End of Term Summary

As an individual who has been determined to work in ecommerce since first year, INSY 440 really made me realize how ignorant my view on ecommerce was. As a frequent and avid online shopper, my perceptions of ecommerce has always been: just put on an attractive website, present a nice product catalogue, do some promotions and BAM, sales will come pouring in. However, INSY 440 has exposed me to many deeper levels of ecommerce, including the key fact that ecommerce the term itself means more than just clicking on the “Add to Cart” button. 

There are three key takeaways for me from this class. First of all, I finally understand how the Internet came to be and how it works. The evolution of the Internet has never been something I thought about as it just seemed to happen. However, I am grateful to actually learn how it came to be, and grasp the protocols that make the transfer of information and data possible. I will never forget that Mr. Tim Berners-Lee is the one to thank for the development of WWW! 

My second takeaway is the importance of security. From deciding which encryption method to use to determining what kind of virtualized server to implement, security considerations are embedded in many aspects of building a sustainable and functioning ecommerce platform. I found it extremely meaningful to learn about the existence of PCI DSS, since it’s such an integral audit for organizations that handle credit card information. 

My third takeaway is the reinforcement of my interest in data and data analytics, and my goal of pursuing a future career in this field specifically in the fashion and beauty industries. Especially in the data analytics lecture, hearing words like shopping basket analysis and clickstream analysis fascinated me and it opened my eyes more to the degree of tracking and data collection possible through a user’s each and every movement. I also believe that the mantra, if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it will be one that follows me throughout my career. 

INSY 440 was undoubtedly a worthwhile learning experience. I cannot wait to learn even more in the real playing field! 

lululemon's Ecommerce

Today I’m going to focus on my favourite brand and company: lululemon. As I wrote about before, omni-channel sales strategies are becoming ever so important for retailers. For lululemon and its other athletic wear competitors like Nike and Under Armour, it’s definitely no different. In the difficult year of 2014, lululemon’s ecommerce was able to drive the company’s sales in the Q4, contributing 18% to the company’s top line and approximately 26% to its income (Forbes 2015) 

lululemon began selling on its ecommerce website in 2009 and has seen increasing growth over recent years. What really drove ecommerce in 2014 was the launch of a mobile app that enabled customers to shop on their smartphones. Once again this underscores the importance that mobile is going to continue playing in aiding ecommerce and overall omni-channel experiences. At the end of Q1 of 2015, over one fifth of luluemon’s growth that quarter was attributed to the ecommerce platform, where revenues increased by 27% to $83.6 million.  

What’s interesting to note is the many factors that affect online sales. For lululemon, diligently managing its web inventory is key for responding to variations in online orders. As Marcos Garcia mentioned in his guest lecture, ecommerce demands show daily and yearly variations and in this case, the yearly variations definitely play an important role in determining lululemon’s ecommerce sales. They noticed that as temperatures were extra low in the February 2015, this kept many of the usual yogi customers indoor and thus created a hike in ecommerce sales during this winter period. What lululemon did well in response to this was ensure a shorter distance between distribution centers and the customer, to have products delivered in a timely manner despite adverse weather conditions. This brings up the significance of aligning ecommerce with an efficient supply chain management strategy. Aside from having an ecommerce website that is user-friendly and induces customers to add to their carts, what then becomes the determinant of whether or not ecommerce will drive sales is the strategy behind how you deliver the products. 

As CEO Laurent Potdevin forecasts even more accelerated growth in ecommerce for lululemon in upcoming quarters, it is exciting to see what other ecommerce innovations this company has in the works to drive this growth. Hopefully, I can soon one day be a part of the process of creating these innovations! 

The Success Factors Behind Sephora's Digital Evolution

After being prompted by the many emails, addressing me so personally and eloquently and flashing the most desirable new beauty products for this holiday season before me, I gave in. I walked into Sephora this past Friday for the V.I.B. 20% sale and spent an amount that my McGill Intro to Information Systems Grader salary only managed to cover about a quarter. Sephora has been known in recent years to really at the top of their e-commerce, omni-channel retailing and beauty technology game. And so I want to look more into that for today’s blog post. After all, if they successfully managed to make me buy $250 within 20 minutes, I must give them some props. 

Looking at an article from HBR about “How Sephora Reorganized to Become a More Digital Brand”, chief marketing and digital officer Julie Bornstein detailed the changes made to Sephora to help it evolve digitally. First of all, the importance of having a web development team in-house was highlighted. While the first Sephora.com was an outsourced product, Bornstein made the effort to build a team of digital and web talents, who then in turn constantly improved and optimized the web and mobile experiences of the Sephora website based largely on their own analytics. 

In addressing silos in digital, Bornstein emphasized how enmeshing digital at the highest management level is key. It makes sense given that this is something many companies are still struggling with today: legitimizing the need for digital. Once its importance is engrained in top management, it becomes easier to justify the necessary risks and experiments for digital success. With this embodiment of digital, Sephora has taken it one step further with consistent customer- centric thinking, centering brainstorming in the shoes of customers: how would I want to shop? This benefitted Sephora massively as when they first heard of the industry’s forecasts in mobile commerce, they immediately dove head first and were able to be among the first to develop a mobile site for beauty sales.  

Sephora’s innovation in digital goes beyond its web presence and has been extending in the store experience since 2012, with the introduction of Color IQ. This technology takes the guesswork out of finding the right foundation and concealer shade by taking images of a customer’s forehead, cheek and neck an calibrating the three photos into one colour composite in 2 minutes. The resulting Color IQ number can then be used to pull up the best matches of foundations, lip colours and concealers that match the customer’s skin tone. This Color IQ number can also be inputted on the Sephora website to retrieve online product results.  

It’s evident that Sephora’s digital success is highly reliant on having strong top management support and investment in digital, a risk-taking attitude and a design thinking approach to digital. These are definitely things that beauty and even other retailers alike should keep in mind when trying to devise their strategy for linking the online presence with the in-store experience. 

Chief Digital Officers Taking The Seat At The Table

I woke up this morning to a Facebook message from a good friend with a winky face to the article “Does Digital Finally Have a Seat at the Table?” from Business of Fashion. It’s extremely interesting to see how fashion and luxury goods companies that have previously been slow to adapt to the digital playing field have now been upping their game.  The Chief Executive of Prada once said that “It’s not that I am skeptical about digital, it’s just that I have many more important things to do”, with the focus of the business mainly placed on the luxury market’s growth in China. However, the slowing Chinese economy now places ecommerce and digital as one of the very few ways luxury companies can continue to grow. 

As opposed to digital being just a subset of marketing and ecommerce, fashion and luxury companies like LVMH who have designated a new role: Chief Digital Officer, show the new need and move to integrating digital into core business strategy as a department of its own. For someone like me who has been passionate about the potential of digital and analytics in fashion and beauty, it is beyond exciting to hear that many companies are finally recognizing the importance of digital to future growth. I find it intriguing that this article details two different types of CDOs, ambassadorial and transformative. Ambassadorial CDOs are those who are typically placed in a company to signal to shareholders that executives are serious about taking advantage of digital opportunities while transformative CDOs are those who have knowledge of both marketing and technology and an operational background. A transformative CDO sounds like my dream job articulated right before me. 

For these luxury fashion companies, it’s evident that inefficient data collection is a problem that permeates across the industry. Without having direct –to-consumer channels online, it’s difficult for many of these brands to collect data on their consumers’ online shopping behaviour and understand their evolution. For Westfield, addressing this problem meant hiring a chief data and analytics officer to integrate data with strategy and thinking and to create ways of better utilizing data to optimize customer and retailer experiences. 

It’s so amazing to see all these new opportunities opening up in the fashion industry for digital. I know the same is happening in the beauty industry and this gets me more excited to discover the career opportunities that lie ahead for me for being someone who studies both Information Technology and Marketing. 

"Social Media Is Not Real Life!"- The Fate of Influencer Marketing

If you haven't heard about Essena O'Neill's social media quitting story by now, chances are you have probably been hiding under a rock (but then again it is midterms season, so I don't blame you because I'm the same). But then again, Essena's story has literally spammed every possible Internet news and social media outlet in one way or another.

The TL;DR of the drama is that 19 year old Essena, who has been a famous social media influencer with over 600k followers on Instagram and other huge followings on YouTube, Snapchat and Tumblr decided to quit all her accounts and claimed "social media is not real life". She reveals how it takes 100 shots to get one perfect photo and that being obsessed with social media fame has consumed her. Although I do agree with what this girl has said and sympathize with the negative feelings she has felt with social media, I do have a slightly alternative view to the rather generalized and biased claims she has fired against social media. But for the purpose of this blog, I'll stick purely to the digital marketing/ ecommerce implications of its, particularly for influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing is an integral part of any fashion/ beauty brand's online marketing strategy nowadays. The truth is all consumers are aspirational beings and especially with the interconnectedness of Instagram, it has become easier than ever to pick out the people who inspire you and try to replicate their style or lifestyle habits. Although most people do recognize that many influencers are paid for their posts, Essena's story will undoubtedly create some authenticity skepticism for many consumers. If people begin to see influencers as fake and regard the content they post with distrust, this can create a a huge digital marketing dilemma.

So then, what exactly should fashion/ beauty brands do in response to this? As an Econsultancy blog post pointed out, there are no easy answers to this. However, they should definitely attempt to factor in more authenticity into their collaborations with influencers. Instead of just paying a myriad of different influencers to pose with fashion or beauty merchandise, it may be more worthwhile for brands to be more selective in the influencers they want to work with and focus on developing more long-term relationships as they would with traditional celebrities. As opposed to just sending a list of requirements for an influencer to follow when posting a photo with the product, having a degree of co-creation could definitely bring more truth in collaborations.

This Essena news headline may be a matter that fades from our timelines in a few days but it has inevitably struck a chord in many people in regards to their personal social media attitudes and behaviour, and the overall scheme of social media marketing as a part of digital marketing. I personally do agree that many things that I see on the social media accounts I follow may not necessarily be authentic. But at the same time, it is important to recognize that social media is not the source of evil. Companies and users alike have the choice of how they wish to represent themselves through social media and the fact that marketing is weaved in our everyday lives is not something that we can change.

Euromonitor Podcast on Digital Trends in Beauty: If We All Already Know These Basics, How Do We Differentiate?

In preparation for my participation in the L'Oreal Brandstorm competition, whose focus this year is on developing an integrated digital strategy for La Roche Posay, I was looking into some Euromonitor analyses on what makes a successful digital strategy and ended up listening to a podcast that focuses on this topic. It was actually surprising to find that the research mentioned aren’t that much of a surprise to what I’ve already learned through my work at Vain Pursuits. 

The four pillars for a digital strategy in beauty were noted to be: engagement, personalization, curation and best price. The Euromonitor analyst emphasized the importance of having a holistic approach and thinking of overall brand development through the digital strategy. In terms of engagement, the advantages of conversing with customers were highlighted, being that this allows marketers to harness more data on customers’ behaviours and their beauty regimes and that it can lead to higher brand loyalty as customers’ needs are more accurately identified and met. Personalization is no doubt another obvious pillar, as customers are looking for more tailored solutions especially when it comes to skincare. What surprised me was that the two main trends identified to address this pillar were virtual try on and skin analysis, trends that I have already been familiar with, from learning about L’Oreal’s Makeup Genius App to being highly acquainted with Vain Pursuits’ business model. 

This podcast itself did not present me with any revolutionary ideas or findings. However, it has led me to consider an important question: how salient have the successful factors of digital in beauty become? In a sense, it seems almost like most digital marketing individuals and brands have caught on to what people want. We see apps and brands incorporating augmented reality growing by the day and there isn’t really anything that you can’t get personalized, particularly in beauty. How exactly then, can a beauty brand differentiate itself on digital and find the disruptive technology that will propel it in this saturated digital beauty playing field? This is something I really hope to find out soon,  as I know my Brandstorm fate is heavily dependent on the answer. 

HBR Digital Customer Engagement: L'Oreal Innovating the Customer Decision Journey with Makeup Genius

After spending an inspiring weekend in Boston to attend the Harvard Women in Business conference, I ended the trip well with the purchase of the latest Harvard Business Review issue, which has a focus on digital customer engagement. One of the key parts that caught my attention in the segment was the focus on “streamlining the decision journey”, striving to deliver customers directly into the loyalty loop and keeping them in there. 

The main example illustrated in the article is the L’Oreal Makeup Genius app, an app launched in 2014 with over 14 million downloads that allows customers to virtually try on makeup at home using augmented reality. The recognition technology can capture 64 facial data points and 100 different facial expressions to flawlessly apply makeup onto the face. The user can then save their photo with the makeup on, purchase the products in the app through retailers like Amazon and directly share their latest look to social media. The app’s functionality extends beyond the purchasing decision in that after the customer’s purchase arrives, she can reopen the app and it will automatically give her instructions for applying the products. The app then stores data on the styles that the customer appears interested in and will periodically alert her of a new style she might like. Through several more purchases and a greater awareness of her preferences, the app can further tailor the recommendations sent. It has been analyzed that this interaction helps to cultivate customer loyalty and encourage the sharing of app links to friends who have similar interests in beauty. 

I think this app is an exemplary example of combining the four key capabilities of effective customer path to purchase journey, as highlighted through the HBR article: automation, proactive personalization, contextual interaction and journey innovation. It definitely highlights the rapidly growing importance of personalization in all aspects of a customer’s purchasing experience and how when this is delivered effectively through digital technology, it can create a loyal retained customer.  

Sources: 

https://hbr.org/2015/11/competing-on-customer-journeys

Luxury Fashion Brands in the E-Commerce Competitive Landscape

Luxury fashion brands that have traditionally heavily relied on fancy flagship stores and distribution through department stores are shifting their competitive landscapes. It’s no surprise that many notable brands like LVMH and Hugo Boss are actively developing their own e-commerce platforms now that it is evident that shopping behaviours are migrating online and the growth in the Chinese luxury retail market is slowing. The result is a new competition ground between these brands’ own e-commerce sites and the department store e-commerce sites that they typically sell through. 

I personally found it very interesting to see such a big move for luxury to e-commerce, given the fact that luxury fashion is a high-effort purchase that normally involves more in-person engagement with the product prior to purchasing. However, it is definitely worth nothing that it is predicted that the “web sales of luxury goods will grow at more than twice the pace of the overall luxury market, to 27 billion euros ($30 billion) through 2019”. It seems likely that luxury brands will increasingly utilize the “showroom” strategy whereby using their existing stores and outlets as a means for consumers to interact with the products but aiming to drive conversions and repeat sales through e-commerce. 

I believe it’s important to note that moving the luxury fashion market online doesn’t just provide brands with another channel to sell through. With the various metrics and data collection mediums available, there is a vast amount of customer data that these brands can collect through consumers’ e-commerce and mobile behaviour to better understand how to adapt their online strategies. There’s also much experimenting to be done to see whether brands should focus on selling through their own e-commerce sites or work closely with their department store distributors to build a stronger presence on their websites. As the luxury retail online continues to grow in the near future, it's interesting to consider whether an e-commerce storefront can ever render the luxury storefront obsolete.

Article inspiration source: http://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/news-analysis/luxury-web-battle-looms-as-lvmh-hugo-boss-develop-e-commerce

Shopify's "Buy Now" on Twitter

This morning I briefly came across an article about the new “buy now” button on Twitter. It definitely intrigued me but it was not until I actually sat down tonight to look at the fashion-tech news that I truly considered the implications of this, not only for e-commerce retailers, but for the future trajectory of social media as a whole. 

Shopify is a Canadian based company that develops software for online stores and retail POS systems. It has a range of clients from emerging startups like fashion brand Good As Gold to growing small businesses like Skinny Teatox. With the new partnership with Twitter, Shopify merchants can tweet any product and it will include the buy button that lets users “make purchases within their Twitter timeline”. Similar buttons have already been implemented for Pinterest and Facebook.

As a frequent e-commerce shopper and aspiring digital marketer myself, I recognize the importance of social media platforms as a way of reaching out to potential customers and convincing them to convert. However at the same time, I am really thinking about how this trend of “buy now” buttons everywhere will come to impact the quality of content and interactions by these brands on social media. Especially for fashion and beauty brands, I believe that it is extremely important to cultivate a strong connection with customers and communicate with them the brand’s story and lifestyle as a part of leading the customer on the path to purchase. With more and more of these features that allow customers to purchase directly from social media sites, I feel as if the opportunities for true customer relationship development may be hindered, if companies are not careful in using it. I agree that to a great extent, it becomes very convenient for customers to click a button and be led to purchase. Yet at the same time if brands focus too much on just generating the click to purchase and ease off on still enhancing the various touchpoints with the customer, what they may end up facing is a series of one-time purchases, but not high customer retention. 

With the current movement of technology and mobile, it is inevitable that our apps will only continue to be crowded with “buy now!”, “click this!”, “go here!” call to actions. What I feel is extremely critical though is that companies do not take this as a means of being lazy and just bombarding timelines with “buy now!” Tweets. They must continuously strive to build on their brand stories and give potential customers a reason to come back! 

The Struggles of Instagram E-Commerce at a Skincare Startup

This week at my work as the junior digital marketer for the beauty startup Vain Pursuits, I was put in a position to deeply consider how a user’s path to purchase actually works on Instagram. Through the past four months, I’ve been focusing on a rebranding strategy for Vain Pursuits’ Instagram feed, featuring more lifestyle shots and bringing in Instagram influencers as brand ambassadors. Our initial growth in followers and engagement in June was high and we were thrilled to see a few conversion to sales. However these days, there are symptoms showing that this initial plan is no longer capturing users’ attention as we planned it to. Our number of followers have relatively plateaued and engagement rates per post are decreasing. 

Looking at an article from Adweek detailing how to turn Instagram into a revenue channel, it was reinforced that “when presenting your products on Instagram, you can’t just sell. You have to inspire.” This is something that I’ve picked up on a long time ago, just by being a regular Instagram user and Instagram brand shopper myself. The problem that now exists is how do we capture Vain Pursuits skincare in a way that inspires people to buy? It is evident through analytics that just taking shots of the products themselves is not very effective, as consumers cannot envision themselves using the products. I closely studied how Frank Body, an extremely successful coffee body scrub from Melbourne have done their Instagram photos. Bringing in $20 million in revenues the past year through just Instagram as the acquisition channel, it is no surprise that Frank Body knows quite a few things about how to best showcase your products subtly and stir enough curiosity to drive sales. 

Frank’s advantage is by having a strong brand personality through personifying the coffee scrub as a flirty guy. Although this is not completely relevant to what Vain Pursuits does, it can be inferred that we definitely need a stronger and bolder tone of voice in the captions of our Instagram posts. At the same time, the photo posts themselves need to feature more faces and beautiful models. The truth is, Instagram is a place where action is taken based on aspiration. “The aspirational nature of Instagram is driving desire, and that desire dries sales” and so we must devise a new kind of photo-taking and photo styling approach that shows a sexier side of our skincare that our target market consumers would better take in.

It’s crazy that a simple app for viewing photos is actually a complicated science in itself. Successful Instagram e-commerce is a combination of consumer behaviour and intensive visual content marketing. Even though it can be a lot of work sometimes, this is the type of marketing puzzle that I want to solve every day in my future digital marketing career. 

Link to Adweek article: http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/how-to-turn-instagram-into-a-revenue-channel/627189

L'Oreal Canada in the E-Commerce Scene

This past week was full of a whirlwind of events. However, one of the most memorable moments was definitely speaking with L’Oreal Canada at the Desautels Career Fair about their opportunities in digital marketing and e-commerce. This experience inspired me to look more into how L’Oreal successfully manages multiple brands on e-commerce right now.

I came across an article and video that discuss the partnership between L’Oreal and OSF Global Services, an e-commerce technology services provider. It was interesting to see that L’Oreal decided to outsource the development of an e-commerce platform instead of developing it in-house. The company had the goal of replatforming multiple brands within a limited time frame and thus it was more feasible to collaborate with a specialized and innovative firm. This actually relates as a nice example to what my INSY 333 class discussed last week about firms outsourcing software development when it is not part of their core competency, or when they need the final deliverable within a short time frame. Through working with OSF, L’Oreal was able to deploy four brands including Biotherm, Shu Uemura, Clarisonic and Kerastase within 3 months per brand onto the “core architecture” created.

What intrigued me was the concept of “responsive design”, which OSF implemented to meet L’Oreal’s requirement of a clean and sleek design that not only attracts, but engages customers on the sites. Responsive design “suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation”. I find it so fascinating how everything revolves around the user nowadays. May it be an e-commerce site or even just an overall digital marketing strategy, a push strategy is pretty much completely out of the picture, while the possible dimensions of a pull strategy continuously increase as new opportunities arise to interact with consumers in various aspects of tech.

I would say the key takeaway is that digital is evidently changing the retail landscape, and it’s here to stay. Even a large beauty company like L’Oreal that has traditionally relied on B2B selling to retailers has immersed in the e-commerce scene to greatly increase their conversion rates and revenues. This is only the beginning to a lot more change that digital will bring.

Links:
http://www.osf-global.com/company/newsroom/osf-helped-l-oreal-achieve-a-double-digit-increase-in-sales
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/01/guidelines-for-responsive-web-design/

When Tinder Meets Uber- For the Modeling Industry

Welcome to my first blog post for e-business. I don't want to bore you right off the bat, but I also want to make sure that you know the nitty-gritty of what common theme to expect among the many more future posts to come. I love the fashion and beauty industries (original for a girl, I know), but what I love even more is understanding how tech and anything digital are shaping these industries and changing the way traditional business models operate. And even more specifically, how the e-commerce and digital marketing scene works in the businesses of these two industries. Let's get started, shall we? 

It’s not every day that you have a friend excitedly sending you an article on Facebook saying “OMG your ex-boss is on Business of Fashion!”, but that’s exactly what happened a few days ago. I interned at a modeling agency in New York called Silent Models last summer and little did I know that one of the intern duties of testing out a new app my boss was secretly developing would one day become one of the headline articles in BoF’s “Fashion-Tech” section. 

When I first played around with Swipecast, identifying bugs and weaknesses of the UI, the app idea intrigued me a lot. While the app’s current analogy is “Uber for models”, as detailed in the article, I bet few people know that it started out more with the concept of “Tinder for models”. In the earlier concept, the idea was to have models upload their profiles and for casting agents to swipe through models looking for work, much like how users of Tinder do based on judgments of appearances. It was extremely interesting for me to see how this initial idea was eventually adopted to the current “Uber for models” approach whereby models upload a portfolio and casting agents filter them based on preferences such as height and hair colour, and can send booking requests, much like how you would send one for an Uber driver. 

The UI of Swipecast

With the emergence and fast-paced growth of social media and disruptive technologies to support and even become the primary platform of many traditional businesses and e-businesses, it really makes me reflect on the growing impact of technology on multisided platforms, and how this creates new business opportunities that could never exist years ago. With apps like Swipecast, aspiring models can easily gain more exposure and job opportunities while budget-tight fashion brands have more options in economically casting their campaigns. 

However at the same time, it is also clear that this kind of technology can’t completely replace the human interactions required in booking big modeling jobs. There are still many key considerations such as the level of accountability or the model’s ability to move and interact on set. 

At the end of the day, I think examples like Swipecast in fashion industry push us to deeply consider, to what extent mobile technology can change the ways traditional business models work, and shift work to a more digital basis without jeopardizing the value of human interactions.

Link to the article: http://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/fashion-tech/modelling-apps-swipecast-feels-instagram