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Hey y’all and welcome back to a very special International Women’s Month episode of Southern Fried eCommerce from EYStudios. Our cohost Jay Brimberry has left us for the week presumably to watch Willow on repeat, leaving cohost Emily Faulkner to play. And since she’s in charge she brought in two of her team members — Jess Richmond, a Digital Content Specialist, and our newest member of the marketing team Mara Lewellyn, a Digital Marketing Coordinator — to wreak havoc with her.
Get To Know Our Guests — Jess Richmond & Mara Lewellyn
We start by discussing Jess’ plans for the weekend which includes packing and more packing, unfortunately. Fortunately, it’s because she just managed to buy a house in the hottest real estate market in the country — Raleigh, NC. Mara will be having far more fun wedding planning for both her and her best friend’s wedding which she is the maid of honor in. Their weddings are only a month apart which makes for double the planning fun!
Typically Jay likes to ask our guests a group of questions before we jump into the meat of the podcast but since Emily is in charge, she switched up the questions a bit. To quote her, “Jay’s not here, Jay can’t stop me.”
1. What is your favorite business jargon?
Emily’s example is synergy because she likes to annoy people.
JESS: I like using really big, long Scrabble words for no reason. I feel like that comes from having a useless English degree and spending too much time in literature courses.
MARA: I think I’m the opposite of you Jess. My useless English degree I think is why I like simple language because all I had to do in college was pedantic language. Now I’m just tired of it.
2. Follow-up question, clearly taking a jab at Jess: If you use kind of flighty, fancy lingo do you think people think that you’re intelligent, or do they think you’re trying too hard?
MARA: I usually go with trying too hard.
EMILY: But what if people are just that smart? Like Jess is that smart.
JESS: It depends on how you come across. I think sometimes it comes off authentic and sometimes it comes off like you’re trying too hard.
MARA: Yeah, it definitely depends on the person and what they’re actually saying.
JESS: Exactly. Like if you’re at a bar and you start talking about the aeration of the beer and stuff…I’m done. I’m done with you.
Emily then told a great story about when she dated a Mr. Fancy Pants and she tried to chill red wine in front of him and he had a full-blown hoity-toity conniption. She now only buys red wine that can be chilled.
Mara follows up by telling us about her fiance’s bathroom closet wine-making endeavors. In short, it did not turn out well. They called it John’s Janky Juice and Mara thinks it tasted like steak sauce. How you get from grapes to steak sauce is really a chemical experiment worthy of the label potion craft.
3. What is your Willow? Jay loves Willow and tries to get every employee and podcast guest to watch his beloved movie, what movie is that for you?
MARA: This is really hard because I really love movies. Emotional support movie? 27 dresses. That’s my go-to. Go-to Disney movie? Tangled. And then anything with Paul Rudd and Chris Pine.
Emily then asks Mara if Paul Rudd is her Adam Driver, referring to her obsession with the Star Wars actor who covers nearly every inch of her office. This includes a signed shirtless picture of Adam Driver, one of the few things that keeps Emily going.
JESS: On that level, my Adam Driver is Grant Gustin. He plays the Flash on the CW. And I love him so much I have watched full productions of him in college musicals on YouTube.
Mara informs Jess that Grant Gustin will be in a new movie called Rescued by Ruby. Emily asks if this will be Jess’ new Willow.
JESS: Eh…I don’t know. In terms of Jay’s desire to push this movie on people. That’s more of a TV show thing for me. I really try and push tv shows on people. I try and find out their personalities and then go, ‘oh you’ve never seen Community? You need to watch Community.’ ‘Oh, you’ve never seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer? You need to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer.’ But in terms of what my Willow is, it’s definitely Harry Potter.
Emily follows up by asking her which is her favorite Harry Potter book. Emily’s is the fourth book, The Goblet of Fire while Mara prefers the darker sixth book, The Half Blood Prince.
JESS: The third one, Prisoner of Azkaban. Mostly for the Marauders. I am currently reading a very, very long and detailed Marauders fanfiction.
Emily then says that her favorite movie is Big Fish but she doesn’t really like to push it on people. She loves that it’s a tribute to Tim Burton’s father and his passing. She watches it every year on her birthday and cries thinking about how “people will remember you.”
Jess mentions that’s a far more culturally impactful film than what she plans on watching for her birthday: a marathon of Mary-Kate and Ashley films. This results in a collective squeal from everyone as all three of these weirdos are girls born in the 90s. We then find out that both Emily and Jess have been to the Mall of America and had the exact same reaction: “OMG, this is like totally where Mary-Kate and Ashley had their birthday party.” With that last bit of a tangent on how much of a loser everyone on the EY Marketing team is, we dive into the real eCommerce news of the week.
New From the EYBlog
Emily starts by updating us on the latest happenings on the EYStudios blog:
- Southern Fried eCommerce Episode 24 Recap
- How To Identify Your Competitors Online
- Why You Should Care About the New Technology for eCommerce
Nike Is Into The Metaverse, Are We?
The first article we dive into this week is “Last Year, Nike Embraced the Metaverse. How’s That Paying Off?” from Tubefilter. The article takes a look at how different brands including Nike are doing with the metaverse specifically the Roblox online gaming platform.
Emily starts our conversation by asking Mara about her thoughts on the metaverse in general. Mara says she doesn’t know how to feel yet but gets a general sense of authoritarian takeover or dystopian nightmare fuel. She mentions she has recently reread The Circle and Ready Player Two so this could be influencing her opinion. She also references the recent film Free Guy as what she imagines the metaverse to look like.
EMILY: This sounds so lame and anti-disestablishment but because corporations are the ones that are building [the metaverse] it won’t have that same feel that I enjoyed about Free Guy where it just feels like you have the reigns to do whatever you want.
Jess mentions she pictures it more like Neopets but where everything is branded.
JESS: I think this might be the generational gap between millennials and gen Zers and whatever comes next, I think Alphas? That’s not going to give them a complex. The gap where I don’t like playing video games online with other people.
EMILY: I don’t either!
JESS: And it’s probably because we’re women. We’ve had really bad experiences talking online. So I wonder if that’s going to change. If there’s going to be a gender dynamic change or maybe it just becomes more common to play games online for everyone. More common for everyone to just go hang out in the Ralph Lauren store. But for me? That doesn’t seem like a thing that is ever going to happen. Just like my dad isn’t going to put on a VR headset anytime soon.
Emily agrees and thinks that millennials and Gen Zers, maybe eventually Alphas, aren’t as interested in branded content as much as brands would like them to be. She wonders if this is a trend that will change and branded content will become more embraced or if eventually the metaverse will become less branded as a result of people’s wants.
EMILY: As a millennial, if I see something sponsored or branded my eyes just kind of glaze over. And I just don’t care as much. I’m more fascinated by indie content or indie businesses because I know that it supports a direct person rather than a conglomerate.
Jess points out that she is susceptible to influencer marketing when five, ten years ago she probably thought that would never be the case. Now, she’s buying shampoo just because a YouTuber she thinks is funny likes it. She thinks branded content could change in that way but we’re just not there yet. This is just the first step, she says, it’s bound to be clunky and not feel quite right but eventually, she thinks it could all become a lot more seamless.
Product Tags Now Available To All Instagram Users
Speaking of eCommerce technology becoming more seamless, our next article jumps into Instagram’s latest release. All Instagram Users in US Can Now Create Product Tags from AdWeek, discusses the widening of the product tag feature that originally debuted in 2016 to creators only.
Emily starts off the conversation by talking about how she feels this is the next evolution of influencer marketing.
EMILY: Not everyone is a big box influencer. I do think there is a lot of value in just smaller people being able to share the products that they love…Just getting it out to a lot of people whether you have a large or small following. Of course, large followings will always get larger eyes but I think there’s always a lot of small but mighty things that can come from it.
Mara brings up the fact that when large amounts of people gain access to something there are sure to be mistakes with tagging the wrong product or malicious posting on behalf of brands. Previously, there was a lot of serious vetting of posts by these brands before they allowed influencers to post branded content with tagged products, now that’s all gone to the wayside.
Jess agrees and mentions now someone can say “these are the worst earrings ever” and then tag the product. Emily asks if this is a case of all press is good press because she tends to look at the negative reviews of a product first.
JESS: I think it depends on the context. If you’re looking at a review on a site and you see this is one of 3,000 reviews and there are 10 negative reviews and 2,990 positive reviews. So you can see that oh these ten people just had a dented box arrive. And you can kind of measure that in your head and think, ‘okay maybe they’re shipping isn’t perfect but whatever.’ But if you see one video or one post on Instagram that’s negative and that’s your entire view of the product, you’re going to make an assumption that ‘oh I follow this person and they said it’s bad so it must be bad.’ Because there’s not that greater context there.
Emily then asks what should we advise customers dealing with this new feature and how to monitor these types of posts.
MARA: My biggest thing is responding to messages and posts in a timely manner.
Jess agrees and says that if you come across a negative post like that and the company has responded beneath it saying, “we’re so sorry your package came late, is there anything we can do to make it up to you?” goes a long way.
Emily also agrees and says that another way to alleviate the negativity from a post is to make your own post in response. Maybe a user says this lipstick looks horrible when they wear yellow, make a post about how awesome the lipstick looks when you wear red.
Emily then asks if there’s any other reason people might like or dislike this feature. Jess mentions that as a former newspaper editor, she likes the idea of just being able to source everything in posts whether that’s a product tag or tagging a business in general. She also likes to see sources in other people’s posts.
Emily agrees with that last part especially when it comes to others’ outfits. She desperately wishes she could click on everything in every picture and find out where it came from. She actually suggested trying to find a way to do this in real life as well, via the Free Guy glasses perhaps.
Mara also points out that the smaller brands or businesses she would most want to use this feature with, might not have the ability or employee capacity to keep their Instagram product listings up to date.
People Are Going Outside and eCommerce Statistics Prove It
The last article we will focus on in this episode is “L.L. Bean Sales Spiked 14% Last Year As More Consumers Played Outdoors” from Retail Dive. The article discusses the increase in outdoor equipment, clothing, and entertainment sales since the Coronavirus Pandemic has started to slow in some areas of the country.
Emily starts out the conversation by asking Jess how people can leverage this for those who might not have a direct connection to the outdoors. Jess suggests really tapping into influencer marketing in these situations and trying and get some posts where your products are being used outside, on vacation, at the beach, etc. She said, it could be a pair of jeans but you can still show them being worn at a picnic in the bright sun, or maybe it’s a blender that makes really good smoothies have an influencer show themselves making a smoothie before their morning run.
Jess also mentions that when you’re writing content for social media or blogs, it’s important to acknowledge that the pandemic is still happening. She says that a lot of consumers are still concerned about safety “out in the real world” and it’s important not to push that to the side. She offers the example of promoting a product with the line “on your next socially distanced vacation” or something similar.
Emily then asks Mara what her thoughts on an organic vs. paid marketing strategy are when it comes to these businesses that may be experiencing an increase in sales. Mara says she thinks that organic marketing always makes a business come across as more authentic than a paid marketing strategy but that we always advise both in order to find your audience. She also points out, like every true marketer should: everyone is not your audience. There are very few places (if any) that can appeal to absolutely everyone. So it’s important, Mara says, to find your audience and really plug into what they’re looking for from a brand.
MARA: Every company needs a different strategy. There’s no one size fits all, everyone is different. Everyone will have slightly different strategy needs and different strategies that will work. You have to try trial and error; you can look at competitors around you and pull ideas from what they’re doing but what they’re doing might not work for you. You’ve just got to figure out what your best selling point is.
Emily agrees and points out that in addition to nearly everything else in the world being unprecedented because of the pandemic, marketing is still wading through unknown territory. She gives the example of summer, “Is this the summer to just talk about summer? Or do we still need to emphasize the safety of it all, is it a minimal thing we need to discuss, etc.” She admits this is hard but that it’s important to try.
She then turns to Mara and Jess to ask one last question, “Can you guys think of a brand that is doing a really good job right now outside of L.L. Bean?”
MARA: Well you know who is doing the most? Shein.
There was then a nice little tangent about Shein has become what seems like an overnight success story. In Emily’s words, “everyone is wearing Shein, everyone is posting about Shein.”
JESS: One that I have seen through influencer marketing and just paid ads, in general, is HelloFresh. They’ve really capitalized on the ‘save some money, save some gas, avoid restaurants’ thing. And they really suck you in with how much they give you off your first purchase. So it just comes across as ‘free food? Yeah!’
Emily agrees and says that she was very much influenced by their marketing and especially loves watching people make the food. She, however, points out that they have great customer service. One of her boxes from HelloFresh came with already spoiled food so she reached out to them and they immediately refunded the price of the whole box. They also promised her her next box would be even better, even fresher — and it was.
With that final note, we would like to take this opportunity to remind you to subscribe to the podcast and come back here to the EYBlog for more podcast recaps, blogs, and guest articles!