I'm here at the Cannes creativity festival, and I'm
accompanied by Dinesh. Dinesh, thanks so much for joining us
today. Can you tell us a little bit more about your role at the
Zalando Marketing Services? Sure.
I lead the tech team at Zalando Marketing Services, and we
enable brands to connect with consumers, to inspire them with
storytelling experiences and build loyalty.
What do we know from the fashion industry is that the customer
journeys have complexified a lot. So there are a lot of touch
points. Can you tell us a little bit how you stitch it together?
Sure.
When we when we talk to our consumers, we see
consumers are looking for inspiration in their shopping
journey. So
what we do is we use data and insights about how consumers
interact on Zalando.
To be able to expand, you build on that and say, OK, who are the
users brands can reach?
And that can mean through the various social media channels
and one, brands can tell their stories themselves, but also we
enable who which influences brands can actually engage with
so that they can actually make their stories more authentic and
so they can authenticate their brands as well. And one build
their brand awareness in those social media channels, but not
in there, but actually drive the customers back into Zalando to
re-engage them and to drive
purchase as well. And again, that's a loop of you learn
insights, you do it. And when brands do this well,
we've actually seen brands who achieved what we call as
cultural relevance,
where when they do achieve cultural relevance, where the
right kind of users purchase,
they've achieved price leadership. What this means is
they break through the glass ceiling where they are no longer
compared with their peers on price.
You're one of the most advanced fashion players in the industry.
You're also a pure player. You are sitting on a lot of data, a
lot of insights. How do you curate those data to make them
actionable for the brands?
It's a good question because our brands are asking the same
question on, hey, how am I performing on the platform?
And I'm investing into marketing, how does it
contribute to my growth of the brand? And you know, we're
analyzing all this data and we built a product called the
customer journey compass.
The customer journey compass does three things. One, it
provides data on how many customers are engaging or aware
of the brand or engaging with the brand and who have actually
purchased
along with the audience penetration of other brands
overall in the platform as well as in the categories.
Now two, it also helps compare against their peers. How, how
does that, the penetration and their scores, compare with their
peers and what doing.
And third,
in addition to doing that, it gives specific audience
segments, which says, OK, now if you want to increase engagement
or you want to increase purchase or you want to increase
awareness,
Based on the goal, the audience that will most likely engage and
it will drive the highest value for the brand. And we give that
to the brand as well. So these are three things that you know,
the customer journey compass provides and we've seen brands
really engaging with this and it changes our approach from, or
our whole marketing. It puts the customer the front and center of
marketing and we call it customer centric marketing,
Super exciting. Dinesh, you've been in the AdTech industry for
very many years. Can you tell us, what do you think AI has
changed and what are you using at the moment at Zalando in
terms of AI?
Now, we really believe AI is going to change the marketing
landscape. It's already doing and we know it is already making
the creative production a lot more efficient. And we've seen a
lot of examples here today at Cannes.
And where we see in the whole marketing journey, because
brands have a lot of engaging content.
We are visualizing an experience where brands bring their
content,
And our platform is able to create unique ad experiences at
scale
Based on the users or how they would engage. So earlier it used
to take a long time for these brands to create one creative.
Now at scale, you're saying, OK, we can create 10 different
creatives. Because we know audiences engage with different
kinds of creatives, they can actually create it.
And then, we will build it on top of our personalization
stack, where we already match the right content to the right
users thereby driving a lot more engagement. So we see marketing
our investments into marketing driving a lot more efficiency.
Thanks so much Dinesh for joining us today.
Thank you. Pleasure.