Ep. 265- FUTURE OF SEGMENTATION w/Anthropologie Sr. Dir. Global Strategy - Ian Dewar 🧠- Loyalty, Candles, Bucket List Travel, and more...

0:08Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately. You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwetelson. Let's do this, not that.

0:40we are back for do this not that podcast presented by marigold and we have a tremendous guest today why do i say that so who's here we have ian doerr who is the senior director of global strategy at anthropology i love anthropology anthropology is in my mall you walk in there and you just feel good you're like wow i'm having a bad day but i'm here and i feel great they have one of the most fiercely loyal customer bases in all of retail. People actually really care about their brand. They really care about their connection with the brand. And we're going to talk about the customer and customer feedback.

1:13And what Ian does over there, he's the global leader of a team that oversees and executes customer strategy, including loyalty and analytics and customer insights for North America, Canada, and Europe for anthropology, for anthro living, for terrain, for anthropology weddings. I mean, the guy's got a lot going on and we're going to dig into all of it. Ian, Welcome to the show. Jay, thank you very much for having me. Appreciate it. Awesome. I should have put on like anthropology clothing. So we have a lot of it in my house, actually. So first question, though, do you have like a candle? Does your house always smell good?

1:42I mean, is that a thing? I do. I do have a candle. In fact, I have a like I have a seasonal candle. It's very pine Christmas scented. So I need to get a new one. Actually, I almost burned through it. I have a home office. I also have a cat. I also have a dog. So I need to like clean up the office of some of their action on a regular basis. So, yes, I know where you can get a new one, by the way. I have a Santa mug from Anthropologie. Look at this, your whole thing. I mean, you don't really go too far. It's amazing. All right, before we get into customer feedback and how you leverage that and how you get it, how did Ian become Ian?

2:22Well, thanks. Thanks for asking that. So my background was always customer experience. I went to university like most people do. I got a degree in marketing. I got a job at an advertising agency. I wore a shirt and tie to work every day. I hated it. I quit. I went and got another degree in economics. I thought I'd work for the Canadian government. And I also hated that. And I got a job leading bike tours in Europe. And so I went off to Europe and I spoke French and I led these bike trips. in the Swiss Alps and the French Alps and the Pyrenees. And one of the foundations of what these bike trips were all about was creating this unique customer experience, right?

3:06Customers, especially Americans, don't have a lot of vacation time. They're committed to, like, getting out and getting the most out of their vacation. And we built these experiences that we visited castles and we went to wine caves and we did wine tastings and we rode, you know, somewhere between 60 and 100 kilometers a day. For Americans, that's 36 to 60 miles per day. But, you know, we rode our bikes and then we stayed at nice hotels and we had great dinners. And the whole focus on these bike trips, and then we evolved into hiking as well, was how to create an experience of something customers couldn't do on their own.

3:46And that was like the foundation of building these experiences. So eventually I had to stop riding my bike around Europe and get a job where I had to go to work myself. So I just moved into the office and I started designing bike trips first for Backroads based out of Berkeley, California, and then for Trek, the bicycle company based in Wisconsin. And it was the same idea. It was how do we create this really unique customer experience that it's not just fun and it's not just exercise, but it's really memorable and really unique. And that was basically my foundation for 10 years. I created a bike trip in New Zealand.

4:28I led a hiking trip in Nepal. I worked in Bhutan. And eventually, again, eventually I had to slow down a little bit and evolved to the customer experience side of both the bike business and the travel business. And so I worked for Track. I worked for Specialized, which is another bicycle. I moved to California to work for, Wisconsin was too cold. So I moved to California to work for Specialized and I ran their events program. We had a program called the Specialized Riders Club and it was like an affinity program. I wouldn't really call it loyalty so much as it was membership. But I basically planned bike rides and parties and opportunities to meet professional cyclists and training camps and all of these types of events that allowed the customers to use the products we were selling, which was in the case of Trek and Specialized Bicycles.

5:20After a while, I ended up getting a job at the North Face. I switched over from cycling to more of outdoors. But it was a similar, in that case, I was asked to come to the North Face to build our first loyalty program. So there was no loyalty at the North Face. And we created this program called VIP Rewards. It did have a loyalty component. So as you spent money, you got a pool of points. Those points can be turned into a gift card at certain times of the year. But it also was really based around experiences. I think we were one of the first programs that allowed customers to get points for simply doing things.

5:55We had check-ins at our stores, but we also built a check-in tool in our app where you could check in at a national park and get 25 points. And so, you know, it's not a lot. It ends up being about$2 when you kind of transfer that to you. But as customers visited more national parks, they were able to earn rewards. and then we built rewards opportunities that were beyond simply getting a gift card. Like we had a whole catalog of experiences. You could get a tent with your points. You could get a day of running with Dean Karnasas in the Marin Headlands. You could, our number one customer one year picked, instead of, again, taking a massive gift card as a reward, picked a trekking trip in Nepal and went off to Nepal.

6:35So this whole idea of building loyalty through experiences, I took what I learned, you know, basically running bike trips when I wanted to avoid getting a real job and somehow turned it into a real job. But the idea was, how are we building this foundation of experiences? And so when I was in the middle of COVID and I wanted something new, I got a call from Anthropologie. I got a call from the Anthropologie recruiter. And they said, look, we really want someone who can listen to customer feedback, look at customer data, and synthesize it into what's next for anthropology. And I loved that idea.

7:16And I thought, you know, here's a big company, well-respected company, a company I already shopped with. I looked up my own loyalty account when I started anthropology, and I'd already been a member of for 10 years before I started working here. So so but but, you know, here's a company who really cares about about about the customer experience and is is hungry for a way to take that data and and use what the customers are telling them, telling them or us now that I work here to make better product, to to present better product and to and to really tailor our assortment to what our customers want to buy.

7:53not just what we think they should be wearing or sitting on in the case of furniture. And so I was really impressed with the approach that anthropology had towards building customer experience. It's a little different than, you know, I'm not I'm not creating and we're not doing running around Central Park and there's no trips to Nepal in the in the anthropology rewards catalog. But at the same time, the idea of a big brand that is really actively listening to what its customers want and responding to it was super appealing to me. So three years ago, I started here in anthropology, and that's kind of where I am.

8:30That is an amazing story. It makes me feel very lazy. The 60-mile-on-the-bike thing is next level, so I'm going to try to do six first. But, you know, what's interesting about people in marketing, It's very rare that there's a linear path in someone's career. And I would say yours is the least linear path in all of marketing. But it's awesome because your experience has kind of fueled a lot of the things that you've brought to these organizations and really innovated within these companies. And anthropology in particular has such a following. I don't want to call it a cult, but it's such a following.

9:08People care about the brand. And is that a result of your focus on customer feedback? I mean, how do you and how can others prioritize customer feedback and then let it permeate throughout their business? You know, I think anthropology, and again, like I said, I was a customer here before I started working here. What always made Anthropologie unique was the ability for the customer to come in the store and find something they love that they didn't expect. And I think that's, you know, like what's the secret sauce? The secret sauce is that the brand really listens to what customers are looking at, what they're buying, and responds to that by continuing to create unique products.

9:55one of the things I think we are really great at now is continually refreshing inventory and refreshing the stores so that if you go shopping at Anthropologie, you went last week and you need to run out and get a last minute Christmas gift tomorrow, you're going to see a totally different story. Yeah, of course, there's going to be candles. Of course, there's going to be mugs. Of course, there's going to be dresses, but you're not going to see the same thing. And that's different from kind of where I came from. You know, we set the floor at the North Face in August for fall, and the product is kind of the same for three months.

10:28And then we add in some heavy winter coats when we get to October or ski coats in October. When I worked at the bicycle company, you have a season, you know, the bikes all get introduced in the fall. And then they're the same bikes. And yes, they flow in based on the seasonality of it. But there's no reason to go back to those stores on a really regular basis just to see what's new. Anthropology has continued to bring in new products so that the customer can always find something new when they go to the store or go on the website. But a great example is we did some research last year. We wanted to better understand multi-generational shoppers at Anthropologie.

11:08So it's really hard to use CRM data for that because only one person pays for the product. So we did store intercepts and we set up a table in the stores and we asked people if they would come down and sit down with us. We gave them all candles for their time. And one of the questions we asked is, why did you come here today? And if you bought something, why did you buy that item? And we were really looking to kind of understand that motivation. And one of the things we heard over and over while we were doing this research was, I didn't really know what I wanted until I got here, but when I saw it, I loved it.

11:44That is real. I feel that when I walk in your stores. like you wind up buying five more things than what you planned on and you may not even buy the thing you planned on yeah yeah and that's great for us i mean and again it's it's different right like like at at the north face customer comes to the store because they want a backpack or a pair of hiking boots or a rain jacket i i love the way anthropology has really created this sense of discovery that that our customers feel very confident that they can find something new and kind of discover on the way, whether that is on the app or in the store or literally what we send them by email, they respond.

12:25You know, I've never seen the level of email engagement that we have at Anthropologie anywhere else I've worked. So let me ask you a question about metrics for a second. Like what are metrics that matter to you in terms of trying to really get your arms around your customer feedback? Is it your email click-through rate or number of reviews are getting? Are there certain things that are like, we're always looking at this? So we are very deliberate about asking our customers for feedback. And we get a relatively high amount of post-transaction feedback. Like most brands, we send you an email after you shop with us.

13:06If it's online, we generally wait a couple of days until the product has arrived. If it's in store, that email comes the next day to you that says, you know, we'd love your opinion on your experience. And we get about a 5 % response rate, which is really high for feedback surveys. And I actually sort of anticipated you would ask this question. But I asked my team how many surveys we get per year. And we've received just in the transaction feedback survey 300 ,000 so far this year. and we'll probably get another, you know, that was a week or so ago. So we'll probably get another 50 to 75 ,000 literally before the end of December.

13:49So we're coming in at close to 400 ,000 survey responses from customers. And then we also have a whole research arm where we do a customer census every year. We get 25 ,000 of our customers fill out the census and tell us what they think about the brand. We do surveys for the year. So we're getting close to 500 ,000 data points each year about what customers think about anthropology. And then within that, about a quarter of those customers who send the post-transaction survey write extensive comments. So, again, you're talking about close to 100 ,000 comments per year. And you know anthropology.

14:29And you know what anthropology customers are like. when a customer loves our brand, they are very happy to give us their feedback. And so, you know, we're getting paragraphs in some cases of feedback that, again, most of the time people are filling these things out on their phone and they're writing paragraphs of what they think about anthropology, what they think about the product they just bought. They're giving us suggestions for new products we should buy. They're telling us what they love about the store. And so it's a great tool for us to start that point. And then, you know, you asked about metrics.

15:00We track MPS, so Net Promoter Score, for both online and the retail stores. We also have a customer satisfaction score. And then specific to stores, we ask about the experience with associates and fitting rooms and availability. Specific to the web, we ask questions about ease of navigation and ease of checkout. But the two metrics that we really track and we report on them weekly, but we have a monthly where we do a deeper dive recap is net promoter score and customer satisfaction, CSAT. So that's amazing what you are getting at scale, that feedback that you're getting at scale. And I want to ask you a question that might be a little bit off script, but I'm really curious about your take on this.

15:45So do you think that the future of segmentation in marketing is sort of doing like sentiment analysis on the feedback that you're getting since you're getting so much of it at scale? Are you then ever thinking about turning around the feedback you're getting and saying, okay, these people are our most loyal people. These people kind of just are new to us. They're kind of into us. These people, we got to get them over the hump based on the feedback that they're giving. Do you ever consider using all of that data in the other way in terms of your marketing efforts? Yeah, for sure. For sure. And I think the future of segmentation is really multi-layered, right?

16:23It's number one, what is the opportunity? If your top decile of customers are already shopping 10 times per year, then maybe two more purchases is your best chance or three more purchases is your growth opportunity. You know, if your bottom half of customers and most retailers will tell you if they're tracking their customers, the bottom half are shopping once. So it's pretty hard to get 100 percent more purchases out of that pool of customers. And so starting to think about, like, where is your opportunity to get that incremental additional purchase? Well, taking a customer who's who's already buying from you eight to ten times per year and getting 10 percent more is one.

17:05taking a customer who shops once and getting one more purchase is 100 % more purchases. And so if you think about kind of the juice versus the squeeze in spending marketing dollars, it really makes sense in a lot of cases. If you are a brand like ours, that really focuses on becoming more relevant to our customers and building that frequency of purchase to spend a bigger effort on your better customers. And so certainly that's kind of the starting point for Second Patient. I think that's so valuable for everybody here, even if you're a very, very small marketer, because so many people are focused on, oh, 40 % of my database hasn't opened or clicked an email in a year.

17:44And they just have these win back strategies and win back and wake the dead. But really what you're talking about is that's fine. You could do that once in a while, but really lock in on the people who are locked in on you. Right. I mean, that's where your growth is going to come from. No, absolutely. And then use that and look at who the best customers are and make that your acquisition strategy. How do we get more customers that have the potential to grow into our best customers? And if you're a brand that gets your best customers are shopping 10 times per year, your new customers are not going to shop 10 times per year.

18:20But this sort of acquisition at all costs, you're going to end up with sale only buyers. You're going to end up with Black Friday only shoppers. You're going to end up with one specific product only buyers when really your acquisition should be looking at how do we kind of refill and continue to bring in customers that have the opportunity to grow into multi-visit per year customers. I think that's super, super valuable advice. All right. One last question that has nothing to do with anything. I'm just so curious. You have done a lot of cool travel. You might have done some of the coolest travel of anybody I've come across.

18:56So I need to know what is on Ian's bucket list? Where do you, where is someplace you haven't gone? Like, I really am going to get here before it's all over. I really want to go to Argentina. Like I really, like I, you know, I follow a lot of chefs on Instagram. Yeah, so do I. And I feel like they are like partnering up with Argentinian chefs. and they're like they're they're going to buenos aires and they're like buying these giant steaks and eating them at 11 o 'clock at night and i'm like i really want that

19:35but you're gonna be on a bike i can't go with you you're gonna be on like a hundred mile volcanoes and there's like mountains and there's like good mountain biking and horseback and all that. But man, like, I just feel like that is like, it's like, it's like South American Paris. And like, how do I get down there and eat that food? Listen, I'm all in on that. You have to invite me on that trip. And I am so appreciative that you came here today. Everybody listen, we're going to put Ian's information is LinkedIn, everything in the show notes, in anything you want people to follow you anthropology anywhere, anything before.

20:11Yeah, no, follow anthropology. I mean, come to our stores, buy stuff. Come on. But yeah, If you want to follow me, I am, you know, I'm happy to continue to drop my pearls of wisdom every once in a while. But absolutely. I mean, I think the product that we have coming up now in Anthropologie is super exciting, kind of where we're leaning into, especially entertaining. I have a photo literally on my desktop that we used last year as like this tablescaping for holiday is like my dream table. So I'm all like, take a look at what we're doing outside of traditional, what you know anthropology for with sweaters, dresses, mugs, and candles.

20:53And look at what we're doing in table and home decorating. It's awesome. It's so true. Your in real life stuff is amazing. Follow Anthropologie, everyone's social. We're going to put Ian in the show notes. Ian, thanks for being here, man. Jay, really appreciate it. It's great. I love coming on these things. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice, but the party's not over. Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers. And hook us up with a five-star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time. Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100 % free, visit guruevents.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Damon John, Martha Stewart, and me.

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