CMO of the Year 2019: Amit Shah, 1-800-Flowers.com

A Post-Digital Mindset

By now, the ability to leverage digital capabilities in order to facilitate a better customer experience is table stakes for most brands. Yet Shah sees signs that the broader culture is starting to tire of its obsession with technology, whether it’s the idea of retail stores taking digital “holidays” or consumers strictly monitoring their device usage. “We’re starting to move from a hyper-embrace of technology to a post-digital mindset in which there is a growing, underlying fear about how much of that interface is good for us,” he says. “Our customers are becoming a lot more thoughtful about the technologies that are being thrown at them.”

For those reasons, Shah says that it’s critical for product innovation to be truly outward looking and focused on the consumer, and for marketing to have a strong emotional underpinning. “Even for direct response companies and rigorous programmatic marketers, getting that emotional journey right for customers is really important for building relationships. So is making sure that the emotional constructs you’re building reflect what your customers want, not necessarily what your products or services were originally intended for.”

Among the things that loyal customers of 1-800-Flowers.com want are convenience and flexibility, attributes that have driven a number of digital innovations during Shah’s tenure. One of those is SmartMessage, an augmented-reality messaging feature leveraging Apple’s ARKit that was introduced last Valentine’s Day. The technology lets iPhone and iPad users on the 1-800-Flowers.com mobile app send customized AR photo and video messages to their sweethearts using a variety of filters. Another is SmartGift, a feature that allows the gift’s recipient to digitally “unwrap” the present for a preview, accept or exchange the item, then select a preferred delivery address and date.

 “We looked at a number of technologies and we felt SmartGift had a great approach to solving recipient preferences without knowing their physical address. It just relies on a cell phone or e-mail,” explains Shah. “SmartGift completely changes the traditional gifting flow and allows us to make more informed recommendations the next time that customer is shopping on the website.”

It also deepens the well of data and insights that 1-800-Flowers.com can use for future marketing purposes in this highly competitive category. “Marketers often talk about an external feedback loop between branding and performance, but you can also have an internal feedback loop around how you collect and use data with customers,” says Shah. “Over time, it allows you to have a very deep advantage over competitors.”

Still, he says that 1-800-Flowers.com “takes a very serious approach” to privacy. “When you collect or share data without customers’ knowledge or permission, it degrades the emotional connection you’re trying to build,” says Shah. “We are privileged because we get to know about a lot of personal life events, so we put a lot of thought into how to become better stewards of customer data. What we’ve learned is that, as long as you’re using it in a very thoughtful manner, customers want to give you their data because they’re thinking it will help cut down clutter and interruptions.”

Becoming a Well-Being Advisor

The 1-800-Flowers.com business was founded in 1976. Parent company 1-800-Flowers.com Inc. went public in 1999 and has a long history of growth and expansion in the U.S. The current portfolio comprises approximately one dozen other well-known gifting and retail brands, including Harry & David, an omnichannel retailer of gourmet foods and gift baskets based in Medford, Oregon, as well as Cheryl’s Cookies and The Popcorn Factory in the Midwest. At corporate headquarters in Long Island, New York, Shah oversees a marketing department of about 100 employees who work on a number of individual entities and brands.

As the company has evolved, 1-800-Flowers.com has taken a larger role in promoting the well-being of its customers. In the sympathy category, for example, it offers advice dealing with grief while leveraging partnerships such as a relationship with TV personality and musician John Tesh, whose bylined articles are featured on the website. It also provides a number of resources through a content marketing arrangement with Modern Loss, a best-selling book about grief that expanded into a blogging site populated by experts who tackle sensitive subjects like condolence etiquette. “What used to be a transactional exchange [giving gifts] has evolved into something much more experiential,” notes Shah.

In a society with an aging Boomer population, it’s critical that 1-800-Flowers.com has become more relevant not just for times of happiness and celebration, but also the “Get Well” occasions and somber periods of mourning, Shah says. While marketing normally shies away from having delicate conversations with customers, the messaging around comforting was a natural extension for the brand. “A couple of years ago, we made a decision to acknowledge the amount of loneliness in the world and that sympathy occasions were especially important, and we put out a series of campaigns that evoked the idea of sympathy and get well in a very thoughtful manner,” he says.

“Our modes of cultural expression today are both more diverse and increasing,” says Shah. “Let’s say you have an office colleague whose father passed away. You know the family is of the Jewish faith, and [you learn] it is appropriate to send a basket of fruit on the day of sitting Shiva. This is part of how we’re educating the customer in this emotional journey. We connect with customers, then increasingly use digital tools to engage with them on-the-go and deepen the relationship.”

Gaining the Global Perspective

Throughout his life, Shah has had a number of personal and professional experiences that influenced his thinking on an international scale. He has worked at both small local digital startups in the U.S. and expansive global organizations like McKinsey. Back in 1999-2000, he received a Global Research Fellowship from the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, which allowed him to travel the globe to Nepal, Thailand, Northern Ireland, The Netherlands and Canada.

“Growing up in India gave me a broad perspective of humanity, and I am fortunate to have been educated in two systems,” says Shah. He appreciates the contrast of having lived in Calcutta and, later while receiving his undergraduate degree at Bowdoin College, in the small town of Brunswick, Maine. Shah is a major proponent of a liberal arts education (he has a Master’s degree in Liberal Arts from Harvard University), which he credits with honing his ability to think critically and to learn.

“That is probably the most important skill set for any marketer right now,” says Shah. “The only way to successfully co-exist with machine learning and AI is to make learning a very primal task. We used to hire mainly for IQ – who are the smartest guys in the room? Today, it’s a much more team-oriented workplace. A lot of interviews are about EQ (emotional quotient) and working well with others. In the last three or four years, I’ve started to hire more for ‘LQ.’ What’s your learning quotient? What is your ability to learn?”

Shah believes that a company’s ability to cultivate agile, cross-functional teams depends heavily on leaders who can nurture all of these skill sets. “I advise younger people in marketing and leadership on how to build teams that straddle the traditional and emerging worlds,” he says. “Your external aspirations have to be equally realized internally. If you want to grow as a company in a complex and pluralistic world with many emerging skill sets, you need to hire and nurture the same things internally – build up that level of leadership and ability to provoke LQ. Those things are highly correlated.”

The Holistic Approach

Shah’s holistic approach to marketing manifests itself in a number of ways. One is his view of the 1-800-Flowers.com brand as evolving past its identity as a pure direct marketer. Generally speaking, he says, the traditional dichotomy of brand building and direct-response marketing is rapidly eroding. “Any modern marketer is actually a combination of the two,” Shah says. “We are brand builders but we are extremely thoughtful about how we do it efficiently.”

Toward that goal, advertising for 1-800-Flowers.com is typically concentrated around the major holidays, when more than 50% of site traffic comes from mobile devices. The brand employs mobile display banners for prospecting and retargeting, as well as video advertising on multiple platforms. “We do both linear and addressable TV, but we do it in the times we think it makes the most sense,” Shah notes. “It’s important in a saturated digital environment to be targeted. That is our bias. You can achieve a lot of scale using [video ads on] YouTube, which brands may not think of for direct marketing campaigns but is actually mid-funnel in its media execution.”

Shah is also forward-thinking in the way he has structured the marketing department. Unlike traditional organizations, 1-800-Flowers.com has established “a more modern growth stack” that spans major functions including brand marketing, product development and customer insights. In part, this is designed to address the desire for a continuous customer experience – from the time an ad is clicked to the time spent on a landing page, for example.

He’s given a lot of thought on how to strike a balance between data and creativity. Companies, he says, increasingly are automating the “orchestration” of marketing in order to free themselves up to be more creative. Still, he urges peers in the packaged goods industry to become more “analytically rigorous” in regard to data collection and ROI measurement. “A lot of the measurement and decision-making practices in advertising have become too familiar,” he explains, citing an example. “You need to rethink the best way to look at the response rate to display ads. You cannot produce better creative unless you understand some of the modern currency of measurement.”

Marketers should ask deeper questions of their agencies and challenge both internal and external stakeholders about how to achieve better outcomes, he suggests. For too long, he says, marketers have been complacent about staying within the realm of “what is believable” versus “what is measurable.”

“It doesn’t mean that only all that is measurable is what is effective. There are campaigns and ways of going to market that aren’t easily measured but are very effective and efficient. It comes down to your ability to out-learn your competitors. That is what differentiates you from others.”

That is a gift any marketer would willingly accept.