AI Prompting Cheat Codes for Ecommerce Success, with Chris Perry, Chief Learning Officer at firstmovr

Transcript

Our transcripts are generated by AI. Please excuse any typos and if you have any specific questions please email info@digitalshelfinstitute.org.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (00:00):

Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf where industry leaders share insights, strategies and stories to help brands win in the ever-changing world of commerce.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (00:00):

Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf, where industry leaders share insights, strategies, and stories to help brands win in the ever-changing world of commerce.

 

Peter Crosby (00:22):

Hey everyone. Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. Over the past year, Chris Perry, Chief Learning Officer at FirstMovr has had literally, and I mean that literally hundreds of conversations with e-commerce leaders and doers about the ways in which AI can be wielded to simplify work and improve outcomes. And as they often do at firstmovr, they generously created a new series of free content called Prompted that clearly lays out some of those AI cheat codes that can supercharge your work and help you see around corners. Lauren, Levi Gilbert and I interrogated him about a few of those to get you started. Welcome back to the podcast, Chris. We are so happy to have you back. Thank you very much.

 

Chris Perry (01:05):

Thank you Peter and Lauren. I love being on your series. You have an amazing one with so many awesome guests, so I might bring everyone down a little bit, but I'll try to lift it back up with great energy and content today.

 

Peter Crosby (01:16):

I have no doubt you always do. We are all about anti hype here on the podcast, especially about ai, but there is a lot to process. There's so much opportunity, but it can be overwhelming. And so we had you here because you and Oscar have developed a bunch of content around really practical uses for AI in the world of e-commerce. And tell us a little bit more about what you guys were looking to accomplish.

 

Chris Perry (01:43):

So as with anything that we do at firstmovr, almost 95% of everything is free and we just love to bring great people like you do on this podcast series together and bring actionable insight and knowledge and then applications to what we're doing to help everybody do a little bit better. And one topic obviously has been ai, and we've been doing tons of trainings for companies, obviously content on this for a while, but like you said, everyone is trying to get attention. So there's a lot of hype. I say everyone's trying to get, there are a lot of thought leaders out there that are obviously trying to get eyeballs and attention and ears. And so sometimes they have to do the clickbait and the very dramatic language around things, both exciting news, but also sometimes that more like doomsday prepper type commentary. And that's not bad.

 

(02:32):

It gets you to listen, but we do have to try to bring this back to, so what does that really mean for me so that I'm not in that I got left behind or I've been displaced. And so we launched Prompted this year, it's our kind of free upskilling platform. We have a number of different series of content and we've really tried to bucket it into consumable chunks, right? News capabilities, skills impact to org and teams and change management. Not that they're unrelated, but just so that different levers can be pulled mentally at the right time. But the part that we think is so important is this, what's in it for me? What's going to happen to me individually in my job, but also in my career? Because we were doing some math in about, there are about 3 million associated white collar workers in the US alone in CPG at CPGs and in agencies and everybody that supports them.

 

(03:26):

And if you look at all those, McKinsey and Bain and the big four consulting group, obviously everywhere from 30 to 70% of work will be impacted. I would argue a hundred percent of work will be impacted, but it's not necessarily replaced. It's just people using AI as I know well. So the reality though is your chances of being displaced without doing something about it are a lot higher than winning Powerball. So the lottery. So I really don't want anyone to be displaced. They didn't know it was coming and they were working actively to pivot. And obviously that comes down to everything from step zero, which is just are you using AI for your own personal needs and learning about quality and quality out and just practicing the fluency of it. But then very specific tactical examples of how you can do it at work in your job to make you more relevant for re-skilled roles, new roles, a world where the triangle becomes a diamond internally, and there may be fewer entry level or admin type roles and a lot more orchestrators of the business.

 

(04:29):

So I want to make sure everybody's ready for that. We are constantly collecting real examples as we do trainings and weave AI in asking people how have they done it. Obviously real case studies, testing it ourselves, trying to find the ones that nobody's been doing yet, and then bringing them back and having people tested. So it's been kind of exciting because we can actually turn this, I don't know what to do. I'm a little worried about my future to like, oh, I can actually do way more in less time and actually show off as opposed to just being efficient in my job. I'm effective in my job because I actually removed three hours of busy work and now I can really show off my insights and my decision making and my strategic thinking. So I know we're going to dive into some, but I'm excited. I think there's a lot of little things sometimes they're very tactical, but they can be really powerful in both time savings, but really launch padding you into what you were really trying to do.

 

Peter Crosby (05:24):

Yeah, let's launch pad in with the first example. I would love that. What's up first?

 

Chris Perry (05:29):

Well, so one, I know that definitely sales leaders across CPG and to be fair retailers, I know we may have lots of audience members out there from different sides of the table. This could also be for solution providers and brands. This could also be for marketers trying to engage internally. But it is that idea of that buyer role kind of role play simulation of, and some of this can be kind of macro and then it can be more micro. So simple things are when I think of a sales leader, again, they're often going into line reviews, they're going into price conversations, they're going into assortment defending, they're going into the formal JBP process. Sometimes those things are happening now, obviously outside of the actual top to top JBP. So whether it's the big one or it's the ones leading up to or following the big meetings, it's about plugging in giving ai, whether it's your internal one for anytime you're going to share confidential information, your approved copilot or if it's chat GBT or a third party tool where you're not going to share anything that isn't public facing, but it's just more for the scenario planning, you can use that as well.

 

(06:42):

But literally you train, give AI its role. Obviously when you think of role context, objective format, you want in the really nice templates for how you prompt and then upload information, like latest earning calls from your retailer, known JBP priorities or stated retailer priorities, capability assessments from, if I think about retail media, maybe you're uploading things from Mars, United Commerce. I know they put out that really cool report card every quarter. I mean it doesn't have to be any one cut. It could be all these different pieces. Let it do the synthesizing, not that it has all the right answers, but then now it has its own learning model for who it's supposed to be and now go in and practice. So this is what I'm trying to do. What is their immediate pushback going to be? Right? What are my gaps in my story?

 

(07:33):

This becomes a really nice safe sparring partner for you. And it's not that you might say, oh, I knew they were going to bring that up. Well, yeah, they were. So that validates that. But what else would they bring up? But what might be a second thing they would say? And I've also, again, I'll leave people nameless to protect the innocent, but I had a fellow leader on the CPG side who actually with their internal one, just so it was protected, they took emails from their buyer so it almost could figure out the individual person's nuances. So they were actually able to identify a few things that that buyer seemed to be measured on, that they weren't actually stating based on the way they were talking in their emails. And so again, it's not about manipulation, it's just like you have to know your opponent slash your partner.

 

(08:22):

Hopefully it's your partner in this case, but it's not always just the entity of Walmart doesn't want X, Y, and Z. It's Sally, it's John, it is the person who has a beef. So interestingly enough, that person was like, it seems like I think their internal one actually flagged that they might seem to have an issue with you. Oh, baby, it's my style. Chris is just annoying. So he's just relentless and way too energetic, but it might flag that for you so you could counter yourself and come in a little bit stronger. So there's actually another piece too that you can do, but this is one that I think is an easy one because a lot of times it's hard to role play with someone on your side of the business who can't be the other role, but AI doesn't have any bias until you give it the bias and the role to assume,

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (09:11):

I really like the point around understanding the retailer, especially around JBP planning, right? Because you need to start really early prepping for JVPs, right? Is it six months in advance that you need to get all the entire team ready to go, and what are the resources that you need? So thinking about AI as your partner to get all those teams set up so you can have a productive JBPI think is really important. And we can start talking about JBP now for the end of the year, right? Exactly. What can you gather from it?

 

Chris Perry (09:43):

Because again, things that are happening to the retailer literally now are the things that are going to trickle into that conversation. Obviously when my retail business is down, I need all my partners to step up now with more investment or to drive the category. Obviously there's an immediate response that trickles down through their organization if you're facing them as a CPG partner. But some of this stuff trickles through the system. So it was like in Q1, we started to have a profit margin issue on a retail side. And so that translated to the JBP discussion, like you said, Lauren, six months later because now we have to write the ship because there was some internal levers pulled, but now it's up to the external levers that need to be pulled or demanded to be pulled. So I think that one's an easy one. And then just to build on that too, this is in prep for your JBP, but when you actually have developed your deck, this sounds silly, but with your internal one tool, because again, you wouldn't want to put this on an open platform, but upload your deck into your tool or take pieces of it if it's too long a file or whatever.

 

(10:47):

It depends on what your limitations are internally. And then ask it again, give it a roll, give it the context. What would the buyer push back on? Is this story flow compelling? Just when we talk about compelling PDPs, is this story flow compelling or confusing? Is this going to open Pandora's box or make us go down a rabbit hole? Are there any, I'm glad you asked questions that I've missed or that I should include. Is there anything that is less important as the upfront? I just need to align you on the general principles of our partnership, and then the rest goes into now that we've agreed, let's figure out the how part, right? So again, this helps you be, all of that initial insight helps you arm yourself for a one offline review leading up, like you said, Lauren to the JBP. But once you actually have the story, I find when we work with brands on their JVPs, prepping the team, but also even looking at their real decks often, again, it's like a hundred pages before you got to the So what start, these are our objectives, correct?

 

(11:49):

Yep. Thank you very much. Here's what we are aligning on. These are what you want, this is what we want. This is where we see the overlap. Would you like us to walk through that? Because is there any question about that alignment? No. Do we see these as the first three short-term things? Yes. Okay. So if we're agreed to that, now it's just a matter of how do we want to bring that to life? How much are we willing to put in? So now it's just the semantics, right? So that makes it sound simple, but a lot of times it's like if I had more time, I would've written a shorter letter. The JBP could be a much shorter letter. AI could already help you walk in with that without having to have somebody else consult you on it. So I just think there's so much within the JBP process that all teams can benefit from.

 

(12:31):

But I really like it's analyzing because I always say that we are what we do and we do what we measure. Your buyer on the other side is measured a certain way, and it may not always be clear beyond the obvious retailer goals or KPIs. And it might be an individual thing, they're just uber anxious about their next promotion or something. And it may not come through as I'm being measured on that, but it might come through their tone, it might come through the way they write their emails. Little things like that can be really helpful if you know that because then you can walk in and be their partner, which is the whole point.

 

Peter Crosby (13:05):

That's one of the things I wanted to go back to. Lauren, you were talking about you can start planning for your JBP now. And one of the things that popped into my mind is as a user of Gemini in the work that we do, so it's a safe box for us, you're able to use notebook LM to just fill it with sources. And so if throughout the year, every time you see a little piece of content or an email or something that you're like, oh, I want to keep that in mind when I'm doing, yeah, just load it into the notebook, lm. And then the cool thing is once that notebook is done, you have your notes done. It's one click inside of Gemini to bring that whole notebook into the context window for the actual JBP planning. So I've been able to use that a couple of times and it's just made my life so much easier. It reminds me back in college when I would go to write my term paper and I would sit on my bed and I'd have my laptop and then I would put every book and source that I wanted to call on, and it was just all laid out around and I would get, where was that? Oh yeah, here. And essentially notebook LM is doing that, but at obviously,

 

Chris Perry (14:23):

And then synthesizing, right? Remember in Q1 when your buyer, she mentioned this, that has to come back up again. But that's probably something you should acknowledge. It can prompt that for you.

 

Peter Crosby (14:36):

Yeah, it's a really great resource. So I just wanted to, for anybody out there that's using that, I found it incredibly useful.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (14:43):

We all graduated college without ai. I think we all get a pat on the back for that one, right?

 

Chris Perry (14:48):

It might've been a better time, but we got to make do.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (14:52):

Yes. So Chris, the next one is one I'm very, very passionate about, and that's the creative brief. There's so much opportunity to improve the creative brief, to get more cross-functional alignment, to have one cohesive creative brief instead of six creative briefs. So tell us how can AI help with the creative brief for brands?

 

Chris Perry (15:13):

Yes. Now again, I know we're speaking to lots of different audiences. We've trained media companies on media planning, which I always find a little bit ironic. I thought that's what they do. But what I realized is they've got a lot of specialists, and so it's like they don't all get the holistic process. Each of them is plugged in. So we sometimes come over as air cover to help bring all their teams together and then help them from a brand side think through the brand's lens. But we do this with sales teams because again, they don't always understand, they don't do the media, but they're accountable for the retail media growth. And so their business objectives need to be weaved in. So there are a lot of players or actors on the stage that need to be aware of the brief to plan the results, to optimize to brief, and they're not always all dangerous.

 

(16:02):

So we've done a lot of the manual training, if you will, but then increasingly over the last year, we've added AI in so that you do the thinking because we want you to practice the critical thinking and the discernment and think through it. But then you can also then go back and validate it with ai. And then over time, as long as you practice the thinking in my purest mentality, you can save yourself some time by doing the AI and just jump right to the insights and application or optimization. But one example that we've done a number of times recently, we'll do a full day workshop where we'll walk through the brief, the plan and the results, what goes into the brief, how do you write a really nice brief even before you use ai, this is the kind of thing you might get back from a Walmart Connect or a Round de or a Kroger Precision marketing or whatever.

 

(16:48):

Here's a plan based on that brief, and then we try to get real examples from the brands. Here was an example here was that campaign run. Here's what happened. Do we think, did the plan work against the brief? Were they all synced back together? Was there a gap somewhere in the process because we might've achieved something that we didn't actually intend to get, so yay. But that wasn't the point. And if we want to do it again, we might want to do it for a different reason, or if we wanted a different outcome, we need to do something different upstream. So we try to break that down. And you can do that manually in a matter of minutes in the whole scheme of things, but you can do it in seconds when you add ai. And so again, to your point, Lauren, some simple things would be upload a brief and give it the role, give it the context and what am I missing?

 

(17:35):

What would my media planner or my media agency be missing to develop a plan that meets these needs? Or you could even preempt because sometimes you're supposed to give a little bit of insight to what platforms or tactics that you might prefer or to see if the media agency sees those as meeting those needs. You might want to plug in, I know Amazon ads has this capability and we'd like to see if that makes sense in the plan, but you could even ask some of those tools just to, they may not always be right, but they might give you an idea that you hadn't considered before. But really what's cool is you can upload literally a multi-page brief, the full plan even in the less pretty format that you get in the Excel sheets and whatever line by line, which are often really hard to read with all the targeting lines and everything from some of our key retail media networks.

 

(18:26):

And then the results from your campaign and then ask it a number of, did the campaign perform per the plan and the brief objectives? How do we know that where might be their, again, you can give them a whole letter like set of prompted questions. What questions are not being answered that I should go back to my media agency or my retail media network to answer, what should I do this again? I mean now again, it will come back to you with its assessment, and it may not be perfectly right because again, you might need to give it some additional context or, oh, I realize I didn't give them why we were doing this campaign to begin with. That wasn't in the brief. But again, assuming you put quality in, you get this really amazing assessment out. And then again, I always like to practice the actual thinking through so that I know that if AI broke down, I could go back and do it myself, but it skips a lot of those extra steps and just allows you to cherry pick like, Ooh, it seems off here.

 

(19:26):

Let me go back and look at that page on the Walmart Connect report to see where it was missing that, or what would I discern as I'm a second opinion or a third opinion here? And then you get this insight that then just becomes like, now I get to act on that. So you saved hours of time and debating with the team, you get the output, you can spend the hour aligning on that next step and then go optimize and move a little more quickly. And then also could say, if I were to write a brief like, Hey, if got a lot of new to brand people, but my goal had been to really engage or defend my current shoppers, I'm making that up. You might say, how would I take the original brief and rewrite it to ensure it's comprehensive, but that it's designed and should get a different output?

 

(20:11):

And that way then when you hand it back to the media team, the media company, your media network, they have clear directions on how not to copy the same thing that you just did so that you get a slightly different outcome. So like I said, you can keep it strategic depending on what level of the organization you're at. You can get very hands on keyboard, but it's a pretty powerful time savings as long as what goes into it. Like I said, I don't want you to miss the steps so that you're not a practitioner leader, but you don't have to be the practitioner the whole time. You can just orchestrate that through.

 

Peter Crosby (20:47):

Let's travel now and traverse the distribution void as I think you may call it. What can be done there?

 

Chris Perry (20:59):

I know there are a number of different tools out there. A lot of the digital shelf analytics tools out there are adding AI capabilities. I want to say not everyone has access to the same or any automated tools. So I always like to make sure the ideas that we're giving you are things that you can do without those tools. Maybe just your internal AI or a chat GBT or whatnot. But obviously if you have some of a profit hero plus a data impact by Nielsen iq, any of the platforms that allow you to track all the four Ps of sales and marketing online, you can set up some of those alerts and have those things pop up and flag, I was supposed to have 10 items and now I only have nine or I have 10 and they're listed, but five are out of stock or low stock.

 

(21:46):

I mean, you can get that kind of thing. So when I think of distribution void, I mean obviously it's is it listed, is it in stock? We could also look at placement as a level of mental availability, physical availability as well. So there are a number of different things you can do on the physical and digital shelves with ai. One that was kind of an interesting one, and I know I shared this one before and I know it's such a tactical thing, but it's kind of cool. We did a workshop last year in person where we did day one was walking physical shelves across four different retailers and auditing for different categories that the brands represented that came, and we did this with the category management association, and then the day two was the digital shelf audit and then bringing that all into a category review.

 

(22:31):

Now, again, you could have done this as a sales team, it could have been a full commercial team with marketing. It could be the Catman team. Any team can be included in this. But it was really interesting because we were all standing in the aisle, and I remember we had little templates. They could fill out notes and things, and everybody was counting the number of skews on the shelf to try to do a shelf analysis and the snack bars. And we were looking at toilet paper and cookie. We were looking at lots of dog food. And I was like, why are you counting it? And I remember I would've counted it too, in my past, we didn't have ai, but then I was like, well, let me test this. I knew I'd done it before. Let me test it. So I took a picture of the shelf and then I asked it to do the full physical shelf audit of share of shelf in the planogram by skew by brand at overall and by eye level.

 

(23:21):

And it spit out within literally seconds this amazing analysis. And then I went back and actually counted it to make sure it was right, and it was right multiple times. So give or take one s skew where it was kind of bridging into another category, and it was kind of the skew wasn't clear that it was in that category. It was a new format. So it was like 99% accurate, which was pretty cool. And then we were looking at that across the four different retailers. So that was giving us a, I remember, I'm going to have the numbers wrong, but kind bar and the snack bars had, I'm going to make up a number, 20% share of eye level at three of the retailers, but a 15% share at another retailer at the fourth one. So it was kind of interesting. Then you could kind of right there from an in-store perspective, you could go back to the retailer and say like, you're leading competitors locally.

 

(24:06):

We have a greater share of the eye level placement. So a little bit of a wtf, what's going on? Why can't we get that? But then you could go back and say, well, it's not just about comparative versus my competition. You could say, well, they have it wrong. We have the right share of shelf allocation. You go online and then you look at, and you can obviously take a digital shelf analytics tools, rank report. You could also just take the screenshot of the search results or the category results from a page and then do the comparative eye level versus page one placement and then see what the gaps are. Because we know retailers are looking at who's influencing what e-commerce is often influencing the in-store purchases. We know the shopper journey starts online. So if suddenly kind bar, I'll pick on them again, had a 30% share of page one versus a 15% share of in-store.

 

(25:00):

There's a gap there right now. I'm not saying they're going to suddenly change the whole shelf overnight, but interesting insight, we're already leading where the growth is. Why don't we have that same presence in store? So it can become a planogram reset optimization conversation starter. It can be a competitive assessment tool. But I have a lot of simple little things, but I also save hours of counting shelves. And even though we know search is like mini aisles, you could take some representative aisles for top search terms and then compare them just to, again, just a representative of Sesame Street Science, which one is not like the other, right? Hey, online, we're way underrepresented, but offline we are overrepresented. You might want to save that one for yourself and not tell anybody, but how do I improve that? So it can prompt your actions. It can prompt the retailer too.

 

Peter Crosby (25:51):

And Chris, I'm just curious, at the CMA session, how many of the people, one, were there people in the room that immediately went to using AI or were you the first one to bring it up as an option? And how many of them seemed comfortable with it? How many were like, oh, yeah, I was just wondering sort of where the mood of the nation was at that

 

Chris Perry (26:13):

Session. No, no. And obviously as we know, and that was six months ago that we had that specific session, which prompted a number of those use cases to be democratized as many places. I feel like a profit sharing, lots of you should try this and you should try that because they were. But I would say honestly, we're seeing adoption increase very rapidly as people get more comfortable and the tools can do more things because not a matter of waiting a year, it's like wait a week and the thing can do or pay from the free to the premium tool and you can suddenly do way more faster. But I feel like honestly, a good three quarters of the room obviously used AI for themselves, but not a lot internally. And some of the feedback we still get when we do this is, oh, well, my company gave us this policy about what we're not allowed to do with ai, so I don't really do anything. And you're like, whoa, whoa, hold on. They didn't say don't do anything. They said don't do this. But I realize don't sounds like safer just to pop back or easier to just, it's easier not to get in trouble,

 

(27:12):

But by all means, use your own discernment. Am I putting my confidential p and l uploading that into chat GBT? Yep. Then you're in trouble if you're doing it in your personal one. And that's been okay. Confidential information can be shared in your internal copilot. I feel okay trying it out. So again, for the same reason we do the store walk or shelf audit, maybe save one of those. I say it's heresy that you wouldn't do your digital shelf audit, but do it with ai. Try something. The worst thing you can do is fail. Who are you failing to yourself? And then you'll figure out, oh, that was kind of garbage in and I got garbage out, so let me try it again and give it a better prompt. Or Hey, this tool can't do this. I know some of the internal tools that some of the CPGs for a year or so, they couldn't upload documents, you could only write into it.

 

(28:01):

So they're getting advanced very quickly. But it was like keep testing the limits of the tool so that you don't miss the opportunity to get the benefit of the tool saving you time or getting you better insights. But I felt like it was a good three quarters that were like, oh wow, I hadn't thought about doing it for this purpose. And again, if you're taking the shelf public search results and public in-store shelf, you can do that with chat GPT. I mean that's not confidential. You haven't uploaded, this was proprietary category data provided by the retailer to my category team and I stole it. Now I'm putting it in. It's stuff that everyone can see. So I honestly think about half of the things that we're talking about. You could do publicly with your own chat GB teacher with no concern that it would reflect poorly back on something that was private internally. But you just ask, is this something I could access publicly? Yes, that I'd feel a little more comfortable doing that earnings calls, like we were saying with JBP, that's all public stuff, so you're not sharing something that should be a concern. It's only when you're sharing that they sent me their p and l for the category and I put that in. No, but this is your best judgment

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (29:12):

Really. Exactly. Don't go to jail. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And test and learn. I think the big theme is just try stuff within reason and see what works, see what doesn't work, and just kind of go from there. And Chris, so we know that content is both king and queen. I really like that it is also queen and king and we know there's many different content applications with ai. It can help write content, it can help create imagery, what some of the ways that brands have been using it every day and testing and learning to be able to enhance their overall content

 

Chris Perry (29:49):

For sure. And once again, I know there are some cool tools out there, both digital shelf analytics tools, traditional ones, but some of the newer, maybe new and in a quarter of years, e-commerce years, but relatively newer tools, the visits, the detail pages of the world, the dragonflies who can audit, can use AI to help with a IO or visual content effectiveness. We work with everybody, so I am always aware of some of those new tools, but even without those can, any leader, any commercial leader could do simple things like for instance, take your PDP, you can take a full screenshot of a PDP on your retail site. If you're a sales leader, you could do that for your target page or whatever. And if for any reason that full screenshot is hard to read, then I might just also upload the individual carousel images.

 

(30:37):

Pick your power SKUs, right? You don't have to do this for every sku, but start with the power ones, your 80 20 rule or your top 10 upload the PDP. You can even reference whether to Peter's point about creating your backup dossier of all the stuff that should be basing off, or you can direct it to this is what the brand website and social media, it says it's their message. These are the selling stories for the brand and the product. And then literally ask it questions. Is the narrative in the correct order? Is this in the best selling story possible? Are there redundancies? Lauren, I know as a judge on our end caps, we've been looking at pages and some of these pages are amazing, the finalists, but sometimes it's like the same benefit is repeated three times, but one time it's by itself. Another time it's in a summary. And then it's also implied again as if they didn't have other things they could talk about. So it's not that it isn't amazing content, but it is duplicative. So you can ask for the redundancies just like you de-dupe and Excel flag.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (31:39):

Chris, one of my favorite ones is let's say you have the same product being sold on Amazon, Walmart, and Target. You don't have the same content across all those retailers. I find this on the end caps a lot. You have an amazing Walmart, PDP, and then I go to Amazon, you only have two images. So also looking at the consistency across how you're showing up on the retailer sites,

 

Chris Perry (31:57):

1000%. And again, some of that can be flagged. Obviously if you're looking at your in Salsify, in a profitero, right? You're looking at your reports. But the manual audit is important too because sometimes you're waiting for that daily or weekly update, but not everybody's looking at it. I always like to say it's like when you're at the airport, if you see something, say something,

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (32:17):

Say something,

 

Chris Perry (32:18):

Something, go see something. But you can help with the selling story. And again, you don't have to be the graphic designer. I think a lot of people too say, well, that's not my job. I didn't say it was your job. You aren't the cook, but you can help the cook run the restaurant. So hey, I walked my shelf. I noticed we were only had two images, so that was an easy gap to send back to the right person on the team, or I noticed that our selling story seemed to be missing a few things. And then I even had it compared to other PDPs against our direct competitors just asking if their selling story was a little bit stronger. What were they mentioning that I'm not mentioning, right? Because maybe we have the same benefits or same features. So that competitive gap is awesome, just assessing it by itself.

 

(33:00):

There are tools that obviously do ratings and reviews like I think of Yogi and Bizarre Voice and all these obviously even Amazon's and some of the retailers. AI summaries can help you with this, but you could copy and paste the actual reviews. Just take a swath of reviews, copy the text into a document or copy it right into your AI and ask it to flag the most recent reviews or my five star reviews wherever you can pull it. Even if you had to do this a little bit manually, you can just say, is my selling story missing any insight or verbiage or benefits or concerns that are being raised by the actual reviews? Obviously if you have some of those summary tools, that's helpful too, but my point is you don't always have to wait for the summary tool or hope to have the budget for the summary tool to use a public facing tool to do this.

 

(33:52):

And the last one that I've had a couple people do, this is kind of fun. When you search something on Amazon or walmart.com or wherever and your product does or doesn't rank, or you look at your digital shelf reporting and your product does or doesn't rank where you want it to rank, you can't go and say Amazon search, why am I not ranking higher? But you can actually ask Rufuss and or a chat GPT or a copilot or a Gemini, why am I not ranking this high? What do you think I'm doing now? It will not give you, those tools are not designed only for a IO optimization, but they have some pretty darn good insights. And I did this with chat GPT because the number one recommendation in one category that I looked up on chat, GBT was on page three of Amazon. So I thought it was kind of an odd, this is where dead bodies are, right on Amazon search. I'm like, so I asked, why isn't this ranking? It said, sometimes the products that are best for a need are not, don't rank the best. That was very interesting, very aha. But I said, what could be done to rank higher? And then it actually went based on all of the information, it could discern on the A nine, a 10 algorithm if you were the co cosmo thought of this, right? It's

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (35:05):

Cosmo now.

 

Chris Perry (35:06):

Cosmo, yes. So have you optimized these things based on all the public facing and obviously consulting and blogs and all the information, not necessarily going to publish its black box formula, but it gave some pretty relevant insights for what you could do. And then even said, and if you had more reviews that spoke to this, this, and this, which might give you, again, not, you can't manipulate the reviews, but you might say, well, if I spoke to that, my content maybe a little more, maybe shoppers would actually speak to that, right? Hey, this was for sensitive skin, or this was for sensitive teeth for a toothpaste. And you actually speak to that benefit. You can some other people who are the right audience might start saying, oh, I love this for my sensitive teeth, which then would help you come up for that query. So there's some really cool simple things that are actually, they sound tactical, but they can become really strategic ROI wise, and you don't need, I don't want to say you don't need the tools, but everyone can tap into the free tools. You already have access to get started, and then you've got some amazing partners out there that can take your business to the next level and scale it.

 

Peter Crosby (36:11):

So Chris, to close out, I have just a couple of little questions. Ones little, first of all, sort of acronym alert, you said aio O, I know a EO, I know GEO and maybe I've heard a IO, but I've already forgotten what it is.

 

Chris Perry (36:29):

I want to say they're all relatively the same thing because we haven't landed. It's like e-commerce, digital commerce, e dash commerce, omnichannel, connected commerce. We have like 50, but

 

Peter Crosby (36:40):

What does the I stand for?

 

Chris Perry (36:42):

It was like artificial intelligence optimization, right?

 

Peter Crosby (36:45):

Oh, okay. I thought it was agen,

 

Chris Perry (36:47):

A IO. I've heard it all. So I was like to make sure I include everybody,

 

Peter Crosby (36:51):

I thought it was like age agentic ish optimization or something. Okay, now I'm clear. Thank you.

 

Chris Perry (36:56):

I kind of like age-ish optimization.

 

Peter Crosby (37:00):

Do the best you can.

 

Chris Perry (37:01):

We've trademarked it here. Maybe we can get the domain name on godaddy.com.

 

Peter Crosby (37:05):

And as we were talking about all of this, I think about the barriers to sort of getting to this new omnichannel, to breaking down the silos of brand and trade and et cetera, sort of working together. And I'm wondering, can AI help with ideating how to break down those silos? If you do your JBP and then you're like, well, this is really just reflecting what would be the value in sort of getting the brand? I'm just wondering if it can sort of help almost be a thought partner to try and knock down some of those silos and find the reasons for cooperation and collaboration. Have you seen anything like that, that kind of thing done?

 

Chris Perry (37:54):

100%. I mean, again, sometimes those feel like less, they're very tactical. Some of the ideas would be like, for instance, have you invited those people to your reviews, right? What's funny is, so I was just at the CMA SEMA conference in one of the workshop we did with, it was 120 people broke out into groups, but we were looking at the six most common barriers for catman teams, just as an example, team function for adopting an accelerating omnichannel. And it is everything from insufficient data to limited understanding of Omni to the in-store planning process is very time intensive and a lot of resources go to that siloed teams, wrong stakeholders or missing stakeholders, prioritization. So some common barriers. And so we had everybody break up and they were all signed different barriers and they had to share with the group and then share back what were some of the things they've done to fix those or solve for those, or what have they seen worked and what were their ideas.

 

(38:52):

So I collected all of those. I have a whole stack they did on analog paper. It was amazing. We got all these sitting in front of me, and then I used AI to synthesize all those so we could capture all the ideas. And then I had AI answer the questions without, I did it first without their answers. And there's a lot of common genius thinking from human to ai, but AI also offered some things that the humans hadn't thought of because to be fair, they're in the middle of overcoming the barriers. So they haven't thought through all the change management levers because they haven't necessarily been empowered to do that yet. But to your point, Peter, just 100%, there are some best practices for how to lead change to break down silos. You could just ask, I've been doing X, Y, and Z. What else can I do?

 

(39:38):

Obviously give it some context, unless you're literally, I've done nothing. What do I start with? It might be have you put it on your agenda? Have you invited that person to your meeting? Have you gone and talked to them about what their challenges are so you really understand their barrier? It might just be that they don't get it and a little education and a human touch moves them forward. Or it could be they're not measured that way, and we need to go up a level, get your boss to work with their boss. But there are some common things that obviously we share when we're talking about change management, but you can definitely have AI find your gap, and then ideally, if you know the person you're working with, you can kind of figure out that person might have a personal barrier to something. That measurement in the past, AI scorned me, so I hate ai. I'm never going to adopt it, right? But you never know. So there could be a vendetta against ai, right? But definitely a thought partner on that because that's, again, and I'm an idea person, so I don't need a lot of help, but I like it. Some people aren't idea people. They need some help, and AI can really help with that.

 

Peter Crosby (40:39):

Well, Chris, this is as always awesome and so generous for you to share it, not only here, but also where can people get more on what you've talked about on these, and then all the other topics you and Oscar are gathering for this new series.

 

Chris Perry (40:55):

So we do obviously a ton of stuff, and you guys are partners with us as well on a lot of our content series. All of our events and content is on firstmovr.com. There's no E in firstmovr, no E in e-commerce, even though they're three. But firstmovr.com/events. We've got all of our events are free unless we're at a conference where you pay for their ticket and we're just there, but we have all free content. The prompted series is there. We have monthly news, we have quarterly capabilities and org impact, skill impact. We do a lot of custom trainings for companies as well. So if we can help you plug into something you're doing for AI or Omni or anything, we're here to help. And it just being friends in the industry, if you have specific questions like we'll geek out all day long with you, connect with us on LinkedIn, email us, we'd love to help. Again, we want everyone to get on that arc on Noah's arc. I don't want anyone left behind, and if you want your own arc, we can help you build that too. But we want you to sail and survive and thrive in tomorrow's AI world.

 

Peter Crosby (41:54):

I bet you that arc was smelly. I don't know if I want to be on the arc.

 

Chris Perry (42:01):

I would definitely bring a healthy dose of obsession by Calvin Klein. Just a little spritz here and there.

 

Peter Crosby (42:06):

I've been watching the Olympics and the number of Carlton Cruise ads. I'm like, let's gather there. Sorry, Lauren. Nice. You were going to say something helpful or something, right?

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (42:17):

No, I love this conversation. I'm giving a quick shout out for the Digital Shelf Summit. Fourth. Fourth of the sixth. Chris is running an interactive session, going to dissect PDPs and content online, so highly encourage you. That's on May 6th, the Digital Shelf Summit in Atlanta, May 4th of the sixth. Make sure you get your ticket and join Chris's interactive session. We're trying something new where there will be audience participation, not just kind of sitting and listening. So I'm excited,

 

Chris Perry (42:46):

And I know you've got Lauren, you also have the AI content as well from a lot of awesome leaders. That'll be a compliment. So AI will be in every topic, but there's obviously extra focus on AI, again, making it practical and useful. Deping, which I love. So I can't wait to see you all there.

 

Peter Crosby (43:03):

Yes. Thank you, Chris. Thank you.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (43:06):

Thanks, Chris.

 

Peter Crosby (43:07):

Thanks again to Chris for the fun and insightful advice. Get more of it live in May in Atlanta. Like Lauren said, at digitalshelfsummit.com. You can look into registration and more information, and thanks for being part of our community.