Brand Marketers Insider Summit - Day 1 - Opening Remarks - Steve Smith

1. What is the biggest challenge facing your
brand as you try to increase scale?
• Low brand awareness. Our unaided and aided brand
awareness is relatively low, so while that presents a
challenge due to the investment it requires to have a
larger share of voice, it also presents a huge
opportunity
• Awareness and consistency across the many channels
where we are communicating with customers

2. What is the biggest challenge facing your
brand as you try to increase scale?
• Finding profitable ways to grow customers
• Trying to scale paid advertising in a way that continues
to be profitable
• Cost of acquisition, spending in less traditional
channels to grow brand awareness.
• Scaling the various challenges while maintaining key
metrics
• Scaling social media to drive efficient ROAS

3. What is the biggest challenge facing your
brand as you try to increase scale?
• Balancing commerce with brand
• Physical products brand growth are often throttled by
supply chain
• Connecting all data to create personalized messaging
• Consolidation of distributors combined with a big
uptick in emerging brands. Harder than ever to
compete for shelf space with retailers

4. What is the biggest challenge facing your
brand as you try to increase scale?
• Finding the right talent
• It’s been difficult to work quickly to develop new
content, but also have that content be engaging and
high quality
• New products & Inventory

5. Which customer acquisition channel(s) have
been most responsible for your growth until
now?
• We are a big fan of organic YouTube. It has impacted
the growth of the company dramatically.
• Facebook / IG - with video in particular has really
changed the game for us as you can show
proofpoints of function-oriented products very
compellingly
•

6. Which customer acquisition channel(s) have
been most responsible for your growth until
now?
• Social lead Gen programs
• Paid social - Facebook and Instagram
• Online Paid Channels (paid, affiliate)
• Physical events that we attend
• Organic sessions on our DTC site
• Social Media, CRM, SEO, Affiliate

7. Which customer acquisition channel(s) have
been most responsible for your growth until
now?
• Paid search (shopping and text ads)
• Paid search, SEO. Need to find wins in pure
acquisition like display
• For DTC we’re recognized as a destination

8. Which customer acquisition channel(s) have
been most responsible for your growth until
now?
• Strategic partnerships
• TV and Brand campaigns
• Home Shopping

9. Which channels are you looking towards for
your next stage of growth?
• Social activation gives us scale in a really efficient
way. Our investment levels are relatively low but
we’ve become a lot more data driven in our approach
so scaling is easier
• We're doubling down on video on FB/IG - though we
haven't cracked it on YouTube.
• Video (YouTube), Native advertising, Podcasts, print
• Retail, TV, Print, Digital

10. Which channels are you looking towards for
your next stage of growth?
• Digital TV (optimize based on data from smart TVs
and streaming services

11. Which channels are you looking towards for
your next stage of growth?
• We are going to continue to invest in our organic
strategy through our YouTube, Social Media, and
blog.
• Our goal is to find channels where our service is
meaningful and limit our engagement with customers
to those channels.

12. Which channels are you looking towards for
your next stage of growth?
• Scaling the big ones like PPC and SEO and getting
more out of Email
• Paid search
• Continued investment in our CRM platforms once we
have customers in our pipeline.
• Amazon

13. What have been the biggest challenges in
working with outside agencies, data
providers, vendors?
• Integration - as more and more we lean on numerous
outsourced partners (email, SEM, dev, winback etc)
their systems all need to play nicely and as part of a
wider funnel on our e-com site
• Being able to connect our internal data through
multiple platform in real time.
• Meet time lines

14. What have been the biggest challenges in
working with outside agencies, data
providers, vendors?
• Attribution (vendors)
• Turnover (agencies)
• Lots of complexity due to restrictions on marketing
alcohol. Internal complexity from the various data
collection/POS systems we have that aren’t tied
together. We have a lot of data, it’s just very difficult
to piece it together effectively.

15. What have been the biggest challenges in
working with outside agencies, data
providers, vendors?
• Understanding our brand values and culture has been
a challenge for the small amount of agencies we work
with.
• Brand consistency
• Consistent results
• Resource management

16. What have been the biggest challenges in
working with outside agencies, data
providers, vendors?
• Outside providers valuing quantity over quality, lower
quality work due to a full client roster
• They do not truly understand our business and try to
treat us like we are selling $75 shoes or Insurance
quotes. We have a very upscale customer base that
may have a 3 month sales cycle
• To find partners that truly understand our brand and
our voice.

17. What have been the biggest challenges in
working with outside agencies, data
providers, vendors?
• Need to find partners that are doing something
different or have a niche that goes beyond what 50
other vendors can offer. Sorry but, “we will be your
strategic partners” or “we can track conversions right
within our platform” is not enough of a differentiator
• Connecting data, sorting through all of the
technology solutions that are out there. Finding time
to parse what vendors can be strategic long term
partners

18. What has been your biggest customer service
challenge?
• There's a soft line between FB ads and customer
service, and so the ads often serve both roles which is
something we've been embracing as an opportunity
for real-time conversations with the customer
• Ensuring we’re responding to customers in a timely
way. We don’t have customer service over the
weekend or in the evenings which can create issues
for fans looking for quick responses to questions they
have

19. What has been your biggest customer service
challenge?
• I would say the biggest challenge is operationally
fulfilling orders that stand out from the pack. Most
third-party logistics providers focus on cost and
speed, rather than quality and presentation. It’s been
hard to find the right partners who can grow with us.
• The delivery aspect (we are a modern furniture
company)
• Getting all reps to be consistent

20. What has been your biggest customer service
challenge?
• Our customer service allows for self-service as well as
talking to a real human being. We want to empower
customers with education and the tools to help
themselves because it's often faster for them and
helps them understand the solution if they're part of
the process, but we don't want them to feel like we're
pushing them to do it themselves because we don't
want to help them in more traditional ways like over
the phone.

21. What has been your biggest customer service
challenge?
• Inventory stock outs
• Connecting all customer data to customer service
data – e.g. next best offer, most recent offer viewed,
etc