Episode Summary
In episode 15 of the 7 Figures and Beyond marketing podcast our discussion is geared around sales channel conflict, focusing on the challenges brands face when selling through various online and offline platforms. Greg illustrates the complexity of customer journeys and attribution issues arising from multi-channel marketing, using a fictional scenario to highlight how consumers’ interaction with brands across different channels can lead to attribution confusion. Jason Richardson from Genesis shares his journey from a college entrepreneur to a seasoned expert in consumer product sales, emphasizing the importance of understanding customer behavior across platforms like Amazon, Shopify, and social commerce. The conversation delves into strategies for managing sales channel conflict, pricing, and the impact of emerging technologies like AI on the retail landscape, providing valuable insights for brands navigating multi-channel sales environments.
Key Takeaways
- Sales Channel Complexity: Brands face significant challenges in attributing sales and understanding customer acquisition costs due to the complex nature of multi-channel retail environments.
- Customer Behavior Insights: Understanding differences in consumer behavior across platforms (e.g., Amazon, Shopify, social media) is crucial for tailoring brand strategies to optimize sales and engagement.
- Managing Channel Conflict: Effective management of sales channel conflict involves maintaining pricing parity across channels, strategic promotions, and possibly offering exclusive SKUs to different retailers to avoid cannibalization.
- Impact of AI and Technology: Emerging technologies, particularly AI, are reshaping the retail landscape, offering new tools for marketing and operations but also requiring brands to adapt and integrate these technologies thoughtfully.
- Personal Journey and Expertise: Jason Richardson’s experience highlights the importance of hands-on learning, agility, and strategic thinking in scaling consumer products across diverse sales channels and navigating the complexities of multi-channel retail.
Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Jason Richardson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/imjrich/
Genesis: https://gensm.com/
Episode Transcript
Greg: 0:28
Welcome to episode 15 of the 7 Figures and Beyond podcast. How is everyone doing today? All right, today’s discussion is going to be pretty awesome. I’m excited about it. We’re going to dive into sales channel conflict, so I talked to a lot of brands who are selling on different channels. Those channels could be online channels like their website, amazon, tiktok, etsy, walmartcom, et cetera, and they can also be offline channels, like selling in different retailers or at Costco and so forth.
Greg: 1:04
When your product is sold in so many places, it can be difficult to determine how your marketing is performing and what your true customer acquisition cost is, and then also who should get credit for the sale. At the end of the day, customer journeys are incredibly complex and very messy. In fact, I even wrote a post about this on LinkedIn earlier this year. It may have been actually six or seven months ago, I’m not sure, but I am going to read this to you. It’s totally fictional, but it kind of gets the point across about how messy customer journeys are and how selling in different channels and on different platforms can just really mess up your attribution and create that conflict. So, again, totally fictional, but as a consumer, you see a Facebook ad. You go visit the website. You poke around and you leave. You get pixeled. You see a retargeting ad on Google. You come back to the website. You poke around a little bit more, leave again. You jump over to a Facebook group or head over to a forum that you’re part of. You ask you know who uses the product and ask for some feedback or some reviews.
Greg: 2:17
A few days later you get a mailer from the brand mailed to your home. You head back to the website. You add the product to the shopping cart. You start the checkout, leave again. You decide to go over to Amazon, see if the product is sold there. It is. You add to the cart and you leave. So now you have two shopping carts started. They’re just sitting there not really doing much.
Greg: 2:38
A few weeks later you get a mailer from Costco. You see they sell the product in store and it is on sale next week. Costco’s, you know, half a mile down the street. You walk in on a Saturday morning and you buy it. Like that’s that’s for real. Like, even though that’s fictional, that’s that’s a kind of a real customer journey in terms of how people shop and how they do research and where they prefer to buy and spend their money. It’s incredibly crazy and it’s incredibly complex. This is where sales channel conflict comes into play. It’s a problem. Today’s guest is Jason Richardson. He’s of Genesis. He is going to talk with us about this problem. Jason, thank you for being with us today. It’s good to be with you. I’m excited. Before we dive into our conversation, would you take a few minutes to introduce yourself to our listeners and share a little bit about your personal story and how you’ve gotten to where you are today?
Jason: 3:43
Sure, well, I got started in consumer product back in college. I was a college kid studying entrepreneurship, and I’m the youngest of five sons, or I have four older brothers, and so I was looking ahead and seeing what my brother was doing. Anyway, my oldest brother was very entrepreneurial and he launched a company, a baby product company actually, and he was an industrial designer. And so he designed this foldable baby bathtub, which sounds kind of crazy right now, but at the time it was super novel, super super original. And we went to a trade show in 2009 and the company just took off like overnight which I say that, but there were like years going into that moment, overnight, getting a product at that show. But I had joined them like a couple months earlier, helping them with like sales and marketing, as I call it, which I had no idea what that even meant at the time. But I was like hey, bro, I’m a student, I’m a student, I want to get some experience in something entrepreneurial. Can I help you with sales and marketing? And he’s like sure, you’re free, you’re cheap, you know nothing, but you’re hungry, so come work with us.
Jason: 4:59
So for six and a half years, we scaled that company and we actually managed to scale it to 30 countries. We were in all the major retailers in the U S. We sold across DTC, amazon and we were on all these major talk shows. We had tons of great press and, anyway, learned a ton in those six and a half years just by like figuring it out. And I say figuring it out because we had no idea what we were doing honestly, didn’t know what casebacks were, didn’t know what customer lifetime value meant, didn’t know what all this stuff. We just were figuring it out on the fly.
Jason: 5:38
But somehow we managed and had some decent success with that company and had some decent success with that company. Then, in 2015, I was like I think I’m ready to do my own company and try my own thing, and so I kind of had to make a decision Do I go make my own brand, do I go make another baby product company, or do I package up all this experience that I just acquired and go offer it to other brands who are trying to do the same thing of scale their business across multiple sales channels? And I decided at the time that the world didn’t need more products. The world needed more people who knew how to sell those products, and so that’s how Genesis was formed, so that’s how I got started.
Greg: 6:20
It’s amazing and today you focus primarily on Amazon Is that right Today, the focus is Amazon.
Jason: 6:25
We started on Amazon in 2015 and have done a number of things over the years, like managing all channels for some brands or managing retail strategy and how do you work with buyers, how do you expand your footprint in store. But, yes, today our focus is exclusively Amazon. That’s awesome.
Greg: 6:46
Great. Well, thank you for sharing and, like I said, I’m super excited about this conversation today, and I know you are. You know when I, when I initially talked to you, you’re like, yeah, let’s talk about sales channel conflict. I’m like great, because this is what a lot of people are struggling with right now. Okay, so I’ve got a few questions, you know. I’ve shared those with you. Are you ready to dive right in? Let’s do it.
Greg: 7:10
Awesome, cool. So my first question kind of digs into consumer behavior. So how does consumer behavior differ between platforms like Amazon, shopify, tiktok, and then how does this impact a brand strategy for managing sales across multiple channels?
Jason: 7:31
Well, I can speak a lot about Shopify and I can speak a lot about Amazon. I can’t speak that much about TikTok, but we all generally kind of understand the game there. But I don’t know like the specific numbers around.
Greg: 7:46
Let’s just call it social media in general.
Jason: 7:49
Okay, yeah, social commerce, right, is kind of what it’s grouped into, which is growing like crazy, by the way. But yeah, I mean, the biggest thing perhaps is like conversion rates. So good, conversion rates on a shopify or a dtc platform two percent, three percent, four percent, you’re rocking. Yeah.
Greg: 8:12
Five percent, you’re killing it all right, you’re the unicorn that no one can touch at five percent, yeah yeah, I mean conversion rates are.
Jason: 8:20
are that’s what you can expect with a dtc platform like shopify and it shopifies? Yeah, that’s what you can expect with a DTC platform like Shopify and Shopify. Yeah, that’s what we recommend to everybody who’s thinking about doing a website. But Amazon conversion rates, you know, 5% is on the low end. 10 to 15% is what you can expect. We’ve got a client that has 20% conversion rates on their listings and they’re $100,000 a month account. Their a hundred thousand dollars a month account, a hundred thousand plus a month. So conversion rates just differ like crazy because Amazon just makes it as as perfected the science of checking out on desktop, on mobile, wherever you’re at. And so those are.
Jason: 9:04
Those are significant differences between Shopify and Amazon. Right there, tiktok, again, it’s, it’s, uh, it’s. I don’t know that the conversion rates, but it is. I know the usage rates and how much time people spend on it per day and, like the, uh, the success of TikTok shop and it’s. So I’ve definitely kept my eye on it as like some new platform that we should be aware of as marketers, as consumer product experts. But yeah, the downside to Amazon is you don’t get all the customer data and so it’s really tough to drive up customer lifetime value, whereas if you got people coming through your website, there’s all sorts of things that you can do to nurture that relationship, to increase customer lifetime value. Because you know who they are, you can reach out to them, you can talk to them. You got their email. You can do all sorts of things, but again the conversion rates matter here. Would you rather have one customer coming through your Shopify?
Jason: 10:04
site or two or three customers coming through Amazon which help increase your bestseller ranking, which gets you in front of the hundreds of millions of shoppers on Amazon. It’s just a much bigger pool that you’re getting in front of on Amazon than through Shopify. So conversion rate is what I think about most like when I’m thinking about different platforms and what your strategy should look like based on the platform.
Greg: 10:31
Yeah, and you know, coming at it from the Shopify side, I mean we’re very heavy Shopify and driving customer acquisition over there. The two, and correct me if I’m wrong you know, shopify is in some cases it can be really top of funnel, middle of funnel, where people are starting to become aware of a brand and doing their research and then going into comparison mode, whereas I almost feel like shoppers on Amazon are at bottom of funnel, like they know what they want and they’re rare, they’re there and ready to purchase, and so it’s almost two different mindsets.
Jason: 11:09
I think that is yeah, I think that happens for sure. I mean, I’m thinking personally if I know what I want, yeah, I’m going to Amazon first because I need it there tomorrow or the next day, so that that customer journey makes sense. I also think Amazon um is top of funnel too. Okay, uh, years ago, I would say around around the time I was starting my agency, and so Google used to be the number one product search engine in the world. Right, I want a product, I need to go research, I’m going to go search Google.
Jason: 11:41
Well, around that time Amazon surpassed Google as the number one destination for product search. People begin their product search, they go to Amazon, and that’s still the case today. So there’s definitely both use cases with Amazon because it’s you know, 40% of all e-commerce in the US flows through Amazon Interesting S flows through Amazon Interesting. So the sheer volume of product, of catalog, of assortment is there. So it’s still I mean we can get into this a little bit more if you want, but it still, I think makes sense for most brands to have a presence on Amazon because it is so top of mind for the U S consumer and because if you see something on Tik TOK, or if you see something on Facebook or if you see something out in the wild, is how I describe it. More often than not that individual at consumer will go check Amazon to do some research to find it before Google Interesting.
Greg: 12:42
Okay, cool, very cool. You learn something new every day. There you go. All right, let’s jump into our next question. So can you share some success stories or some case studies where brands have effectively managed sales across multiple online platforms without cannibalizing kind of their business or their market?
Jason: 13:02
Sure, well, one company that we got really involved with years ago was called Dockatot, and you work with a lot of baby companies Very familiar with them.
Jason: 13:13
Yeah, will know that company, but they so. They were actually one of my first clients at Genesis and they had just come to the U? S from Europe. They’re a European based company and so they had this kind of fragmented team here in the U S just trying to get things going. And they had some really good traction early on with DTC and they’re on Shopify, um, and they hired me to do their Amazon.
Jason: 13:36
Well, things were going so well that they’re like, uh, we need. I mean it was funny cause, um, I was managing Amazon but I needed barcodes for more products right To create new products in the catalog. I was like, hey, can you send me more UPCs or talk, tell me who who manages those so I can get them. And the founder her name was Lisa. She’s like no one does that. Do you want to take that on? I was like, sure, I’ve managed UPC barcodes so I can take that on. And then something else would come up and I’d be like, hey, who’s managing your inventory forecast? Because I’ve got replenishments that I’m trying to schedule and plan out and who’s managing that? And she’d say, well, no one’s managing it.
Jason: 14:20
Do you want to take that on Long story short? Eventually, my role expanded from just Amazon to eventually managing North America for Docta.
Speaker 1: 14:30
Oh cool.
Jason: 14:32
We built the team at Genesis to support Docta and eventually, docta swallowed us whole. At Genesis to support Doctot, eventually, doctot swallowed us whole. But, that being said, we started DTC and then Amazon right after that, and then, soon after that, we started getting approached by retailers, which is awesome, by the way, if retailers approach you wanting to buy your product, versus you going to them selling your product way better experience.
Greg: 14:55
You know you’ve made it at that point selling your product way better experience.
Jason: 14:59
You know you’ve made it at that point.
Jason: 15:03
That’s one reason, one smart reason, for focusing on DTC first. If you can unlock that channel and unlock the social media and just get this following without the need of retailers, it just helps your. It gives you so much more negotiating power when it does come time to do a deal with a retail partner. But we started adding retail partners and then all of a sudden we had this conflict because this retailer over here wanted to run a promotion. Well, when that retailer runs a promotion, it ticks off this retailer. And if this retailer runs a promotion, Amazon hates that because they want to be the lowest offer on the internet. And if they’re not, they can do something called suppress the buy box, which means they kind of hide the add to cart button and make you dig for it as a consumer, which just tanks your conversion rate.
Greg: 15:53
Okay, hang on Like they’re actively out there looking to see if people are running promotions and we’ll, and we’ll mess with your buy box.
Jason: 16:02
Yes, a hundred percent what? And they won’t. They won’t look at every platform, but they will look at target. They will look at Walmart, they will look at eBay, I’ve heard and sometimes they’ll look at your DTC site if you’re big enough. But there’s nothing written on the internet about this. There’s nothing in the Amazon terms of service or whatever. They just say they want to be the lowest offer on the internet and if your buy box ever gets suppressed, it’s because Amazon has seen your product, your UPC, listed for less than what it’s listed for on Amazon and they suppress it.
Greg: 16:38
And then when?
Jason: 16:38
the sales over?
Greg: 16:39
will it just go right back to how it was Usually?
Jason: 16:42
Yeah, wow, okay. So that’s what I mean. Like this conflict, like, oh well, crap, you know, target wants to run a promotion and I want to run a promotion with them to increase my, my sales velocity.
Speaker 1: 16:54
Right, cause I want to.
Jason: 16:55
I’m giving a thumbs up on the screen. So you got to figure out how to manage this conflict, and what we usually start out by saying is like price, we want pricing parity across all channels. Yeah, it makes it so much easier because if you don’t, you’re you anger your partners because these different retailers, these different platforms, they either have a buyer behind it, or there’s a merchant behind it, or there’s an individual who’s like trying to grow the business, your business, right, you’re selling product to them so that they can sell more product, and if they’re, if the playing field is not fair, that’s really tough to strengthen and grow that partnership, and so pricing parity is what I recommend now you can run.
Jason: 17:43
yeah, it’s critical. It makes it easy for consumer journey, because if someone you know consumer buys it from your website and then they see it at amazon for 20 bucks less, they’re like actually I want to refund and ship my product back because it’s cheaper over here. It’s just a nightmare. So pricing parity is a good place to start. You can run account or channel specific promos though. So if target wants to run a promotion, what I say is like give it to them for a time, but be aware that Amazon may penalize, you, may suppress that buy box if you don’t give them the same promo. And so then you’re like oh, should I run promos everywhere all at the same time? And the answer is it depends.
Jason: 18:30
Mother’s Day or Black Friday or something like that, if you’re in the baby category makes a lot of sense, but it’s very nuanced, so it’s hard to throw out a blanket statement. It’s very nuanced, so it’s hard to throw out a blanket statement. But what I like to do is give every account an opportunity to feel special, to feel like I’m really trying to strengthen the partnership by giving them an exclusive SKU, running a specific promotion, giving them some kind of deal without giving away the farm essentially to say, hey, we’re committed to this partnership and you’re also not my only customer, frankly, and we want to grow this entire business.
Greg: 19:10
Yeah, I love that idea of giving them an exclusive SKU and then you can run promotions around that SKU and not have to worry about Amazon or the other platforms. I like that.
Jason: 19:13
That’s one of the best ways that we found at Dockatot as we were scaling and adding. That’s one of the best ways that we found at Docktaut as we were scaling and adding retailers like Nordstrom and buy my baby, and Bloomingdale’s and blah. Blah blah is giving not giving everybody the full catalog yeah, which sounds counterintuitive, but it’s very strategic, yeah.
Greg: 19:32
Do you ever see brands kind of roll out I don’t even know what to call it, but like create a new brand to roll to amazon selling the same product, but they name it something else, or is that like not really heard of?
Jason: 19:50
it’s not super common, but I’d call that like a next level strategy, because most people, most brands, have their hands full with just one brand To manage. A second brand is like, but if you’ve got the infrastructure and you’ve got the know-how and the skill set, yes. I’ve seen it happen where they roll out a more economical brand for Walmart, for example, because they don’t want to affect their brand image their higher end brand image.
Jason: 20:21
Yeah, nordstrom. Should the same SKUs be sold at Nordstrom as Walmart? Right? People debate about this all day long, but most people say no For in-store no. So, yes, I’ve seen kind of subsidiary brands or you know. Yeah, new brands pop up that cater to specific channels, but, like I said, it just things get a lot more complex when you’re at that level.
Greg: 20:43
Cool. Well, we’re going to dive into pricing here in just a few minutes, but my next question is like what are the key indicators that a business should be looking at or should be considering when evaluating the performance of multiple sales channels, and how do you balance those metrics without favoring one platform over another?
Jason: 21:07
Well, it all starts with, like your business objectives. Yeah, like what metrics matter most to you. You know, if you’re a SaaS company, it’s like signups, that’s all you care about.
Greg: 21:19
Yeah.
Jason: 21:19
Just getting signing up. But if you’re a consumer product brand, again the channel matters, your objective matters. For example, baby registry one key metric for a retail partner like Target is registry numbers.
Greg: 21:39
And if you ask for it if you ask for it.
Jason: 21:41
If you ask for it, they’ll give it to you and you can look at your, your registry numbers month over month over month to say, hey, is this trending up or is this flat, or is it because that’s a leading indicator? Yeah right, registries. I’m gonna have a baby and so I’m gonna create a registry and you know, three months, six months down the road, I’m probably gonna someone’s gonna be buying this product for me, so registry numbers are huge. Um, sales per store per week is also huge, because that’s what buyers are looking at for like a retail channel, yeah, retail store. If their sales per store per week are healthy, you’re good.
Jason: 22:19
If they’re not healthy you’re going to get nixed and you’re going to get kicked out of the store. Another thumbs up. Sorry, I got to turn that off, so it’s very channel. Specific Customer lifetime value is really interesting, though you know, early days when I was getting started in consumer product, I didn’t really think about that. I didn’t know about that. But again, anybody who is wanting to really scale a brand needs to understand that concept, because you can acquire customers like crazy, but that’s just exhausting. You’re on a treadmill. The brands that separate themselves from the others are the ones that figure out how to get the same customers to buy over and over and over again, to continue to add value, to expand that customer lifetime value, for, like Apple, look at how they’ve proliferated their assortment of SKUs to just, I mean, I’ve got Apple everywhere.
Greg: 23:17
Everywhere Yep. And it’s a new computer every two years and a new phone every year. It’s crazy.
Jason: 23:24
It’s totally crazy. So again, what’s your objectives as a business? Are you really trying to win over a retail partner? Well then, your metrics should you should focus on those ones more. Are you strictly just trying to pump out as much DTC volume as you can? There’s a set of metrics for that, and someone like you, you know, working with you, would would help guide them to figure out what. What metrics should they be looking at? It’s more than just site traffic. How much traffic did I get? It’s a lot more than that Interesting.
Greg: 23:55
Are you able to pull those kind of metrics from Amazon? Are you able to see average order value and customer lifetime value, or do they not provide that kind of insight?
Jason: 24:04
Definitely not as much insight as you get from your own website Customer lifetime value. You won’t get that. They will tell you who’s a repeat buyer and who’s a new to brand buyer Interesting. So they, they, they’re giving you more and more, um, and there’s definitely a lot of software tools that plug into the backend through APIs and allow you to and can kind of uh, pull out better data than what you might get through like seller central, which is what we use to, you know, to to manage everybody’s brands. Yeah, but yeah it’s. It’s definitely not as going to be as rich, but it’s getting better, I’d say.
Greg: 24:41
Interesting, okay, great, so let’s jump back into pricing. How do pricing strategies differ across various online platforms like what are the implications for brands in terms of sales channel conflict and overall profitability?
Jason: 25:00
well, every channel is going to have its associated costs and therefore different margins. Yeah, especially if you have pricing parity right. Everybody’s got the same 1999 retail price, but the costs associated are going to be a little bit different and so understanding what those costs are is super critical. Because when, like, for example, we just went through this exercise recently with a new account for us where they’re trying to figure out their retail pricing we’re helping them launch and go to market and as we started to dig in their mind, they had a retail price in mind, kind of picked out. And when we ran the numbers for Amazon and kind of tallied up everything, it was like I’m losing money on every single purchase because they just didn’t quite understand all the costs associated with selling on Amazon FBA and the cut that Amazon takes and everything.
Jason: 26:04
Yep, and also the same goes for like when you go into retail. Every retailer has a different set of sales, sales, discounts and allowances, interesting and be careful with what you quote somebody from a wholesale price standpoint. If you meet somebody at a trade show, I always say like if the buyer says, what’s the wholesale cost on this? And I’m always careful with what I say, because if I say, if something retails for 20 bucks, they’re going to want to buy it for 10, but then they’re going to tack on their discounts and allowances on top of that, which could be five to 10% additional off of the wholesale price.
Greg: 26:45
And you don’t know that just from having a face-to-face conversation with them.
Jason: 26:48
No, so you’ve got to be careful with again. You could lock yourself. You could paint yourself into a corner and lock yourself into really low margin with that account because the buyers are really smart and they they’re already playing the game when they meet you. Some of them, not all of them Some buyers are really really awesome because they understand the game, but some will be sneaky and will try to uh catch you saying something, saying more than you should, and now you’re like crap. I didn’t know that you had a five percent marketing co-op that I had to pay for, out of or that was deducted from every single remittance check that you sent me yeah, so.
Jason: 27:27
So costs are different every single channel. Margins are going to be different every single channel. I will say this, though it’s not the worst thing if you have a SKU, that’s like a loss leader, meaning if you have a SKU that is just not profitable but it keeps your foot in the door on a certain channel or at a certain retail partner, embrace it and figure out how to surround it with other supporting SKUs that are profitable. And I’m thinking like the old you know the famous rotisserie chicken example from Costco, where they don’t make money, I heard, on the on the chickens. Maybe they do, but they keep it so low because it just keeps people coming back into that store. And so maybe you lose money on the razors and you make money on the razor blades. Maybe you lose money or you break even on the first purchase of of mud water, which is a big DTC brand, because they know that the customer lifetime value is four X that initial purchase.
Jason: 28:29
So it’s I think about that too right. It’s not. I don’t have to get 50% margin every single place I sell a product. That’s short-term thinking, I think, and that that is not very strategic. But understanding the costs associated with each channel, understanding, acknowledging that your margin are going to look a little bit different every single channel. But yeah, you can figure out, you can crack the code. You just it takes some figuring out. And take some experts like like you, or a sales rep who has worked with a retailer like Target.
Jason: 29:03
I keep using Target because everybody, just about everybody, wants to be in Target at some point with their 1800 stores, but they have very specific terms that that they use for all their vendors Costco same thing, uh. So knowing those beforehand, as you’re getting going, as you’re ramping, as you’re scaling, is really important, because if you don’t choose the correct retail price, you’re either going to have to well, you will have to do a price increase later on, which is not the end of the world, but it’s also not ideal.
Greg: 29:33
Yeah, so where do you start? Do you like to start at, like, the most expensive place and say, okay, like we’re going to look at Amazon, because Amazon’s kind of expensive to sell on, and then back out your numbers? Is that how you like to approach that?
Jason: 29:46
Yeah, I mean, usually I would, I would start. I mean, so there’s a tool that we use it’s a PPA tool, product profitability analysis where we’ll basically have all these channels set up with the known costs for each channel and then we plug in our cost of goods, like our landed cost, yeah, and then say what does the margin look like? Is it sustainable? Okay, no, we got to increase by five bucks. Well, what’s the retail? What Is it sustainable? Okay, no, we got to increase by five bucks. Well, what’s the retail? What are their competitors doing? Okay, maybe we won’t increase five, let’s increase three, Gotcha. And you kind of just look at it through these different lenses of like if I sell to Target, if I sell to Costco, if I sell to Walmart, if I sell on Amazon, if I sell to DTC, what are all my costs? Or what’s my margin on each channel? And then you kind of figure out what price point makes sense.
Greg: 30:35
Then you just tinker with the numbers. I like that. You look at competitors as well. That’s awesome.
Jason: 30:39
Yeah, some people will say don’t focus on your competitors, just focus on the customer. I’m like, okay, everybody’s looking at it, but everybody should be looking at competitors, be aware of, like, what other people are doing and take that into consideration for sure.
Greg: 30:53
I mean, there’s a good chance I say this all the time is that there’s several years down the road ahead of you, right, and they’ve, they’ve played this game. So you at least need to be cognizant of what they’re doing, because you can learn some stuff from them. I like that Totally, 100%, cool, cool, totally, 100, cool, cool, all right, um, sweet, you know I we covered a lot already today, so, kind of in closing, are there any final words of wisdom that you have for our listeners when it comes to sales channel conflict?
Jason: 31:24
the world’s changing rapidly fast and it is, you know. Ai is the hot topic right now. I’m super excited about it. I’m also a little scared about it. I think it’s, you know, and that’s justified, because it’s like this new thing that’s so powerful.
Greg: 31:43
I think we all are a little freaked out.
Jason: 31:45
So I would two things. I would say everybody should figure out for themselves what their relationship is going to be with AI and figure out how to. What’s the relationship going to be like? Are they going to embrace it or are they going to completely ignore it and shun it? And there’s no right or wrong.
Greg: 32:03
Yeah.
Jason: 32:04
But it’s here to stay and it’s going to affect every industry. So I think I’d recommend people get educated before just reacting to like hating these people who are bringing AI to life and creating robots, like they’re stealing all these jobs. Like go watch the movie called Hidden Figures. It’s a really, really good case study about back in the day how human mathematicians human calculators, I think, is what they were called back at like NASA in the early days. They didn’t have computers, they had human calculators. Well, computers came along and started to replace these human calculators. Some of them got really upset. Others retooled themselves and figured out how to maintain and service these new machines, these computers, and it stayed relevant thereafter.
Jason: 32:53
I think we’re in a similar moment where AI is going to be changing a lot of things and we’re a lot of us are going to have to retool ourselves and figure out how do we stay relevant going forward. And the second thing, if you’re in physical products, we’re always going to need physical products. Ai is not going to replace the need for a phone, a key Well, maybe a keyboard, maybe somebody, but like desk clothes, gear, mountain biking, you know, all this stuff like the physical world’s not going away, so manufacturing is going to stay around just the way it goes. It happens, though it’s going to be changing. So those are two thoughts. I had.
Greg: 33:31
I like that, I like, so I guess maybe one last follow-up question is are you starting to see AI change the way that you do Amazon for brands?
Jason: 33:41
Yes, and I’m still again learning how I’m going to use it going forward, but I’ve been tinkering more and more with it and using it as a co-pilot. I describe it. It’s not doing all the work right I’m still in the driver’s seat but it’s definitely like a great little assistant that can help me think through. It’s a sounding board. It helps me refine ideas. Idea generation is super valuable. Marketing, I mean content, podcasting, ideas. It’s just, it’s really, really powerful. So, yeah, it’s not, we don’t have like this AI playbook yet, developed at Genesis, but we’re going to be incorporating it in some way to add value to our clients, to find ways to drive growth for our clients. So, yes, we’ll be using it.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
