Insights Everywhere #006: Zarina Stanford

Step Into The New Connected Bazaar

How to supercharge your commerce engine with the power of user-generated content

In this conversation, Zarina Stanford, CMO of social commerce platform Bazaarvoice, discusses her career in marketing roles at some incredible technology companies, including IBM, SAP, Syniti, and Rackspace Technology - which has given her a ringside seat to witness what she describes as the evolution of marketing in the digital age. She emphasizes how conversations are no longer one-way and brand-directed, but that consumers are engaging in one-to-one style public conversations with the world. These conversations online are what dominate the market and strongly dictate what people are saying and thinking about brands and products at large. She discusses the importance of brands utilising these consumer voices to shape their brand narratives and to even help guide product development. She mentions how Bazaarvoice helps brands harness this power. The dialogue also touches on the implications of these changes for governance and society at large, highlighting the need for brands to adapt to the rapid pace of digital transformation.

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Key Takeaways

• The evolution of marketing has shifted from a brand-to-consumer (B2C) to a consumer-driven approach (C2B).
• Zarina emphasizes the importance of brands paying attention to public consumer voices. Bazaarvoice helps brands harness consumer-generated content.
• The beauty industry excels in leveraging consumer-generated content.
• Social media and digital communities drive brand messaging and product development and help brands market at the speed of culture.
• Co-creation with consumers enhances brand authenticity and energy. Authenticity in brand narratives is paramount.
• The digital landscape demands rapid response from brands. Content must be relevant, timely, and personalized.
• The lines between B2B and B2C are increasingly blurred. B2B buyers are also people and therefore overlap with B2C buyers in how they think and feel.
• Continuous learning is vital for growth in the marketing industry.

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Hi everyone, I'm Wayne Guthrie. I'm a creative director and advisor at Studio Everywhere. Today I am excited because I get to talk to one of my favourite people that I've had the pleasure of collaborating with for a while now. A very experienced marketer and brand leader, Zarina Stanford, who is currently at Bazaarvoice, a social platform, and has come to that via an incredible journey through  IBM, SAP, Syniti, and Rackspace Technology where we crossed over. So Zarina, it's a great pleasure to welcome you to Insights Everywhere and introduce yourself.

I still remember when we first met, somewhere in Shoreditch so many years ago, and it was an amazing gathering and thank you for allowing us to use your studio and your space at the time as well too. That was quite an experience in terms of transforming an entire company and brand in less than 10 weeks. That's what we did.

So fast forward, I'm here, CMO at Bazaarvoice, as you mentioned, the social platform. We're really, really proud to have been a 20-year old company ready to champion the individual, particularly consumer's voice, as it relates to brands and retailers and their respective products. And what I call in layman's term, word of mouth marketing.

As CMO of Bazaarvoice, I am responsible for product marketing, for brand, for demand, as well as efficacy - all of the above. And one thing about me is that I actually, if I have a dream, I would dream to call myself a Chief Growth Officer because everything that we do is about growth - whether it is customer trust, consumer trust, market share or share voice and absolutely for demand, for conversion to purchase and loyalty and the likes. So thank you for having me.

I was thinking about your journey in this business. It's quite a unique perspective as the world has gone from a largely analog world of broadcast media, where media plans were pretty simple things, relatively speaking, to digital, into mobile, and then social dominating that space.Now here we are staring at the possibilities of AI.

So I think you're uniquely positioned really to give an interesting point of view on where social first marketing is, and where it might be heading.

If I could and allow myself to widen the spectrum, I'd like to really comment on the overall business and technology landscape, whether or not it relates to marketing. Because I think this transformation that we're talking about, that you just queued up, is one that each and every one of us around the world is experiencing.

And what is exciting to me, in this very moment as we speak now, is that it's a transformation that is owned and driven and absolutely championed by every single citizen on earth. So that means 8 billion plus people, each and every one of us, in how we shop, how we behave, how we communicate, how we find our watering holes, so to speak, and how we talk to our friends and families, let alone for businesses, are all based on this very quasi one-to-one communication, but in a massive scale. So that's where we are today, right?

If you think about all the social platforms, whether it is for friendly communications that was so many years ago on Facebook. And now it's Twitch, it's TikTok, it's YouTube. Because the way we communicate is no longer just in the old days, we do this [gestures talking on the phone or face-to-face], but I feel like people don't really do this anymore. They just get on a screen, usually it's one of the little bitty tiny screens, and just type away.

And then the purpose of how we use these and what we communicate with isn't just about checking in on what's today's vibe, or what's up, Wayne. It's actually also to share what we think about a particular business, what we feel about a particular product, and what we actually believe that is something that we need to share.

So from all spectrums, with that onset, I wanted to bring it to now. So many years ago, I'm probably going to pick up from my IBM days. We talked about e-business heavily at the time. Meaning that businesses are no longer just knocking on the door and having face-to-face meetings and not having just the normal in-store kind of transaction. We were talking about through this whole used to be called, but it's kind of a dated term now, through cyberspace we connect and transact. And we, at that time, this is back in the '90s, I mean, and early 2000s, we were talking about digital transformation and digital transformation as in exactly what you said, where we used to do things in a manual analog way.

And then all of a sudden, because of speed, because of technology, because of everything else, we could be almost anywhere. And I'm going to give a plug here to David - when David and Jason created the company Studio Everywhere, I just loved the name of it. It is Everywhere. I mean, every moment, everywhere, right?

And if I fast forward into my SAP days, it's really the whole CRM, the whole customer relations management, all really on a digital form factor. And all along the way we talk about infrastructures and we talk about data, which is what I did when I was at Rackspace and with Syniti. And now three years ago, I joined Bazaarvoice and, why does it excite me every day? I'm going to go on record. I feel like I'm on a mission and not just really doing a function and not just working - it’s because the power of each of us as individuals is profound. Recently we teamed up with bbc.com StoryWorks as well as with Consumers International to really showcase how the whole industry from a commerce and a retail perspective has changed and how brands have to really relegate control to the consumers who are actually controlling the brand narrative and the product narrative. Because that's how they think. That's what they feel.

I wonder if the brands you’re working with are more on top of this - and if they aren't really viewing it as seeding control to the audience, but more about recognising that that's the new marketplace. It is less just dominated by broadcast media, but that customers have an influence and presence within the marketplace and that it is all a contributing part of your brand story.

Are they embracing it more, not just positively, but embracing it as a new form of energy that they can access to benefit their business?

Yeah, I love how you just framed that. It's a new form of energy. It's new form of infusion, if you will, right? Because, here in our business, I mean, for anyone who is in the marketing space and in the sales space, we all know the criticality of content. Content has to be relevant, has to be at the right time and has to be current and has to be feeling like it's personalized. Cause we still like to talk one-on-one.

And it's interesting that I think as individual shoppers ourselves and as consumers ourselves, we really carry the most respected and the most relevant voice. And exactly to your point, many brands and retailers around the world many years ago had already harnessed the fact that, “Wow, if our consumers can really be our best sellers and our best advocates and our best champions, it's up to us as businesses to take advantage and to leverage that. And to underscore that.” I think the really, really important part though as businesses do that, is to make sure that number one, it is truly authentic. That is the only content that is truly to be trusted.

It’s worth, just for people that are listening that might not yet know about Bazaarvoice, for me to explain a little bit what it is that Bazaarvoice does within the marketplace. Because you've arrived not just at another business in a CMO role, but as you said before, you're now in a business which in some ways is redefining the marketplace. It's redefining the opportunity for brands to communicate… or not even to communicate. They already have that down. To reframe how brands exist and brand presence, I suppose. If we accept that all marketing is really about establishing presence, relevant presence and meaningful presence in the marketplace, it seems to me that Bazaarvoice is helping to make that possible for brands. It might just be good to hear a little bit about Bazaarvoice and the difference between the two roles for you from being a CMO where you're really focused on communication to now where you're pretty much focused on how you enable others to communicate and to exist.

So let me take the first part first. So Bazaarvoice is about a 19-year old company that really started with the single premise by the co-founder to say that if the voice of fellow shoppers are number one, very informative, and number 2, could truly help me make the decision of whether I should consider one product or another. Or for that matter, if I even should buy one versus the other, that promise of the word of mouth marketing was how Bazaarvoice started. Pragmatically at the time, it was heavily on text-based and star-based ratings and reviews. Right? We all do that still today, 20 years later. We look at, if I'm going to buy something, I'm going to rent an Airbnb, or if I want to look at a particular apparel, I first do that. And in fact, we do a series of what we call the Shopper Experience Index, where we ask thousands of consumers how they make decisions often times. And that user-generated content and creator-generated content is still the first thing that they would go look at. Whether it is for early discovery or for that matter, right at the moment before they're about to buy. They want to know, what are people saying about it?

And that is the foundation of Bazaarvoice. Today, we help with not just that baseline of showcasing and amplifying, as well as with optimizing that organic content, while partnering with 10,000 plus brands and retailers around the world. We also have two distinctive communities - one of influencers, and one of everyday shoppers just like you and me - to test something and then tell the world what they think, because they're very on-brand, they're very savvy, and they also like the creative freedom and also being authentic. So if you put it all together, Bazaarvoice really helps brands and retailers harvest, source, and distribute organic content from consumers,  influencers, and creators as a part of their content supply chain, oftentimes complementing branded content.

Are there any brands that you think are really leaning into the opportunity? Who are tuned in to this new marketplace and the potential within it more than others? Or perhaps categories or verticals that you think are standing out as leaders in the new way to behave?

That's a great question. And I would say, let me just give you the scale first. So more than 12,000 actual brands work with us as the Bazaarvoice Network. And they fall into key categories. And I'll jump into that in just a moment.

In addition to brands who are actually the manufacturers sometimes, or they are the representation of particular products as an example, there are also retailers. Retailers and marketplaces are also other places that you and I as shoppers go hang and go figure out what's new.

And so in that sense, I would say they're not the only three, I'm just in the rules of three. I'm going to call out first of all, the three categories that in my opinion have absolutely almost perfected the best means to optimize that trust and that availability from a content and the consumer's voice perspective. First and foremost, absolutely the health and beauty industry. I mean, imagine any of you listening here, if you're in the TikTok generation or Facebook generation, it really is immaterial that many of these brands are showcasing how actual normal, everyday consumers are consuming and using their products. And the imagery or the video clip or a wheel of someone using the product who kind of looks like you or who kind of looks like us has the most profound impact for consideration and for purchase. Health and beauty is by far the best because I think, and if I may, there's so many of them, you can literally name all of them, right? It could be all the way from L'Oreal to e.l.f. to Revlon to Estée Lauder and Charlotte Tilbury. In that whole space, they all harness the voice with the consumer.

And in fact, to that extent that I would, I trust that she won't mind me calling it out, my colleague and friend and a CMO fellow, Osh, who is the CMO of Maesa, they have a number of beauty brands. I think she captured it the best and in the most succinct way, if I may. And she kind of says that the holy grail of marketing is brands don't have to do it because your consumers are doing it for you.

If you embrace user-generatd content, and embrace it in the right way, it not only adds an energy, a power, and an unprecedented authenticity to your brand because it's coming from your audience, it also in a strange way can take care of a lot of the heavy lifting.

I think, that brands used to have to do this through above the line communications. It makes me wonder if there could be a renaissance in high -evel brand expression and presence because brands can concentrate more on UGC. It's just interesting to think if we accept that that's the new dynamic of how we create presence, brand presence, then what does the process now look like?

Yes, I love that notion. If I may, I'm going to use a heavy duty, but a very old word, co-creation. I think that is what it is. If I think about, I love to ask for your thoughts on this, right? If this is the creative process that we used to use, which in the past has been, as a brand, I'm going to write up everything about my brand. I'm going to create everything about my products. I'm going to do everything branded. And fast forward to today, communities are really driving what a brand's potential and huge potential of mushrooming can be.

I'll use the e.l.f. example. Kory is a phenomenal leader driving their marketing. And you can see it in their results and you can see it in how they present themselves. Number one is always about their communities because the communities are the consumers who are actually telling them what they want, telling them how they want it and telling them where they want it. It's the best way for not only creativity in terms of brand messaging and presence. It is a phenomenal force to drive product development.

I saw a great podcast, similar conversation to this actually with with e.l.f. CMO. It was incredible. She made the point that essentially, their audience is somewhat of an open and ongoing research resource, because they're constantly getting feedback and that goes directly into new product development. She said that they're almost at that stage where they can market at the speed of culture because, although that's kind of impossible since the internet, but what a great goal to have, right? To be trying to keep in step, at least in step or potentially lead occasionally.

She's definitely my hero. And I think so many of us can all learn from that mindset. And this whole broader reality of co-creation can help the world, can help businesses and can help us consumers be more relevant and be more informed at the same time.

And one dimension that we hadn't touched on yet, and what I would really like to give a shout out to, is that if you take that kind of model - Consumers are on their devices, and I don't know if I'm an average one or not, for at least 10 hours a day. You are either holding or you're doing something with it. And that creation happens on a rapid by the second space.

And if you think about Studio Everywhere as an agency, you as the creative and I as a traditional marketer, back in my days, it would take us weeks, if not months to create a profound piece and dribble down the other pieces to support it. And today, time is of the essence. I mean, things move at a fraction of a second. Can we afford to wait that kind of time horizon when your consumers are moving at pace to figure out what they want? So they don't go to you as a brand, they go to others. They go to TikTok, they go to social media… it's amazing.

And just to give a scale to the audience in terms of how active we as consumers use and share and either consume, share or reshare, or create for that matter. The Bazaarvoice network around the world is used by 3.2 billion shoppers on a monthly basis. That is humongous. It's insane. But those are the touch points. That as we shop, as we think about who we're going to give presents to this holiday season, as we start to think about gifting and what have you, that's where we do our research.

I think it almost makes a slight mockery of the idea of walking into any planning session, thinking about “how do we consider social in this equation? Where is social?” And even if you're saying put social first, I feel like when you rack up those kind of numbers and statistics, if you think about it, it almost it exists at the center of everything now.

It's not an add-on, it's not a nice to have, it's not doing it to stay relevant - it really is something that exists at the centre and is redefining, I think, the role of a brand in terms of where comms begins and ends and the community aspect that takes over. It's allowing brands at best to stop having to communicate and, instead, to have an ability to commune with the audience and enjoy that as a joint process for marketing and product development.

Totally, because the sheer volume - how many of us are on earth, right? And how, socially active, regardless of age. By the way, remind me to share a couple of data points. But I wanted to go back to your point in terms of, if we think about these dynamics, that this is how we communicate one-to-one. And now it's giving brands a chance to talk one-to-one with individual consumers. Not in the way that we're doing it right now as we speak, but the fact is that I, as a consumer, can actually be heard and I can actually speak and express what I think directly to a manufacturer. That's very profound.

I've started back  so many years ago where we were saying, "Let's do a focus group." and then you wait three to six months to go find out what they think. This is a very different world. This is a total paradigm shift.

Yeah, it's one big focus group out there and it's not afraid to speak and publishes results in a minute. It's kind of strange in that way that there's less of a funnel involved now and there's more of just a large map.

And they're organic. That's the beautiful part. It happens at all times.

I have this image in my head of now that there's people to hold your hand, there's people to go shopping with, you're not doing it alone.

I love that. You're definitely not doing alone. And before you touch on something, you already know so much about that product or so much about that brand. It's profound.

Do you find that people also post-purchase are doing that as well? That they're staying involved? Have you got any data on that? To almost to reaffirm the purchase in their own mind - that they've made the right choice. Do people stay? They don't disconnect at point of purchase. In other words, they're still there talking about it and looking at comments and reviews?

That's a great question. Absolutely, yes. So I'll give you two sets of data. First of all, in fact, we just released our annual Shopper Experience Index, and we were just showcasing that over the last couple of weeks around the world with our well-done road shows, and it's now available publicly.

First thing's first, regardless of age group, whether it's Gen Z or Baby Boomer - anyone who is adult enough to be responding to this survey which means they have to be 18 years old and higher, including the elders category or age group is 65 plus - Regardless of what age group they are in, one out of two of us have actually purchased something on social media on a monthly basis. It's just staggering!

So that's the purchasing part. Then I swing over to early on in their journey - to the very beginning, right? What did they do? How did they discover? Discovery of products, number one, happens on search/social. The second place that people go to discover is actually retailer websites and marketplaces. Search is 32%, so three out of 10 of us. The retailer website and marketplace is 29%, another three, so six out of 10 of us use some form of social and online to discover.

Then to your point about loyalty, that in fact shows slight fluctuations heavily in the Gen Z and the millennial space. They follow their favorite brands and products for that matter throughout the entire formerly called funnel, but at every touch point now. So to your exact point, it is no longer/ definitely not linear. I'm not even sure that you can even draw it out anymore. It's just kind of a web of how things are happening.

And we, this is the part I love about it is, we as individuals and we as consumers have the choice. It's up to us now. It's not about being bombarded by TV ads, by media, by whatever, by all the one way advertising. It's us. We can make that decision. That's powerful.

I know you love mentoring, and it’s something that you’re great at. How do you find that has changed? Because obviously you're getting younger people come into the business and some of them are working for you, some of them are in adjacent businesses, but you are helping them out with advice. How has that changed over just even the last five years?

Just saying that, a visual comes to mind. There are two ends of the spectrum. I think one, and I'm going to start with that, it just keeps absolutely reminding me and all those people in the conversation, the importance of learning and relearning.

One of my absolute favourite moments of being mentored was with Neil Waters, who is with Egon Zehnder. And it was not officially a mentoring session, but the one thing he said, and I'm like, "I am so being you and I'm so you in that sense." And his comment was that "When I'm 85, I'm still going to be learning. Because the day I stop learning, I shouldn't be living."

So that to me is also how I live. Learning both from a personal and professional standpoint. The last five or 10 years though has drastically also punctuated and added one other aspect to it, which is relearning. I think especially for those of us who have been working for so many years and for so long. I mean, my team, most of them are probably half my age, but I love learning from them because they think differently, they have different mindsets and they have different orientations. So that suggests to me that I have to continue to relearn.

So this mentoring and reverse mentoring is so powerful. That's the two ends of the spectrum.

I love the idea of reverse mentoring or that it's a it's a two way street. A part of me thinks that, with good mentors, it's always been like that. I think you're right that now more than ever, there's an opportunity to learn from from people that are coming into the business who are younger. And it makes it kind of exciting because everyone has something to contribute.

Yeah, if I can think of it like a spiral, an upward spiral - we learn and we share and impart knowledge. As you talk about, I do think there is a huge value. And I would preach to experience and maturity and knowledge sharing is something that is critical. We have to have the frame of reference, so to speak.

But as I'm thinking about this upward spiral, that as we keep contributing to the wealth of knowledge and to the wealth of learning and relearning, it can only go up. I mean, it can only grow. And hence why I want to be a Chief Growth Officer than anything else. Because I think we're here to grow just like plants, just like ourselves and our minds continue to grow and the market continues to grow.

Well, I think of all the places you've been, this position at Bazaarvoice is the one most appropriate for that title. You’re in a pivotal role in an important company given the social environment that we’re in.

It's really reassuring and powerful when part of what you do is to grow the business. But as you're growing the business, you're also changing and benefiting other businesses and the world at large. It’s amazing.

I wonder whether or not there could down the line be a function or a purpose for the tools and processes you’re creating at Bazaarvoice to go beyond marketing. For example, could they be utilized by governments? By countries? I think that could be an interesting question because we will have tested them through marketing, so we'll have a pretty good idea about how they work. Is that something you guys talk about?

Not in a business as usual way. In, the light of, especially in the government's use perspective, right?

If I could reverse that - citizenship is a different thing. If you think about from a citizen's perspective, and if I may now not only be constrained to one country, but the whole world, the citizens of the world. I think this is where we can consider, what is the current and future state of consumerism? Of how we would communicate? How do we govern what is real and what is not? and what is to be trusted and what is not? And, how we may envision new use cases that we hadn't even thought about today. I think this is phenomenal. It's exciting. I mean, that is why I think as a species and as groups of people around the world, that ability to keep innovating. And, you know, I know everybody talks about AI these days and machine learning and what have you, we have to take advantage of those tools. It's for us to do, because it is to enable what we can do as a human race.

But I think that I'm being selfish and being overly prideful, because I think that as a human, I can't see other entities, living organic or otherwise, to have the willpower and the ability to continue to learn and to continue to apply and with the systems from technology, being able to be inclusive and being able to bring it all together. So to your question, it could be only for us to imagine.

It's quite an exciting thing. I think that indirectly, if we can untangle a lot of the challenges we face pragmatically through things like how businesses build themselves and relate to audiences, hopefully it can have a relevance beyond that to the world and society at large.

To bring us back to Earth a little bit though, I do think that especially in today's world and today's economic climate and the business climate, businesses still have to find means to number one, deliver value. And number two, to capitalize on that value. And for anyone who might be listening, who happens to be a brand or something along those lines, I would absolutely challenge you by asking, “Have you taken full advantage of the value of the voice of your own consumers?” And that could actually be applied both to B2Cs as well as B2Bs. We can all learn from it.

B2B and B2C are converging in terms of how we work with both.

Two thoughts. One is my own personal estimation. Because I was in a meeting yesterday and I cannot remember how this came about, but it's related on this front. It’s a question of how much is the work we’re doing B2B?

If you were to draw a Venn diagram. What is the overlap of B2B and B2C marketing? I believe that when I was growing up, it was very much maybe like 5%. My two circles are like this. In today's world, because of all these digital and social amplifications, availability and scalability, I believe it is at least 50-50 intersecting. So in that intersection, how could we learn from each other? It's on both sides.

Would they continue to become one? No, because the principle 101 of marketing would suggest to say if the target audience is different, you need to do things slightly differently because of segmentation and what have you. But even many decision makers and influencers for B2B, they are themselves individuals also first, and they are themselves consumers first. So I do think that crossover is going to continue to increase.

I remember when I first came here, one of the realizations that I had is that we always talk about B2B and a B2B2C. I happen to believe it's the reverse now. It's actually C2B and C2C. And if you're really smart, take advantage of that and become the C2B and B2C and  that's powerful.

That’s interesting, because seeing over the past few years tech industry events have become more popular with consumers - like things like CES and Mobile World Congress - which were pure sales events, pure for industry, but are now covered online.

Techies don't want to know the product when it's being released, they want to know what's going on in development. They want to be part of those conversations. It's becoming measurably way bigger for people and those lines are completely blurred. And I think it is fascinating.

Yes, I think so too. And to kind of wrap it up, if we all do take advantage of it, brands could be more informed and consumers are more informed. And therefore you're beginning to really see the power of that collaboration and co-creation. Who knows what the next world will be.

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