Impact of Covid on the Consumer Market with Chris Epple

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with my friend Chris Epple. Chris is a seasoned marketing executive who builds brands and drives business results with no compromise on either, which I love. Chris has worked at a bunch of really interesting brands over the years from Kraft to Pepsi to A& E, now at Harman. Chris, welcome to the Daily Bolster.

Chris Epple: Thanks for having me, Matt.

Matt Blumberg: All right, so my question for you today is how has marketing changed with COVID, with the pandemic? I think all of us who've lived through this are going to mark time by the time before COVID and the time after COVID, but in particular, how has consumer marketing changed over the last couple years?

Chris Epple: Yeah. I mean, I'd say post pandemic, I think brands and/ or consumers are focused on digital availability. It's something that has always kind of been there, but really you've seen the change mostly in categories that previously weren't. So take things like buying a car or trying out a pair of headphones, that was focused on going into a store, that was focused on face- to- face interactions. And now these types of companies need to find totally new ways to educate consumers and provide experiences when the store is now sometimes an afterthought.

Matt Blumberg: Interesting. And I mean, I think for things that were already digital, clearly there was an acceleration.

Chris Epple: Sure.

Matt Blumberg: What you're talking about is really a step function for things where there was probably a website, but it wasn't expected to do very much other than point you to a store and show you pictures of products.

Chris Epple: Yeah. I mean, yeah, for sure. I mean, you think about you buy a car, you used to go in, you used to test drive it, you used to speak with the salesperson. You wanted to buy a pair of sunglasses, you'd go in, you'd try them on. New headphones certainly saw this. So companies that have now looked to reinvent that experience, whether it be send them in and try them on and send them back if you don't like them. I think content-

Matt Blumberg: That's what Warby Parker has done, which is so cool. You just get five glasses in the mail in a really nice packaging. You try them on and you send four of them back. They're probably hoping you only send two or three of them back and you keep extra.

Chris Epple: Yeah. Well, I think Warby Parker had no idea the pandemic was coming, but is a brand that exemplifies how to be set up in a post pandemic world. I think content too. So take electronics, right, used to go in, you should try headphones on. For a while, that became absolutely not going to happen. And even still, I think the adoption of that is a little bit, people are a little skeptical. So content, testimonials, influencers, all of that are ways that you're getting research, you're getting information in ways you had never gotten in the past.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, that is really interesting. So give an example of something you're doing at Harman.

Chris Epple: Yeah. So Harman, one of our big focuses is on headphones. So one of the things we've done is we've looked at different types of apps and applications where you could scan your face and try headphones on virtually, as an example of things we've tested with and dipped our toes, I'm not saying they're all successful. We've changed and made our return policies a lot easier because we know that people are probably not as often going to go into a retail store and buy them. So let's make it easy to go to jbl. com, buy a pair of headphones and send them back as seamless as possible. So that's something we've done. And then even though it's not JBL, but certainly our retailers, I mean, they've built all new retail dynamics, whether it's buy online, pickup in store, curbside pickups, just different ways to change the entire experience for how to shop. I think we've all seen, you look at Amazon, the return policies have gotten so much easier because they know people are buying double, they're buying triple and returning one or two of the purchases.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. And it looks, obviously, some categories are easier to do that than others. I think the cars are another great example. Obviously you're like, you're not going to buy a bunch, but the digital experience is going to continue to evolve there.

Chris Epple: Sure. And I think people will rely more on... And there's a weird connection between this new kind of post COVID world and the rise of influencer marketing. I don't think it's a coincidence because people are maybe less apt to sit and spend an hour with a salesperson, but they'll listen to five or six... Take Lexus for example as we work a lot with Lexus. Lexus has a full army of influencers who are creating content loosely and sometimes directly tied to car buying experience, and consumers now are much more willing to spend hours online watching those testimonials, which is time they would probably have spent in a store rolling up the windows, playing with the radio and trying out the car.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, that's right. There's also an emerging category that another friend of mine has a business in called Conversational Commerce, which I think is up and coming and sort of blends those things together. Chris Apple, Marketing Guru, thank you so much for being with me today.

Chris Epple: Thanks, Matt.