Lisa Gavales, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer
EXPRESS

Lisa Gavales is EVP and Chief Marketing Officer for EXPRESS, a 550+ store retailer selling men's and women's fashion apparel. She has been with EXPRESS since January 2008 and leads marketing, visual, creative, and e-commerce. She is responsible for building the brand and creating compelling, consistent messaging and imagery. Prior to joining EXPRESS, Lisa spent 14 years at Bloomingdale's, where she started as VP of Planning, became a GMM, launched bloomingdales.com, and left as SVP of Marketing. Prior to Bloomingdale's, Lisa spent five years as a retail strategy consultant for Management Horizons, a Division of PWC

Q&A

EXPRESS is a 30-year-old retail brand that continues to strive and thrive in the retail sector. How has the brand been able to stay relevant to its core base of 20-something consumers?

We are relentless in our focus on our core 20-something customer. We believe that the sharper we edit our assortment and our communication for our core customer, the wider the actual audience can be. This clarity of vision and consistent approach has allowed for continued success throughout three decades.

You talk a lot about consistency as a core competency of the company. Can you please elaborate?

We've had the luxury of consistent leadership over the majority of our history, which has provided a clear and focused point of view. We have catered to the mid-20s customer, who is in his or her first job—a critical juncture in one's life—including a critical juncture in one's wardrobe. We haven't varied from this perspective. We love our customers, and when it's time for them to move on, move on they do, without us trying to figure out what EXPRESS should do to reinvent ourselves to chase the customer through their life.

In addition, our organizational structure allows us a level of consistency in our customer touch points that isn't always true. We have one buying team, one creative team, and one marketing team. Regardless of location, channel, or device, our customer can count on EXPRESS to have the same product at the same promotion with the same projection. We are the true definition of channel agnostic. Wherever customers want to interact with us, they are assured that they are getting the best we have to offer.

Looking forward, what are the strategies for driving top-line growth at EXPRESS?

We have 4 pillars of growth.

1. With 600 stores, clearly store growth continues to be a priority. 
2. We believe there is still plenty of new store growth available to us in the U.S. 
3. Digital sales will become a bigger and bigger part of the future of our brand. EXPRESS.com became a commerce site in 2008 and has been an important part of the company's growth since then.   
4. We are strategically entering international markets such as Canada, where we just opened our first two stores weeks ago.

Given the demographic of your core audience, how are you embracing e-commerce and social and mobile channels, as well as measuring their value and effectiveness?

With a mid-20s customer, digital has to be a part of everything we do. Our customer is rarely more than three feet from her mobile device and is typically watching/using/working on more than one screen at a time. Late to the game, EXPRESS.com only became a commerce site in 2008. Since then, we've launched an award-winning mobile site, had one of the first full assortments with real-time inventory available on Facebook.com, and landed in the top 50 for the number of Facebook and Twitter followers, according to Apparel magazine. While each device, each application, and each communication medium has its key performance indices, social media, for us, is about two-way communication and staying front of mind. A direct-mail-only customer will hear from EXPRESS one or two times per month. An email customer will hear from us a few times a week, but a Facebook fan or Twitter follower is in touch with our brand multiple times a day and is often participating in the discussion about the brand. We've come a long way from the days when companies still asked if they needed to have a social media presence; as we all know, customers are out there talking about us whether we are there or not. We choose to be a part of the conversation. Our objective is to become a more and more integral part of our customer's lives. Certainly social media is part of our customer’s life, so to be a part of it, we are there, too.

In addition, digital communication has allowed us to socialize what we are doing, perhaps in one market, across all of our customers. So when we had a runway show in the middle of Times Square in July, we live streamed it for everyone to see. When we go to music festivals across the country and listen to and talk to musicians, we videotape our experiences and post them for everyone to share in them. The digital space has become our number one communication tool. Whether for its immediacy or for its reach, it is typically the first touch point that a customer has with our brand when something is going on. 

What programs do you have in place for furthering loyalty, repeat purchase, and gaining feedback from your target age group?

Today we have a loyalty program that is tied to our credit card program. Though widely used, we are in the beginning of testing a payment agnostic program that comes with both promised and “surprise” benefits of being a member. Both programs are frequency and revenue based; the new one rewards not only shopping, but also activity.  As for feedback, we have a number of ways of garnering customer feedback. The most immediate feedback loops are based on ratings and reviews online (which we take very seriously, share across the company, and immediately react to), as well as store purchase surveys to identify service levels and answer monthly ad hoc questions. More strategically, we have a seasonal tracking study now in it's sixth year, and we participate in syndicated data feeds to enable competitive analysis.

What have been some of your challenges and adjustments in moving from Bloomingdale’s to EXPRESS relative to merchandise mix and consumer targets?

Generally, the role of the CMO in retail is similar regardless of the merchandise mix or target customer. While not easy, it is simple: Identify the needs of the customer, find out where he/she gets information, and make sure your brand is there solving his or her problem of the day. That said, the Bloomingdale's customer is much more affluent, and she typically spends quite a bit on her chosen brands. At EXPRESS, we touch many more customers, each of whom perhaps cannot spend as much, but who, in aggregate, represent a huge percentage of the population of our target age group. At Bloomingdale's, communication was much more about precision, while at EXPRESS we cast a very wide net, and our precision comes in the crafting of targeted messages to each of the customer segments.

Ashish Gambhir,
EVP and Co-Founder, newBrandAnalytics

Ashish Gambhir is Executive Vice President and co-founder of newBrandAnalytics, the leading provider of social business intelligence solutions, providing unmatched guest satisfaction, customer intelligence, and competitive insight for the hospitality, restaurant, and retail industries. newBrandAnalytics' flagship and enterprise grade product, Social Guest Satisfaction™, enables customer satisfaction-focused organizations to identify real-time key insights from guest feedback. newBrandAnalytics' insight is proven to yield operational improvement, enhanced marketing opportunities, and new strategic initiatives that drive increased revenue and guest count. For more information, please visit www.newBrandAnalytics.com.

SOCIAL BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE DRIVES THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Much is written about social media and its impact on brands and consumer opinions. To date, we have learned that brands need to mine real-time social media customer feedback to better understand what their customers are saying. We also know that effectively doing so will help improve the customer experience, increase revenue, and lower costs. As a result, an increasing number of organizations are using social analytics to attempt to understand the meaning and hidden value behind the reams of social data. Unfortunately, these analytics gravitate toward tangible metrics like “followers,” “likes,” or star ratings, but severely lack the actionable analysis and value executives needed to drive business decisions. 

Companies Need to Take a Deep Dive Into Online Guest Feedback

Brands, for the most part, are not actively participating in online conversation about the hundreds of factors that impact the customer experience. Instead, customers are tweeting, posting, and blogging their opinions in free form, talking about whether or not they will return to your location, buy your product again, or recommend you to their peers.

A consumer survey (taken in Q1 of 2011) by Temkin Group, a customer experience research and consulting firm, found that customers provided feedback through social media or other websites twice as often as they provided feedback directly to the company (e.g., phone call, letter, email, website, etc.).

Whether sharing positive or negative feedback, social media’s growing power as a real-time consumer sounding board opens the door for a new level of customer intelligence because unsolicited feedback provides the most valuable elements of the experience as defined by the customer. Few marketers, according to The Intelligent Approach to Customer Intelligence (2009) by Forrester Research, actually use this data to inform an enterprise-view of their customers. The report, which highlights the difficulty executives are having in using social media feedback data intelligently, explains that the majority of companies struggle to fully understand their customers and leverage their customer data as a strategic asset. 

Bruce Temkin, managing partner of the Temkin Group, is quoted saying, "Feedback is cheap, actionable insights are priceless. Once you get into actually quantifying how customers view you, it starts changing how your people think about the business. They start to spot customer issues and put in place processes where they can highlight and start to solve the big problems. And the big payback is customer loyalty."

Those organizations that have utilized social business intelligence approaches have realized fantastic results, including noticeable improvements in quality of service. For example, Carolyn Prebil, Marketing Coordinator for Murphy’s Restaurant, has seen the intrinsic value of mining online customer feedback in driving employee motivation and productivity. Prebil has created a social media "shout-out board” that is posted in the employee break room at Murphy’s. Using information culled by newBrandAnalytics, she posts the positive online comments that mention specific servers and/or bartenders, such as "This was the best $200 I ever spent at a restaurant. Ask for Thaddeus and you will be well taken care of!"

"The shout-out board has promoted what I would call friendly competition among the wait staff as everyone wants to see their name mentioned. Seeing the board before their shift starts is very motivating and reminds our servers how important customer service is and how their performance and interaction with the customers directly impact the overall guest experience," Prebil says.

Turning Lemons Into Lemonade

Every company is bound to be criticized by an unsatisfied customer at one time or another. While your first impulse may be to discredit negative feedback, particularly from unsolicited sources, these negative comments need to be embraced for what they really are—golden opportunities.

There’s an old saying that life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you react to it.

A negative review is a golden opportunity to show you care about creating a better customer experience not only for the customer who gave the negative review, but also for the countless others who are reading it. Customers and potential customers are more likely to forgive negative feedback if they see that the brand is listening and working to fix the problem.

Such is the finding at Crave, a Minnesota-based restaurant and lounge concept whose keen focus on social business intelligence has helped recapture guests and enhance the overall dining experience. Partnering with newBrandAnalytics, Crave identified a particularly negative review from Yelp.com, an online community for customer feedback about local businesses. It was also determined that this particular Yelper had a high credibility score. A clear credibility measurement is an impactful outcome of sound social business intelligence.  
 
Crave’s marketing manager immediately invited the reviewer back to the restaurant. Not only was the guest delighted and surprised to hear from Crave altogether, but also revisited the restaurant and revised the initial comments on Yelp, commending the company for its commitment to guest satisfaction.

Pinpointing Areas Most in Need of Improvement

Chances are that at any point in time, there are myriad opportunities for improving the experience of your customers. But with limited time and resources, few companies can tackle all of these issues simultaneously, and that’s assuming you know what all those areas are in the first place.

Mining and evaluating real-time customer feedback helps you readily identify a critical mass of feedback around certain aspects of the customer experience and pinpoint areas most in need of improvement. For example, noise was never really an issue at Fifth Group’s South City Kitchen Vinings restaurant in Atlanta, or one they thought they needed to address. Through the newBrandAnalytics Social Guest Satisfaction solution, Robby Kukler (Partner, Fifth Group) identified significant feedback about the volume in the restaurant being uncomfortable during dinner. Digging deeper into the insight, he found that the comments were coming from diners who sat in the same portion of the restaurant.

The South City Kitchen Vinings team ran a few tests and determined that the sound system was operating inconsistently, which caused the volume to randomly increase and decrease, directly impacting the portion of the restaurant where the diners who commented online mentioned the issue.

Management made a quick, low-cost fix on the system, and since the change was implemented in January 2011, there have been no negative mentions about volume being an issue at the restaurant. As Kukler points out, the small change generated huge value.

"Imagine all the customers who experienced the issue but never mentioned it to us; those are customers we were likely losing because the volume of music in the restaurant was uncomfortable. Thanks to the Social Guest Satisfaction platform, we were able to identify the issue, make the quick fix, and avoid losing customers to this issue going forward."

Social media feedback is rapidly growing, has tremendous reach, and is unbelievably influential. Knowing what customers are saying online and putting all of the social media activity to work in a productive way is a business imperative. The payoff of being able to effectively leverage all that data in terms of innovation, productivity, service, and business growth is undeniable. As Jack Welch is quoted, "An organization’s ability to learn and translate that learning into action rapidly is the ultimate competitive advantage."

Jason Heller, CEO, AGILITI

Jason Heller is CEO of AGILITI, a consulting firm focused solely on client-side digital marketing operations management, helping clients foster productive relationships with their agencies and empowering clients to take control of their digital strategy. Follow him on Twitter at @JasonHeller.

Digital Experiences Are Redefining Brands

Has your company augmented its brand strategy or brand positioning within the last three years? If not, you may want to drop everything and add this as a priority on your marketing calendar for early 2012. Now is the time to take a long, hard look at how the dramatic evolution in digital consumer experiences and expectations has expanded the scope of the very fundamental concept of what your brand means to consumers.

What Is a Brand?
While everyone may define a brand differently, historically a brand is shaped in part based on the perceived or actual attributes and unique differentiators we project to the market through marketing, and in part based on the experience a consumer has with your product and those who represent it.

The new brand relationship is far more complex, fragmented, transparent, and unforgiving. Today your brand can be influenced by the market in ways that were not possible just two or three years ago. However, this can be very good news for marketers willing to embrace the new consumer journey and the evolving needs of their brand.

Engagement Is More Than a Buzz Word
The consumer journey is not linear. Consumers are influenced by advertising and PR across a fragmenting media landscape—as well as the increasing volume of consumer voices in social media channels—so our approach to developing and nurturing relationships with consumers must be equally non-linear.

Consumer engagement marketing, including content marketing, is an effective conduit to establishing and nurturing relationships with consumers in a relevant and meaningful way. Consumers explicitly seek out and implicitly discover content and resources every day. Providing the resources that meet consumers' needs and interests should become one of your brand attributes. After all, if you are not providing the resource, it may come from a competitor or a marketing partner who can funnel category consumers toward your competitors. Providing relevant, informative, entertaining, and engaging content earns good will, establishes brand value, drives word of mouth, and generally creates influence throughout the consumer journey. Consumer engagement and content marketing transcends the silos of acquisition and retention.

Strategically, the value of your content is an extension of the value of your brand itself. This is not to be taken lightly. A mature content strategy positions the brand as a resource and fosters deeper relationships with consumers, helping to convert prospects to customers and customers to advocates. Sounds like relationship marketing, doesn't it?

We Are All Relationship Marketers
Non-linear consumer relationships have created a continuum and an inter-relationship between content marketing and CRM. This can initially present an organizational structure challenge and requires significant collaboration between CRM and the greater marketing department in the development of cohesive strategies. However, the benefit of this evolution is significant. Both content marketing and relationship marketing are predicated on understanding the motivations, needs, and behaviors of existing and prospective customer segments and catering experiences that best foster deeper relationships.

Measuring the Steps Along the New Customer Journey
Content marketing adds measurable touch points for consumers to engage with your brand as they travel along their journey. Your content and distribution channels should be as diverse as consumers' needs and media behaviors. Develop content and resources for various stages in the customer lifecycle and ensure visibility and discovery everywhere—from your website or blog, syndication partners, social media, and mobile. As the market continues to evolve, digital out-of-home and connected TVs may round out that list for some marketers.

Over time, the goal is to correlate increased engagement with content to increased customer value. Tracking metrics related to search visibility, social media sharing and discovery, new visitors/relationships, and migration across the continuum to social, email, and mobile CRM programs will paint the picture of how the relationships evolve and provide insight for optimization. Some marketers will be fortunate enough to track direct revenue as a result, while others must utilize surveys to establish attitudinal benchmarks of increased consumer value. Either way you slice it, content has become a proven staple in the new marketing playbook.

Marketers can no longer afford to look at content marketing as a nice-to-have tactic. In the era of consumer engagement, consumer empowerment, and the non-linear consumer journey, content once again is king. Is it part of your brand positioning yet?