Latest / The Retail Podcast / Navigating the The Holiday Period 2023 (Golden Quarter) Predictions: Insights from Salesforce Caila Schwartz Director of Consumer Insights and Strategy, Retail & Consumer Goods at Salesforce

Transcript

Navigating the The Holiday Period 2023 (Golden Quarter) Predictions: Insights from Salesforce Caila Schwartz Director of Consumer Insights and Strategy, Retail & Consumer Goods at Salesforce · The Retail Podcast

• 0:00
  Hello and welcome to the retail podcast that cell Source
• 0:02
  connections. I'm here with Kayla Schwartz.
• 0:06
  I butchered a title. The last time.
• 0:08
  So Kayla problem, butchering your side.
• 0:10
  So what are you eating? That's what are you doing sales
• 0:12
  force? Majeure strategies.
• 0:15
  So I'm all about understanding, how consumers are behaving and
• 0:19
  bad attitudes in triangles that are happening in the market and
• 0:23
  these are data from Salesforce. And I had the great privilege of
• 0:27
  watching you on stage, who's the I did?
• 0:30
  In get the name of the brand that you on.
• 0:31
  You're on the stage with a retail, Taylor Snipes and shovel
• 0:36
  cool Nikes. And that's what they're all
• 0:38
  about. Right there all about the thing.
• 0:39
  I was like yeah apparel it came across when she was lucky but
• 0:43
  you were talking about your holiday predictions and so
• 0:46
  before we get to that, why I normally like to do especially
• 0:48
  with female leaders in their field it's the maybe if we could
• 0:52
  do a little bit of a time travel and go back to Kayla wins when
• 0:55
  she was young and Laquida was young.
• 0:58
  If you could go back and talk to That about how to get to hear if
• 1:02
  there's an accelerating lesson, something you could have done
• 1:06
  earlier on in your career, that would accelerate to where you've
• 1:09
  got to have any thoughts on what would that be?
• 1:12
  What would that Vise be? Well, you know, growing up.
• 1:15
  I was very, very shy. Okay Wyatt.
• 1:17
  And I hated public speaking and even through college is really
• 1:22
  challenging and that held me back a lot because I had a lot
• 1:26
  to say, and I didn't feel comfortable speaking up.
• 1:29
  Up and didn't have that confident and I could go back to
• 1:34
  my younger self. I would tell her that it's okay
• 1:37
  to speak your mind and yeah, ask questions and that you can be
• 1:41
  coffin and it's all going to be okay.
• 1:43
  And and yeah you know what's really interesting I've asked
• 1:48
  for cios and CEOs and one of them have said that, yeah, it's
• 1:54
  fascinating and and like, I look at it from a different
• 1:57
  perspective of, is it permission to speak?
• 2:00
  You know, in terms of sometimes you were in meetings and we
• 2:02
  don't show that we can speak but they all said that they wish
• 2:04
  they hadn't held themselves like super, super fascinating in the,
• 2:08
  in terms of that sense is that in terms of you're just focusing
• 2:13
  a bit on your younger self and stuff.
• 2:17
  GTO the career that you chose. Was that attack?
• 2:20
  You really chose me. You like it University.
• 2:22
  We had to make those decisions on where to go.
• 2:24
  How did you choose what to do? That's a great question.
• 2:27
  I was on a completely different path.
• 2:28
  I was actually pretty Dad. I wanted to be a doctor for a
• 2:31
  while since I was a very little girl, and I went to college and
• 2:35
  got a degree in biology and said, all my pre-med
• 2:38
  requirements, and then my senior year.
• 2:40
  I said, I'm not really into this anymore.
• 2:43
  Yeah. And I changed course, and I
• 2:47
  landed intact, but I landed intact, because of my data
• 2:51
  analytics are little, my ability to think critically.
• 2:54
  Yeah. And had a very interesting
• 2:57
  educational upbringing and which Another story letters, light
• 3:03
  itself, well to being asking credit Goldstein thinking bag
• 3:07
  asking her to question then. And that's how I landed where I
• 3:10
  am today. Wow, I did not anticipate being
• 3:13
  in Tech, but I couldn't be happier.
• 3:17
  There's something to that you wanted to help because that
• 3:19
  comes across, right, in terms of the whole, wanting there to help
• 3:23
  and do better, and be better. And provide people with more
• 3:26
  than I can say, I can speak the caring better.
• 3:30
  You know, because I can imagine you're gonna be a doctor or
• 3:32
  something. You have to catch.
• 3:33
  Ya, and so yeah. Anyways, I like problems.
• 3:37
  Okay. So there's like, I think that
• 3:39
  parse it being able to solve complex problems.
• 3:42
  Yeah, yeah. I think that was.
• 3:47
  What Drew you this sold in pain. Yeah yeah.
• 3:49
  Are you don't actually care about people.
• 3:57
  Well, I mean was super fascinating is Think about what
• 4:00
  you were talking about yesterday.
• 4:02
  Yeah, your holiday predictions. Holy mouling, really difficult
• 4:07
  to sort of take a look into the Looking Glass and you put some
• 4:10
  really big numbers. So obviously a lot of the
• 4:13
  audience would have had a chance to be there but I know if you
• 4:16
  don't mind maybe spending a few minutes and just taking us
• 4:19
  through your you know, top 5 predictions and the numbers
• 4:22
  super fascinating, those numbers.
• 4:24
  Yeah. Well you know this year where we
• 4:28
  see the market Going and retailers and Brands really
• 4:32
  going to be doubling down on customer retention strategies
• 4:35
  and we've done a lot of research.
• 4:37
  What is impacting us for Behavior?
• 4:40
  What's driving? Us?
• 4:41
  Mercy, stay loyal to Brands. And so when we looked out Trends
• 4:45
  in the broader Market, narrowed it down to five me being the
• 4:49
  first is all around generative and predicted a I do too.
• 4:53
  Hot topic. Yeah.
• 4:54
  For sure today, this conference show this year, in general.
• 4:58
  Yes. And we anticipate It being a
• 5:01
  driver of Revenue, go holiday. So around a hundred ninety, four
• 5:06
  billion dollars were generated by a combination of generative.
• 5:12
  And this really isn't that wild, and we think about how
• 5:17
  predictive AI has been contributing to Commerce
• 5:20
  experiences. Yeah, yeah.
• 5:23
  So last holiday 15% of All Digital Revenue was generated by
• 5:28
  consumers buying. A product that was recommended
• 5:33
  to them from an AI. That's growing.
• 5:38
  Exactly. So just acceleration
• 5:40
  acceleration and I think, especially in retail, brands are
• 5:45
  experimenting is really cool. Geez, consumer-facing models
• 5:48
  using Ai and particularly Iraq at Bots.
• 5:52
  And a really cool thing is one area of, especially when
• 5:56
  experience it's going to drive humor.
• 6:00
  Purchasing decisions because we know more and more consumers are
• 6:04
  comfortable with this technology.
• 6:08
  One is so there are a lot of returns last.
• 6:12
  All day, I anticipate returns are going to continue to be an
• 6:15
  issue this holiday season. But where the issue lies is
• 6:20
  Policy is. Yeah, you seen a lot of brands
• 6:23
  or pulling back on this generous return policies charging for
• 6:27
  returns? Yeah, it does kind of have, you
• 6:29
  know, I think we're weak. See the challenges lie in there
• 6:35
  is just retailers, are big fear about the policy?
• 6:38
  Joey, what we found in our research was that consumers are
• 6:42
  less concerned about having free returns.
• 6:44
  Yeah. And more concerned about having
• 6:46
  an understanding of that return policy.
• 6:50
  Yeah we're having a degree symbol.
• 6:52
  Yeah. And knowing that they're going
• 6:53
  to get their money back refund and knowing that they can
• 7:00
  understand. So the coast of the return isn't
• 7:02
  necessarily the issue, it's knowing that you can return the
• 7:06
  parameters of and those are return refunds and return policy
• 7:12
  just Glory this British bases. Yeah, so it's a matte we
• 7:16
  anticipate around 21% of online, orders are red.
• 7:20
  And what we mean by it risk is that consumers might man in our
• 7:24
  van baskets. Exactly.
• 7:26
  Or returning product never come back again, but you're not real.
• 7:29
  I'm facts. 81 percent of consumers say that they'll stop
• 7:32
  doing business company altogether, just one bad return
• 7:36
  X. Oh wow.
• 7:37
  Okay so the stakes are really high sure.
• 7:40
  Especially if you're trying to build brand loyalty lie that you
• 7:42
  spent all that time, engaging you've got them to the website,
• 7:45
  you've got something in the car. Exactly, I'm going off, just fix
• 7:49
  it. It's like, is there a way that
• 7:51
  you remedy that? Yeah, well, we did a lot of
• 7:54
  research. Yeah.
• 7:56
  Different types of policies. The biggest thing we saw brains
• 8:00
  and each other's doing was putting their return policies in
• 8:03
  the Footers of their website. Don't you Buried?
• 8:06
  Buried, and so, it's really heart aren't.
• 8:09
  And I think the biggest mix is making it permanent putting on
• 8:13
  the product detail page and making a blank clear.
• 8:16
  A lot of the lane and policies hungry.
• 8:19
  These'll be friendly. Sure.
• 8:23
  And so even if you did get to that part that page you might
• 8:27
  not have fully understood, so just making it clear and making
• 8:32
  plastic. Okay?
• 8:34
  Number three, number three, I'm usually a child child child
• 8:38
  countdown in and I'm gonna free holiday.
• 8:40
  Thanks my my favorites because I'm a huge user of this fish buy
• 8:48
  online pick up in store. Omni channel in general.
• 8:51
  Yeah. A lot of the behaviors that
• 8:54
  consumers picked up in 2020. Yeah, big digital stories that
• 8:59
  we saw, we're on each in behaviors.
• 9:01
  They were turning to social media, her product inspiration
• 9:04
  and they were using tactics like buy online store and buy online
• 9:09
  pick up in store sticky. Its digital behaviors that
• 9:12
  consumers adopted. Yeah that's 2020 and it.
• 9:15
  Well continuing yeah fact, it is 39 percent of shoppers They only
• 9:20
  seek out Brands tellers offer, I like sort and another large
• 9:25
  percentage I think it's around. Twenty seven percent say that
• 9:28
  they will look for online or in-store inventory, on a
• 9:32
  Retailer's webpage. Yeah, before making a purchase.
• 9:34
  Wow. So he's on your channel.
• 9:36
  Behaviors are sticking we anticipate or we wanted to
• 9:39
  understand right, what's happening at the store, you
• 9:42
  know, what's happening online? What the store, pick up that
• 9:46
  online word or what are they doing?
• 9:47
  And there. A lot of the time, they're
• 9:51
  making an additional purchase and so we wanted to put a number
• 9:54
  against that and just like a conversion or Apso exactly it
• 9:59
  up. So they get to the store.
• 10:01
  They make second part of that. Second purchase doesn't have a
• 10:03
  hive, average order value. Yeah, and that online purchases,
• 10:07
  but still, it's an additional incremental purchase.
• 10:09
  It's a huge opportunity again, without to customer retention.
• 10:13
  Yeah, build that experience. He can, you know, build a
• 10:17
  relationship, sales associate care.
• 10:20
  Would that in store buy our product thing about, you know,
• 10:24
  having a high-powered product recommendations in the store
• 10:26
  says the. And in order to engage that
• 10:29
  online buyer when they come in to pick up their order.
• 10:31
  Yeah, really powerful. So we anticipate around 20
• 10:34
  billion dollars of additional incremental super fascinating I
• 10:40
  interviewed the she's gone, the lady from see how it impacts on
• 10:46
  obviously being uk-based didn't know the brand but I And look at
• 10:50
  all of their stuff that they do really interested.
• 10:53
  The one thing that I just to pick up on the relevant to that
• 10:56
  was that she was saying that. They have what for her has
• 10:59
  worked, is there buy online pick up in store or online?
• 11:03
  Pick up curbside or buy online or iron store and get ship?
• 11:08
  Yeah, I'm just curious in terms of when you saying buy online
• 11:10
  pick up in store, is there a reverse of that?
• 11:13
  Like you know, when people by installing ship out or is that
• 11:16
  all different? Like data set?
• 11:19
  That's different data. Assets is not.
• 11:20
  That isn't the same incident. However, we are seeing a big
• 11:25
  impact of in-store behavior on digital purchasing.
• 11:28
  Yeah. So people will go into the store
• 11:31
  to do a lot of research and then go online to make a purchase go.
• 11:34
  Yeah and in fact some of our research has shown that
• 11:36
  specially urgency Millennials. Yeah they're more likely to be
• 11:40
  the store empty-handed majority of them say that was in a week
• 11:44
  my interest in which is really interesting.
• 11:47
  Yeah. Okay, I want to go.
• 11:50
  So in areas in a number for Holiday 2:37 show who called
• 11:57
  prediction, number four is all around the particular, Mercy,
• 12:02
  social media have it bigger and bigger impact every year.
• 12:07
  And right now, which I've spent ten percent of all, e-commerce
• 12:11
  are driven by social media and it's growing here by 29% and q1.
• 12:19
  We anticipate when we look at what's actually influencing
• 12:23
  traffic. What tactics been social media
• 12:27
  are influencing, will be found really is.
• 12:33
  It's not influence receiving. Younger generation are not buy
• 12:38
  into influencer. No, I'm worried about
• 12:40
  advertising. Okay.
• 12:42
  Oh, consumers are much more likely to engage and Trust in
• 12:46
  feet. Advertisements, go.
• 12:48
  And they are other types of marketing.
• 12:51
  And it's yeah, well it's the whole t-shirt and tote bag that
• 12:56
  you get ticked up made me buy it for anything in that that say
• 13:00
  you in feed advertisement. Did you look at which?
• 13:03
  And and to maybe do want to answer this but in terms of
• 13:05
  Which social platforms are crushing it in that sense, all
• 13:09
  should retailers. I mean is there a piece of
• 13:11
  advice? Do I go off and integrate into
• 13:13
  insta or Tick-Tock or do I build my own life Commerce?
• 13:18
  Yeah. Solution of curious and that I
• 13:21
  feel like so on aggregate. He see, but the majority are was
• 13:24
  traffic coming. From social media channel to
• 13:27
  econ, website is driven by Facebook, however, that mixed
• 13:31
  changing. And so, we're seeing more
• 13:33
  Instagram, or seeing Tick-Tock, it's still have issue a space.
• 13:38
  Then in that sense, or is that a global number?
• 13:40
  Well, you More Europe and North America but you know, Asia
• 13:46
  Tick-Tock. Yeah.
• 13:48
  What I would say is if you are thinking about this for your
• 13:50
  brand it's more important to look at your specific audience.
• 13:54
  Yeah. Where they are, yes, we talked a
• 13:56
  lot about vetting, your brand on the channel and devices that
• 13:59
  your customers absolutely. So looking at your audience
• 14:03
  saying okay what is my where is my audience today and then
• 14:07
  engaging them on those channels? They're not going to follow you.
• 14:10
  You have to follow them. Yeah and so I will.
• 14:12
  I wouldn't say that there's a one size fits.
• 14:14
  All that's what social media channels to invest more heavily
• 14:18
  in. Yeah, more about using your own
• 14:19
  data and it makes so much sense as you come into the holiday
• 14:22
  season and you looking for ideas on, who do I buy what from you,
• 14:26
  it is going to be some sort of social something.
• 14:28
  Yeah, that's triggered that. So it's really great.
• 14:31
  I did. Okay in a number of fun in 2025
• 14:36
  Fiction, it's all about resale, okay?
• 14:39
  And so we asked her wanted to understand how does The resale
• 14:42
  Market into consumers, purchasing a?
• 14:45
  Yeah. And while we found that a large
• 14:49
  percentage of consumers are buying silver themselves.
• 14:51
  Yep, bar and also large all the lb Olympus on a percentage
• 14:57
  planning on gifting resale or friends family this upcoming
• 15:01
  holiday. Yeah, we're seeing retail in the
• 15:04
  market continued to grow. Yeah.
• 15:06
  Relevancy more. And more consumers are meeting
• 15:08
  in to resell specially by a towel on the condition that way.
• 15:12
  At CRC retails. I would she save on cost and
• 15:16
  that was the number one reason why I can see all interest
• 15:18
  during thing with the sustainability where they need
• 15:20
  all the other seen abilities, number two, okay?
• 15:23
  Okay, price price, looks like game.
• 15:25
  Sure that you've got them. Like, you know, when you have to
• 15:26
  say that the words, no cross comes up and their
• 15:36
  sustainability. So, sustainability is number
• 15:39
  two, actually the, the drive to reduce.
• 15:42
  So, So there's been a bit of debate on this on whether or not
• 15:45
  the resale Market is actually cheaper.
• 15:47
  I mean, like significantly cheaper to nudge a conversion.
• 15:53
  Yeah, I'll be looked at resale from a very holistic respected
• 15:56
  digital marketplaces as well as we off property resale, like
• 16:01
  it's the marketplace or other types of peer-to-peer type of
• 16:05
  folly. So depending so there's a wide
• 16:07
  variety and where consumers tend to buy.
• 16:10
  Yeah, it depends on what they're buying.
• 16:12
  So for example, if you're in the market for furniture.
• 16:15
  Yeah, hungate consumers are more likely to turn to face
• 16:19
  Marketplace but if are in the market for apparel shoes luxury
• 16:24
  going to go to digital marketplaces where they know
• 16:26
  that that purchase is verified authentic.
• 16:29
  Going out and they're buying the real deal.
• 16:30
  So depending but and you know different motivation right?
• 16:34
  Like for example if you're buying furniture place, probably
• 16:38
  our motivations going to be availability.
• 16:40
  Yeah. You know they can pick that item
• 16:41
  up pretty quickly. Whereas, if you're going to buy
• 16:43
  an item, you might take a few weeks or few nights ago, so
• 16:48
  depends what the motivation is, what the product is, but on
• 16:52
  average we anticipate this 70% holiday purchases will be or
• 16:56
  holiday gifts will be up from resale resold goods and we asked
• 17:01
  to meet it'll say traffic billion dollars out weights are
• 17:04
  doing fantastic and that's going to be a win.
• 17:07
  I know if you looked at your watch how we doing for time?
• 17:09
  We got five minutes left, fine. Okay.
• 17:13
  That's fantastic. So as we come to the sort of
• 17:15
  final stage of their, the pot, the interview podcast, I'm
• 17:19
  curious on your sort of your, you must have an immense.
• 17:22
  Why seemed immense access to a lot of data points.
• 17:25
  How do you decide where to go for your data?
• 17:28
  Yeah, right. I'm just curious, we're really
• 17:31
  lucky because it's Outsource it. Access to.
• 17:34
  So much data, in fact, our shopping look, just looking at
• 17:37
  our shopping data, it's representative of one and a half
• 17:40
  billion Global. Oh wow.
• 17:42
  Manson Mercy, we're tracking data across all different
• 17:45
  touchpoints, Social Mobile best man's, and all of that.
• 17:50
  So we're looking at the trends and very holistic view all the
• 17:54
  time and we're trying to find markers or indicators, ferns new
• 17:58
  things coming up. For example, we never would have
• 17:59
  been talking about social media. We hadn't seen some of these
• 18:03
  Trends are too much on these aggressive growth rates.
• 18:06
  So we're also just markets need to customers.
• 18:11
  Yeah, do a lot of third. R&D research and understand
• 18:14
  other people are saying, yeah. And so we're always trying to do
• 18:17
  research and continue to make sure that we're aligning with
• 18:22
  you, what the broader Market is seen, but also be a good.
• 18:26
  So if I'm a retailer home, listening to this and I want to
• 18:29
  access, you know, your font of knowledge, where do I go?
• 18:33
  Where where, how would I find out more about some of the stuff
• 18:36
  today? Yeah, well you have a whole
• 18:38
  there. That's a battery of resources,
• 18:41
  free. Sources for everybody to access
• 18:43
  Connor website called her insights HQ, right?
• 18:47
  And we have quarterly. And that's so it's a battery of
• 18:51
  benchmarks that we update every quarter.
• 18:56
  And we've been doing this ten years ago.
• 18:58
  Well, yeah. So there's that, we also have
• 19:02
  holiday insights on. And so that looks into those
• 19:05
  Peak shopping movements holiday season.
• 19:07
  And then we have a third page with all the other events
• 19:10
  happening so long. School time, day, library of
• 19:14
  knowledge. And it's right there.
• 19:16
  It's all right. There is free for everybody.
• 19:18
  And what's really cool about the data is that depending on your
• 19:21
  router goal or your region, you can split it a go deeper into
• 19:24
  it. It's available final question.
• 19:29
  What's on the radar? What's coming up next?
• 19:31
  I will see. You've done your holiday
• 19:31
  predictions bat. Is that coming out as a report
• 19:34
  them? Yet this coming out as a report
• 19:36
  middle of June. Okay.
• 19:37
  So that will be life for everybody that access, okay?
• 19:40
  And it'll be form of a block. Ugh, he wept a web page update,
• 19:44
  okay? And then we'll be going deep
• 19:47
  into that school, tries later this summer The Soma.
• 19:50
  Okay. And then we'll come out in
• 19:52
  September with like full forecast for holidays.
• 19:55
  Follow him how much we anticipate our suspect where
• 19:59
  growth will be online sales, things like that and then we'll
• 20:05
  be tracking for the rest of the holiday season summer in
• 20:08
  January. And then what will you be doing?
• 20:10
  Live data? Updates are all.
• 20:12
  I'll keep an eye out for ya. Thank you so much.
• 20:14
  Thank you. Thank you.