By nickjohnson - March 26th, 2014
Our weekly interview this week features Rose Hamilton. Rose is the Chief Marketing Officer for Pet360, the pet parent destination - providing "expert advice, an active community of pet parents and the convenience of home shopping all in one place".
Rose Hamilton, Chief Marketing Officer for Pet360
Rose has been at Pet360 for over 3 years, and in her time at the company has made significant changes to how the company markets, bringing an increased focus on the holistic customer experience. Previously, Rose had senior roles at Best Buy, Ann Taylor, Remodista and more. She's the recipient of several marketing awards, including the 2013 CMO Club "Rising Star" award.
In our interview, we go in depth on how Pet360 have evolved and transitioned to focus on customer experience as part of their aim to enhance customer loyalty and engagement - and differentiate from the '300lb gorilla' - Amazon.
Can you describe your role at Pet360?
I’m the EVP and Chief Marketing Officer for the organisation. I have responsibility across all of our primary brands, which include petMD.com, Pet360.com, and PetFoodDirect.com.
Our goal at Pet360 is to pull together all the resources that any pet parent could possibly need, and then - through combining community, commerce, content, and product - deliver a complete customer experience. The aim is to provide pet parents everything they need, at any given point in time.
My role here is to oversee the customer engagement team. It consists of any role that touches the customer experience - so merchandising, marketing, content, editorial, loyalty, creative, branding. Essentially all of the assets that go into creating an experience for our consumer.
It’s not about big data, it’s about how you leverage the insights
Have you evolved the Chief Marketing Officer role since joining the company - to ensure that one person has that overarching responsibility for all customer touchpoints?
We’ve re-organised over time. When I came in, I was the CMO, but only focused on PetFoodDirect.com. We had acquired petMD by that point, though it was being managed separately.
In time, we launched the Pet360 brand. That was where we began to create a full experience for pet parents, which was obviously difficult to do in an exclusively commerce-focused environment like PetFoodDirect.com.
We wanted to pull together all the great content and experience out of petMD, and all the great commerce experiences out of PetFoodDirect.com, and then layer in engagement - to focus on getting consumers connected with each other. The goal was to really help create solutions and answers for pet parents, based on whatever topic or lifestyle need they might have.
So we’ve made quite a change to get to this customer engagement-focused brand. And my role has evolved alongside that.
What were the drivers pushing you towards this Customer Engagement model?
We all know that Amazon is a 300lb gorilla here. They really do excel and exceed at selling products. In order for us to compete in a world where razor-thin margins are now the norm, you need to have something that’s going to cause the consumer to want to stay with you - above and beyond just a price point.
So we really needed to differentiate. Focusing on the customer, creating trust and transparency - and ensuring we add value - is what’s going to help us stand out. It’s incredibly tough to compete against Amazon if all you’re doing is focusing on selling products.
I think it’s critical to focus on building loyalty with consumers, and helping to fulfill their unmet needs.
How do you understand your customer well enough to deliver them relevant and valuable experiences?
It starts with leveraging the analytics, watching how customers are engaging with us.
Every day we’re getting data on the sort of topics that are important to our customers, what questions are surfacing, and where engagement is happening across our sites. Then we ensure we’re building out content, assets and tools that help to answer those questions - and facilitate dialogue.
We have lots of different customer touchpoints where we’re getting feedback, and we use that feedback to adjust, and to be nimble on a daily basis.
How do you ensure that all that data is going into one place - so you can build a unified picture of your customers? How do you ensure that the data you’re gathering actually creates actionable insight you can use to improve customer experience?
Collaboration is important
It’s all about how we’re organised.
We don’t just have a marketing department, or a merchandising department, or a creative department, or a social media department. We have a customer engagement department. We have a customer engagement team. How we collaborate and interact with each other is what converts all that data into actionable insight.
Working together as a united team is the big difference in how we’re able to organise ourselves here, versus other environments I’ve been in, where you have separate ‘brick and mortar’ teams and ‘online’ teams - and you’re not all necessarily sharing the same information.
What do you think is the biggest thing you’ve learnt as a CMO over the last year?
It’s all about collaboration again. In this case, the necessary unity between technology, and the other parts of the organisation. Neither of the two can live well without the other.
Finding new ways to build those relationships and making sure that the technologists and customer engagement teams work together - so that they can be great partners at the table as we create a wonderful consumer experience.
What do you see as the big opportunities for marketers in the coming year?
There’s such an explosion of data that’s available for marketers right now. But the importance ascribed to ‘Big Data’ itself is kind of silly to me.
It’s not about big data, it’s about how you leverage the insights to create new experiences and relevant experiences, how you’re able to harness that data to build products that create value, that people want to pay for!
At the end of the day, the first person to use that data and figure out how to leverage it, and how to be smart about it, is going to be the most successful in my opinion.
Does an overweening reliance on data begin to start stymying creativity? Is data simply something that will help one evolve as opposed to doing something revolutionary?
I think data can be revolutionary. It depends on what data you’re using and how you’re using it.
I think about the experience that we’ve created, where we’re taking registration information such as the size of your pets, the breed, the age, and we custom create and curate an entire experience for you - based on what you’ve shared with us.
That personalised, exceptional experience requires data.
So I think data has the capacity to be revolutionary. That’s not to say there aren’t challenges - the important thing is not to become overwhelmed with the volume of data out there, and to ensure you’re focused only on the data points that are going to create value.
It all comes back to value. You’ve got to be really clear in your vision and what problems you’re trying to solve, otherwise data will cause you all kinds of confusion that won’t necessarily lead you to something that’s of use.
That concludes our interview with Rose Hamilton. Rose will be joining Kristen O'Hara, global CMO for Time Warner, and Kara Segreto, CMO for Prudential Insurance, at the forthcoming Incite Summit:East - taking place in NYC on November 12-13.