Organizing Around E-commerce

In late October, market research company eMarketer estimated that U.S. e-commerce sales would reach $305.7 billion in 2014, an increase of nearly 16% from the year before, and account for 6.5% of all U.S. sales. Mobile commerce contributed to the rise as it is expected to exceed $58 billion in sales this year, a nearly 40% jump from 2013, according to the research firm.E-commerce is hot, and with increasing conversations around omnichannel marketing, Shopper Marketing asked digital brand marketers about how their organizations aligned around e-commerce. The marketers represented such categories as kitchenware, pasta, video games, writing products and commercial products. Alignment varies from full-on integration within sales and marketing to the unveiling of a veritable e-commerce central command center.The goal of e-commerce is pretty clear-cut, however – to move product. So whether working with Amazon.com or Walmart.com, there is little difference from a marketing perspective, says Amy Andrews, associate director of shopper marketing and insights at Ubisoft. “We partner with all of our retailers to develop omnichannel programs to influence the right shopper at the right time with the right message,” she says.How brands organize around reaching Amazon.com vs. Walmart.com (and its physical stores) is trickier. According to Jeremy Liebowitz, vice president, global e-commerce at Newell Rubbermaid, e-commerce can’t just be an add-on to somebody’s role. Liebowitz has been tapped to lead the charge of e-commerce for Newell Rubbermaid and open a new e-commerce hub in New York City, in effect more than doubling the manufacturer’s resources toward e-commerce. The hub will work with satellite offices in High Point, North Carolina; the brand’s headquarters in Atlanta; and globally in Tokyo and London.Liebowitz, Andrews, Barilla America’s Erin Miller and World Kitchen’s Andy Wang recently participated in our virtual roundtable discussion.Let’s start with Newell Rubbermaid’s hub; describe it, please.Liebowitz: We open in early 2015, starting with about 25 or so people and will expand as needed. The capabilities will include strategy (an understanding of strategy, channel growth and shopper marketing within the e-commerce space) and analytics (understanding the analytics that drive how people shop and the actual sales analytics that come from retail partners and our own spaces).How is the hub designed? Do you have teams that work on specific retailers?Liebowitz: It’s interesting; we looked at so many ways to structure the teams. I needed to really understand both our retailers and our different brands and what was going to be our best effort at driving collaboration and growth. What we determined to be the best way was to organize around our strategic business segments. So, for example, I’ll have a writing team that encompasses all the writing brands in fine writing and creative expression and everything else. They will understand how to best drive an entire category of writing like markers or fine writing in e-commerce, and we’ll then use that learning and understanding to collaborate with each of the retailers where we sell those types of products.Then, within Newell Rubbermaid, we have specific retail partnerships – we have a Walmart team, a Target team, just like any other big company – and we will collaborate with them to drive total growth.And where does e-commerce fit within Ubisoft’s, Barilla’s and World Kitchen’s organizational structures?Andrews (Ubisoft): E-commerce is part of our broader retail team. It is not a separate group but rather integrated into our current sales and marketing structure.Miller (Barilla): We do not sell directly to consumer, so for us, e-commerce describes the grocery e-retail sales channel and therefore e-commerce falls into sales, working very closely with digital marketing, supply chain, brand and shopper marketing.Wang (World Kitchen): E-commerce is highly integrated within our organization. We have two teams: interactive marketing and e-commerce retail sales. Both fall under marketing and sales groups and serve a distinct role in the organization.How big is your e-commerce group and what are its functions?Miller (Barilla): In the U.S., we currently have three full-time e-commerce positions, two sales and one category manager. We have shared resources with shopper marketing, customer logistics, digital marketing and shopper insights.Andrews (Ubisoft): Because e-commerce is integrated into our retailer team, it shares the same functions from sales to marketing to operations. We also have a shopper insights team that focuses on how shoppers research, browse and buy across all channels.Wang (World Kitchen): We have two areas of focus: digital marketing and retailer sales. Our marketing group focuses on the brand activation activities, Web properties and social strategies. Our e-com retailer sales group primarily manages the pure-play retailer channels and support.Does Amazon.com get dedicated resources, or any other pure-play online e-tailers?Wang (World Kitchen): Our retailer e-com team focuses on a number of key retailers, with Amazon being an important part of that strategy.Andrews (Ubisoft): Amazon has dedicated resources in sales, marketing and analytics – similar to our other top brick-and-mortar retailers. We’ve recently added a digital shopper marketing function that drives our strategy across all of our online and mobile retailer websites.Liebowitz (Newell Rubbermaid): We have an existing Amazon team, and Amazon does work and operate differently because they only have the one channel that they’re working with, so that does make the nuances a bit different. We’re looking for ways to expand further into e-tailer, pure-play spaces as well. Those dedicated teams will work collaboratively with the hub.Wang (World Kitchen): There are certain advantages to working with retailers that have both in-store and online distribution; for example, being able to test online is an advantage for those customers and allows for some flexibility in product placement.With which retailers are you executing e-commerce programs and what exactly are you doing to drive shoppers to the island of e-com?Wang (World Kitchen): I prefer not to name them, but we work with all of the major retailers as our brands have strong distribution nationwide.Miller (Barilla): We support most of the more established e-com partners. Our focus is to increase the meal occasions with pasta so we do programs around recipes and dinner occasions. As a company, we also have many sponsorships with charities to stop hunger, and we will tie in with our retail partners there as well.Liebowitz (Newell Rubbermaid): Over the past year, we started with the lowest hanging fruit, which is a cleanup of our brands and products that are currently online today. It’s making sure that wherever a consumer might find one of our brands within a retail partner that we are putting forth the best product pages, making sure that the product is searchable, that we have good images, and that we have video where needed. There was no point in putting together a big mar-com program to drive a consumer to a product page. If the product page is suboptimal, they won’t convert anyway.Andrews (Ubisoft): We execute e-commerce marketing programs with all of our top retailers, including Amazon, GameStop, Walmart, Target and Best Buy.Liebowitz: Interestingly, each retailer space is going to be a little different because the shopper is going to be a little different in each space. It’s early, but we have seen some key wins around search. We have been able to improve our search results on retailer pages to improve placement of our products. And then with photography, we started a project to create better images of our products for our retailers and have found better interaction with those images that we pushed out so far.Final question: How much of your digital marketing is designed to drive direct online sales, indirect offline sales or both simultaneously?Wang (World Kitchen): All of the above. Our digital marketing group focuses on winning that Zero Moment of Truth. Whether we need to reach the mobile shopper in-aisle or drive online retailer sales, we focus on engaging our consumer wherever they might be. We strive to provide all of the necessary marketing support for retailers and work closely to meet their needs.Liebowitz (Newell Rubbermaid): Sometimes that’s a matter of the retailer’s dot-com space and what it is trying to push, but my goal in e-commerce is to get shoppers to convert at that point of inspiration. Now, if their inspiration was going to the retailer’s dot-com site, they loved our product and decided to purchase the product in-store, that’s great. I’ll know that I have done my job.Miller (Barilla): Our website has a “buy now” functionality for all items, and it takes the shopper to e-tailers who carry that item. Any brick-and-mortar program that has a digital component will also link to the e-tailers’ website if available.Andrews (Ubisoft): In the past year, our shopper marketing and digital marketing teams have become increasingly connected on all programs. We are working together to integrate our shopper and digital programs into a single experience for the shopper. We’ve seen success with this approach, driving both in-store and online sales.

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