Episode Details

Main Takeaways:

• Phillip and Brian are joined today by research guru, Rachel Swanson, founder of Method + Mode which gives bespoke insights for brand growth.
• First, Brain and Phillip give a COVID-19 update.
• The trio review Rachel’s work on Future Commerce’s Vision 2020 Report and reflect on the process of the research and give their own insights to the findings.
• Rachel makes data come alive and creates a story from the data she gathers.
• The three discuss the cyclical nature of retail and how DTC brands are evolving and how they think brands will continue to evolve in the future.
• And they throw in a few hot takes, just for the fun of it.

COVID-19 Update from Future Commerce

• We were off message with our episode last week when we published our episode talking about Ingrid speaking at Shoptalk 2020 which then got canceled.
• Brian lives in the Seattle area. There are no gatherings of more than 250 people allowed, even with religious gatherings.
• Businesses in the Seattle areas are struggling with the lack of interaction.
• An interesting statistic, a lot of DTC toilet paper companies are having a very high amount of traffic on their sites. Who Gives a Crap, Bippy, and No. 2 are all out of stock.
• There’s an interesting development in how technology can aid in this environment.
• We’ve seen a big step up in corporate responsibility in response to the virus.
• We’re no longer a manufacturing-driven economy, we’re a services-driven economy and the service industry’s suffering will impact the entire global economy.
• Storefronts selling services JUST overtook storefronts selling goods, which makes the impact of COVID-19 even more unfortunate.

What is Method + Mode?

• Rachel is a market researcher & brand strategist, focusing on leveraging custom research to inform business executives and decisions.
• Rachel has a heavy background in media, fashion, and beauty.
• Method + Mode creates a custom research plan to help their clients get the research they need.
• Bespoke insights for brand growth.

Making the Data Come Alive

• Originally, Future Commerce worked with Method + Mode to do some audience research
• Most recently, Rachel worked with Future Commerce on our Vision 2020 Report.
• Rachel doesn’t do academic research.
• She works with existing hypotheses, business objectives, and consumer reality. The key is to triangulate the three into succinct research that services the objectives of the business.
• Rachel’s approach is to lay a foundation towards the hypotheses and then to validate or disprove those hypotheses.
• Asking non-binary questions in a way that requires a response is a great way to get a sense of broader themes.
• More people have a better understanding of why they won’t do something, rather than why the will do something, so Rachel often asks why people won’t do something in creating her surveys.
• Writing a good survey is a skill that requires a lot of practice.

Gaining Insights from your Data

• In your surveys, you always want to throw in some issues that will help disprove some of your biases.
• Rachel includes multiple ways of exploring important objectives to create consistency in answers.
• When understanding benchmarks, the Vision 2020 report wanted to go