Season 2 Recap

Rob Goodman:

Hi, everyone. And welcome to Now What?, the podcast from Wix about how technology is changing…everything. I'm your host, Rob Goodman. And in this series, we're talking all about evolution in business, design, development and beyond. In this episode, we're taking a look back on our second season of Now What? podcast and what a season it's been — packed with glimpses into the future of eCommerce, subscription businesses and building community in this new Web3, metaverse, crypto world. And we got into what it takes to lead and manage today and got to a deeper understanding of how radical inclusion is the key that unlocks innovation. Our guests ran the gamut from the Head of Commerce at Meta to the Design Lead for Ads at Spotify, Head of Innovation at Interbrand agency, Head of Digital at Chipotle, plus incredible guests from Stripe, Tonal, Imprint Projects and many more.

Rob Goodman:

If you're new to the show, definitely hit rewind on this season. Our team is so proud of these episodes and I can't thank you enough for tuning in and listening and spending time with us. Also a big thanks to our guests this season for joining and sharing so many insights with us. So let's get into this look back at Season Two of the show, starting off with Steve Kalifowitz, Chief Marketing Officer at Crypto.com. In our episode with Steve, he walked us through his career from Emmy award-winning producer to global marketing lead at Twitter, and now his work ushering in a new era in fintech with the global brand he's building at Crypto.com. Here, Steve discusses what it takes to create a brand from the ground up and lift an entire industry in the process.

Steve Kalifowitz:

One of the things that drew me to the crypto industry and to Crypto.com specifically, was that the industry wasn't really controlling our narrative. The narrative was being written by others because so many in the industry were so focused on building. So it was a genuine unsolved problem to help build a company that will both help create the narrative for the industry and also create a real crypto brand, which I don't think has really existed until we showed up in a true brand way. There were known companies but they weren't brands. No one could tell you what those companies stood for or what they made you feel or where they focused as an organization. It was really cool the other day, I met somebody who had joined the company two weeks earlier and they said to me they'd been working in the crypto world for about six years.

Steve Kalifowitz:

And when they told their parents, they joined Crypto.com, this was the first time that their parents not only knew the company that they were joining but their parents were excited for them to be joining this company. And those are all of the ancillary benefits that investing in and developing a brand give you, there's a lot of soft, qualitative things that go into decisions that people make and brand is like a puzzle when all the pieces of the puzzle come together well and they fit together subconsciously in a person's mind then that's their understanding of the brand. Yes, there's that thing of…you could invest tons of money in many years to build up your reputation and with one thing, kill your reputation. Sure, that could be one very big puzzle piece that doesn't fit the rest of the puzzle pieces that you put together.

Steve Kalifowitz:

But there's a lot of little things that you've got to build. So as we've been building the brand, we've been focusing on building up a lot of the little things and the strategy overall is to present to the world a real company that has real people that knows how to behave like a grown up brand. When I think about the crypto industry, there's a lot of companies in their early stages that are a bit rebellious and that was a draw for the early adopters and for the innovators, if you know that book Crossing the Chasm, they refer to those people as innovators and early adopters. And that may have been a draw for the early people but if you think about it, we're talking about money and people's hard earned money. And to a certain degree, the next group of people who come into the industry I think are unlikely to be drawn to a rebellious company because that might suggest that company might do things that will put their money at risk and that's not what people want to do.

Steve Kalifowitz:

And fundamentally Crypto.com is a large, strong company that is very trustworthy. We have the biggest insurance policy in the industry, we have some of the highest AML (Anti-Money Laundering) and KYC (Know Your Customer) policies around. We really focus hard on working well with regulators in every market that we work in. And we go the distance to make sure that we take really good care of our customers and that's something that I think you should not only know about us but you should know about the industry, that there are companies like us in the industry. And so when we go into a sponsorship, first of all, it introduces us to the market but it also introduces the industry given the name. So when you watch an F1 race and you see the word crypto…forget about our mark, the line and the.com on the other side of the word crypto, lots of people have opinions on what crypto is.

Steve Kalifowitz:

So putting it in specific places and in specific integrated ways I thought originally and now I can see in the data and from just qualitative and quantitative metrics people understood how we intend to present ourselves and that there's authenticity backing it. And we're attracting all the right people. We grew from around 10 million people and 10 million users in Q1 of 2021 to about 50 million, five zero. I think we announced that number about two weeks ago, so in April. So in roughly a year we grew 5X.

Rob Goodman:

Next we'll hear from Tressie Lieberman, Vice President of Digital Marketing and Off-Premise at Chipotle. This was one of the most refreshing interviews of the season. Tressie always has these bombs of wisdom that she drops and our chat together was no different. If you're curious about how Chipotle has revolutionized its business and digital marketing in the process, definitely dig into her full episode. Now let's hear from Tressie, as she talks about finding the sweet spot in marketing to make the most of cultural moments and also experiment as a brand.

Tressie Lieberman:

We call our team internally the Culture Hunters. The expectation is that we're out there seeing where the world is going and technology is always a huge part of that. Technology is what creates a lot of culture and shifts trends and consumer behaviors.

Tressie Lieberman:

So you kind of look across the spectrum and try to find the sweet spot of an idea that's going to tap into the culture, be only right for your company and really hit a win with the consumer. When you find those ideas you can go all in. Experimenting on TikTok doesn't take a ton of time and resources and building it into the roadmap. That's something where we can have an idea and jump on it in real time. If you have a concept like doing an experience on Roblox, that's obviously going to take a lot of the team's resources and you really need to be thinking about are you going to hit it at the right time?

Tressie Lieberman:

There's a concept called The Creative Curve. It's a book I read that I really enjoyed that just talks about hitting ideas in that sweet spot. Sometimes you miss it. Sometimes you're too early and sometimes you're too late. Try and get it as close in there as possible.

Rob Goodman:

When we talk about what's next in eCommerce, social selling is at the forefront of every commerce expert and business owner's mind. And who better to give us a glimpse into that future than Benji Shomair, Vice President for the Commerce Business at Meta. I highly recommend revisiting Benji's full episode. And in the meantime, here's Benji breaking down the key trends that are informing the shape of things to come for eCommerce.

Benji Shomair:

In many ways, social commerce is already a reality. Some forecasts are putting it at a trillion dollar opportunity in 2025. But I think what we see on our platforms, I think many people see it in their lives. I think social commerce is here. There are two trends that are behind this. I mean, the first is this idea of the customer journey is changing, sort of how and where people want to shop.

Benji Shomair:

And the second is this other concept I alluded to of content and commerce are converging. The way I sort of frame it is the idea of content is increasing the front door to your store. Now, we've seen big shifts in shopping behavior before. We saw the move from in-store to online. Then we saw online to mobile. Now we're seeing evolution into social. What's really changing this most recent shift is where people are spending their time, many cases in social apps, and how that's changing the path to purchase. The marketing funnel, that traditional marketing funnel is in many ways collapsing, creating so many sorts of new opportunities for brands and people to connect.

Benji Shomair:

On the content side, of course, that also means that people have more opportunities than before to discover those products and to purchase them sort of more instantly than ever before. I think what this all nets out to be is that shopping is evolving in some ways from a place where businesses were creating destinations. You were really creating these shopping destinations to a much more sort of always-on journey where people are making discoveries and purchases in places like, quite frankly, we would've never expected it before.

Rob Goodman:

And speaking of the future, obviously what was Facebook is now Meta and includes Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp. And I'm curious about your perspective from the eCommerce side of things, how the metaverse fits in, Web3, crypto, all of these kinds of future-forward technologies that I know the organization is really excited about and consumers are starting to dabble a little bit in. But talk to me a little bit about how the metaverse might fit into eCommerce.

Benji Shomair:

Yeah. I mean, just think about how exciting it would be to virtually try on something in the physical world, that's sort of one of the more obvious experiences that people think about. And even who knows what the virtual opportunities will be to develop. But many times when you see a platform like this develop, the first things you see poured over are references to the previous era.

Rob Goodman:

Right. The first webpages were like just the newspaper kind of thrown up on a website.

Benji Shomair:

Exactly. And I think that's very much what we're sort of seeing and thinking about now. I think the obvious implication is like, oh, I try things on in the real world. I'll try things on in the virtual world and that'll be super helpful. And you already see that in AR ads where you can sort of with makeup see what it looks like in your face, AR ads with cars and see what it looks like in your driveway.

Benji Shomair:

And so you're already seeing that sort of first phase of experimentation take place, where we're taking our current rubric and our current way we look at things and just sort of applying it to this new world. I think what's even more exciting is the things we can't anticipate. And I think this touches on a lot of the Web3 and the world that's out there, is like what are the new paradigms that are opened up by these sort of new immersive experiences?

Benji Shomair:

And I think in many ways it's anyone's guess, and I think that's the excitement very much in the world these days around those opportunities is just the white space that's ahead of us. 

Rob Goodman:

Hey, everyone, I hope you're enjoying this episode. I just wanted to take a moment to tell you more about Wix. Wix is the all-in-one platform for running your business online. Trusted by over 210 million people around the world, with Wix you get incredible security, reliability, performance and SEO, no matter the kind of business you run or the size. I've built my websites on Wix where I share more of my career story, podcasts I produce, like this one, artwork and merchandise. And I can tell you, it is so fun to build sites and apps on Wix. And I know agencies, startups and larger eCommerce companies scaling their businesses and relying on Wix for impeccable security, reliability, performance and search engine optimization. It's because with Wix, anything is possible. So if you're interested in learning more, visit wix.com to start building and growing your business today, that's wix.com.

Rob Goodman:

Now let's get back to the show. Adam Katz is from the award-winning agency Imprint Projects. He's a leader in cultural and community activations working with some of today's biggest brands from Levi's to Lego, Sonos and Google. Here, Adam breaks down how brands can think about power in communities of purpose to drive greater impact and increase business critical metrics too.

Adam Katz:

Our approach is to help brands build communities of purpose. When I say communities of purpose, it's important to understand that this is not necessarily the best community or the biggest community, but it is a very powerful way of framing community. It's important to understand the other kinds of communities.

Adam Katz:

Communities can be communities of place. These are when you have people that have a shared background, either, maybe they live in the same place, shared circumstance, a language or maybe ethnic heritage. You can imagine a community of New Yorkers or a community of English speakers and people belong to these communities by representing and identifying as part of this community.

Adam Katz:

But it's kind of a loose circumstantial sense of community. Most brands think about their community in terms of practice. Communities of practice are people who share interest or an activity like buying something, a consumer community, fans of Supreme, for example, or fans of the New York Yankees or perhaps people who identify as home cooks that share this practice.

Adam Katz:

The way that you participate in this community is usually through consumption. You enjoy doing this practice and you connect with other people who enjoy doing this practice. That's really important to brands. Certainly that's the biggest community that brands have. You could call all the consumers of a brand that kind of community, a community of practice. What we try to level up to is to build communities of purpose, which is when you actually have people who are united around a common cause, a goal, and they share a journey.

Adam Katz:

These are more characteristically understood as the people who are either educators or creatives or organizer activists, they're people who are trying to do something, they're learning together. They're teaching each other, they're changemakers, they're out in the world, sharing an ambition for some different future. This is super powerful for brands, because you can then show up, not just as part of this community, but as a resource to supercharge, to catalyze the activity of this community, to help pursue this desired shared outcome. It's a very credible way for a brand to participate. It's also a very sustainable investment for the brand, because it's not predicated on some of the normal marketing segmentation that happens, right, which is geographic demographic. In fact, it's accessible to anybody who might share this same desired outcome, the same cause.

Rob Goodman:

Our last clip is from Rachel Gogel. Rachel is an independent Chief Creative and Culture Officer who currently leads design initiatives at Airbnb. She's the Women in Leadership and Design Chair on the AIGA SF Board of Directors and is a longtime member of Queer Design Club. In our interview with Rachel, she broke down the eight essential skills that managers need in order to lead today and here Rachel discusses why diversity is so important to better teams, products and business outcomes too. In this clip, I asked her why companies need to start paying attention.

Rachel Gogel:

This practice is good for business and simply put, it's just the right thing to do. On the creative front, the concepts and best practices around, let's say, accessibility and inclusion should be baked into all work that you touch from the beginning, not a requirement that is checked off once the project is complete. A lot more teams are bringing these types of conversations earlier on in the funnel. There's still, obviously, a lot of work to do. But it's essential to understand the implications of all of our creative decisions from the people that you may portray in a campaign, to the language that you use, to collaborators and professionals that you hire, or the cultural references in your copy or marketing. And if we're not thinking about these elements, then we're not thinking about the full experience.

Rachel Gogel:

And this is important, whether you're serving a global audience or not. Even a small size of people has different needs. And then on the leadership front, building teams that reflect the expansive needs of our audience or of your audience is critical as well. The idea which you alluded to is that, definitely more perspectives on solving the problem, the better the outcome. And you have to design with people, not for people. The hard part with that I've seen happen to date though is that often certain brands may be reaching out to let's say, a DEI consultant or someone who maybe represents a certain slice of the community to bring in that particular perspective and help teams learn and do better. 

Rob Goodman:

Thanks Rachel, for all your insights and openness in our conversation. There's another great episode this season, that dives into the value of radical inclusivity to drive real innovation in technology and business. It's our previous episode with Christopher Nurko, Chief Innovation and Growth Officer at Interbrand Group, the world's leading brand consultancy. You got to check out that episode too.

Rob Goodman:

Thanks so much for listening to this look back on Season Two of Now What? podcast, the show about how technology is changing…everything. Please remember to share this show with friends and colleagues, drop us a five-star rating or review wherever you're listening right now and hit that follow button to stay in the know. You can hear all these episodes, get show notes, transcriptions, and so much more at wix.com/nowwhat. Now What? podcast is produced and hosted by me, Rob Goodman, Executive Producer for Content at Wix. Audio engineering and editing is by Brian Pake at Pacific Audio. Music is composed and performed by Kimo Muraki and Executive Producers from Wix are Susan Kaplow and me, Rob Goodman. We'll see you soon.