Marketing has a “hammer problem”: How to win at tech strategy in 3 steps

When it comes to new technology, marketers have a “hammer problem,” using it to solve every perceivable problem. But Sephora’s Stuart La Brooy, vice president at Sephora (LVMH), explains at eTail Asia 2024 about how to avoid falling into this trap and achieve tech strategy success.

● Many marketing campaigns that have over-invested in the tech space ultimately discover that it didn't matter.

● By using tech at the very start, marketers can be sidetracked into applying it as soon as possible instead of solving the problem.

● It is more important to understand the problem and its size, assemble the project team, identify the impact and stakeholders.

Why it matters

Instead of immediately turning to tech to solve a problem, marketers should first interrogate the problem, identify who can solve it and map out the key stakeholders involved because it is necessary to consider the flexibility, time and effort required to arrive at the solution.

Takeaways

● Manage stakeholders and be clear about the position of everyone in the team, while setting a timeline ambition of key milestones.

● Stay oriented on the problem but be very flexible in how you solve it; having a pilot and iterative scale-up approach helps.

● The time and effort to be invested in a tech roadmap can be better determined when the above points are understood.

Marketers are often guilty of hopping on the bandwagon of the latest “it” emerging technologies of the moment, Stuart La Brooy, vice president at Sephora (LVMH), observed in his keynote at eTail Asia 2024.

“Sometimes, when you get excited about the tech, you can forget that you're also in charge of solving a problem. Anyone remember NFTs, crypto and Web3 and how that was going to change the world? What about virtual reality? I've been part of many marketing campaigns that have over-invested in that (tech) space only to find out at the end of the day it didn't matter.”

By starting with tech at the get-go, marketers can easily be sidetracked into wanting to apply the tech as soon as possible, instead of solving the problem at all.

Herein lies what he calls the “hammer problem”: "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

By way of example, he singled out AI as "a fantastic piece of technology", with the recent unveiling of ChatGPT-4o set to “transform customer service” with real-time speech and vision capabilities to aid natural human-computer interaction.

Yet, La Brooy had a question for all conference attendees present that morning: “How many people here actually love talking to machines?"

He said Sephora fundamentally recognised that “just because we can do it, doesn't mean we should”.

“AI is fantastic at helping our customer service agents understand enough about the problem to help solve it but we would never want to get rid of the person. I want to make sure that it gets figured out versus leaving it to potentially a tech solution that doesn't close the loop.”

La Brooy laid out the three steps that his team at Sephora deploys for tech strategy success:

1. Understand the problem

Rather than “jump straight” into a tech project, La Brooy’s advice is to “take a pause and make sure you can fully articulate the problem you are trying to solve”.

"A lot of tech projects are about executing the tech,” he said, calling this approach a "warning sign" that the problem has not been fully understood.

He had a list of criteria to aid this understanding:

● How big the problem is: Sizing up the problem to see if it is “material enough” to allocate both time and resources to it is the starting point.

● How clear the problem is: Understanding what the problem at hand is, why it matters and what exactly it involves is the next criterion. A good litmus test is to write down the problem. “If you can't write it down, you probably have not understood your problem.”

● How to measure it: Knowing how to measure to determine success comes next because then, “you know what you're trying to optimise for” through establishing KPIs, even before embarking on the project.

2. Build the team

“We like to make sure we're really embracing everyone in the room as we try to pull things together," said La Brooy’s of Sephora’s emphasis on diversity in assembling project teams.

For starters, he recommended doing a stakeholder mapping, going by the role they play in relation to the problem at hand:

● Who benefits: The sponsor is the person who stands to benefit most from solving the problem. “If the problem you are trying to solve is primarily about the customer, who in your business team to represent that voice for you should be responsible.” Also, this person is “someone who cares enough about this to help you get through roadblocks, to help you bust barriers, to help you find the investment that you need”. In short, the sponsor helps to move the project forward.

● Who manages: The project lead is the person who will manage the project, “pull it all together”, and be held "accountable for getting you over the hill, getting you through the milestones, getting you on time and on budget”. Only one person should play this role and it is crucial that he or she is not encumbered by other roles such as sponsoring or solving.

● Who solves: Unlike the sponsor and project lead, there is likely to be not just one expert but a group of experts to help solve the problems that implementing the technology might create. This is especially so when more complexity is involved. Engineers are typically included.

● Who cares or is impacted: As La Brooy attested, the list of stakeholders who want to be involved and kept updated about the progress of the project is usually a long one. He stressed the need to make sure these stakeholders fully understand their role is not to solve, propose solutions or manage the project, while assuring them that they will be kept in the loop about the progress of the project.

La Brooy said the secret is managing stakeholders.

"When you are really clear about what everyone's position is as a team, you can play as a team a lot more effectively.”

Going forward, it is also crucial to set a timeline ambition of key milestones at this project formation stage.

“Start with the end in mind and work back to the big stages to go through. Am I going to pilot and prototype, and then scale up once I am confident it will work? Will I roll it out in terms of key dates and have a simultaneous roll-out in all markets? These are important things to lock down as you look at building your project milestones, even if they do change."

3. Fail forward

When it comes to failing forward, La Brooy said marketers must “stay oriented on the problem but be very flexible in how you solve it".

“A pilot and iterative scale-up approach can really help."

Taking different approaches and assessing how well a particular solution works as “the core measure” can help the team uncover the most effective fit for it.

But problem-solving this way means the team must be open to constant adjustments rather than fixate on using a certain method or tool. "You might need to change your tech approach.

You might find the tool you thought you were going to use is not the tool you ended up with. You might find that it makes more sense to be a little bit more basic in terms of right implementation at less scale because it's a more effective way to solve the issue.”

It is important that the problem and KPI stay unchanged. If either does shift, this simply means the project is becoming a different one, in which case, La Brooy said it may be time to shut the project down and “formally move the problem and the KPI" to a new one.

“That is fine but you need to know that you have done it.’

Ultimately, the clarity that comes from the above exercise has helped La Brooy’s team to discern how best to invest time and effort within Sephora’s tech roadmap.

"What I am most proud of for this team are the projects we did not do because it shows that we're thinking about tech resources and thinking about technology in a very strategic way.”