Bringing Retail Strategy to the Digital Shelf

Bringing Retail Strategy to the Digital Shelf Speaker 2: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Better Advertising with BTR Media podcast. Today, I'm incredibly excited to have Serena Hopson on. Hello, Serena. Speaker 1: Hi. How are you, Destaney? Speaker 2: I am doing well. So, Serena and I have, I would say, followed each other for a while on LinkedIn. You, of course, work for Purina, which is an incredible company in the network, and you're an account manager on the eCommerce side, which is always a fun space to be. And I think you maybe started commenting on some of my posts and we started having a discussion and I was like, wow, that's such a fun brand that I thought it'd be an incredible opportunity to have you on the podcast. So Serena, I would love to just hear about your story and how you got started in the eCommerce space. Speaker 1: Yeah, so one thank you so much for having me. I mean, I feel like I'm on a celebrity's podcast Honestly, I think just following you and and reading all this awesome content that you have to post about the spaces It's amazing. I love like our e-commerce community of people that we've built on LinkedIn It feels like we all know each other even though we've never really met But yeah, so I have been in the e-commerce space for the last a 9 or 10 years. So I had a good long career with Home Depot right out of college and then decided to take a pivot after about 10 years with Home Depot and went to a CPG company called Spectrum Brands. And I started in forecasting, of all places. I think that there's been so many points in my career that I'm like, I've never done this before, but we'll give it a try and see how it goes, right? So I started at Spectrum Brands in 2015 doing forecasting for Dollar General and then quickly took on Amazon as a customer. And at the time, we had Amazon rolled into this bucket of all other customers, which is hysterical, right? And really didn't have a whole lot of visibility into what they were doing individually as a customer. So we broke them out because I think that most people can relate to this when I say this, that they were really messing up like orders. Um, for, uh, our, our company, we, they were being incredibly unpredictable. So, um, when they still really are from an ordering, um, but yeah, so I, I started forecasting for Amazon and dollar general or my two customers. Um, and I learned just so much about the space, um, trying to predict their ordering habits, honestly, like, I really understood and tried to learn what was driving demand and what was causing them to order in such a spiky way. And coming at it from that point of view really helped me understand them as a customer and understand everything that was going out on the PDPs and how promotional activity was impacting demand. So I fell in love with it, honestly, and I started to see it as kind of the The one area of sales that I felt like I could do within e-commerce because it was a very different relationship with customers like Amazon or Chewy or other pure play customers than it is with traditional brick and mortar retailers. But it's also more exciting because things are constantly changing and it's like this puzzle that you're trying to put together. When they change their algorithm, what's it going to do to your sales? How's it going to impact ranking? How's it going to impact relevancy? All these different things that, I mean, obviously they all funnel up into selling and making sure that you're getting out in front of the consumer. So I fell in love with it and just took it from there, right? Moved into a a project manager role within spectrum brands and that was really great experience on the e-commerce team because I was. Helping to implement projects that we had never done before and I think that's probably like the theme within eCommerce is like doing things that you've never done before. Also trying to navigate how a larger organization does things and how we can adjust to what these pure play retailers need from us. So think things like brand registry, transparency, direct import projects, those sorts of we've never done this before but what are the capabilities that we need as an organization to do it and how can we roll this out with our retailer. So that was great. And then I moved into sales, which is a kind of a different beast. Yeah, so I moved into an e-commerce like omni-channel sales role. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: PetSmart, Petco, Home Depot and Lowes.com pieces, which again is completely different than pure play, right? Because you're talking about such a small portion of the overall business. But now such an integral part of just the consumer journey and making sure that everybody internally knows that, yeah, this is a really small portion, maybe a couple percentage points of your total overall business. But if you don't have your content right and people are searching for it, that's really going to start to impact your in-store sales and really evangelizing what that omni-channel relationship looks like with the retailer. So yeah, that's how I entered like the sales realm. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: With all of this like operational experience, I think that Just being data-minded and open to like how we do things has really helped me in the space. Speaker 2: You've had such a, I would say, well-rounded career progression where some people get stuck in certain areas and kind of struggle. You've been able to see the big picture but also work, especially I would assume in the project management role, and all of the small pieces that come together that are going to do what you kind of mentioned is, you know, what's going to I drive the POs. What's going to drive the top-line sales growth? And I think people who come from traditional brick-and-mortar sometimes struggle to understand that something as simple as a different order of keywords in your title is going to affect that top-line growth, which can make it really hard to justify certain investments that need to be made. Like you said, the syndication of content across platforms is super important, but then you have to adjust the content per platform. So how have you approached... You've obviously been able to see it all, and I think that's been really beneficial. But when you're working with a leadership team that maybe Doesn't see it all or comes from more that brick-and-mortar background. How have you found the best ways to kind of tell that story and get the buy-in needed to really push eCommerce forward? Speaker 1: Yeah, so I think honestly, that's a great question because if you think about most organizations internally, most people grew up in like a brick-and-mortar only space. So they're only seeing it from that lens. And honestly, my advice is to kind of lean into that. So find a way to be able to describe and evangelize and teach about eCommerce That resonates with a brick-and-mortar audience so for example when i was with bonite as the VP of eCommerce i came in. It's a very brick-and-mortar and very niche space. What we were selling at Bonide, for the most part, we sold at some larger brick-and-mortar retailers. But I was talking to an audience who had a very heavy brick-and-mortar sales background. So when you're talking about eCommerce and We were in a time where we were constrained on inventory. So there was this thought that we could Cut back on what we were sending to Amazon or other e-tailers because we at least wouldn't lose the planogram place, right? Where with other brick-and-mortar retailers, if you're not shipping in full or you've got lower fill rates, you're at risk the next time you come around to the planogram reset. Well, Bonide couldn't, you know, Give us the product that we needed last time so we need a more reliable vendor for that spot. But the reality is that if you're cutting back on Amazon or any other eCommerce retailer, you might not lose the spot in the planogram per se because you'll still have the PDP out there. It'll still be live. You're still listed with them. But you did lose the spot on the planogram because as you start to When you run out of stock, your rankings are impacted. And so I approached it as that first page of search results, that's your planogram. And once you've fallen off that first page of results onto the second page, you've basically lost your listing because it's going to impact sales so much that you might as well have lost your listing. So by putting it into those terms, then like my CEO understood, okay, I understand that now and we have to kind of rethink how we're approaching who we fill and who we're prioritizing. Speaker 2: A hundred percent. I think that's such a fantastic call out. This is something That I presented on as well is just when you walk down the store at Walmart, it's super easy to conceptualize how much of the shelf is available for any one category. But when people think of Amazon or Walmart.com, they still think that the digital shelf is unlimited, but ain't nobody scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page. That's not how it works. You can get so caught up in how quickly everything changes in our space And that can be really, really overwhelming to leadership as well, which kind of causes this uncertainty with making investments that, yes, are a little bit more risky. So I think that's such a great call out to meet them where they are. Because as we all know, I can't imagine getting started in eCommerce today. I manage such a small portion with just the retail media side, and I'm still like, I'm overwhelmed half the time with all of the updates. So having to find that balance of, you know, They already have enough on their plate. How do we meet them where they're at and help them educate and figure out the similarities between platforms is such a good call out. Speaker 1: Yeah, I have found that to be the most helpful, honestly. And then once you can start with Those sorts of basics you can always add on later, but you can't immediately come out of the gate talking about display. Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: Because we're not there. Speaker 2: How would you say kind of your trajectory in eCommerce has affected how you would advise the younger generations who are potentially considering getting started? I mean, my sister is a freshman in college and I've actually struggled With her because she doesn't kind of know what degree she wants to get. I did a general business degree. I stumbled into eCommerce and now this is where I'm at. So I've tried to kind of sell that story and excitement. But it's also really difficult because I still think eCommerce is viewed as non-traditional. Like a lot of people don't quite understand the space that we're in. What advice would you give to kind of someone starting out in our space? Speaker 1: Yeah, so my advice is honestly to be open, right? Like I think that especially when you're young, And this isn't just like self-inflicted, right? I think this is a societal thing too, that we're like pick a degree, find your path, like and you must immediately know when you get out of college that you want to be a doctor or you want to be a lawyer or teacher, whatever the path is, right? But I think that their life and careers are just so much more than that. Even now, 20 years into my own career, I'm still like, I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. So I think having an opened mindset to like, yeah, I'm going to try this. And there are going to be bits and pieces of this job or this position that I really love and parts that I'm just not a fan of. And then try to find things that you like to do more that challenge you. There's always going to be parts of a position or job that are not ideal or they're not fun. Let's just be honest. Find stuff that you like to do or that's challenging. But also focus on developing some really general skills, right? In business analytics, for example, knowing how to look at data, knowing the questions to ask of your data is super important because I think that no matter what role you're in, especially now, most organizations are moving to Data-mindedness and using data to make decisions. So making sure that you're good at that and developing those skills no matter what the data is, right? If it's in the media space, obviously, it's super data-heavy, but being able to translate that into just general business as well. I think Part of what I am so grateful to Home Depot as an organization for is developing that business acumen. I mean, I spent a lot of time in the stores, and I don't think that people give retail workers enough credit, especially those of us who've been in department supervisor roles or assistant store manager, store manager roles. Because there's a lot of business acumen that you have to know. I mean, I know that like some people even who are working at Walmart stores also go through this, right? Where you're constantly looking at sales numbers and trying to figure out, okay, well, why did I dip in sales here? And you're walking over to The aisle, the CEO, well, I'm out of stock. And this kind of told me that I needed to pack down this area or we learned a lot about margin and selling your higher margin stuff to compensate for some of your lower margin items. Things like selling paintbrushes and paint rollers with your paint because the paint's what's driving them in but your paintbrush and paint rollers are where you're getting the margin, right? So, I owe so much of that just general business acumen knowledge to Home Depot and I think that focusing on being open to that and learning just general business knowledge is super important because you might have an idea of what you want your path to look like, but I'll tell you right now that A company or your career is never necessarily going to go in that direction. To me, careers aren't linear. I've taken many steps back so that I could move forward or lateral moves so that I could continue to grow certain skills. So to me, it's about focusing on the skills that you're building and the general skills and being open to whatever that next role is. Speaker 2: I think fundamentally a lot of those principles are so important. One of the things that you said just in relation to forecasting is I didn't know what I was getting into and I said yes. And I think that's super important because, I mean, my first semester of college, I went to school for early childhood education. I am absolutely not going to go back and be a teacher at any point in time. I don't know what I was thinking at that point. But to your point, no matter what idea you have for your future, unless you were like, hey, I'm a fourth-generation doctor. This is what I want to do. I think the open-mindedness and saying yes and being willing to take chances is incredibly important. Especially when you have that secondary aspect of understanding the general business or idea of what you want to accomplish. I think a lot of people miss that piece. How do you make yourself valuable where you're at? Maybe you don't understand the P&L aspect of the business conversation we had, but if you're I'm in a small startup. I think I have a team of 30 at this point. It's teaching my team members our goals and the vision, but hoping that they're the type of people to figure out a way to drive the overall business growth. And someone who can go in and understand what are the weaknesses within their current department, how can I make myself irreplaceable, is incredibly, incredibly important. I think that's a skill set that can take someone anywhere. The confidence or willingness to take risks and then the fundamental understanding of how you can make yourself valuable in a role. Speaker 1: Yeah, a hundred percent. So it's funny. My bachelor's degree is in international studies and the German language. I haven't spoken or written a lick of German since I graduated college, but I took eight years of it. Speaker 2: That is incredible. Speaker 1: And then I went and got my master's degree in human resources management because I really wanted to be in human resources at the time. But then like 2008 hit, and I think for those of us who were graduating college or having, you know, getting our master's degree at the time, like, It's a huge pivot point for a lot of people and I think that anybody that graduated during COVID probably feels the same way. It's like, well, this is what I was going to do and I'm like, well, crap, that's not available to me anymore because at the time all of the human resources type positions were Being restructured or a lot of layoffs within HR. So it was like, well, how do I pivot? Because at the end of the day, life, honestly, it's just a lot of different pivot points. So making sure that you're open to whatever your career can kind of throw at you, but then being like resilient enough to like what you're saying is learn and learning how to make yourself valuable in any of the positions that you take. So it's really like that general skill Learning, honestly. Speaker 2: A hundred percent. I got a piece of feedback early on in the entrepreneurial journey and it was instead of making a list of everything you want to accomplish, which can be unlimited, it was sit down and make a list of everything you don't want out of life. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's awesome. Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a really good pivotal mindset shift for me because I think it's so easy to get caught up in everything. And I sat down and I was like, you know, I want to be happy. I want to have good work-life balance and I made this list. And I think that's what really helped me to kind of continue to grow and take my skill sets, which I went to school for early childhood education for a little bit, thought I wanted to be a teacher, but realized I was passionate about educating. My full role right now, I would still say, is educating. I would probably make the same assumption, maybe not on the German side, but everything you learn from an HR perspective integrates pretty directly, I would say, with what you're doing every day. It's those fundamental strengths that you have, how can you apply them with flexibility because it's all about pivoting. Speaker 1: Yep, absolutely. That's awesome. Speaker 2: So, what do you want to do over the next few years? I mean, it's unlimited with that being said, with everything in eCommerce. How do you see your role changing or growing? Speaker 1: Yeah. So, I think personally, right, I've spent a lot of time within operations and sales and I bounce back and forth between the two because in my opinion, I mean, Everything is interconnected within business, let's just be honest. I think that bouncing back and forth allows me to stay grounded in one or the other. There's so much about operations that can impact sales and there's so much about sales and the way that We interact with our partners that can really mess up or impact the operating side too, right? But one thing that I don't have on my resume is anything that has to do with marketing. I mean, a little bit, right? In my role within Bonide, I did lead a content portion of eCommerce and a retail media position within eCommerce. So I kind of set the strategy, but it was more from a sales lens. Like, these are the sales that I want to achieve and these are the levers that I can pull to help achieve that, right? But I've never been in a role that specifically focuses on the marketing side of eCommerce. And I think that would be a real stretch for me, which is something that I'm looking forward to in whatever my next role is, right? Like I want something that's going to challenge me, that kind of scares me a little bit going into it. Because that's the way I can continue to grow. I've spent, you know, the last nine or ten years doing sales and operations within eCommerce and I think I kind of got it down. Now I'm just looking for something to help me stretch a little bit. So I'm hoping that if I can find my way there within Purina, honestly, I really want Purina to be my last stop on this company. And what I really love about it is that we're constantly talking about What are our career aspirations? What is the next role for you? So I think to me, short-term, within the next, you know, few years, that's where I want to go. Longer term, I love leading people and leading us toward a business goal. So I think really long-term in general management. But honestly, I mean, who knows between now and then. Who knows? Speaker 2: That's the question. Speaker 1: I love that. Speaker 2: I think that's incredible that you have the vision for moving into that. You asked me right now where I wanted to be in the next few years. I don't know if I could answer that concisely of like that's the area. Especially I just I love what we're doing right now in retail media, so I guess it's continue to doing what I'm doing times two or three. I'm really curious how things like AI is going to impact The future and what it looks like both on the team-building side, like every single aspect of business, I don't know how much you've played around with it, but I think it'll be really transformational and that kind of overwhelms me to like, you know, actually I don't know where it's gonna be in the next two to three years. I'm so over indexed to the power of AI right now. I'm like, who knows what to expect? Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that is definitely an interesting space. I think that I'm hopeful that what it allows us to do is allows us to take some of that like menial tasking off of our plates. For example, if you're writing a job description that you want to have posted, it's a newer position. If you can put a couple prompts into chat GPT and have it like knock that out for you, all you have to do is make some edits. That's a huge win, right? And that's just on the basic level of what AI does for us. But what it does is allow us The more freedom of that time that we would have spent drafting that from scratch to work on other things, strategy, more high level things that maybe AI can't tackle. So I'm excited about what it does do. I am a little nervous, I guess, from an inequality standpoint, I'll be honest, about equality or I work within some of the lower-paying jobs and how that might impact. I'd hate to see a great technology like this kind of further the gap, but I think that overall it could be a good benefit to our society. Speaker 2: I think something that I've found to be really valuable, and this even relates to our earlier conversation, is access to education. I think it's an incredible opportunity. I don't utilize any of the paid AIs, for example, but I can open Instagram and use MetaAI, and I've used it to draft emails, or we've used it to ask questions around forecasting as well, just really simple things that we need a better understanding of. And I think that's something that's really important in our space is just that even if you don't know something, you have to know how to access the appropriate information and learn enough about it to be dangerous. I will drop that in the career advice section that we gave. Whether it's YouTube or LinkedIn or meta AI, it's knowing how to go out and get it yourself. I think it's an important aspect. Speaker 1: Yeah, I know enough about retail media to be dangerous. I tell people that all the time. If you gave me a bucket of money and asked me to set up campaigns, I would waste that entire bucket of money, but I know how to theoretically do it. Speaker 2: Yes, yes, and that's really what matters. I mean, the hands-on keyboard stuff is important, and this was something I actually I didn't believe it was possible because it took me seven years, I feel like, to get articulate with Amazon advertising. But we've taken interns directly out of high school and took them through the Amazon Accreditation Program, took them through the Better Media course and had them hands-on keyboard launching campaigns. I don't know if the younger generations just used to taking in a ton of information and learning and taking risks because they were raised on social. But it's that ability to just hop right in. I think the harder part is the part that you mentioned. It's tying it all together. It's seeing the overall vision. Hopping in the weeds, you can follow a quick course online, but it takes some reps to understand the overall vision. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true. I know that that's a gap for me, so I'm just focused on... Speaker 2: I can help you fill that gap. Don't you worry. I can cover that. I'll give you a little Destaney Better Media course over the next two weeks and we'll be done. Speaker 1: Awesome. Speaker 2: Well, I think it's close to time to wrapping up now and I just want to thank you so much for hopping on the podcast and sharing. I think our space is incredibly exciting. Our little self-help group is probably a better term for our little eCom community because we all need some level of therapy for being in the roles that we are. It has been amazing and it's connected with so many amazing people. And yeah, I just wanted to thank you so much for hopping on. Speaker 1: Yeah, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for your time. I feel very honored to be on this podcast, honestly. Speaker 2: Of course. I'm sure everyone on LinkedIn is going to love it that we're finally together. So, all right. Thank you all for listening as always. And if you have any questions for us, feel free to drop it in the LinkedIn comments and we'll try to get back to you. Thank you all.