Maximizing Competitive Intelligence

Future Commerce Podcast: eCommerce, DTC and Retail Strategy

This week we dive into competitive intelligence: what are your rivals up to, and how does it affect you as a brand leader? Josh Wilson, CEO of Particl, reveals how observing competitors and smartly leveraging that data can distinguish you from the rest. PLUS: A brand review of Popsmith, and we rehash the concept of DISloyalty. Listen now!

Biggest Month Ever

• {00:14:38} - “{Competitive intelligence} is harder and easier in multiple ways now. Your next competitor can come from anywhere. Where I feel like historically there were capital requirements and technology kind of barriers of entry that prevented that. But then on the flip side, the shift to online gives you kind of a great pulse on signals and what everyone else is doing. It's great for brands just to be thinking about and to have a strategy around.” - Josh
• {00:17:26} - “It's essentially impossible to block bots without blocking customers unless you put everything through a lock behind kind of a login portal. I would focus more on how can you use it to your benefit.” - Josh
• {00:25:20} - “What we'll do is we ingest our customer's data and we will look at the products they're selling and the product types. And with that, we've been able to guide customers towards product types that we feel better overlap with their business, make more sense for their customers to buy, and kind of a natural progression of the business.” - Josh
• {00:28:40} - “We saw pink start selling like crazy. And then we had brands that were kind of the major capturers of that, like a SKIMS, for example. They basically took all the pink products, put them in a collection for Barbie, and those products sold off the shelves. Now, the thing is, those products actually hadn't been selling very well before. It was a very clever way to use existing inventory, package it slightly differently, and sell it.” - Josh
• {00:32:11} - “Like my Co-Founder says, "The opportunity of a lifetime comes once a month." So it's important to stay current and up to date. It's important to not read yesterday's newspaper. That's why we think you need data for what's going on right now, not a week ago or whatever. By that point, it's too old.” - Josh
• {00:34:45} - “Brands can move the needle with very small changes, as well as they can ensure that they're not just discounting and lighting good money on fire, good margin. It's actually less about vertically looking at the brand down and from a data and correlation perspective, it's actually more about looking sideways at the product type because the customers are comparing your leggings to someone else's leggings to someone else's leggings. They're not comparing your product to your t-shirt or your leggings to your t-shirt to etcetera.” - Josh

Associated Links:

• Learn more about Josh Wilson and Particl
• Get in on our Muses Mail and join us at Art Basel in December
• Grab your copy of The Multiplayer Brand here
• Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet?
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

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