If you put pen and paper in front of 10 marketers and asked them to write out a marketing strategy, you would get 1 answer worded in 10 slightly different ways.
Ecommerce is formulaic at this point.
If you talk to 10 customers about your product and brand, you would get at least 10 different ideas you could immediately use in your business.
Ecommerce doesn’t have to be formulaic.
I started in ecommerce on the marketing team at Ownonly Custom Suits. It was 2014, and I was living in China. They needed an American to help them sell suits in the US. As someone with a lot of energy and proficiency in English, I was the man for the job.
But I sucked at it. I was too new. I managed social media, copywriting, customer service, advertising, SEO (not really but I thought I was), email marketing, and even a bit of influencer marketing.
Many hats. No hits… I didn’t have anyone to guide me. I learned a lot though. Enough to keep going.
Over the next 7 years, I continued in marketing with several roles at several companies. I learned more at each turn and leveled up in success each year. I was on a career path. It was fun. I was loving it.
Then the pandemic hit. And it did to me what it did to nearly everyone in ecommerce…
It boosted my standing as a marketer. It made me think that I was great at it. That I knew exactly what to do. I was confident that you could put me in any company and I would know what’s missing and exactly what to do. I knew everything.
Boom. I was a strategist.
When I moved to Korea in 2006, I got a book that promised to teach me 한글, the Korean Alphabet, in 4 hours. So I bought it.
True to the title, it worked. I could easily read, phonetically, every thing I saw. After just a few hours. Regardless of not understanding the meaning of the words, I knew all the piece that make up the language.
A year into the pandemic, I was like that Korean textbook…
We could jump on a zoom call right now, and I could teach you marketing strategy. In 4 hours. I could teach you the components of marketing and how to piece them together. Show you how it looks and sounds. And how to make you sound fluent in marketing.
Looking back, I think that is the strategist that I really was… unboom.
In 2021, I stopped being a “marketer.” I realized there was more to know. So I turned my attention to studying customer psychology. I wanted to study the customer that I was sure I understood in those previous roles.
It was quite a change. And it was fascinating.
How did I start? I called them.
I set up an account recruiting platform and booked interviews with regular people. I held video calls to listen and learn, to get their perspective.
I even made a newsletter and podcast out of it.
I read up on and wrote about customer psychology. Behavioral economics. I worked as a consultant with brands to interview their customers.
Slowly, I began to understand the customer. From their side… and vice versa.
I learned out how to apply what I learned to marketing. Strategically. Never again will I see marketing and strategy in the same way.
So often brands frankenstein together a strategy based on the skills of the specialists on their team. Sort of hire people to cover each channel, and there it is… Strategy.
It is the easy way to build and manage a program. You choose distribution channels, create content, spew it out, and them analyze the data. It’s not exactly a spray-n-pray marketing style, but close.
This patchwork of marketing get brands into a rut. It lacks real strategy.
Ecommerce is a nascent component of commerce.
Shopping online is around 20 years old, but realistically is much newer to most people. Ecommerce is still finding its groove. How it fits into the grander scheme of business and consumerism.
But the dependence on tech and this notion of data is king has grooved our marketing into a rut. On one hand marketers know what to do. They know the channels and have mastered them. We know the buttons and when to push them.
On the other, this creates a red ocean where the entire industry is doing the same effing thing over and over.
The biggest brands, the household names, were established before ecommerce was mainstream. And they are still the biggest because they aren’t just pushing buttons on Shopify or Klaviyo or Apps and expecting magic.
They know their customers and know how to speak to them.
Sure, they are the incumbent brands and have boatloads of money, but that is not their super power. Their super power is in their ability to connect with customers.
Their super power is their brand.
Not all strategy is equal
There is a term for the type of strategy that ecommerce uses: Commercialization.
Commercialization is a marketing strategy used by businesses who sell a product where demand already exists. It focuses on exposure, staying top of mind, pricing and discount move, and retention.
If you sell toilet paper… this is the strategy for you. People need TP daily, and when they run out, they will buy more. Each brand of TP has its ideal target and they market to those people. Pretty straight-forward.
But what if you don’t sell toilet paper. What if you are Dude Wipes? You are an alternative wipe. Standing up to Big TP. They reinvented the corn cob. They can’t follow the same playbook as Charmin or the store brand.
They have to create demand.
And that is it… the difference between the strategy ecommerce uses, and the strategy that ecommerce should be using. One that creates demand.
Commercialization vs. Customer Strategy
Commercialization assumes demand is there. You just need to push the buttons to sell your goods. It’s straight-forward.
But if you cannot assume that there is high demand for your products, you cannot rely only on commercialization tactics. You have to create demand. Demand in each individual customer and hence in the wider market.
You need a different set of buttons
You are pushing the customer’s buttons. You are listening to them and iterating off of their ideas. Not force feeding discounts and emails so they know where to go before they take a shit.
Customer Strategy is where 90% of ecommerce brands need to be. Founders create innovative products and have loads of energy. They want customers to fall in love with their products. The ones that succeed in that are the ones who are several steps closer to their customers than their not-so-successful counterparts.
They do not rely on tactics of commercialization.
This is why I hate it when marketers use Nike and Apply as examples of great marketing. They are great examples, but they demand is a given at this point and so following in their footsteps isn’t for small or newer brands.
What using the wrong strategy look like…
“Have you or anyone here talked to your customers yet?”
The CEO answered “no.”
“Ok then, we will start with that.”
The CEO had called in a conversion optimization specialist who was there to help with a new product line that had a confusingly low conversion rate.
This new product line seemed to fit the rest of their products, but sales never seemed to pick up. They had redesigned the website and all the other categories saw an increase in conversion rate.
What was going on?
It turned out that the new product line was not aligned with their customers. It categorically fit in with the other products, but their target audience were not interested. Those who did buy were a completely different type of customer with completely different reasons for purchasing.
Their product was not aligned with the customers’ goals. The marketing was thrown off. The customers who did buy these products more less found them by accident.
They lost a lot of money in their attempt to launch this new category. On inventory, warehousing, and tons of ads that never converted.
This real-life story was surprising to me because they were well-established with revenues of 8-figure per year. Not a startup.
This is what happens when commercialization is used when Customer Strategy is needed.
What is Customer Strategy
Customer Strategy is the process of creating demand for your products by aligning your business operations with your customers’ goals across Product, Brand, and Marketing.
Everyone has a limited discretionary income. And with inflation and a gloomy economy, your potential customers will be choosey in how they spend that extra money. They have to want it before they buy it.
That’s what I mean by demand.
Demand in Customer Strategy is not market demand, like with TP, it is demand within the individual customer. Because when we know how to create demand in the individual customer, we can then extrapolate that to a wider audience of like-minded customers.
The central component of this process is direct communication with customers. Not surveys and data analysis, but through anecdotal findings via qualitative conversation. Finding the true motivators behind why they buy.
Customer Strategy is then implemented through creative iterations in your Product, Brand, and Marketing.
Learn more about Customer Strategy
To unlock growth, you need a key… and your customers are the key. If you want to learn more about creating and implementing this is your own business, just reach out.