0:00 Good afternoon. Hello. Hello, everyone popping in. Great to see you. I'm Kiri. And I'm Doug, and we'll get started in just a minute. 0:10 We're gonna wait for some people to straggle in. Hey, Doug. I have a question for you while everyone is joining. Maybe some people will pop their answer in the chat as well. 0:20 But I was curious if there is an AI tool that you have been using either personally or at work that you weren't using at the start of this year, let's say? 0:34 At the start of this year? I wasn't using Claude heavily. I was using OpenAI and Gemini, but not Claude. 0:42 But I'm exclusively Claude now. And I do use an app, which is... Clearly, I could probably reproduce an AI platform called Mem. It's a notetaker. 0:53 It's very good. Okay. Yeah. It's very good. So that that would be a tool that clearly is using one of those technologies on the back end, but is very streamlined and very focused and does what it needs to do very, very well so that I don't feel a need to recreate it. 1:08 I'm willing to spend a little bit of money to help out the founders. Yeah. That's interesting because I think, you know, there... There's these tools where it's like, wait. We can do absolutely everything and it's overwhelming. Right? 1:20 But then there's... If there's, like, a really clean, clear use case for something, then it's easy to kinda wrap your head around and become a power user. 1:29 So I love that. Check out Mac. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's got a real, you know, like a real UI. It's practical. It's very focused on what it does. 1:37 So... Yeah. Alright. Well, I I guess what we'll do is we'll welcome everybody. I'm Doug Sturm. I'm the chief marketing officer here at Bazaarvoice. 1:46 I've been with Bazaarvoice for about four years. And I guess the most pertinent thing about my background is I was a client twice. So I was the chief digital officer at the Hershey company prior to Bazaarvoice. 1:57 And before that, I ran digital for North America at Unilever. And I've been in digital almost exclusively for about fifteen years. 2:06 And I'm joined by Carrie Masters, who's our favorite independent analyst in the retail industry and also the publisher of Retail Media Breakfast Club. 2:15 And you're joining us at about 3AM your time is my understanding. Why I look so awake and and and alive right now. Yep. 2:24 You look you look lovely. So what we're gonna do here, this is a live conversation. It's research backed. 2:33 We did some survey work with about 3,600 respondents. It's not a generic AI trends talk. And we're really gonna talk about where brand equity gets tested in AI mediated shopping and how to win on the modern shop. 2:49 So what we're going to cover today is a couple of big questions, really, is when AI surfaces recommendations without traditional brand signals, what keeps your brand valuable? 3:01 So we're going walk through this structure here, four big buckets, how we got here, a really cool history that Carrie will take us through in terms of how we got to where we got in the brand world and within retail, what changes in terms of AI, what traditional brand signals fade in AI shopping, and what are the levers that you need to check instead, what the data shows specifically in terms of the shifting role of brand equity and AI, and then what to do about it in terms of authentic customer content. 3:35 So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Kiri, and she will take you through some very interesting slides. Great. So I love looking at the history of retail because there's so many things that we can learn about the human condition and consumer behavior. 3:53 And the more we look at history, we realize, I think this is some version of this has happened before. And I look at this prediction about the death of brand has happened at various points. 4:06 And so far, none of those predictions have actually been right. The current version that we have, which is, hey. AI is gonna create this race to the bottom. 4:16 Consumers are gonna have perfect information about all of these brands and ingredients and prices and where to buy where to buy it cheapest cheapest that, you know, this... 4:26 Brands are gonna stop mattering. But to understand where we are today and how likely that is in the course of history, if we look back on history, we can see that the big sort of the big concern of the time never really sort of eventuated into the death of a brand and and a certain type of evolution. 4:48 And in some ways, brands became even more important. So I I think about even, you know, before the advent of the brand, which was actually started with the the invention of cardboard and commercial canning and the railroad, We didn't have brands at all. 5:07 We had a shopkeeper behind the counter scooping out our flour for us. But I I think today, as we look at what has happened throughout history with these big movements, these big changes, that death of the brand never actually happened. 5:23 And today, we're looking at AI and how it is shaping what customers discover, but we're seeing that it is also not the death of the brand that a lot of... 5:34 You know, there's a lot of concern and some predictions around a little earlier in the in the journey. So let's turn over to a poll now and get the audience engaged here. 5:46 We've got some questions for you. The questions are... The question is, have you discovered any brand through AI? 5:57 So, yes, you did and you ended up buying it. Yep. But you didn't purchase it. No. But I have used AI for shopping related research or you haven't really done anything in this area at all. 6:10 And we'll come back to these poll results in just a second. And while we're doing that, Doug, we need to talk about my hair. 6:19 I'm having my my best hair years ever as a 39 year old. I've waited a long time for this, and I'll chalk that up to my my reliance on AI and the constant questions that I'm throwing over to AI about hairstyling tools and what I need. And I ended up with this guy. 6:41 I'm gonna put that in front of my face so you can see it. It's this really wacky looking hairstyling tool that I would never have imagined, like, putting into my carts from a brand that I have never heard of before, never seen advertised on TV or anything like that. 6:56 And this is how a lot of shopping activities are working now is that we... We're asking for advice and we're seeing a selection of products that we might not have even considered before. 7:09 And the concern, I think, for a lot of brands, established brands, is that the years of the brand building that that they have invested into their brand is going to be reduced to stats, to a a rating, a price, a, you know, where where is it, ingredients. 7:33 And I think it's the same discomfort that brands felt walking into Amazon for the first time and figuring out where they would belong on that shelf. 7:42 We'll come back to that a little bit later. But this doesn't mean that brand equity disappears. Alright. So we've got our poll back up on the screen here to see how how the audience has responded here. 7:56 So a lot of people have used AI and ended up purchasing. Quite a few have used it for shopping related research, but haven't purchased. 8:06 So interesting to see that result there. Alright. But this is the thing that hasn't changed even with all of these progressions in in AI. 8:22 Shoppers still wanna decide for themselves. Shoppers still want to have some control over what ends up in their home, what they're feeding to their children, what they're going to be spending their hard earned money on. 8:38 And just like brands vouching for their own products was never enough in traditional marketing channels, shoppers are holding on to that final call of what they're going to buy themselves. 8:52 A lot of shoppers are already skeptical about AI's motives. And something from the research that was particularly interesting to me as a media and advertising person is that over half of shoppers suspect that ads shape what's recommended. 9:09 And we know that this is not true because the AI companies tell us they're operating on completely separate systems, but there is still this belief that they do actually shape what ends up being recommended. 9:24 So that leads to the real question that we wanted to ask with this research, which is when you don't fully trust that intermediary, what do you check instead? 9:36 So, Doug, let's get into some of those findings now. So, yeah, the really interesting thing is I can talk about my hair as well, Carrie, of which I have none. 9:48 Albeit being a thirty year veteran of the beauty industry, I spent thirty years sewing so much hair I know. Exactly. And look what look what happened to me. 9:59 So I think the the the key here and and one of the things people should take hard in, whether you're a retailer with with private labels or a a a additional brand, is that shoppers still want proof at every step. 10:14 The shopper journey is still a journey. AI essentially is just one part of that journey. 10:22 It's not a single touch point, one and done, which I think is really the fear. So shoppers stack AI with websites visits, social and retailer checks, especially for brands that they don't know. 10:35 So they want to see what the AI says, but they also want to verify that that holds up under scrutiny across multiple trust points. 10:46 So trust just doesn't just decide whether someone double checks. It decides how long that takes. And when it's time to buy, the brand's own website still wins. 10:55 So I know a lot of us think about our websites as relatively low traffic. Well, are relatively low traffic, but there is a utility in those websites. 11:04 And I find this very interesting because I grew up in the age of when digital commerce was on its infancy, and it was the same there. The journey could be very sarcucatous. 11:14 I'm gonna practice that word. And what would end up being as people would would end up going to the website and checking what the brand was actually saying about themselves as opposed to just what they were seeing out in the broader environment. 11:28 So when it's time to buy, brand website still wins. And the opportunity isn't just being recommended. It's being ready everywhere shoppers checks next. 11:37 So in other words, you have to be active across multiple touch points. So the one thing that should be, I think, clear and hopefully is as we go through the rest of the deck here is if you're established, most of the day is about protecting what you already have. 11:55 So it's just as in the physical world, you want to protect your shelf space. In the digital world, you want to make sure that you're one of the mentions in search. 12:04 It's the same here. You want to make sure that you're being mentioned. And if you're a challenger brand, it's about the fastest way you can earn trust that you haven't built yet. 12:12 So whichever goal is yours, the data shows where you need to start. Yeah. And this is the clearest finding in the study. 12:21 And and what we were able to do here very very intentionally is ask shoppers what's the difference between your behavior for a brand that you already know and trust versus one that is unfamiliar to you. 12:35 And how we were able to then sort through the results there is find out things like if before shoppers seriously consider an AI surface option, do they do they... 12:49 Are they more likely to click through and consider a brand that they already trust? 12:57 And that is particularly true in some categories like beauty and personal care and less so in other categories like home improvement. 13:08 And we have that category breakdown in the full report. So make sure if you want to see the full report with all of the findings, click through to the doc section of the webinar there and and download it. 13:21 And this all matters. This this this differing behavior and trust between a brand that I already know and one that I don't matters because it tells you, as a brand, what do you need to prove, not just who you need to reach. 13:38 And shoppers believe what they're choosing is based on performance, whether or not that's the full story. 13:46 That was the belief that people shared with us. Why do you choose this known brand all the time? And primarily was a belief that this brand performs better. 13:59 And so this is an opening for challenger brands as well. If you can provide that proof of performance that outweighs the legacy brand awareness on the modern shelf. 14:12 So I I think that what's really interesting is, you know, back in the day, I managed the sales forces that that called on Amazon, and I interacted as as part of the sales leadership with my other channel leaders. 14:26 And one of the things that we always worried about was channel conflict. What was happening algorithmically on Amazon and how would that affect how pricing was taking place in other channels? 14:38 And so just to address the price fear head on, this is something that you may be thinking quietly about as well. And some marketers would assume AI turns every purchase into a hunt for the lowest price. 14:52 The data says otherwise twice over. Loyalty has a real cost to overcome, essentially. And most shoppers won't budge for a small discount. 15:01 It's the same effect that we saw years ago as e commerce was in its sentencing. So price alone rarely decides where someone buys. 15:10 So if it's not price, what actually earns the click for a brand that shoppers don't know yet? Yeah. Yeah. 15:18 And and in other words, what does a shopper need to know before trusting a brand that they're not familiar with yet? 15:27 And so a lot of shoppers start out a little bit hesitant on this unfamiliar brand, and that hesitation is exactly what proof you need to provide to overcome that. 15:39 So AI doesn't replace this need for proof, but it raises the stakes on having it. And the proof has to be readable not just by human eye, but by the AI tools who are able to bring that back into the chat experience. 15:58 So you can see here reviews with photo or video, written reviews, product specs, star ratings. These are all things that consumers are expecting to help aid that decision and build trust. 16:13 And this one's personal. I love that you mentioned Amazon before, Doug, because I had a a similar experience back in 2015. 16:22 I actually started a marketing agency that primarily helped brands sell on Amazon. And there was a... 16:31 It was a surprising amount of resistance that brand... A lot of brands had to selling on Amazon back in those days. They would say, well, wait. Isn't Amazon a... 16:40 Isn't it a bookstore? Or isn't it a discount site? And, you know, we're a premium brand. No. Thank you. We do not wanna be there. 16:49 But that... This reminds me of that time as well because that stripped down product list that we saw earlier where, you know, it's kind of a utilitarian. 17:03 Do you want product a, b, or c? This is how some sort of product exploration looks in AI. That reminds me a little bit of that concern that brands felt when looking at Amazon in 2015. 17:18 And I hear that the same concern from brands. You know, dupes. What what about the dupes and the copycats? 17:28 And what about discounting? Is this gonna be a race to the bottom? But as as Doug shared before as well, most shoppers still check out on the brand's own site or on a retailer's site. 17:45 And the real lesson, I think, from that early history is that brands that, like, held out off of selling on Amazon for a while, they didn't just disappear, but they did fall behind and they did sort of open up the door for resellers, for unauthorized resellers to start telling their story for them. 18:08 And so I think this is my sort of warning advice is if you skip that same this this... 18:16 The same opportunity with AI, the model is going to do the same thing for you. It's gonna make up its own mind about what should be shared about your brand and about your products. 18:26 Yeah. I think that's a that's a really powerful example. I I saw that myself at Unilever. So at Unilever, there's 47 different brands that I had to essentially manage across many different categories on Amazon. 18:41 And there were a number of our brands, beauty brands. And in fact, a a brand that I helped build and then sell to Unilever was one of those brands where they they really did not wanna go on Amazon. And that was essentially the argument. 18:55 Like, you you are already on Amazon. You just happen to be in third party, and you don't control any of the equity messaging around that. You're not optimizing for any of the content. 19:05 It's whatever, you know, the the seller decides it to be. And that might not work with your price point, and it might not be the kind of message that you want to convey. 19:15 So you are absolutely right. It's already happening with AI. A lot of conversations from some of our clients in a very, very, very high end luxury where they've been very, very careful about their distribution strategy and whether or not they actually wanna have reviews. 19:33 So some of their brands might have reviews, but a lot of very high end brands would not. But they are reconsidering their approach to AI because they wanna make sure that they're at least being discovered. 19:44 So here's a couple brands that are getting it right. They're very different categories. There's a there's a question around, is this only CPG in our research? No. There's there's also, you know, durable goods. 19:55 There's luxury. There's apparel. So it's not just fast moving consumer goods and traditional CPG. There's a little bit of everything in there. 20:04 But here's a... This is a very interesting one in terms of the established brand versus what I would call a a challenger brand. So if you take a look here, there's an established brand, in this case, Castro, protecting their equity with a really, really strong review coverage. 20:18 So both a volume of reviews, but also a very wide distribution of that content across retail and social touch points, not just retail syndication, which is what typically reviews have been used for historically, but using that same content to light up other touch points to ensure that no matter what part of the shopper journey a consumer or shopper's on, Casserole will be in front of that shopper. 20:44 And on the other side, you've got a challenger brand. The challenger brand is building trust fast and they're really focused in on volumes. 20:53 You take a look at scaling reviews from a thousand to over a 113,000, a huge really Herculean effort by this brand to essentially get their brand up and in front of consumers in a way that's more difficult for them than say a Castro because they have more limited distribution. 21:14 But the kicker here is that it's the same trust signals that shoppers look for. It is is the same is the same thing that AI is looking for. 21:23 They use the same information to find and recommend a product. And UGC, whether a human or a robot, is key to winning over both types of shopper. 21:34 Carrie, any quick takeaways? Yeah. I think, you know, that there is... For me, it's clear why brands fear this because of this sort of perfect information that consumers are able to get. 21:48 I hear I hear a lot about race to the bottom and commodification and why would anyone buy something sort of outside of price. 21:58 And the reality is so much more nuanced than that. Not everyone is out there to buy the cheapest thing. 22:06 We have different reasons for going to different retailers and buying different brands that are not always easy to explain rationally either. 22:15 And I will also just say that, you know, not all shopping is fun. Not everyone loves shopping for jeans. Not everyone loves shopping for the the grocery shop, but there's still... 22:26 It... It's highly dependent on person context, and there are still many categories and elements that are. And shopping is self expression for a lot of people, so they will still want to have their hand on that decision, maybe pulling in some information from AI to make a good one. 22:45 But people will still want to be involved with many of these decisions and interrogate what is behind that recommendation. 22:55 Yeah. Absolutely. A a peer of mine says, hey. I can't try on a pair of jeans or a pair of shoes. They can't... But they... And you need those things, you know, that... 23:05 That's part of the that's part of the fun of shopping. It's not always just the transactional, you know, logical, you know, path that anybody's following. 23:15 So what we wanna do is is is bring together these streams. Again, if you're established, don't rely on recognition alone. 23:24 Make your proof visible everywhere AI looks in shoppers purchase. So you you wanna be able to get content, core creative content as well as user generated content fired up in as many touch points as you can. 23:36 That establishes the the consistency and all the touch points that that is required by the shopper journey, whether the shopper is a human or whether it is AI. 23:47 And if you're a challenger, you know, build up credibility fast with real customer content. Lead with reviews, especially those with a photo video proof to earn shopper trust and really communicate different product attributes and use cases for your brand. 24:03 I'll give you a really good example. Harvard Business Review did some research and what they were finding across OpenAI or ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini was that the running shoe brand Brooks was inordinately showing up in results. 24:23 And Nike, which is by far and away the world's biggest shoe manufacturer, athletic shoe manufacturer, wasn't maybe performing as well. 24:33 And essentially, it came down to Brooks was really focused in on the use cases that... And and focused in on what people were asking in terms of the product and then trying to figure out a way through their user generated content to answer those questions really succinctly and sharply. 24:52 Whereas Nike was taking a very different approach. And it just goes to show either there's no one way to do this, but it's a new world and you need to think those things through because this is how the robots respond. 25:07 So with that, we're going to wrap. There will be a little bit of time for questions here, couple minutes. But from the shameless plug department, I wanted to just mention to everybody here on the call, Bazaarvoice Inspire, which our own event, the art and science of product discovery, maybe in a city near you. 25:31 Amsterdam, unless you had a time machine, has come and gone, but a fantastic event. London tomorrow, if you're in the area, we'd love to see you. 25:40 Paris, New York, Sydney, Chicago, San Francisco, you can see the list there. You'll see this type of research in a lot more depth and a lot more around the playbooks, around whether you're a challenger brand or whether you're an incumbent, whether you're a manufacturer, whether you're a retailer, all of that goodness and a lot of research and our product roadmap is at this event. 26:04 So with that, I'm going to just say thank you to all the attendees. And if we wanted to field a few questions, we could. 26:13 Yeah. It looks like there was a... I wanted to point out a question from Anne who just, I think, was asking about the categories before. 26:22 So in this report, we do break down a lot of these findings by the categories, beauty and personal care, apparel, footwear and accessories, electronics and appliances, baby, kids and toys, pet care, home and kitchen furnishings, food and beverage, DIY, and home improvement. 26:41 So we've cut a lot of the analysis by those categories so you can see what is... What sort of trends are shaking out in your specific category. 26:50 So I just wanted to point that out. That's in the full report. Yep. One of the questions was around, do do you think that with the the more spread use of AI, consumers and shoppers will begin to trust it more? 27:04 And we do have research that does say, in fact, yes. And third party research as well that I believe, you know, it was a a very low percentage of people were were trusting it last year. 27:17 I can't remember the exact percentage. But around 20% would trust it as much as they would trust expert advice from somebody that's a known quantity in any given space. 27:31 So it could be like a beauty influencer or something like that. So that's coming. The AI platforms themselves, I've had the opportunity to talk to all of the major platforms in-depth about how they think about authenticity and trust. 27:44 They know that people will not use their tools unless people can trust what the answers are that are being created in response to the questions that people are answering. 27:55 So they're looking for big data sets that have a lot of information about how people feel about products, which is why we're working very, very hard to partner with those platforms. 28:05 So, yeah, trust will go up because if trust does not go up, no one will end up using the platforms. And that's that's not a a winning proposition, obviously, for those for those companies. 28:17 Yeah. There's another question around, can we say more about Brooks... 28:25 How Brooks was able to find the questions consumers were asking AI? The the Brooks and Nike example was actually part of the Harvard Business Review research. 28:33 So you you can find that on the web. So I would seek that out. I don't know what the exact methodology is, but my hypothesis would be that Brooks was mining the insights that they were getting from user generated content to see what types of answers and comments their shoppers and consumers were leaving. 28:56 And they were really... They they were using that as an indication for what a, you know, shoe design was being spoken about. 29:04 And they they decided to to, you know, in some way, shape, or form optimize for those types of answers. That that would be my hypothesis, but I would check the Harvard Business Review article first. 29:19 And then for us, in terms of how to how to still have very authentic content, but still do a bit of coaching around that content to ensure that it's it's hitting the market categorically. 29:31 Like, it could be apparel, for example, like like the the Brooks and Nike example. They have a feature called content coach, which gamifies the collection of the reviews and asks for a lot of the things that are most important for that category. 29:45 So that's a way to ensure that it's still an authentic product experience. It's still created by a human, but it just guides that human to make sure that they're talking about the things that seem to be the most important things related to that category as they're leaving a review for an individual product within that category. 30:04 Okay. Carrie, any last minute thoughts? I think we're right at time. I think we're right at time. This is this is a great conversation. 30:14 Certainly, check out the full report. There's tons of gold in there that we weren't able to touch on today. And really appreciate the time with you guys. 30:23 Yep. We really appreciate it. And, Carrie, thank you for your partnership. Alright. We'll see you next time.
