Industry Voices: How Retailers Align Their Employees Around Digital Transformation Strategies

Article by Rimma Kats | Oct 16, 2019

As retailers evolve their marketing processes to align with digital transformation efforts, many have undergone team restructurings and even developed new roles.

We recently sat down with retailers, including Knix, Natori and Enjoy Life Foods, to discuss their current marketing efforts and how they define digital transformation. Previously, we dug into the marketing channels they rely on most, challenges they face with measurement and whether they’ve acquired enough first-party data. In our final “Industry Voices: A Focus on Retail” video, we look at how digital transformation has changed the way retail employees are collaborating and working together.

“One of the important things we've started to realize is that creative execution is not just this beautiful creative process on its own,” said Danielle Brown, CMO at Knix. “Marketers tend to get stuck in this trap of ‘I have my performance marketing, and I have my creative.’ ... I'm going to take my creative, and I'm going to adapt it into my performance marketing and see how I can make it work. We've recently made a hire, a creative designer, who sits directly on our performance marketing team. She's now responsible for building and creating specifically performance-marketing ads.”

“Collaboration is so important when it comes to operating a business, but I think the idea of making people sit in a room in the same location, that is very much yesterday's process," said Joel Warady, general manager of chief sales and marketing officer at Enjoy Life Foods, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mondelez. "Today, we use a lot of things like video conferencing and other types of video connections that allow us to have this collaboration between employees.

“Our production facility is located outside of Louisville, Kentucky, and our offices are here in Chicago, and then we have sales people that are located throughout the country, but one of the things that we made certain of is that when we move toward this work from everywhere, or anywhere, concept is that everyone has to connect via video. We don't just allow conference calls because we do think, for that type of collaboration, the ability to have whiteboard sharing and sharing files is so important. As we look to transform digitally, it's more than just sharing of information, it's, 'How do we connect better with each another?'”