Committing to the Success
As outlined in the suggested metrics, the core metrics focused on sales and customer engagement. Yet, there was a hesitancy to market the pilots directly to customers
Instead, we saw brand's marketing and PR teams pitching the launch of the resale pilot just to media networks. There was a lower risk in telling the story of launching their resale pilot to this audience.
Across the board the press picked up the stories and gave a lot of credit to the brand and the idea of resale and what this could mean to change our industry and its reliance on only selling new items. The media likes trends.
However, marketing to the brand’s current customers was limited. The most we saw was an email that the brand sent out to their customer list announcing the pilot. Rarely did we see follow-up emails or consistent marketing towards the resale program. In some cases, there was NO communication with customers. The only traffic being driven was through industry media.
For many of the brands, they pointed to the industry press, chalked it up as a success and that was it. But if they had metrics around sales or customer engagement and the numbers were low, it was seen as unsuccessful. When in fact engagement with customers was missing from the pilot itself.
Pilots were rarely structured for scaling
The core question of why the company was doing the pilot was evident at the end of the pilot. We met with every one of the brands and did a summary of the pilot development, the implementation, the sales, customer engagement and made a recommendation for scaling the program. Our audience was usually the team that launched the pilot with us, they were excited to get the feedback and use it. And then there was silence.
We were waiting for the next step – taking what we learned and evolving it and scaling it. But what we realized was that the goals of the pilot were more about learning some information, not about scaling.
For example, at the end of one pilot, a brand had used a specific inventory segment but was unable to supply a continuous stream of inventory for an ongoing resale program. In this case it meant that we had to pull in other teams or change a process at the distribution center. These were now new processes. Instead, these teams and the process should have been involved in the pilot.
In another pilot the marketing department planned one email to their customer base for the announcement. It drove traffic to the resale products and increased sales for these products. However, after the pilot there was no follow-on marketing strategy to maintain the initial success. The marketing box was checked, and it was back to business as usual, shifting focusing to other initiatives
