Commerce Outsights
June 3, 2024
The fundamentals of loyalty programs, B2B is the new DTC, and what Web3 and AI are doing for personalization.
Hello, and welcome to Commerce Outsights—Nebulab’s email roundup of the best reads, listens, and tools from the world of retail, e-commerce, and DTC.
First of all, apologies for the late send. Last week, I wrote most of my content in a not-too-comfortable chair in my hotel in London, where I was staying for Pulse. This week, I am writing most of it in a not-too-comfortable chair in front of the Techtalks stage at Shoptalk EU. I don’t know if it’s the traveling, the chairs, or a bit of both, but I’m not my usual productive self.
On the upside, I have met a lot of you, and it’s been amazing. Thanks for the coffees, the convos, and the laughs!
Anyway, the event recaps are coming in the next week or so—I just need some time to digest it all. In the meantime, as usual, here’s the most interesting stuff that crossed our inboxes over the last couple of weeks.
Does your brand need help with strategy, design or development?
For over a decade, we’ve been shaping, launching, and scaling shopping experiences for category disruptors such as Cometeer, Framework, and Huckberry. No matter where you’re going, we can help you get there.
Thought provokers
🎧 The Future of B2B Innovation (32 mins). Great conversation between our friends at Future Commerce and the Head of Digital Engagement and Strategy at Philips. As a company that sells primarily B2B, Philips has done a great job at stealing a few pages from the DTC playbook to offer a superior CX.
Leveraging the Loyalty Margin: Rewards Programs That Work (15 mins). Published in 2014, this whitepaper by BCG takes a first-principles approach to loyalty program design and measurement. Every single word is still relevant today—in fact, our recent guide to designing and scaling loyalty programs repeats many of the same points.
From the Era of Web1 to the Rise of Trend Oracles: AI Unveils Fashion’s Web3 Era of Hyper-Personalisation (5 mins). There are some interesting parallels between this piece and this guide by Quick Study, which we also featured recently. As our worldview becomes more fragmented (monoculture → subculture → soloculture), our tech needs to evolve in lockstep.
Goings-on
Why Is Fashion Diving Into New Industries? (10 mins) “[Brand Universes offer] consumers diverse entry points, […] allowing the brand to play a more significant role in their lives.” The most powerful brands blend the boundaries that divide industries and business models—and they use technology to bring it all together in one, unified ecosystem.
Hugo Boss Launches Innovative Customer Loyalty Program and Introduces a New World of Engagement (3 mins). Hugo Boss’s new loyalty program mixes aspects of traditional loyalty programs with Web3 elements, such as NFT rewards and token gating. This might be one of the most pragmatic Web3 loyalty rollouts I’ve seen so far—Godspeed.
Google Postpones Phasing Out of Ad Cookies in Chrome Browser (1 min). The rollout of Google’s Privacy Sandbox has been pushed out to early 2025, citing regulatory concerns among other problems. This was expected by a big chunk of the adtech/martech industry, so no big surprises here.
Tool of the week
We don’t accept sponsorships for this newsletter. All product recommendations come from our consulting team.
4GIFT. We’ve been looking at 4GIFT for a few clients and were pretty impressed with their gifting and product discovery solutions. This is the sort of stuff that used to take us weeks of design, development, and fine-tuning before it was usable by a customer, and 4GIFT is abstracting away most of that complexity. Check them out!
You might have missed...
🇬🇧 Pulse is a wrap! Thanks to everyone who came and said hi, and to the speakers and moderators for the amazing content.
🎁 Last week, I was obsessed with gifting, so I wrote about Alessi’s and Etsy’s gifting experiences. People liked it—I think.
🤖 Some random thoughts about AI and e-commerce. More on this in the next issue of The Thought!
🧶 A big welcome to our latest client, the DMC Group! We’ll be helping them with CX strategy and technology. Stay tuned!
🇪🇸 I already mentioned I’m in Barcelona for Shoptalk EU. If you’re in the area, feel free to reach out and we can grab coffee!
Does your brand need help with strategy, design or development?
For over a decade, we’ve been shaping, launching, and scaling shopping experiences for category disruptors such as Cometeer, Framework, and Huckberry. No matter where you’re going, we can help you get there.
That’s it for today!
If you’ve come across any interesting articles, podcasts, or tools we should check out, you can email us at [email protected].
See you in two weeks! 👋