Episode 9: Optimizing Content Syndication - Effectively Connecting Brands and Retailers

Transcription

1 Episode 9: Optimizing Content Syndication - Effectively Connecting Brands and Retailers profitero.com/the-profitero-podcast Phil Chang Chief Sherpa, Hubba Keith Anderson VP of Strategy and Insights, Profitero Well hello, and welcome to another episode of The Profitero Podcast, where we break down major industry developments and interview industry experts and operators about strategies and tactics for driving performance in the online channel. I'm Keith Anderson, VP Strategy and Insight. Today, I'm really excited to welcome Phil Chang, Chief Sherpa for Hubba, which is a Toronto-based product content, management and syndication platform. I know we've been spending a ton of time on product content on some of our recent episodes. I'm sure you'll agree it is one of the most complex and challenging areas in the industry. I think Phil personally brings some really interesting prior experience from a half dozen or more CPG companies themselves. The way Hubba is approaching the problem is pretty distinct. We thought that it would be interesting and helpful to hear from another voice in the industry. That said, we're really interested in all of your feedback on topics and guests that you are interested in hearing from. We've already heard from a lot of folks with input and feedback for where to go next. Please do continue to share your perspective. You can reach us at insights@profitero.com. If you've been enjoying the podcast, tell a friend, leave a review, or at least subscribe on itunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your listening. With that, let's get started with the show. Episode 9; Optimizing Content Syndication - Effectively Connecting Brands and Retailers 1

2 Well, I'm very excited to welcome Phil Chang, VP of Customer Success and Chief Sherpa of Hubba. Phil, welcome to the podcast. Great. Thanks, Keith. Great to be here. Well good to have you, Phil. We often start just by getting to know the guest a bit. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what brought you to Hubba? Sure. Yeah, I'm the Chief Sherpa here at Hubba. I'm very customer-focused. My background spans a whole bunch of CPG companies and a whole bunch of jobs. I've run the gambit. Every time someone at Hubba introduces me, I think they add another 10 years to my life. When other Hubbans introduce me, you'll think I'm 100 years old, but I'm really not. I started my career at Unilever and I've spent time at Revlon and Kimberly-Clark and then the Danone Company along the way, as well as Pfizer, and then I spent a good chunk of time at J&J, and then finally, a stop at Target before coming here to Hubba. I've done everything from sales and marketing to trade marketing, all the way through the gambit. I'm here at Hubba. I met Ben, our CEO, when I was at Target. As a sales and marketer, I've always felt that content, whether it be structured content or marketing content, was always a little crazy to compile and to be able to share with the retailer. Then I really felt that problem when we were at Target. When I met Ben, I was super excited that at the heart of getting content write in, getting materials back and forth from vendor to retailer, that at the heart of it was... The consumer suffers, because they can't search for products properly. It really got me excited. Talked to Ben and worked it out, and got here. We're growing like crazy now. It's really fun to be here. For those that may not be familiar, non-hubbans, to borrow your term, can you just give us a little overview and background on what Hubba is and what Hubba does? Sure. Yeah. At the heart of Hubba, we connect brands and retailers. We help brands get all of their information into Hubba, and that would be anything from an image to long and short descriptions, UPC codes, anything that you struggle to communicate to a retailer or to keep a retailer information sync properly, we would help you get that information out to a retailer and connect you to the retailers, so you've got one less hurdle to do. Then we also help retailers find new brands. Retailers come to Hubba to discover new brands and figure out what should be in their... Kind of 20 percent of delight the customer assortments. Got it. Okay. To listeners of this podcast, the challenges associated with product content I think should be pretty familiar by now. We've had other guests and spoken about some of the leading practices for developing product content and Episode 9 profitero.com/the-profitero-podcast 2

3 storing product content internally as well as on platforms like Hubba. Then to your point, syndicating it out to the different retailers. Do you mind just going into a little bit of detail about where Hubba fits in that whole process, and then with each player in the value chain, retailers and brands, how do they engage with Hubba, practically speaking and commercially? In other words, are both parties potential Hubba customers? Is it free for one side of the marketplace and premium service for the other? Just bring all that to life, please. Sure. Yeah, no problem. Right at the heart of it, Hubba is free. We are free for brands and retailers. We do have a monetary set up, so if you were a big brand and you had many brand managers, whether it be a... Or an ABM and a brand manager, associate brand manager, that had to assemble content, then we would help you get a subscription per month fee. For most brands though, it is free. The reason we do that is we want brands to come here, because brands want to go where retailers are, and retailers want to go where brands are. This creates the perfect storm for folks to come in here, for brands to come in here, share their information, and then be able to share that with the retailer. We target both brands and retailers. We're now growing into influencers. We have influencers who come in here and look to talk to brands or be able to share brand content, as well. We do all of that. If I take a step further down and into the value that Hubba creates for each of the different folks in the chain... If you think about a brand, a brand gets a lot of value into keeping everything in one place. If you think of the world that you live in now, you've probably got content in one place, content being things like long description, short description, all those things that would make you... That makes an e-retailer crazy or makes you crazy that you don't see on an e-retailer site. You probably keep in one place. You probably keep structured data somewhere else, in a legacy system, like an SAP or something like that. That would be things like dimensions and weights and shipping configs and all that kind of stuff. Then the last one you probably keep in another separate place is images. High-res, low-res, lifestyle shots, all that kind of stuff. What Hubba does is it brings it all together. Your value prop is really, one, you have the ability to then share the information within the organization. Everybody keeps one source of truth, we would call it. Then you also have the ability then to share that with a retailer, so that a retailer now has everything in one place, as well. Now if you're a retailer, the other side of that is you do... Your first pass, when you get a new product listed, usually the data is pretty pristine. You've got a pretty good set of information to either be able to ship, display on your website, that sort of thing. As soon as someone makes a change to that though, bad things start to happen. Then you wind up chasing vendors back and forth for the smallest details, whether it be dimensions, case packs, descriptions, all that kind of stuff. This allows you to go into Hubba and be able to connect with a brand and then be able to see everything they have. Whether it be something simple that, as a Episode 9 profitero.com/the-profitero-podcast 3

4 buyer, you know should take you 30 seconds, but is really four conversations around finding a lifestyle image. You can now go into Hubba and just pick the image you want. You can now go in and confirm a case pack quantity or UPC code and be done with it and move on with your day. You've set up some of the challenges around where that information lives. What do you observe about who is actually responsible for managing and centralizing all this content? Or is that actually one of the big challenges, even if you've got some of the right tools in place? Yeah. It's definitely a challenge. Every organization does it differently. I think part of the problem is some of the topics that, Keith, you've covered before, it's just the challenge of moving to an omnichannel retailer or someone that is moving into e-com from just bricks and mortar. You used to be able to set up... Organizations seem to be set up so that logistics are segregated in one section, and then you've got your marketing stuff set up in another section. Then you've got images set up somewhere else. That works okay for bricks and mortar. When you get to e-com where you really need to have the full assortment available in one place, it's just not there. Folks are piece mailing it, for sure. The most embarrassing thing I think for companies is when we go and talk to them, and then you find out that the marketing folks are doing descriptions or long descriptions or rich text descriptions, and then they get into an internal conversation in front of you, where you realize that about eight people are working on all the same things, but they just don't have the right repository to figure out that they're all working on the same things. Yeah. We see the same thing all the time. I often describe product content as a hot potato, simply because the complexity of mapping what's already been developed and where it lives, what should be developed and where to store it, and then managing each retailer's individual specifications. They've all got preferences for how you deliver the content. I've seen shopper marketing, brand management, e-commerce, occasionally sales. Like you say, within different companies, different functions sometimes jump on the grenade, as it were, but they usually throw it back after they try to manage it for a few months. I'm always interested from other folks in the ecosystem that work with a lot of CPG companies, are there any shifts in who owns the development and syndication of product content organizationally? Because it's such a complex area. All the tools are getting better, but... Yeah.... it's not as well-defined inside most companies as other really critical work streams are. You're responsible for making sure that we're in distribution with these retailers. Yeah. Episode 9 profitero.com/the-profitero-podcast 4

5 You're responsible for the marketing campaigns and programs. Yeah. It's neat. I think the one role that I've seen emerge that seems to be very capable of doing this is someone on the e-com side who has... It's either someone like a shopper marketer who sees both sides, the sales and marketing parts of the role, or someone in e-com and capabilities. Usually an e-com capabilities person is really good at that, because I think the coordination of just the number of accounts and what they require that is quasi marketing, quasi sales type of responsibilities makes that role probably one of the most powerful ones I've seen. Yeah, makes sense. I want to jump back for just a second. You mentioned that some retailers use Hubba to discover new brands and discover new products. Tell me more about how that process works. Are they coming to Hubba and searching? What kinds of information about a product can they find there? Yeah. When we talk to retailers, we know, right? In most of the CPG categories, 80 percent of a buyer's assortment is spoken for. That's where their value comes from. That's how they make their profit. That's how they plan their buy dollars. But there's a good 20 percent, and that varies by category, but there's a good 20 percent that is really for surprising, delighting consumers and finding new products or new segments and new assortments that you can find new avenues to profit and new avenues to turn your category. What Hubba does is we make... You have a choice, as a brand. As a brand, you can keep yourself public or you can keep yourself private. The easiest example of that would be like Unilever, where they've got very set distribution channels, would keep their products private and share it with set retailers that they already do business with. For most of the world though, no brand outside of the big top Most brands will never say no to new distribution, so they make themselves public. That means that coming into Hubba, a retailer has the ability to sort by category and just see what's in Hubba, what's new. They also get a chance to see what's trending. We have folks that will like products and vote on them and comment about them. That allows a buyer to be able to track products. They have the ability to create lists in Hubba, so you can create a list. You can track trending products either privately or publicly. That allows you to be able to keep track of things that potentially could be movers that you could use in your next planogram update or your next program update. Got it. Makes a ton of sense. Switching gears a little bit, as I hinted at, we've had other guests on from around the product content ecosystem, folks that run specialized content development agencies, focusing primarily on enhanced manufacturer content, just below the fold, A plus content, to borrow Amazon's term, and other technology providers that help people store and syndicate. It's a very fragmented landscape in many ways with a lot of legacy systems already in place and a lot of brands, as you highlighted. Then a whole crop of new well- Episode 9 profitero.com/the-profitero-podcast 5

6 capitalized technology-based solutions that promise to make things more usable and easier to manage. I get the sense Hubba approaches brands a little differently than some of the other companies, in terms of how you enter those companies and how you support them. Can you talk a little bit about what's different about Hubba's approach? Yeah, definitely. The first thing to know about Hubba is that we are made up of folks that have been in the industry, that know the industry. We emphasize that value and community are two key pillars in the way Hubba does things. Value is really key. You have to be able to see value out of Hubba immediately. While most brands say that they love that, most brands don't necessarily grasp what that means right away. We keep it very low-tech. Anybody can get into Hubba. A very typical scenario is for a salesperson to come in and realize right away that this solves their immediate issues of just being able to share with a retailer. They'll take their internal price lists or... Well, without price. We always tell them to leave out price, but everything else, they have loaded into Hubba. We have all sorts of mechanisms for doing that. Match it with an image. You're really done and up and running. We can see a brand up and running in anywhere from 15 minutes to half an hour. We've seen folks take a lot longer to curate some really cool information in there, but a really functional Hub can be up and running in half an hour. We get folks that ask us as well, "Is there a template I have to fill in? Is there a form?" We always say the same thing, which is, "No, you don't. What you need to think about is what do you get asked for the most in a day?" Key count folks will know exactly what I'm talking about. I think brand folks will, as well. There's always one image, one dimension, one spec, one something that just... You get a million or a dozen calls for a day. That should be where you start. That should be the first thing you put into Hubba, because the minute you share that, those phone calls go away. They can now go into Hubba and just pull that stuff and you can get back to your day. That's the first part. That is where we get... We emphasize to folks that there really isn't a process. You don't need to build a flow chart for this. You really just need to build it and go. Then the second piece is community. We do a lot of work around helping the community. Probably the funniest thing is one of the things I'm doing right now is working with Hubba customers and helping them... Literally boutique service, where we're helping them connect with retailers of their choice. Whether they're looking for small, medium or large-sized retailers, we have... I have a conversation with them. We figure out what works for them. Then we go out and find them folks in the Hubba community who fit the description of who they want and connect them. A lot of brands have trouble with that. Almost the very first question I have is, "What does this cost? Why are you guys doing this?" The answer is always the same, which is we know the problems that are out there. We know how to solve them, and we want the community to thrive. But they're always shocked when I say there's no cost to it. Episode 9 profitero.com/the-profitero-podcast 6

7 Just so I'm crystal clear... Yeah. A lot of solutions like this are implemented after a four-month RFP. You get a committee of cross-functional leaders and users, but if I heard you, your approach is a little different. You put the service in the hands of somebody like a single account manager who can get up and running in 30 minutes and get value. Is that a fair characteristic? Yes. Yeah, absolutely. We can do it the other way, too. We do do them, so we have some global customers that we did have to do some top to top meetings with or those committees. We do very well in RFPs because we're free, which makes the RFP process a pretty cool one for us. But typically what we emphasize is [inaudible 00:20:27] you'll find we're confident you'll find utility in it. Once you find utility, we can add pieces as we go. The first thing is to find use and utility out of it. Talk a little bit more, if you don't mind, about being free. There's gotta be a revenue model. There's gotta be some pathway to sustainable economics. Yeah, yeah. Can you share anything about what that looks like? Sure. Yeah. For probably, I would say, 95 percent of our population, we're free. It really is the concept of brands want to go where retailers are, and retailers want to go where brands are. It's such a chicken and egg, and yet neither side will budge on that. Free is a really great currency. It allows brands to get into Hubba and then it allows retailers to be able to see what's here. It's a great formula for us. We've been on this for about two years now. We've got over 15,000 brands, unique brands, in here. Retailers are growing by the day. It's working. Where we start to monetize is some of those global customers that I talk about, folks like a Unilever or an Anheuser-Busch, folks like that, they come on here and they come on as free. They realize the utility of it, and then they do see the value of sharing that, even internally, and using it as an internal source of truth. When you start to collaborate, you do wind up having to pay a per user per month fee, but it's... We've been told that our full fee is less than most of the estimates that some of our folks are getting from other organizations, as well. Gotcha. Can we spend a minute on analytics? Sure. Episode 9 profitero.com/the-profitero-podcast 7

8 One of the intersections between our services and companies like yours is once a brand has this single version of the truth, sort of a trusted source for product content, and they start to syndicate it out to different retailer sites, as you know, even with the best of capabilities and intent, sometimes things aren't as expected. One of the things we do is simple auditing to compare the actual content on a retailer site versus the expected content, really to help these lean teams identify and prioritize things like missing content or inaccurate content with a focus on some of the things that we know have the most influence over position and search results or conversion. Then secondly, we increasingly benchmark the content characteristics of the products that do rank on page one for search results, or that are bestsellers at a retailer like Amazon. Right. How do you think about the importance and the role of analytics when it comes to developing and managing product content? Okay. I think analytics and content go hand in hand. Your ability now to analyze information and be able to react on things is really crucial, but it does mean that you need to have the right partners in play, so that you can get... You can have the right information at your fingertips and that you have the ability to then apply that against the right set of factors that you put out in the first place. In the old days, when you had a brand, you had to go out and pay for focus groups. You had to pay for analytics and you had to pay for... Pay a lot of money for a very limited set of factors. The opposite is true now. You can analyze anything you want, from the effect of a single description to the way your whole page looks to how you SEO to all of those things. Now the matter is really having the right partners, so that they can help you isolate on what matters the most, so that you can make... Effect is small, but yet effective changes in the way you run your brand. Makes a lot of sense. We focus naturally on product content, but I'm curious. Adjacent to product content, really in the broader set of strategies and tactics for e-commerce, from a CPG brand's perspective, what do you see as some of the biggest opportunities and some of the key challenges? A whole bunch of things come to mind right away. You'd think that companies that have been in business such a long time are quick to react, but I think one of the biggest problems is just adoption. Learning how to play in a different field. I think CPG companies in particular have been very good at learning, one, how to get their fair share of business in a bricks and mortar store, but also to be able to get more than their fair share of attention from retailers. Retailers on a similar scale are very used to getting more than their fair share of attention and knowing how to ask for things in such a way that brands can't say no. I think in the new world, understanding structure, CPG companies are struggling just to figure out how you structure your e-com business, so that you actually Episode 9 profitero.com/the-profitero-podcast 8

9 understand what you're measuring and how you move forward, and then getting a vision of what's to come is definitely a struggle, as well. This is completely unsolicited, but the plug here is that if you haven't heard some of Profitero's podcast before this, you absolutely should listen to them because they are very, very revealing in terms of the way you really should think about moving forward, so that your brand is set up for the future. I think for retailers, the other side is you really need to think about... Retailers need to realize that they're no longer the end destination for distribution. They've got to think of new ways to be able to showcase items, to be able to derive... Drive some value back to a brand as well, where a brand might be able to look at analytics or better information by going to other channels. Makes a ton of sense. Well Phil, this has been really interesting. If people want to learn more about Hubba or get in touch with you, how can they reach you? Yeah. You can head to You can sign up there for free or you can definitely reach us through that website. You can reach me. My Twitter handle You can reach me there as well, or you can reach me at pchang@hubba.com. Awesome. Phil, thanks again for joining us. Great. Thanks, Keith. It was great to be on the show. You too. We'll talk to you soon. All right. Thanks. Take care. Bye. Well, that does it for another episode of the Profitero Podcast. Really great to have somebody like Phil on, who's got such diversity in his background. He's worked at a half dozen CPG brands, rounded the bases at a retailer, and now he's at a solution provider and a pretty key part of the overall e-commerce ecosystem. We've covered a lot of product content related to angles recently, but we'd love to hear from you what you want to hear more of or less of. Reach us at insight@profitero.com. You can find me on That'll do it for this episode. Until next time, I'm Keith Anderson, VP Strategy and Insights for Profitero. We'll talk to you soon. Episode 9 profitero.com/the-profitero-podcast 9