Future Commerce

• {00:04:06} - “The first time I published a zine was in 2015 and I was at a point of my editorial life where I really wanted to have ownership over my work, and I wanted to publish articles that were long-form and a little bit more thought-provoking.” - Melissa
• {00:06:21} - “Your way out of algo chasing was to do something on your own and do it printed. Physical format is the way to free yourself from the algo because no algo beats handing out your zine to people.” - Brian
• {00:12:52} - “Lovers and Outlaws really explores how our relationship status is and how we buy things, consume things, and choose products are interconnected and really it gets into modern marketing and also the five stages of consumerism, which are need for recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and post-purchase evaluation.” - Melissa
• {00:14:26} - “There are a lot of parallels between the way that we're shopping for products and how that informs the way that we shop for relationships today because they both come through the same device. And so the way you buy and the way that you consider purchases is very physically adjacent and maybe even mentally adjacent to the same device that you use to shop for and pursue a love interest as well.” - Phillip
• {00:23:09} - “They say build products that you want to use and also build products that actually solve a problem. So being a writer for over ten years, I knew that there were outdated content management systems, there were outdated payment systems, and also outdated data storage. And I know that for a lot of writers, it's really hard to build a community, especially if you're freelancing and you don't really have the means to maybe start a newsletter list or continue to get recognition over your work. So I wanted to build a product that was totally decentralized for me as a writer.” - Melissa
• {00:29:31} - “What I think we do differently at Future Commerce is we're reporting on our view of the world, and we have a lot of principles around that. I think that what you buy and where you buy it is shaped by who you are and who you're around. And I think you're exploring a totally different aspect of that through this concept of love, sex, dating.” - Phillip

• Learn more about Melissa Henderson and The Violet Verse
• Grab your copy of The Multiplayer Brand here
• Meet us at eTail Boston 2023
• Check out The Edge Summit from Bloomreach
• Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet?
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter ,Facebook ,Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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Brands that act as The Jester appeal not to the reason and logic center of our brains, but to the emotional center of our gut. In our personal lives and in business, we often need the reminder to not take things too seriously. 

Denise Foley, Vice President of eCommerce and Direct to Consumer at The Bollman Hat Company, gives us her thoughts on the role of the Jester and why we could all use more of the levity the Jester brings. 

• {00:03:36 “Just because you're in the corporate world or have an important job, we spend way too much time working to not have fun. There needs to be some sense of levity and fun in the business and the work and it just makes it better, makes it easier to kind of see the humor in things and not take yourself so seriously.” - Denise
• {00:05:29} “We're a manufacturer, so Bollman in and of itself, while we have a brand line under that is really the manufacturer and the umbrella brand. And we've been around for 155 years. Part of the levity we said was this was our second pandemic that we've gone through and survived and thrived through.” - Denise
• {00:07:42} - “There's a lot of great history, not just about Bollman the brand and the company, but the people that have built it.” - Denise
• {00:09:47} “One of the misconceptions I would hope that people would break from around The Jester is that having a sense of humor around the work you do or your brand doesn't mean that you're not serious about making it a success.” - Denise

• Learn more about Denise Foley and The Bollman Hat Company
• Check out other Future Commerce podcasts
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world!

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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This season on Decoded, brought to you by BigCommerce, we're going to break down the ways that winning brands build and launch new products, how decisions are made, how goals are set, and how an entire organization collaborates effectively to bring a new product to life.

Could a retailer be their own competition, and not necessarily in a good way, in the sense of chasing their own past a little bit and maybe not innovating and simply lightly iterating on something that worked for them maybe in a past season, in the past year or even a past decade? Join the conversation as Phillip and Aaron Sheehan sit down with Loretta Soffe, SVP of Global Retail at Assemble, to discuss this and more. Listen now!

• {00:01:52} - “The products that we click on, on a website, the things that we add to our cart are really just the tip of a very, very large iceberg of thought and care and work and design that goes into getting it into a place where not only we as consumers want to buy it, but that we even knew about the product in the first place.” - Aaron
• {00:06:38} - “If you're only listening to your existing customers, you're only listening to your existing fans, you can become actually fairly stale. And I think any kind of business that wants to evolve and grow is always looking to challenge.” - Aaron
• {00:14:02} - “When you start anchored in the customer, your decisions are going to have a little bit more longevity instead of trying to keep chasing the competition. The competition is going to be moving around like crazy, but if you put it through the filter of a customer and their wants, desires, expectations and how can you kind of continue to delight them, I think you're going to be much better served.” - Loretta Soffe
• {00:24:21} - “It's not enough to simply have good ideas or be able to articulate the good if you cannot convince and persuade and adapt it to the needs of the business and the stakeholders.” - Aaron
• {00:29:20} - “If they haven't really dug in and detailed out customer desire, behavior, life stage, and priorities, and if they're not really able to articulate that, the rest of the whole thing is going to be garbage. If you're not able to develop that level or have that level of knowledge, your product isn't going to be good enough because you don't even understand what you're going up against.” - Loretta Soffe
• {00:40:34} - “Traditional retail has been very intuition driven and not a lot of data. And eCommerce, I think suffers from the other problem. A successful retailer has to be able to blend both the data and the intuition.” - Aaron
• {00:49:15} - “If you're a brand introducing new products, you want to get a bigger share of wallet. So be conscious about not cannibalizing your own business, but adding on. And I think of it as a bigger share of wallet or a bigger piece of the closet.” - Loretta Soffe

• Learn more about Loretta Soffe
• Grab your copy of The Multiplayer Brand here
• Meet us at eTail Boston 2023
• Check out The Edge Summit from Bloomreach
• Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet?
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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To understand the future, you must understand culture. That’s the focus of today’s syndicated episode with our friends from eCommerce Fuel. Andrew Youderian sits down with Phillip to discuss the Future Commerce perspective on how cultures adopt commerce as a means of belonging, and how those behaviors are shaping our vision of the future. Listen now! 

• Branding is not just about aesthetics; it's about endurance and persistence.
• Physical media provides a grounding experience amidst the digital world.
• Nostalgia and nostalgic content serve as an antidote to our fast-paced, digital lives.
• The enduring brands are the ones that persist despite all odds.
• Attention spans are decreasing, highlighting the need for authentic, tangible experiences.
• {00:08:08} - “When you're looking at what differentiates a successful brand or a generational brand or what you might call a cultural brand from another is their awareness and insight of what is happening in the world and where they belong in it and what their voice or tone or tenor is when speaking to that element of culture.” - Phillip
• {00:13:49} - “You're never going to wrangle in your consumption, and we're never going to solve some of the problems in this world around sustainability, or climate change if we don't wrangle in some of the worst of us in our human nature. How can we come to a shared understanding of the challenges that we face both in business and in our personal lives?” - Phillip
• {00:16:17} - “Commerce entrepreneurship is one of the greatest, most powerful, most incredible ways to instigate change in the world because creating new ways of engaging with people that have to engage in commerce and doing so with a mindset from the get-go that you have a purpose and a place in this world and you're trying to will something into being, I think it's a very powerful force for change.” - Phillip
• {00:21:20} - “This renaissance and this nostalgia for physical media is also powering brand trends and design trends that harken back to the eras in which those pieces of media were created. These things help us to understand not just that the trend exists, but why the trend exists. And if we could think about those two things in tandem, maybe we can forecast where the next trend is going.” - Phillip
• {00:37:27} - “If you are not plugged into TikTok three hours a day and you're able to actually be able to keep that muscle of long-term concentration, it seems like that's going to be a huge competitive advantage for building entrepreneurship and for just life in general.” - Andrew
• {00:45:06} - “Real brands take time. We're in such a hurry. We're in an unbelievable hurry. If you want to have a brand that endures, you have to endure. And so you just have to keep surviving.” - Phillip

• Learn more about eCommerceFuel
• Grab your copy of The Multiplayer Brand here
• Meet us at eTail Boston 2023
• Check out The Edge Summit from Bloomreach
• Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet?
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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Consumers hold more power than ever before, brands are at the center of a moment, and generative AI is creating an opportunity for people to make bigger cultural critiques. How far can you control how your images are being used? How much does your own literacy of culture and media enlighten your understanding of the nuances of the subtext? Why does this all really matter in commerce, art, and culture? 

• {00:03:43} - “We've become known at Future Commerce for hosting salons, and now we have this new Future Commerce learning offering. If you are an agency operator or you're building high-performance teams in a brand, if you're a brand operator side, if you're wanting to go deeper down the rabbit hole as a brand operator on the topics of retention or new customer acquisition and learn more about things like loyalty, this is for you.” - Phillip
• {00:11:46} - “You see this happen in the founder ecosystem all the time. The founder actually is the brand. The founder is the product. And the things that the founder creates may or may not be good, but that's not the product. That's not why people are bandwagoning. They're bandwagoning on the founder themselves.” - Brian
• {00:22:17} - “Consumers hold more power than ever before. Consumers have an unprecedented amount of power in the way that brands market to them, shape the products and their offerings for the customer.” - Phillip
• {00:24:56} - “Hyperstition is happening in the world of commerce by people now taking a brand and making it part of their own story and fashioning it in their own liking. And when people do that in concert together, they're actually a more powerful driver of that narrative than you as a brand are on your own and can actually manifest where your brand heads as a result of this collective power through these tools and through these ways of electronic communication. “ - Brian
• {00:34:26} - “We're moving to this idea of the discourse being not, hey, look at what generative AI can do, but we're juxtaposing your literacy of a number of things having to... You have to be caught up in the discourse to understand the subtext.” - Phillip
• {00:41:49} - “All of these companies like Reddit and Quora want to prevent companies like OpenAI from training on their data because they have an unbelievable amount of human knowledge in their walled gardens, so why would they not want to capitalize on that for themselves?” - Phillip
• {00:49:14} - “You had cultures that would create things in the realms of science, art, literature, and mathematics. Classics that were simultaneously all occurring at the same time independent of each other. Today, that's happening in fashion and in cultural discourse and in brand.” - Phillip
• {00:52:00} - “We're going to use AI for the critique. We're going to use it to do a bunch of grunt work that no one wants to do. But for original art creation, we're still the center of that. Humanity has to be the one to bring the new ideas to the table.” - Brian

• Grab your copy of The Multiplayer Brand here
• Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet?
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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The Hero is the aspirational archetype that inspires and motivates with optimism and strength. Heroes are there for us, offering security and a reason to be better tomorrow than we are today.

We've looked at the Hero before in this season of Archetypes, but not all Heroes are alike. Listen now as Ian Leslie, CMO at Industry West, shares his take on what it means to be the Hero as a person and as a brand, including some of the pressures, the positives, the negatives, and why it all matters in the scope of the broader story.

• {00:04:14} “There's a lot of pressure that comes with like, "I need to fix it now. It needs to be right now. It needs to work right now." I think understanding and always kind of going back to what am I solving for, and can I solve for it?” - Ian
• {00:06:03} “Batman is representative of something, and oftentimes he can't be in two places at once. And so he has to, just by his presence, empower Gotham to stand up for itself. That's really, I think, probably the most important part of the Hero archetype.” - Ian
• {00:08:22} “I joke that a brand that doesn't come with a side order of world change is kind of looked down upon these days. But I think that's important, as the Hero brand that we are, that our side order of World Change is just accessibility and availability.” - Ian
• {00:12:40} “I coach varsity soccer and that's something that is passed along to my soccer players and just truly when I instruct them, it's just like, "Hey, guys, this isn't because I don't trust you. It's because I'm trying to stand in the gap between you and a decision that could really change the trajectory of your life.’" - Ian

• Learn more about Ian Leslie and Industry West
• Check out other Future Commerce podcasts
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world!

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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• {00:08:55} - “The culture of commerce right now is participatory and people right now are building on each other's ideas so rapidly and in real time that they can manifest things that it used to be only a luxury brand could pull something like that off.” - Phillip
• {00:11:45} - “It's context collapse. This is effectively deepfaking the world, resetting how people think about things. It's artificial context.” - Brian
• {00:13:51} - “The strategy is literally nothing more than getting in a room with your marketing team and even with your brand team and sitting down and just doing a whiteboarding session with a million Post-its that say, "What is happening in the discourse right now?’” - Phillip
• {00:19:53} - “When you're going to build a system to fix a problem that you created that involves differentiating between whether someone's a human or a robot, don't build an orb for people to line up and get signed up. But you have to look evil to get press.” - Brian
• {00:32:04} - “Increasingly customers outside of retail are coming to us and saying they want their B2B experience to be as elegant as possible because they recognize as people that that makes their end buyers happier, probably more likely to convert and ultimately, hopefully, save them money and drive up their actual revenue.” - Michael
• {00:36:38} - “The really interesting change over the last 12 months alone is that we're just seeing new buyers come to the table, especially in non-retail industries, who at the executive level have needs that when you reduce them down, are just like you said, it's about helping a buyer convert and actually exchange that value with the company.” - Michael
• {00:43:24} - “When money is more expensive, folks are going to tighten the screws down. And what we have also seen is the brands that are doing the best are the ones who have been leaning into their loyalty offerings because, as you and I know, a loyal customer is a happy customer.” - Michael
• {00:50:51} - “We believe AI truly is the future and moving beyond a world of just predictive recommendations to truly a generative future that really will change the shape of the experience for both buyers and merchants.” - Michael

• Learn more about Michael Affronti and Salesforce
• Amazon Blimp article
• Grab your copy of The Multiplayer Brand here
• Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet?
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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"In the future, every company is a media company." That’s hogwash, according to Tommy Walker. Tommy is all too familiar with this ideology and the pitfalls in the business of creating media and aggregating attention.

Listen in to hear this insightful discussion and join the conversation.

• {00:05:03} - “Understanding the cost structure and what it takes to hire talent and all of that, without that sort of knowledge, if you don't have that currently right now, then no, not every company needs to be a media company. You're better off spending your money in ads or some other type of growth lever.” - Tommy
• {00:10:34} - “With my own personal brand, I wanted to do a podcast, but I didn't have the bandwidth to do it. But I would become a Serial podcast guest. If you have an infrastructure in place, then let me just be a part of that infrastructure, show up as part of that conversation, do what I do, do what I do well, and then bounce and go do my thing that's independent of all that.” - Tommy
• {00:14:41} - “What I had to do at that time was just a ton of research. This is it. This is the complete unsexy answer to the entire thing. It was a ton of research…constantly looking at what everybody was saying in this DTC space…” - Tommy
• {00:23:46} - “There are unspoken expectations that people have that they don't even know they have until you meet them and what you're doing is setting a higher bar for production and engagement that feels much more like a consumer-type experience.” - Phillip
• {00:28:50} - “Are you establishing those true fans? When you start to get an executive team that is looking for a quick return or has quarterly results they have to answer to that it gets way harder to say, "The long-term success of our business depends on creating things that people actually care about.’" - Brian
• {00:32:24} - “If we live in a participatory economy and we have multiplayer brands, brands look more like bands in the future. And that's why you have these marketers that are so good at what they do. People like Bobby Hundreds who come from local scenes. They come from a scene, and a scene fuses fashion, art, culture, entertainment, and music. It's a state of being.” - Phillip
• {00:40:54} - “What makes a compelling media play is when you can continue to reinvent {the reason to exist} so that you yourself stay interested in it.” - Phillip

• Learn more about Tommy Walker and The Content Studio
• Grab your copy of The Multiplayer Brand here
• Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet?
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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The Sage brings wisdom to those who inquire and mentors those who seek guidance in a kind, calm, and steady manner. They have accumulated knowledge and experience over time and are a valuable resource for others. A brand that acts as a wise Sage can help us open our minds to wisdom and create a more equitable world. 

What if, as a merchant, you could go to that one place and get the support and guidance you need? What if that one place has so much experience that you can learn from them and know they are on your side? That is the layer of value Adobe adds. Listen in as Nitu Walker represents Adobe as The Sage. 

• {00:04:41} “Adobe has always been known to have very strategic partnerships. We have a huge partner ecosystem, but what we really wanted to do is provide a holistic commerce experience. And by doing so, utilizing our partnerships to create value-added integrations.” - Nitu
• {00:07:20} “You've built an entire ecosystem that can meet each merchant where they're at because there are different needs that different merchants have.” - Brian
• {00:11:01} “The Sage meets the Hero on their journey to give them advice and equip them either through knowledge or wisdom or by helping them bring other people around them for the next part of their journey. And that's kind of what you do.” - Phillip
• {00:13:08} “What really resonated with me about Archetypes, especially, which was why I was really excited to do this, was that we have to look at our base, our ecosystem, not as a linear one type of merchant or one type of partner or one type of provider, but that there are so many different ways that we interact with them and that everyone has their own archetype and their own way of how they think, feel, and do things.” - Nitu

• Learn more about Adobe Commerce Services
• Check out other Future Commerce podcasts
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world! 

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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Unless you’ve been under a rock somewhere, you probably are aware of the Barbie marketing machine ahead of the major motion picture release. What does this signify as a moment in our culture and the ways culture and commerce intersect? Barbie brought some major shifts when she first showed up in our world. What will this highly-marketed film bring with it?

Alicia Esposito joins Phillip for an in-depth look at Barbie: the doll, the brand, the film. All brands can learn something from this moment in time, but if we aren’t careful, we’ll learn the wrong lessons and chase some rabbit holes that just don’t make sense. There’s a lot to talk about, so get your popcorn and have a listen!

• {00:04:12} - “There's cultural acceptance of certain types of media and popular media that shapes the way that we perceive the world.” - Phillip
• {00:05:11} - “A brand is not a logo or fonts or colors. A brand is a marker of trust of a corporation that was able to endure despite all odds, and that means that you have to remain culturally relevant. Brands pass away when the culture doesn't accept them.” - Phillip
• {00:06:25} - “If people see the outline of the little flippy ponytail, they're like, "Oh, yeah, Barbie." That's association, but relevance and true brand loyalty tie to a brand's ability to keep the core of what people initially love about a brand or a person, but also be able to adapt to some of the new realities of the consumer, and also accept some of the pitfalls or problematic nature of the past of the brand.” - Alicia
• {00:16:25} - “{Airbnb} is a really great example of a brand that doesn't necessarily have ties to the commercial product world, but really turns it into a commercial product moment through great collaborations.” - Alicia
• {00:27:17} - “Having this brand recall and this nostalgia does create a new vehicle for filmmakers like Greta Gerwig to kind of tap into the mainstream market and tell a really powerful story. But then it kind of goes down this rabbit hole of but if all of the funds are going towards these things and these big corporations that have all the IP already and selling all of the products, what does that leave for new stories?” - Alicia
• {00:29:44} - “Barbie represented a shift of the idea of children's playthings in culture, but it also represented a new monolith, a new way to see and perceive the world through this artifice of fashion, desirability, and idealistic standards.” - Phillip
• {00:40:12} - “We have to {see explicit brand tie-ins in the film} only because a lot of the Barbie dolls of the past did have product tie-ins. There were always some subtle or direct brand partnerships there. I’m curious to see.” - Alicia

• Learn more about Alicia Esposito and Retail TouchPoints
• Grab your copy of The Multiplayer Brand here
• Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet?
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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