper industry at the time. And I had a, I had some mentors that were sitting there saying you're, you're ruining your career here. Because you can go you're going to be a publisher, if you decide you're going to do the classic newspaper thing, you know, this internet thing, it's not going to go anywhere. And I was going no, I actually think this is really gonna change stuff, which, you know, sounds crazy now. But at the time, you know, people didn't they couldn't get their head around the fact that the kind of change that we were facing was going to happen.
Bill Bass29:27
I was at orchard brands. And I wanted us to start doing a lot of kind of customer segmentation work. And, you know, we were a billion in sales spending $300 million a year and catalog marketing expense. You know, you'd think we'd be pretty sophisticated about what we were doing, but we weren't being very sophisticated because we were so caught up in the day to day get the stuff out the door. That there wasn't a lot of, okay, let's sit back and think about really, how do you get customers to go from one time buyers to two time buyers, how do you, if I have a customer that buys pants, are they better off buying a second set of pants from us or buying a shirt. So, if I have a customer with two purchases compared to another customer two purchases, but this customer buys from two different categories, but this customer buys, you know, is weld to a single category, who has a life-, a higher lifetime value, and why and what can we then do to determine if one has a higher lifetime value, can we influence customers to go one path or the other.
Bill Bass30:28
To me, this was all really interesting stuff when I was you know, computing power is going to, to basically costless with Amazon Web Services and things like that. Software is going to costless with things like R and Python, it used to be you'd spend million dollars on a SaaS, SaaS thing, you know, he said, there was getting to be a huge increase in the ability to use really powerful computer science, combined with some pretty interesting stuff around segmentation. And nobody was, we know who's really doing it. And so I said, I'm having the same feeling I had in the early days of the internet, that this machine learning stuff that's opening up right now is going to change how the world works. And you know, a little bit like going off to be an infantry soldier, because I wanted to understand what it was like for people on the ground. Because in college, I studied English and Dance in college. So it was a good idea to understand some of this math stuff. So I went back to school, so, I'm going to get a Master's, I'm not disciplined enough to kind of just do a Coursera thing. And just have it, kind of, on the side and do it. I, like, actually need to have instructors going okay, you have an assignment due, it's due this day, and all the rest of that just gives me the motor, fear of embarrassment in front of your peers and your professor is a powerful motivating factor. And so yeah, so I went back and got a master's degree in, in data science and did machine learning, I built neural networks, single layer perceptrons, and things like that, I, their whole continents of math, I took calculus, I went up through calculus, there were whole continents of math, I never knew existed, matrices, things like that it was blowing my mind. I was working my A** off
Michael LeBlanc32:21
It's the same foot. It's so fascinating, because as you said, the same philosophy, you've had this, kind of, consistent theme in your life, these consistent things that have, you know, this intersection of the personal and professional that have come together, right to, kind of, form, the kind of leader that you are and the kind of retailer you are, and all those great things.
Michael LeBlanc32:37
Last question for you. You know, I don't know what things are going to look like in five months, let alone five years. So, maybe not such a fair question, but how do you think of your role, or the CMO role, the function in the years to come, is this is this advanced AI machine learning going to transform, the, the, the role, and, and you know, if you put yourself forward five years, do you think you'd be doing something phenomenally different or more of the same that you're doing today?
Bill Bass33:07
I think because we have so much stuff now happening online, that you can track. So, you got data. In the past, it was hard to do data you had like store counters, I remember, because we used to have at some of my companies, like companies, like, I was at Sears, we had 800. And something big stores when I was at charming shops, we had a couple of thousand, kind of, mid-sized stores. I remember going into the store and you had to duck down so that you'd be underneath the sensor to tell how many people were coming to the store because you didn't want to screw up their metrics.
Michael LeBlanc33:37
The numbers, yeah.
Bill Bass33:38
All the series x are covered and all of a sudden their metrics are getting screwed up from people going in and out the door. Well, now you got a ton of information about customers, I can track exactly what they're doing on my website, I can see what they're what they're going off and doing. I think the marketing role is becoming more and more the kind of direct marketing mathy type role and less, less the brand stuff because you have so much data, it allows you to go over here and start using that data. And we're talking about big data now.
Michael LeBlanc34:12
Yeah.
Bill Bass34:12
And so, getting into machine learning, you get into the, okay, instead of, like, a lot of companies right now, you have your, kind of, catalog marketing guys in the catalog out and digital marketing guys do the digital marketing and, and so we think about the world in the world of channels. But I think that's going to go away, I think you're gonna start seeing it in the world of segments. Like one of the things that I started doing with my team is I put somebody in charge of okay, you're in charge of getting one time buyers to two time buyers, because that's the big jump. The big jump you get in lifetime value is taking a one-time buyer to a two-time buyer. And so, and as I said that's across all channels. So, whatever goes into the packages to first time buyers, you need to be paying attention to that. The type of digital marketing we're doing to these people, the type of catalog Sending out these people, it starts, it's just a, it's like a it's a rows, columns, kind of, thing. We're gonna slice across all these channels. But typically the digital, I mean, the marketing world has been channel based, I'm the TV advertising guy. I'm the print advertising guy. And I think it's gonna go now to being a segment, I'm responsible for this segment across all these channels. And the segments, you're going to be identifying using machine learning, big data stuff. And that's where you start getting into interesting customer segmentation and start talking to these customers. So, I think the marketing role is going to start shifting more towards that view of the universe. And I don't, and I think you're going to have to have skill sets then that help you understand,
Michael LeBlanc35:48
Right.
Bill Bass35:48
How you, how do you segment these customers out that well.
Michael LeBlanc35:51
Well, it'd be the story of the old joke. I never met a data I didn't like, badoom boom.
Michael LeBlanc35:58
Listen on that kind of father, kind of, dad joke, kind of, Note. Bill, thanks so much for being on the podcast. It's such a treat. I learn so much every time you and I speak and, and Veronika, thanks so much for, for joining me and such a great episode. And we really want to thank you for joining us on Conversations with CommerceNext.
Veronika Sonsev36:18
Thanks so much fellas.
Bill Bass36:20
Thanks, you guys.
Michael LeBlanc36:20
Thanks for tuning into this episode of Conversations with CommerceNext. Please follow us on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music or your favorite podcast platform where we’ll be sharing career advice and marketing strategies from eCommerce and digital marketing leaders at retailers and direct-to-consumer brands each and every episode. CommerceNext is a community, event series and conference for marketers at retail and direct-to-consumer brands. Through our online forums, interviews, webinars, summits and other in-person events, we harness the collective wisdom of our community to help marketers grow their businesses and advance their careers. Join CommerceNext events to meet other industry leaders and learn the latest e-commerce and marketing strategies. You can find upcoming events at CommerceNext.com
Michael LeBlanc37:01
Have a fantastic week, everyone!