Cathriona Nolan [00:00:00]:
Omnichannel is not just about like having a website or an app and having some stores. It's really about wherever she is and wherever she's consuming content, how do we make it easier for her to shop?
Paul Archer [00:00:21]:
Have you ever wondered why some brands grow exponentially, building legions of passionate fans that live and die by their logos and some, well, don't? I do, all the time. And that's probably because I'm a massive brand nerd. But I believe there's a secret sauce at the core of every remarkable brand. A formula that sparks the growth of passionate communities, of superfans, building a business and a reputation that will last for years to come.
In this podcast, we tap into the greatest marketing minds in the world as they share the exact tactics and strategies used to build the world's greatest brands. Dropping actionable insights every brand builder can apply.
My name is Paul Archer and I'm a specialist in Brand Advocacy and word-of-mouth. Having consulted for hundreds of brands on a topic co hosting with me is the wonderful Verity Hurd, expert on the bleeding edge of social media.
It's time to learn and build Brand Advocacy.
Paul Archer [00:01:24]:
Now, I've given you a very, very quick intro of your names and your job titles, but I'd love to hear it from you. What's your name? Where'd you come from?
Cathriona Nolan [00:01:33]:
Hi everyone, I'm Cathriona. Everyone calls me Kat because they get confused by how to pronounce my name. So I'm Kat. Nice to, nice to see you all. So I've actually just come back to the UK, but I've spent the last seven years building POMELO Fashion, which is one of the leading female fashion brands, Omnichannel fashion brands in Southeast Asia, based out of Thailand and covering the entire region. Yeah, very social led brand built on influencers and we're super heavy as a lot of other brands are within Asia, obviously on social commerce. And I'm actually really excited to see the trends and what's kind of just starting to emerge here back in the UK. Excited to be here.
Yoann Chipotel [00:02:14]:
So my name is Yoann. Remember one rule, not selling. So I'm unfortunately part of the sales organization, but I'm gentle. I have a background in content marketing, a lot of social media and I'm representing Emplifi. What we do is helping brands like yours, name like HM Nike, to get that content from their community and leverage it into the commerce website and, yeah, influence more sales.
Paul Archer [00:02:47]:
I was really excited about this panel because I think we've got like two sides. You've got quite a broad approach Which Yoann's bringing. And I think we've always looked to sort of Southeast Asia and Asia generally for social commerce has been the big trend. And I think one of the things that's really shifted in terms of perspectives over the past 12 months is everyone's like, okay, cool, it's huge in Asia with. Particularly in China, but that will never happen here. No one's ever going to do live shopping. And we just had four people. We just found out a dude who sold a car, who bought a car with his.
With his, with his commission payments for it, Having created his TikTok account the date before. So the world has changed and. Or maybe the west is caught up to the East. Do you want to give us a little bit of a. I mean, you were there for seven years. Like, how is, how is that, how did that evolve in that time? Was it like social commerce? Was it baked in from day one or when did it start to surface in Asia and what do you sort of see is about to happen here in Europe?
Cathriona Nolan [00:03:48]:
Yeah. So obviously social commerce is such a buzzword right now. And I think a lot of people automatically jump straight to the live selling. And yes, there some crazy, wacky, unbelievable things, videos you've probably seen, like coming out of China and how people are. People are selling things. Believe it or not, it works. And we're fashion brands. We didn't go quite, quite that far.
But actually for us, before there was even. It was even coined a term even, you know, for us, social commerce is really just being about. About being able to interact with the consumer in a different way and like connect, like, be where she is. Like, that's the, you know, Omnichannel is not just about like having a website or an app and having some stores. It's really about wherever she is and wherever she's, you know, consuming content, how do we make it easier for her to shop. So, you know, I'm even going back kind of like the last 10 years. Probably the very start of social commerce for us was through an app called Line. I'm not sure if any of you guys know it.
It's a messaging app. Very, very, very hugely popular in Asia, in Southeast Asia and Japan. And this is where consumers would basically like how you would WhatsApp. A friend would reach out to us, reach out to our customer care and be asking about products. And that kind of activity and that kind of interaction is the norm also, like selling via Instagram and obviously like there is no, there's no in app checkout within Instagram, but like people DMing us on wanting to buy things on Instagram was something that was very real. You know, again, I'm going back kind of like kind of 10 years. So it very much started there. So we knew that there was a need to interact with customers in that way.
We were also a brand that was very much built on trends, built on working with influencers. We were actually live streaming going back as early as 2019 because what you actually saw in Asia was all the marketplaces were going live where you'd have your Amazon, where you have your brand shop. The biggest ones, Lazada and Shopee were actually integrated and had a fully integrated live stream process where you then could discover the product through kind of live videos ever before like TikTok shop or anything like that came out. So then obviously when TikTok shop came to be a thing, I always like to be first. I want to try something first. Whether it works or not, I don't know. Let's see, let's try it out. And we were one of the first fashion brands within Southeast Asia to, to launch our, our TikTok shop.
And a lot of people said you won't do it, you can't sell fashion, it's too difficult, it's not an impulse purchase. And the top selling products at the time were snacks and phone cases and the ASP was about 40 baht, like 1 pound, 1 pound 20. And we're coming along with like $25 ASP items and they were saying like it'll never work and the platform isn't mature enough and people don't return through it. Still our return rates are very, very, very low through TikTok which is fantastic compared to the rest of our e commerce business. But yeah, we started, it, took off and it has been one of our actually our most profitable sales channel at the moment.
Paul Archer [00:07:10]:
How much, what percentage do you reckon of the revenue comes through social commerce.
Cathriona Nolan [00:07:15]:
Or related direct social commerce? For us it's still actually like quite low percentage wise. We do have like a rather big retail network as well, but that's also because we've only just integrated. So we ran for like a very long time purely on manually uploading products. We were manually doing purchase orders, ring fencing, stock, packing the orders from our office. We were not able to do that for too long. We then had to get it into our integration pipeline. But we unfortunately are not integrated with any third party software so we had to do it all in house and it just took some time. So it's still like in the low percentage Wise.
But now that integration has happened, I expect to just see that that's just opened up our entire product catalog for us to sell and for our affiliates to work with as well. So it's. I can see it. It will surpass for sure our own ecom, I'm pretty sure.
Paul Archer [00:08:17]:
Wow, okay. That's huge. The currency that makes social commerce happen is content. How comfortable are you as a brand using your customers content? Like how much of it do you think is utilized? And then actually how do you use it? Do you using your ads? Are you boosting it? Are you using it on your product display pages? How does that work for you?
Cathriona Nolan [00:08:38]:
I was that marketer that was like, hold up, you know, can we really like lose control? What about the guidelines? Is she cute enough? Is she trendy enough? Is she an IT girl, blah blah, blah, blah. I was hands up, I will admit I was her. Luckily my mind was changed very, very fast for me, I think, look, it really all comes back down to like who you are as a brand. And I always remember this quote from the ex Nike CMO Greg Hoffman, where he talks about, he talks about your brand guidelines being like the picture frame. The stronger your guidelines, the brighter the picture inside will shine. I think that, and that was about design systems, etc. But I think that in terms of your overall brand vision, what do you stand for? What are your core values? Why should she, he, they, whoever, like shop? Why, why should they shop with you and why should they be part of your community? And I think if that's very clear for everyone across your organization, no matter what size your business is, then you know your customers will buy into it. Your briefs to your influencers are better.
The kind of creators that you choose, how you work with your third parties and your agencies is so much, is so much stronger. And therefore then I think the content that you actually get from your UGC will be better. So I think we went through that time, we went through a time where we're going through extreme growth and we did lose sight a little bit of what our community is. And how are we showing up for her? We're a female fashion brand. How are we showing up for her and why do we want that takeaway to be?
So once we went back and redesigned that, it was a total game changer in terms of the creators that we worked with, the kols that we reached out to, the celebrities that we worked with, and then in terms of how we use the content, we use it across all our social platforms and we've just implemented A style gallery where we ask customers to rate and review the product and then upload a photo of themselves and they get loyalty points through our loyalty program.
So kind of going back into that whole brand ecosystem and we actually went through a bit of an argument internally about whether we should gatekeep those reviews and gatekeep the content that, that we are going to be showcasing on our PDPs on our apps. And yeah, we do have a little bit of a review just, you know, for very like, specific, specific things. But I'm a firm believer in like it, it's authentic, so it should be there anyway.
If somebody, if an item doesn't fit someone because they're a certain shape and it's not for them, somebody else can learn from that and then, you know, like that. Also, I think if somebody doesn't buy that item right now, they will probably be more likely to buy something from you in the future because they can see that trust, they've got that trust in you. They can see that you're being authentic and they tend to look at the reviews and they look at the images and then it kind of goes from there. And that's why I think live streaming, live selling, live streaming has been so, so popular is it's that one on one interaction. It's like the same as walking into a store and being like, hey, do you have this in my size? How do you wear this? What is this made from? But actually you get to do it live, from your phone, from your bed, wherever you are. And I think that is really helping. That content, whether it's from an affiliate or from us directly, I think is really, really helping to build that trust in our brand for consumers.
Paul Archer [00:12:22]:
Hey, it's me again. This podcast is sponsored by Duel, which is my company, actually. Duel is the leading Brand Advocacy platform used by the top retail consumer brands, including Unilever, Charlotte Tilbury, Elemis Loop, and about 50 more to manage, measure and scale their Advocacy member, affiliate, creator and brand ambassador operations. The platform offers unparalleled scale for complex brands by automating nine out of ten of the standard Advocacy management activities and allowing them to focus on arming their Advocates with the right tools to tell the brand story and drive Social Commerce, they can grow faster for less.
We only work with 15% or so of the brands we speak to, but we try and add value in many other ways, this podcast being one of them. So if you are a brand that's interested in this, maybe a large consumer retail brand, ideally you're doing $20-$30 million as a minimum, and you're pretty advanced on social and you need to know what the next stage is, then please get in touch. Email me at paul@duel.tech, that is Paul @ D, U, E, L Dot T, E, C, H or Google Duel dot Tech.
Paul Archer [00:13:27]:
Nice. The last Social Commerce summit we did, we had Laura Mallows on stage talking about how she grew mallow's beauty through TikTok Live. And actually it reframed it for me it was like this isn't a channel, this is another retail channel. So it's the same experience that you would have. You go into a store and you talk to a store associate who's advising you and being that trusted expert that you. That's the reason why people go into into stores. But actually it's on a digital version of that and actually that frame things quite differently. And so for me I thought that was quite a nice idea from there.
And I love Greg's amazing. He's accepted my LinkedIn request but won't respond to my messages. Trying to get on the pod.
Yoann, we talked about ugc. We're opening the gates, we're telling all VP of brands are wrong, largely wrong. What are the pitfalls with ugc? Like you're working across a lot of brands, like how can it go wrong and where is that sort of line to make sure you can kind of control it.
Yoann Chipotel [00:14:30]:
So I think a lot of people mentioned like not having strong brand guidelines should be one of them. We've seen examples. So I see like everybody's on their phone. So you could go to Nike website and see are they trying to leverage that community, that style but also give subtle ideas about how to produce that content or to create or to share and also tell people that you want to receive content. I think there's like a kind of a unilateral view from brands. It's like okay, we tell you what we want, we tell you everything. But once the community starts talking and using your product in different ways, whether you like it or not, I think you should capitalize on that. And you know, you mentioned the bad reviews for example.
Cathriona, we working with one of the largest retailers. So like people in E Com, you are in ecom, that's going to talk to you. Even showing bad reviews can help because as you said, it's the trust is the trust. It's informing people when they reach that PDP page to add to cart and to buy and inform everything and reduce also the returns so we have one big retailer. It's like 20% less returns based on people saying like, it doesn't fit me, you know, because that's also the beauty of. Obviously when we talk about ugc, we think about like content, so visual content. But that could be reviews. Right.
What's the way I wear my sneakers is not the way you wear your sneakers. Right. The way I wear my shirts, it comes like from a diverse pool of lovely species of human being. So it's always interesting. And when it comes to beauty, same thing like skin colors, et cetera. It's really good to have people that look like us tell us what the product does.
Paul Archer [00:16:28]:
And nice trainers as well. Very suitable for that.
Cathriona Nolan [00:16:31]:
I also looked down when he said that.
Paul Archer [00:16:32]:
Yeah, very well drawn attention to them. I love that one. This is the outcome of why you have UGC insight. Anonymous Key keeps popping back up on mom's iPad again. But like was asking how do you leverage your community online? If not all your community is familiar with social tools, like, particularly if your audience is a little bit older, which I think is the case. So we had a whole bunch of Gen Z brands here and it's easy if you represent, but this gets progressively hard with different generations. Is it the same? Can you still do it? And if so, how do you make sure that happens?
Yoann Chipotel [00:17:06]:
Yeah, so you have to get the content through other channels, like emails. Right. So when you think about your community, the simple start is like, who's buying from you? We all receive emails that our package is being sent, that our items are being delivered. So you have that community already. And you can also make sure that these people are buying multiple stuff. I think somebody mentioned earlier asking for pictures. I think that was you actually pictures review straight from that email. So you can also collect this content straight from email.
Right. What we are trying to do as vendors or tech providers is to make it seamless for you. There's nothing else that we do. Right. It's just really seamless for you to communicate with your community and for the community to communicate with you via content.
Paul Archer [00:17:57]:
It seems that there's an insatiable demand from brands at the moment for high quality authentic ugc, which actually by its nature is a bit of an oxymoron. And so it's like, oh yeah, we want ugc, but it also needs to be really good. So that there's. That's a pretty limited Venn diagram you're trying to work for. If we look at POMELO, like you guys were very successful, like using creators, is it The POMELO Girls campaign that you had, can you tell us about that as a campaign, how it worked in Southeast Asia? And then actually, what do you, what do you see translating into. Into Europe and the U.S. yeah.
Cathriona Nolan [00:18:31]:
I mean, the hashtag pomelogirls has been around for almost since we, since we started. And it really just, it started not out of any commercial angle. It started just as having a way for us to see everyone who's posting our clothing, who's buying our clothing, for us to have a place where we could review all that content, learn from it, see how they're styling, et cetera. But then what we realized afterwards is actually that is a great captive audience and a great community. That we built it almost like more as kind of a tactical internal thing and less about like we kind of were building the community before we realized we were building the community. But then, you know, we. Then it started to be everything around, like, how do we please our POMELO Girls? How do we unite our POMELO Girls? How do we include our POMELO Girls in everything that we do? And something that we've started doing over the last few years. As I said, we've, you know, been.
Our brand was built basically by working with, you know, at the time, Instagram, Instagram influencers. But what we did find is it was actually like the community almost became like a little bit too exclusive where like as a consumer you could post hashtag pomelogirls on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, wherever you wanted to do it. But we were only rewarding actual, you know, paid creators, your like higher tier influencers and things. So what we started to do to really widen that community and to give back to that community was really starting to involve them, especially our like high tier VIP customers, starting to involve them in PR events, starting to involve them in PR gifting. Similar to what the guys were saying earlier, like take that community and invite them in, you know, the people who are actively posting that we're not actually, you know, paying to do it or we're not asking them for the, for the content, bringing them in and getting feedback on our clothing, our designs, our mood boards, having them be part of that whole influencer experience, even though they're maybe just your kind of regular customers.
Paul Archer [00:20:46]:
Very much sort of matches up with that pyramid that was shown at the beginning. Now when 25% of those people are creators, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they've got millions of followers or even thousands of followers for that. Like the person who started their TikTok yesterday and bought a Merc afterwards. There's examples of that, like you can't put anyone down because of their audience size. It doesn't mean that their content isn't going to be super valuable to you as a brand.
Cathriona Nolan [00:21:10]:
That's the beauty of TikTok.
Paul Archer [00:21:12]:
Yeah, and the other platforms as well.
Cathriona Nolan [00:21:13]:
Right, and the other platforms. But I think TikTok definitely does kind of democratize the whole content creation piece maybe a little bit more than say, you know, we would have been very heavy on Instagram. A little bit more. So then there's.
Paul Archer [00:21:27]:
Yeah, that does make sense. And then there's all the other ones. You've got Twitch, you've got everything which is a little bit rough around the edges and that authenticity can cut through. And it's a bit more native to that as an environment where Instagram's a bit more polished, isn't it? So.
Okay, cool.
So final question for each of you. What is it that you see brands get wrong when it comes to building Brand Advocacy?
Cathriona Nolan [00:21:47]:
For me, I think it's, I always say two things when I'm kind of, when I'm working with my team. It's either too much chasing the trend, chasing the cool, or too much chasing the sale. I think it's really obvious when brands are working with influencers or creators that don't buy into the brand. We had this a lot, especially with the kind of more celebrity scene where yes, you can pay a lot of money and they've got millions and millions of followers. You can get them to post something for you, but it's just not authentic because the day before they're posting about a sausage brand, the next day they're posting about a car, the next day they're posting about something else. It's just like, doesn't appear like, you know, a bona fide follower of our brand. And yeah, you might get some, like your reach might look great or your EMV might look amazing in that moment. But actually as a brand, what are we really getting from it? I don't think it's creating any kind of long lasting moment or kind of any long lasting emotion for the, for the community.
And then also what I see with some brands is, yeah, TikTok is great. And as we were talking about earlier, trends come and go and trends can make or break you, but you have to go after the trends that are right for you and again, right for you as a brand. I've seen some kind of like questionable interpretations of demure mindful. For example, where I'M just like, this doesn't make sense for you and your brand. Or else maybe you're just doing it wrong, I don't know. But yeah, I think there's those two things you have to be true to. Like going back to what I said at the beginning, you have to be true to who you are as a brand and what you offer and what your community is about. And then the rest will follow.
Paul Archer [00:23:38]:
Nice, Yoann, to close this off.
Yoann Chipotel [00:23:40]:
Yeah, I would say the same. So brands have to be true to themselves and also understanding, like the power that their community have. At the end of the day, this is the most important person or the person that buy from you, they can send, set the trends, et cetera, on the trends. Because obviously I'm on the vendor side. There's always like the question of jumping into new channels. So Fred, Snapchat, back In the days, TikTok and I've always asked brand, when I was in that capacity, why do you want to go there? Right? It's like, it's the why. Sometimes we just want to, I would say, feel the content void and creating just to create. And you lose that authenticity, which is a word that we said 100 times today.
But you do lose it. And people feel it, we feel it. We like our personal experience. Like ads don't reach me. I don't think they reach anyone if you don't have that emotion and that connection to it. I think for the generation of my daughter, which is too young to have four net, I think she will cut through the bs, basically. And the value that you're adding to the brand and to your community is really to respect who you are, your core value, and also understanding that your community matters.
Paul Archer [00:25:08]:
Nice. And the more we say authentic, the more authentic we are.
Yoann Chipotel [00:25:12]:
Exactly.
Paul Archer [00:25:15]:
Thank you very much. Like Cat and you. And that's; that's fascinating.
Paul Archer [00:25:26]:
That was another episode of Building Brand Advocacy, the world's top brand building podcast. To find out more about Building Brand Advocacy and how this podcast is part of a bigger plan for our brand building cookbook, then make sure to search for Building Brand Advocacy in Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or anywhere else that podcasts are fine. And make sure that you click subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes. Thanks to Duel for sponsoring. To find out more, go to www.duel.tech. That's D U E L dot T E C H and on behalf of the team here at Building Brand Advocacy, thanks for listening.
%20Cat%20%26%20Yoann%20Banner.png)
.png?width=333&name=Spotify%20Circle%20Logo%20(final).png)
.png?width=333&name=YouTube%20Circle%20Logo%20(1).png)
%20(1)%20(1).png?width=333&name=YouTube%20Circle%20Logo%20(1)%20(1)%20(1).png)
