Episode 168 / Julie Austin / Bravissimo / Marketing & Digital Director
Why Brands Should Create Friction to Develop Loyalty
As the Marketing & Digital Director at Bravissimo, Julie Austin is in charge of e-commerce and marketing for the brand across the UK and the US. She started in e-commerce from no knowledge at all and has gone on to lead marketing and online purchasing for brands such as Claire’s and Mamas & Papas. Throughout her career, she’s developed her Shiny New Object as “friction is where the fun is.”
When you first think of friction in relation to a customer journey, of course the initial reaction would be a negative one. Why would brands want to slow down their acquisition funnels and make consumers have a less than seamless experience with them? However, that is all relative, depending on the type of brand you are and what matters to you, according to Julie.
If you’re looking to optimise conversions and get customers through the website and on to the basket and checkout as soon as possible, similar to the model that Amazon run, for example, then friction is indeed a bad thing. But one of Julie’s top marketing tips – inspired by Dolly Parton – is to “know your brand and do it on purpose.”
This means asking what is important to your brand: what sort of metrics do you want to judge success by and how long are you willing to wait to see the outcomes of your initiatives? For Virgin Atlantic, for example, slowing down their holiday recommendations website and putting up messages to tell customers they were working on a package deal for them led to increased conversion rates as buyers felt reassured that they were getting a personalised suggestion.
For Julie, at Bravissimo, this positive friction translates into explaining more about bra fitting and the brand’s ethos to consumers as they go through the checkout process. This slows down the experience, but it also creates more awareness of the brand, a deeper connection with consumers, and an increased repeat customer rate. Although conversion dropped in the immediate term, what this new approach brought to Bravissimo was increased repeat business which led to increased profitability for the brand in the longer term.
As Julie puts it: “If you look at something in a linear funnel way, which is the race to the end, actually, you're kind of missing out the bits on the way that are a bit about the brand affirmation and the brand loyalty.”
Listen to more top tips from Julie and hear her talk about positive friction as applied to brands today, in the latest podcast here.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Tom Ollerton 0:06
Hello, and welcome to the Shiny New Object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of Automated Creative, and this is a weekly podcast where I interview top marketing professionals about their vision for the future of the industry. And this week is no different. I'm on a call with Julie Austin, who is Marketing and Digital Director at Bravissimo. So, Julie, for anyone who doesn't know you, can you give the audience a bit of background on who you are and what you do?
Julie Austin 0:35
Yeah, of course I can, Tom. And yeah, I'm Julie Austin. As Tom said, I'm the Marketing and Digital Director currently at Bravissimo. And how did I get here? So I did marketing at university a few years ago, don't really need to say how many, 20 is fine. And originally, I sort of spent my first 10 years actually in buying really. I always loved the business of retail, a business of fashion but couldn't draw. And one of the things I always loved was kind of really being kind of by hand a decision making in close to what our customers are wanting. So buying was originally my road, I worked for Next and Boots, in both of that arena, which was fantastic learning ground. And then about 11 years ago, actually, after I had my daughter, I did a complete change and moved into E-commerce and marketing. Started from no knowledge at all googling "what is SEO" at a desk, and luckily had a lot more people around me that started to know what to do and learn from all of them. So I have had the pleasure of since then leading e-commerce and marketing at Claire's. I've worked for Mamas and Papas. And now currently at Bravissimo where I have the very wrong sale title of Marketing and Digital director, it's very clear what I do. And really looking after all our kind of customer numbers. We're very customer driven, aren't we all, but really, across our E commerce and our marketing in the UK and the US.
Tom Ollerton 2:07
Blimey, I love those two admissions of not knowing what was going on, googling SEO?
Julie Austin 2:14
Yeah, I mean, I still do that now some days to be honest.
Tom Ollerton 2:20
What was the last thing that you Googled that you didn't know that you thought you probably should?
Julie Austin 2:24
Um when do we think the next algorithm update is?
Tom Ollerton 2:27
Oh, yeah. Nice. Nice. I'm potentially moving to Hungary in August, and I Googled "Will Russia invade Hungary?" That was my slight concern.
Julie Austin 2:39
What was the response?
Tom Ollerton 2:41
No, I think was the short answer.
Julie Austin 2:43
Well if Google says!
Tom Ollerton 2:45
Well, yeah, and we've gone wildly off topic. So if someone wanted to follow that 20 year journey, and they were a student, and they were just looking for that job, they just want to get ahead in the industry, what advice would you give them?
Julie Austin 3:00
I think the most important thing is that, I mean, I look now, I have the pleasure of having a team of about 26 now. And I look at our 20 to 23 year old execs that coming out of university, and they have got their shit together, like they know so much more than I did at that age. And it's a really competitive playing field now for students coming out of university in quite like a difficult working world as well in terms of the amount of opportunities and the choices they need to make. So the thing I find often when we recruit and when we look at bringing our interns and our execs in, is they almost forget about the 101 of they have to market themselves first, and what is their personal brand? So who are they and what do they want to be, because at this level, from a student perspective, the likelihood is that your first entry level role you're going to get brought on because of your attitude, and not so much your aptitude. And that is really key. So learning about the culture of where you're applying to. And that's not reading the kind of About Us page on a website and reciting that we started in 1995. Really understanding the culture and how you would fit into that culture. And if it's right for you to fit into that culture to because it's a relationship. And working through kind of that more attitude part of selling yourself, who you are, why you would fit, why that would work for you, as you're kind of your application route a lot more so than kind of the necessarily what you can do. I think in tie with that, as well, is also remember that marketing is more than just social media. So really looking at kind of the marketing mix of the brands that you're applying to and understanding and maybe taking a different route that isn't social media driven when you're talking about their marketing critique as well really surprises us as marketing directors.
Tom Ollerton 4:56
There is some awesome advice there. So that's some kind of student advice, but I'm also keen to know more about a more general marketing tip. What is that bit of silver bullet advice that you've given in your career recently or at the start, that you find yourself sharing my stuff.
Julie Austin 5:13
There's actually two, so one's from marketing and one's not. But the first one is, I was really lucky when I was at Mamas and Papas that they invested in me going to do a master's in retail leadership for widows that were assessed. And we had Steve Finland who at the time was the CCO at Clark's come and talk to us. And he said something that I quote pretty much every day, which is progress, not perfect. And in a world of where often marketers are quite perfectionist, and we can always see the opportunity that we could have if only we had this or if only we could get the IT dev or if only we could get the extra sign off. Remembering progress not perfect is the kind of the sense check I give tip, pretty much everything that I do. Is it progress? It's probably not perfect. Is it good enough for our customers? Will they be happy with what we've had? And that's probably the kind of most valuable advice and the one I say with my team more than any.
Tom Ollerton 6:16
What's the other one, you said you had two tips?
Julie Austin 6:18
Oh, the other one's Dolly Parton because I quote Dolly Parton and my team every day. She, you know, the thing about personal brand, she is the original personal marketeer, she knows her brand. And that is find out who you are and do it on purpose. So, you know, really know who your brand is, and yourself, like really know who your brand is, understand it and make sure that all those key elements of who you are, you do on purpose and make that your kind of sense check.
Tom Ollerton 6:45
Yeah, I'm not a massive Dolly fan music wise, but there's a couple of them I like but yeah, I've seen a couple of Netflix documentaries about Dolly Parton, that she definitely lives that brand. I remember when she was recording a film, "9 to 5", the film song, and I think she was living with Jane Fonda or whoever it was. And she said that every day when she left the bedroom, she was like immaculate, you know, wig, make-up, outfit, you know, there was never, there was never any time they didn't see like the full Dolly. And I used to have that level of at least visual, you know, attention on my own brand, which, you know, as a young dad, very rarely happens. Anyway, too much of me in this podcast, we're gonna move on to your shiny new object, which has a funny title, which is friction is where the fun is.
Julie Austin 7:40
Yeah.
Tom Ollerton 7:41
What does that mean? Why is that your shiny new object?
Julie Austin 7:44
So I, we kind of live in a world now, especially retail and marketing, where we race through funnels and attribution windows. And I think we really forget that human behavior often isn't as direct as the marketing funnel that we're trying to throw them down. And often, it's the experiences or the friction that you can create that really creates brand resonance, and more importantly, brand loyalty.
Tom Ollerton 8:12
So expand on that. So why's friction, a good thing? So surely, your role is to make everything seamless and beautiful. And as fewer clicks as possible and dreamy and nice and personal and authentic? Why is friction a good thing?
Julie Austin 8:28
So I think it's important to say when I'm talking here, I'm obviously not talking about negative friction. So I'm not talking about inundating your customers, or your users with 76 pop ups that shout at you about everything, the minute you go into their website, that's obviously negative friction. And obviously back to the point that Dolly made about find out who you are, and do it on purpose. Some brands absolutely do exist to be frictionless. You know, Amazon is the king of that, they know who they are, their whole focus is on creating an entirely frictionless experience. So they don't spend their time on the soft stuff around it. They just spend their time on getting you through that checkout conversion as quickly as you can. So I think the first check before you take any advice from me is, is your brand a frictionless brand, or is it not? Is it someone that actually, if I'm buying soap at the supermarket, I probably don't want a lot of friction, I just want you to show me to the soap that I like. But where we create where our businesses are, where our brands are built on loyalty and long term customer relationships, friction can often be really useful. And it can be useful, I believe, in quite a few ways. So I remember reading about this a few years ago, and it was I don't know if you've ever heard of anything called the IKEA effect. Cool. And so it's like a cognitive psychology thing. I'm sure it's a better title than a thing, but I'll go with that. And it's where they say that there's a cognitive bias where people value an object more if they make it themselves. So if you expend effort or if you expend kind of extra concentration or time to create something, that you're valuing more, and you're also kind of really have that sort of afterglow about it that you wouldn't necessarily get if you just went and immediately did a transaction. So I'm not sure how much I believe that because I've watched my husband put up IKEA flat pack, and I'm not sure he had any kind of afterglow afterwards. But I do, I think it's an interesting concept to think about as marketeers. And it's something I've kind of, I always look at when I'm reading kind of case studies or, and there's a really interesting one, again, interesting, subjective, but I think it's interesting, that Virgin Atlantic had done. So when Virgin Atlantic redesigned their website, they did a whole thing about kind of looking at their user experience, specifically on luxury. And when they did in testing, they found that customers who searched on their site for holidays, if they were served recommendations too quickly, they didn't trust the recommendations because they didn't think that they were considered enough or tailored enough. And then, so there was kind of a mistrust, because everything was almost so frictionless. So when they did loads of UX testing and marketing testing, they actually slowed the page down a little bit, they added in a spinner graphic to say we're reviewing options, and some brand kind of affirmation copy about why it is it's taking time that they're thinking about you as an individual. And they saw online conversion quite rapidly increase and their brand favourability score increase. So I mean, that's against all UX 101. Like everything is about reducing that but by actually creating some positive friction that made that the feeling more considered that made it seem that what they were getting was more bespoke. For them. Positive friction was created, and they saw the return on that.
Tom Ollerton 12:00
So that seems like mega clever. And reminds me of I think Instagram did a similar thing. They didn't need to have a loading thing a while ago, but they put it in and it increased stickiness on the platform, but part of me thinks that's getting a bit Blackhat. Like, yeah, it's dishonest, right, the page isn't loading, it's manipulating you. It's trying to make you feel differently about the brand. Like, do you think there's any of that in it? Or is it? What's the benefit to the user there, I can see the benefit to the brand. Why is that a good thing for consumers?
Julie Austin 12:38
Because ultimately, the result that comes at the end result is the same, but it's the reassurance that because actually, they are looking for bespoke, they are taking everything they've put in and looking for it. But just because the technology can move at a certain speed doesn't mean that the customers trust of that or reassurance of that, or their want of expectation is the same. So actually kind of aligning the experience with what our customers are looking for, or what is going to reassure them about their purchase, I think is really key that's really tapping into customer psyche. And we use an example here at Bravissimo actually where our whole, you know, big focus on what we look at is service and fitting. So I'm going to make a presumption, Tom, I don't want to make it can tell me if I'm wrong, but I'm going to presume you don't buy an awful lot of bras.
Tom Ollerton 13:27
Not recently.
Julie Austin 13:28
Okay, good. So bra sizing actually really quite complex. It's not very easy. But there's 94 sizes that we sell across cups and backs, like it's, it's quite complex on finding a fit that works for you. And if you don't find a bra, you can find lots of bras, same with jeans, I guess would be my comparison, like you find jeans that are like, okay, but when you find the jeans that fit you amazingly like you're in like your full time in, and we know fit's really important for our customers to understand our value, because we know that we're not the cheapest, but we are the best on fit, the best on quality when you find the right fit. And when we looked at UX, if you look at UX alone, I'm quite a passionate advocate for UX and marketing teams to always almost be together if they're not physically at least kind of metaphorically together. And we were kind of working from a website perspective of rushing our customers, new customers, getting them through the PDP, getting them to the basket, getting them through to the checkout, lots of kind of frictionless experience. And that sort of a really good uplift in conversion like so if we just literally looked at our commercial e-commerce ego hat, we'd have ticked the box and gone "Yeah, we rock, that was amazing. We've got them through this follow, you know, our basket drop off is so much less." But when we looked at kind of six months versus after that our return customer was far fewer, because actually they were almost so rushed through their purchase, they didn't see the quality or the reassurance of what they were buying. So they got a bra and it felt okay, but it didn't compel them, they didn't feel part of the brand, they just thought it was like, like, it's a good bra, like, it's fine. But you know, I'll probably do a little bit of quick code shopping next time and look for something else. Whereas when we changed our experience, and actually created quite a bit of friction all the way with kind of, you know, explaining to customers that actually when they put something in the basket that about 70% of our customers the first time when they buy a bra they buy in the wrong size for them, how can we help you, let's give you a bit more information about that and take you over here. Let's show you some kind of marketing videos and show you some brand videos about kind of how we fit, on what our fitting experiences like, what we actually saw as our conversion drop. But our customer engagement increased hugely and our return customers increased hugely, and our profitability increased because of it. So if you look at something in a linear funnel way, which is the race to the end, actually, you're kind of missing out the bits on the way that are a bit about the brand affirmation and the brand loyalty.
Tom Ollerton 16:04
Right, that is fascinating. That must be absolutely excruciating to watch the conversion rate drop, and have, you know, the basket, well, you know, just overall revenue go down, but then to see the returning customers come back, obviously, you know, cheaper to convert, and then that driving profitability. That is an incredible story. And what was the timeframe on that, you know, were you sitting there having a bit of a tough time for six months, or did it turn around in a few weeks? Help me understand how you saw that.
Julie Austin 16:39
We did iterate, we did iterations of it over probably about, you know, no test, no A B test, or no testing should just be kind of one version. So I think we did sort of 11 or 12 different variations within it a bit of a testing roadmap of it. And so it's probably in total, our average frequency is we have customers that are, good customers visit just under three times a year, it's not, you know, it's quite a needs purchase, but a want when you create the want. And so in total, I think we've measured it over about four or five months. But really importantly, our you know, we, from our marketing, kind of my marketing team, we look at everything from customer loyalty. So it's, it's really what's your metric, right? Like, if your metric is purely the money in the till that week, then you probably don't have the skin in the game to be able to have that kind of longer term view. But if your metric is long term, what's your active database? What's your point of lapse? How many customers are you stopping lapsing? What's your first or second purchase engagement? Then you can have that time to be looking at that with a little bit more in depth. So I mean, it goes back really, doesn't it, kind of how your metric-ing yourself and measuring your activities around it.
Tom Ollerton 17:52
So, Julie, unfortunately, I'd love to go deep into this. It's such a fascinating story. But we're kind of running out of time for the podcast now. So if someone did want to continue this conversation with you, how would you like them to get in touch with you? And what makes a great outreach to you?
Julie Austin 18:09
Probably LinkedIn is probably the easiest, right? That's what we all do. So by all means LinkedIn under Julie Austin. What makes a great outreach? I'm not sure I've had a great LinkedIn outreach. I guess that's my challenge. Show me what a great LinkedIn outreach is because I'm not sure I've had one yet.
Tom Ollerton 18:29
No one's ever said that before. That's fantastic. Julie, thanks for the education and that was really entertaining as well.
Julie Austin 18:36
Thanks, Tom. It's been a pleasure.
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