In this episode of Do This, Not That, host Jay Schwedelson interviews Ian Dewar, Senior Director of Global Strategy at Anthropologie. They dive into the art of customer feedback, loyalty programs, and crafting unique shopping experiences to drive growth and satisfaction.

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Best Moments:

(00:46) Introduction of Ian Dewar and his role at Anthropologie

(01:42) Ian's background in customer experience and loyalty programs

(09:22) Anthropologie's approach to customer feedback and inventory refreshment

(12:35) Metrics used to measure customer feedback and satisfaction

(15:41) The future of segmentation in marketing based on customer feedback

(17:47) Focusing on loyal customers for growth rather than win-back strategies

(18:51) Ian's travel bucket list and desire to visit Argentina

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Guest Bio:

Ian Dewar is the Senior Director of Global Strategy at Anthropologie. With a rich background in customer experience, he has worked for brands like The North Face, Trek Bicycle, and Specialized. Ian specializes in developing loyalty programs, analyzing customer feedback, and implementing strategies to elevate customer experiences across industries, including retail and outdoor gear.

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Foreign.

Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that.

We are back for do this, not that podcast presented by Marigold. And we have a tremendous guest today. Why do I say that? So who's here?

We have Ian Dewar, who is the senior director of global strategy at Anthropology. I love anthropology. Anthropology is in my mall. You walk in there and you just feel good.

You're like, wow, I'm having a bad day, but I'm here and I feel great. They have one of the most fiercely loyal customer bases in all of retail. People actually really care about their brand.

They really care about their connection with the brand. And we're going to talk about the customer and customer feedback and what Ian does over there.

He's the global leader of a team that oversees and executes customer strategy, including loyalty and analytics and customer insights for North America, Canada and Europe for anthropology, for anthro living, for terrain, for anthropology, weddings. I mean, the guy's got a lot going on and. And we're going to dig into all of it. Ian, welcome to the show.

Jay, thank you very much for having me. Appreciate it.

Awesome. I should have put on, like, anthropology clothing. So we have a lot of it in my house, actually. So first question, though. Do you have, like, a candle?

Does your house always smell good? I mean, is that a thing?

I do. I do have a candle. In fact, I have a. Like, I have a seasonal candle. It's very pine Christmas scented. So it. I need to get a new one, actually.

I almost burned through it. I have a home office. I also have a cat. I also have a dog. So I need to, like, clean up the office of some of their action on a regular basis.

So, yes, I know where you can get a new one.

By the way. I have a Santa mug from anthropology.

Look at this. Your whole thing. I mean, you don't really go too far. It's amazing.

All right, before we get into customer feedback and how you leverage that and how you get it, how did Ian become Ian, my.

Well, thanks. Thanks for asking that. So my background was always customer experience. I. I went to university like most people do. I got a degree in marketing.

I got a job at an advertising agency. I wore A shirt and tie to work every day. I hated it. I quit. I went and got another degree in economics. I thought I'd work for the. I was.

I'm Canadian, so I thought I'd work for the Canadian government, and I also hated that. And I got a job leading bike tours in Europe.

And so I went off to Europe, and I spoke French, and I led these bike trips and the Swiss Alps and the French Alps and the Pyrenees. And one of the foundations of what these bike trips were all about was creating this unique customer experience.

Customers, especially Americans, don't have a lot of vacation time. They're committed to getting out and getting the most out of their vacation.

And we built these experiences that we visited castles and we went to wine caves, and we did wine tastings, and we rode, you know, somewhere between 60 and 100 kilometers a day. For Americans, that's 36 to 60 miles per day.

But, you know, we rode our bikes, and then we stayed at nice hotels and we had great dinners, and the whole focus on these bike trips, and then we evolved into hiking as well, was how to create an experience of something customers couldn't do on their own. And that all was really. That. That was like the foundation of building these experiences.

So eventually, I had to stop riding my bike around Europe and get a job where I had to go to work myself.

So I just moved into the office, and I started designing bike trips, first for Back Roads, based out of Berkeley, California, and then for Trek, the bicycle company based in Wisconsin. And it was the same idea.

It was, how do we create this really unique customer experience that it's not just fun and it's not just exercise, but it's really memorable and really unique. And that was basically my foundation for 10 years. I created a bike trip in New Zealand. I led a hiking trip in Nepal.

I worked in Bhutan, and again, eventually I had to slow down a little bit and evolved to the customer experience side of both the bike business and the travel business. So I worked for Track. I worked for Specialized, which is not a bicycle. I moved to California to work for.

Wisconsin was too cold, so I moved to California to work for Specialized, and I ran their events program. We had a program called the Specialized Riders Club, and it was like an affinity program.

I wouldn't really call it loyalty so much as it was membership, but I basically planned bike rides and parties and opportunities to meet professional cyclists and training camps and all of these type of events that allowed the customers to use the products we were selling, which was, you know, in the case Of Trek and Specialized bicycles. After a while, I ended up getting a job in the north Face. I switched over from cycling to more of outdoors. But it was a similar.

In that case, I was asked to come to the north face to build our first loyalty program. So there was no loyalty at the North Face. And we created this program called VIP rewards. It did have a loyalty component.

So as you spent money, you got a pool of points. Those points can be turned into a gift card at certain times of the year. But it also was really based around experiences.

I think we were one of the first programs that allowed customers to get points for simply doing things. We had check ins at our stores, but we also built a check in tool in our app where you could check in at a national park and get 25 points.

And so, you know, it's not a lot. It ends up being about $2. And when you. When you kind of transfer that to your.

But as customers visited more national parks, they were able to earn rewards. And we built rewards, opportunities that were beyond simply getting a gift card. Like, we had a whole catalog of experiences.

You could get a tent with your points. You could get a day of running with Dean Carnassis in the Marin headlands.

Our number one customer one year picked, instead of again taking a massive gift card as his reward, picked a trekking trip in Nepal and went off to Nepal. So.

So this whole idea of building loyalty through experiences, I took what I learned basically running bike trips when I wanted to avoid getting a real job and somehow turned it into a real job. But the idea was, how are we building this foundation of experiences?

And so when, when I was in the middle of COVID and I wanted something new, I got a call from anthropology.

I got a call from the anthropology recruiter and they said, look, we really want someone who can listen to customer feedback, look at customer data, and synthesize it into what's next for Anthropologie. I love that idea. And I thought, here's a big company, well respected company, a company I already shop with.

I looked up my own loyalty account when I started Anthropologie and I'd already been a member for 10 years before I started working here.

But here's a company who really cares about about the customer experience and is hungry for a way to take that data and use what the customers are telling them or us.

Now that I work here to make better product, to present better product, and to really tailor our assortment to what our customers want to buy, not just what we think they should be Wearing or sitting on in the case of furniture. And so I was really impressed with the approach that Anthropologie had towards building customer experience.

It's a little different than, you know, I'm not, I'm not creating, you know, we're not doing running around Central park and there's no trips to Nepal in the, in the Anthropologie Rewards catalog.

But at the same time, the idea of a big brand that is really actively listening to what, what its customers want and responding to it was super appealing to me. So three years ago I started here at Anthropology and that's kind of where I am.

That is an amazing story. It makes me feel very lazy. The 60 mile on the bike thing is next level. So I'm going to try to do six first.

But you know what's interesting about people in marketing, it's very rare that there's a linear path in someone's career. And I would say yours is the least linear path in all of marketing.

But it's awesome because your experience has kind of fueled a lot of the things that you've brought to these organizations and really innovated within these companies. And Anthropologie in particular has such a following, I don't want to call it a cult, but it's such a following. People care about the brand.

And is that a result of your focus on customer feedback? I mean, how, how do you, and how can others prioritize customer feedback and then let it permeate throughout their business?

You know, I think anthropology. And again, like I said, I was a customer here before, before I started working here.

What, what always made Anthropologie unique was the ability for the customer to come in the store and find something they love that they didn't expect. And I think that's like, what's the secret sauce?

The secret sauce is that the brand really listens to what customers are looking at, what they're buying, and responds to that by continuing to create unique products.

One of the things I think we are really great at now is continually refreshing inventory and refreshing the stores so that if you go shopping at Anthropologie, you went last week and you need to run out and get a last minute Christmas gift tomorrow, you're going to see a totally different story.

Yeah, of course there's going to be candles, of course there's going to be mugs, of course there's going to be dresses, but you're not going to see the same thing. And that's different from kind of where I Came from.

You know, we set the floor at the North Face in August for fall, and the product is kind of the same for three months. And then we add in some heavy winter coats when we get to October, or ski coats in October.

When I worked with the bicycle company, you have a season, you know, the bikes all get introduced in the fall and then they're the same bikes.

And yes, they flow in based on the seasonality of it, but there's no reason to go back to those stores on a really regular basis just to see what's new. Anthropologie has continued to. To bring in new products so that the customer.

The customer can always find something new when they go to the store or go on the website. But we. A great example is we did some research last year. We wanted to better understand multi generational shoppers at Anthropologie.

So it's really hard to use CRM data for that because only one person pays for the product. So we did store intercepts and we set up a table in the stores and we asked people if they would come down and sit down with us.

We gave them all candles for their time. And one of the questions we asked is, why did you come here today? And if you bought something, why'd you buy that item?

And we were really looking to kind of understand that motivation.

And one of the things we heard over and over while we were doing this research was I didn't really know what I wanted until I got here, but when I saw it, I loved it.

That is real.

I feel that when I walk in your stores, like you wind up buying five more things than what you planned on and you may not even buy the thing you planned on.

Yeah, yeah. And that's great for us. I mean, and again, it's different, right?

Like at the North Face, customer comes to the store because they want a backpack or a pair of hiking boots or a rain jacket.

I love the way anthropology has really created this sense of discovery that our customers feel very confident that they can find something new and kind of discover on the way, whether that is on the app or in the store or literally what we send them via email, they respond. I've never seen the level of email engagement that we have at Anthropologie anywhere else I've worked.

So let me ask you a question about metrics for a second. What are you metrics that matter to you in terms of trying to really get your arms around, you know, customer feedback?

Is it, you know, your email click through rate or number of Reviews are getting like, are there certain things that are like, we're always looking at this.

So we, we, we are very deliberate about asking our customers for feedback. And we get, you know, relatively high amount of, of post transaction feedback.

Like most brands, we, you know, we send you an email after you shop with us. If it's online, we generally wait a couple days so the product has arrived.

If it's in store, that email comes the next day to you that says, you know, we'd love your opinion on your experience. And we get about a 5% response rate, which is, which is really high for, yeah, for feedback surveys.

And I actually sort of, I anticipated you would ask this question, but I asked my team how many surveys we get per year. And we've received just in the Transaction Feedback Survey, 300,000 so far this year.

And we'll probably get another, you know, that, that's, that was a week or so ago. So we'll probably get another 50 to 75,000 literally before the end of December.

So we're coming in at close to 400,000 survey responses from customers. Wow. And then we also have a whole research arm where we do a customer census.

Every year we get 25,000 of our customers fill out this census and tell us what they think about the brand. We do surveys throughout the year. So we're getting close to 500,000 data points each year about what customers think about Anthropologie.

And then within that, about a quarter of those customers who send the post transaction survey write extensive comments. So again, you're talking about close to 100,000 comments per year. And you know, anthropology like, and you know what anthropology customers are like.

When a customer loves our brand, they are very happy to give us their feedback.

And so you know, we're getting paragraphs in some, some cases of feedback that again, most of the time people are filling these things out on their phone and they're writing paragraphs of, of what they think about anthropology, what they think about the product they just bought. They're giving us suggestions for new products we should buy. They're telling us what they love about the.

And so it's a great tool for us to start that point. And then you asked about metrics. We track nps, so Net promoter score for both online and the retail stores.

We also have a customer satisfaction score. And then specific to stores, we ask about the experience with associates and fitting rooms and availability.

Specific to the web, we ask questions about ease of navigation and ease of checkout. But the two metrics that we really Track and we report on them weekly, but we have a monthly where we do a deeper dive.

Recap is Net Promoter Score and customer satisfaction csat.

So that's amazing what you are getting at scale, that feedback that you're getting at scale. And I want to ask you a question that might be a little bit off script, but I'm really curious about your take on this.

So do you think that the future of segmentation in marketing is sort of doing like sentiment analysis on the feedback that you're getting? Since you're getting so much of it at scale, are you then ever thinking about turning around the feedback you're getting?

Say, okay, these people are our most loyal people. These people kind of just are new to us.

They're kind of into us, these people, we got to get them over the hump based on the feedback that they're giving. Do you ever consider using all of that data in the other way in terms of your marketing efforts?

Yeah, for sure, for sure. And I think the future of segmentation is really multi layered, right? It's number one, what is the opportunity?

If your top decile of customers are already shopping 10 times per year, then maybe two more purchases is your best chance or three more purchases is your growth opportunity. If your bottom half of customers, and most retailers will tell you if they're tracking their customers, the bottom half are shopping once.

So it's pretty hard to get 100% more purchases out of that pool of customers. And so starting to think about like where is your opportunity to get that incremental additional purchase?

Well, taking a customer who's already buying from you eight to 10 times per year and getting 10% more is one taking a customer who shops once and getting one more purchase, 100% more purchases.

And so if you think about kind of the juice versus the squeeze in spending marketing dollars, it really makes sense in a lot of cases if you are a brand like ours that really focuses on becoming more relevant to our customers and building that frequency of purchase to spend a bigger effort on your better customers. And so certainly that's kind of the starting point for segmentation.

I think that's so valuable for everybody here, even if you're a very, very small marketer, because so many people are focused on, oh, 40% of my database hasn't opened or clicked an email in a year. And they just have these win back strategies and win back and wake the dead.

But really what you're talking about is that's fine, you could do that once in a while, but really lock in on the people who are locked in on you. Right. I mean, that's where your growth is going to come from.

No, absolutely. And then use that and look at who the best customers are and make that your acquisition strategy. Right.

How do we get more customers that have the, have the potential to grow into our best customers? Right.

And you know, if you're a brand that gets, you know, your best customers are shopping and 10 times per year, your new customers are not going to shop 10 times per year.

But this sort of acquisition, at all costs, you're going to end up with sale only buyers, you're going to end up with Black Friday only shoppers, you're going to end up with one specific product only buyers.

When really your acquisition should be looking at how do we kind of refill and continue to bring in customers that have the opportunity to grow into multi visit per year customers.

I think that's super, super valuable advice. All right, one last question that has nothing to do with anything. I'm just so curious. You have done a lot of cool travel.

You might have done some of the coolest travel of anybody I've come across. I need to know what is on Ian's bucket list. Where do you, where is someplace you haven't gone?

Like, I really am going to get here before it's all over.

I really want to go to Argentina. Like, I really like, I, you know, I follow a lot of chefs on Instagram.

Yeah.

And I feel like they are like partnering up with Argentinian chefs and they're like, they're, they're going to Buenos Aires and they're like buying these giant steaks and eating them at 11 o' clock at night. And I'm like, I really want that.

But you're going to be on a bike. I can't go. You're going to be on like 100.

Mile volcanoes and there's like mountains and there's like good mountain biking and horseback and all that. But man, like, I just feel like that is like, it's like, it's like South American Paris and like, how do I get down there and eat that food?

Listen, I'm all in on that. You have to invite me on that trip. And I am so appreciative that you came here today.

Everybody, listen, we're going to put ian's information, his LinkedIn, everything in, in the show notes. Ian, anything you want people to follow you. Anthropology, anywhere, Anything before you.

Yeah, yeah, no, follow anthropology. I mean, come to our stores, buy stuff.

Come on.

But yeah, if you want to follow me. I'm happy to continue to drop my pearls of wisdom every once in a while but absolutely.

I mean I think the product that we have coming out now in anthropology, super exciting. Kind of where we're leaning into especially entertaining.

I have a, I have a photo literally on my desktop that that we used last year as as like this tablescaping for holiday is like my dream table.

So I'm all like take a look at what we're doing outside of of traditional what you know anthropology for with sweaters, dresses, mugs and candles and look at what we're doing on in in table and home decorating is awesome.

So it's so true there. Your in real life stuff is amazing. Follow Anthropologie everyone. Social we're gonna put Ian in the show notes. Ian, thanks for being here man.

Jay really appreciate it. It's great. It's great. I love coming on these things.

You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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