The B-Corp CCO getting straight A's in customer connection

There are few companies more aspirational than Kathmandu. The outdoor retailer places a premium on connection with the environment, its customers and its people. Eva Barrett, the business’s Chief Customer Officer, explains why knowing the consumer at every stage of their journey is key to her success.

I’ve had a really interesting journey across my career. I can genuinely say that marketing has taken me all around the world.

Before signing on the dotted line with Kathmandu in 2020, I was fortunate enough to spend over 15 years working in Europe, the US and Asia, including stints at Phillips and Adidas.

What I love about Kathmandu is that we’ve been able to inspire great change. As a B-Corp Certified company, we put sustainability at the heart of everything we do, which means we have a wonderful opportunity to lead by example.

Through data, sustainability, customer connection and team upskilling, there are now many new ways for companies to make a difference. And for me, it all starts with the customer.

1. Customer-Tinted Goggles

What will set a successful business apart from the rest is its ability to look at things from a customer’s perspective, and alter strategy based on the different parts of that journey. After all, customers don't care about what is happening in your organisation internally. What they care about is how much they love the brand, and their experience of interacting with it.

In a role like mine, I'm lucky enough to have complete visibility for the customer journey through brand, loyalty and ecommerce. The biggest challenge for organisations now is how they structure themselves internally so they're able to provide the most seamless experience.

If you've got different areas across marketing, loyalty and in-store you have to make sure you're stitching all the data points together. So ultimately, the customer has one experience with the brand. Your whole team needs to be speaking the same language.

Businesses that will win in the future will be able to do all the above. It’s about providing a great experience for the customer, while creating a seamless data experience and connecting with them on a deeper level.

2. Exploring 'The Great Indoors' of Customer Data

An internal ‘single-source of customer truth’ allows us to show up at the right time, in the right way. We rely heavily on smart data to fuel our personalised interactions with customers. Our puffer jackets, for example, are often promoted based on weather data. We use cold or rainy geographic areas to push the product to people in that zone. This provides a better overall brand and data experience from the customer’s point of view.

This data experience is becoming more important than ever, particularly in Australia and New Zealand where we are only going through the death of third party cookies now. There are too many businesses still dependent on third party data, where the focus now needs to be on first party data.

There’s a lot of UX work that is going to be needed across organisations. And we’re really trying to better understand every customer journey, and understand how our customer interacts with us at each stage of that journey.

The work that we're doing from a customer data platform and a personalisation point of view helps us stand out amongst the crowd. Having the single view of the customer - and really being able to focus on customer lifetime value - brings our brand purpose to life.

This purpose is to improve the well being of the world through preserving the outdoors. Our first party data collection through our loyalty program has allowed us to create a club which our customers really want to be part of. From there we will continue to personalise our offerings and connect with customers in ways they expect.

3. On Track and On Trend

One of the key reasons we joined ADMA was to ensure our team is fit for the future as a modern marketing organisation. Predominantly we do this through the ADMA education opportunities across different marketing verticals, which drives learning and development across my team. This upskilling has meant we are developing all of these crucial skill sets that we may not have had right across the whole business.

In our line of work things are moving so quickly. In Europe, they went though GDPR a few years ago, but in Australia we still have a lot in front of us. As an organisation you need to be on top of the latest trends and developments in the market. Especially when it comes to the skills your team needs to launch genuinely effective campaigns.

As a sustainable company, our most recent campaign to create a biodegradable puffer jacket was a big win for us. The state of the textile manufacturing market and the waste it produced wasn’t lost on us. It was through this insight that we created this industry-first jacket, and the extremely well-received global integrated campaign. 

These wins are core to our central purpose as a B-Corp certified company, but they’ve only been achievable due to our team's ability to continuously educate and upskill. Our focus on market trends, data, loyalty or personalisation, means development is integral to our success, and will continue to be for every organisation moving forward.