Q&A: Alice Tomasevic, Strategic Account Director, Wunderkind
Wunderkind’s performance marketing solution allows brands and retailers to scale marketing channels without relying on third-party cookies through proprietary identity management technology, which is purpose-built for web, email, and text.
What is your background?
Graduating in Economics when I started to explore careers in finance and investment, I found that the job opportunities didn’t really suit me. I was attracted to Martech, as it’s a hive of innovation and going through some significant market growth. Working across Sales & Customer Success functions over the years has enabled me to apply my economics learnings in so many diverse ways, as I look to understand and address the needs of the customers I work with.
What are some of the challenges retailers are facing in the current economic climate?
Retailers are facing challenging economic trading conditions, as many consumers struggle with the cost-of-living crisis, these customers are becoming more unpredictable in their spending patterns – when, where and how they shop – as well as their buying behaviours, with brand switching becoming rife and loyalty even to their favourite brands becoming even more fickle.
Retailers are, rightly, having to scrutinise costs, margins, and ROI more closely than ever as operational costs increase across their manufacturing bases, supply chains, and their labour force. This is particularly evident in ecommerce, which has skyrocketed in the cost of customer acquisition (CAC). It is also bringing the return on marketing dollar or ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) into sharp focus, particularly when the cost of engaging a shopper via ‘rented’, third-party audiences, such as search or social media, is increasing exponentially, while click-through rates (CTRs) and engagement levels on these platforms are falling.
At the same time, retailers are also having to prepare for the depreciation of cookies. Traditionally, retailers have been overly reliant on identifying their customers through cookies, and this step change, as Google plans to eliminate cookies from its platform in 2024, will increase the importance of brands owning and optimising their own 1st party data – an issue if you lack the manpower to scale customer data and marketable lists quickly.
How does Wunderkind plan to address and solve these challenges for retailers?
It is estimated that 95% of traffic to a retailer’s web site is anonymous. Wunderkind’s performance marketing solution allows brands and retailers to scale marketing channels without relying on third-party cookies through proprietary identity management technology, which is purpose-built for web, email, and text. Our USP is that we can unlock unidentified visitors to a retailer’s website, by tailoring, automating, and scaling one-to-one experiences, meaning we help retailers and brands acquire new customers at scale and keep them loyal for life.
How do these solutions help retailers and brands operating in the retail sector?
Wunderkind is the only performance marketing engine with guaranteed revenue performance. As in-house marketing teams become leaner, we provide a fully managed service, which becomes an extension of a brands marketing team, there to pick up the heavy campaign lifting and drive customer acquisition performance, all triggered by user behaviour and shopper insights.
Who are your customers? And how are retailers using your systems to gain competitive advantage?
We work with brands and retailers of all sizes, from growing Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) businesses, such as Skinnydip, Spoke London and Facegym to multi-billion dollar omnichannel retailers, such as rag & bone, Refinery29, JLo Beauty, Uniqlo and Clarks.
Through our Identity Network, our customers increase on-site identification by 6x or more, significantly increasing the number of people they can reach. We facilitate greater data capture (3-5x increase in capture programs) to unlock more revenue for retailers through the delivery of our personalised 1:1 messaging triggered using real-time user behaviour.
What challenges and opportunities do you see in retail for 2023?
We will continue to see economic challenges throughout 2023, relating to Brexit, inflationary pressures, and the increased cost of borrowing. This will mean retailers will continue to experience turbulence within their operations as they look to attract and retain an increasingly price-sensitive, loyalty-fickle shopper.
In addition, I anticipate increased regulation in the area of consumer privacy – consumers already understand the way their information is used for marketing. As a result of the proliferation of new sales channels and routes to market, retailers may face greater demands for data governance, as well as for the responsible use of customer data and the privacy around this data, whether it is self-governed or enforced by regulators.
After the digital boom that was accelerated by the pandemic, we are also witnessing the resurgence of the physical store to some extent, not purely as a transactional hub but as an important experiential destination for customer engagement. Particularly when you consider how quickly the retail media trend is growing, with brands and retailers leveraging bricks-and-mortar to serve highly personalised experiences to capture new audiences.
How will you / the retailer address these challenges and turn them into successes?
As retailers continue to evaluate their marketing mix with a critical eye, they will keep a laser focus on operational efficiency. Brands are already throwing out the rule book and becoming far more experimental in their engagement, which, while necessary in the choppy trading environment, can be a good thing when it comes to sparking innovation and new ways to reach and communicate with consumers. Our goal is to assist our customers in identifying those revenue opportunities,reducing the overall customer acquisition costs by leveraging the Wunderkind technology.
To find out how Wunderkind can help your retail operation, click here.
