Newell Brands Has Multiple Brands and Multiple Ecommerce Challenges, which Michal Geller, the President of eCommerce & Digital is Trying To Solve
Creating an exceptional customer experience for a single brand is hard enough, what if you had to do it for dozens of brands all at once?
The buying experience is becoming more and more of a puzzle that comes together differently for every consumer. How they discover something might be different from how they purchase something and how they purchase it might be different from how it gets fulfilled. You can find something in a store, buy it online, and have it delivered via an app. Every part of the process is being uncoupled, and brand leaders have to build for that reality. Every touchpoint, every experience, every interaction has to be optimized. For Michael Geller, the President of eCommerce & Digital at Newell Brands, this is even more difficult because Newell’s portfolio of brands is massive, and well known — we’re talking about Sharpie, Crock Pot, Food Saver, Elmer’s Glue, Graco, and the list goes on. With so many brands, and so many potential touchpoints and opportunities for cross-promotion, how are Geller and his team approaching this challenge?
“There are two things to really look at all the time, and consumer number one, and the second thing is to make sure you’ve got is data,” Geller says. “Making sure that the data that you have to run the business is accessible, usable, digestible, available.”
With digital commerce, Geller says that the data is always available, it’s just a matter of what you do with it. This is important whether you are a digitally-native company, or if your retail sales are still the biggest contributor to the bottom line.
“The great thing about ecommerce is that whatever channel you’re in, it’s incredibly data-rich,” Geller says. “Also, the feedback loops are very quick. In a traditional brick and mortar world, where you’re shipping product to a retail outlet, they’re putting on the shelf, it sits on the shelf for however long and then it gets bought, the data, it takes a long time but there’s a long lag there. In the world of ecommerce, we’re getting real-time information on what’s happening with price, what’s happening with the consumer, what’s happening with supply, what’s happening with out of stocks, all these different things. The data is so rich. We’re still [at a place where] a minority of the business is ecommerce sales, but the data is so rich that it should be able to impact and inform the majority of the business that it still has a brick and mortar base. That’s where I think we have a lot of opportunity to hopefully move faster and make decisions faster than we ever have in history.”
But in order to get that data, you need to have customers. And in order to attract customers, Geller says that bringing them exceptional experiences should be your main goal.
“Consumers are interacting with us in all these different channels, independent of where they shop,” Geller says. “By the way, independent of where they shop might also be different from how they get it fulfilled. A lot of this is becoming super decoupled, and so you have to think about the person who walks into a physical store, a Walmart, a Target, a Costco, wherever, the way that they got to that physical sale in that particular case may have been through a lot of digital assets. They may have been going to our D2C site to get product descriptions or check out colors or look at reviews or whatever. Or it could be the opposite, they may be going into the store to touch something, and then by either directly through us or through another retail outlet. The consumer is becoming omnivorous in terms of the way that they’re consuming the data and learning about our products and interacting with us, and so we need to figure out how to continue to be everywhere that they are.”
To hear more about how Newell Brands is building its ecommerce prowess, tune into Up Next in Commerce.
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