This blog is part of our monthly partner series, where we write about market intelligence, agency trends, and our approach at Zulu Co. The purpose of this series is not to persuade readers; we’re interested in capturing your curiosity and starting conversations. If you walk away questioning what you’ve read, we’ve done our job.‍

Seals 

This entry is an opinion piece about opinions. Buckle up.

Last Tuesday, I watched a pair of elephant seals go at it on zoom for almost 45 minutes. It was an inter-agency call, and we were evaluating a checkout initiative for a client in the CPG space. The client wanted to remove pop ups because “buyers don't like them”, the consulting firm laid out well-intentioned, but baseless claims for why the client needed them.

Two opinions, both bad, argued about direction while everyone watched. It was personal. The opinions were both bad, not because I thought they were, but because we had heat-map data to prove they were. Usually I’d step in with, you know, some actual facts to help guide the discussion, but these seals were big and scary and really didn’t care what anyone else had to say. 45 minutes is a long time, so I started thinking about this blog.

In truth, I’ve wanted to do a piece on Opinion for some time now. More specifically, why they remain relevant in eCommerce marketing, and why they shouldn’t.

The Problem

Somehow, in an industry that prides itself on data driven decision making, opinions are everywhere. The basic problem is that brands usually don’t understand their audience, even though they think they do. Stakeholders use intelligence to develop initiatives and guide their agency. But more often than not, the intelligence itself is unsubstantiated, and largely based on opinion. Data and feelings become inexorably mixed, and are almost always contaminated by personal bias. The result is marketing initiatives that fail not because they were poorly executed but because they are based on someone's opinion, rather than objective data.

The root of this problem comes down to an increasing disconnect between who the customer actually is, and who the brand (or a stakeholder) wants the customer to be. Everyone has a different opinion, and scrambles to find data to back it up. A few years ago I did a test where I asked 4 marketing stakeholders at an outdoor company to describe their customer. The answers were all equally confident, but all equally different.

Brand stakeholders are brimming with rationales for what their audience wants, and why they buy. But most of this is driven by personal biases, rather than a careful analysis of the shopper themselves. These opinions lead to agency directives, which lead to an enormous amount of time and resource being expended to prove something we knew wouldn’t work from the outset.

Why?

eCommerce brands – or more specifically their stakeholders –usually don’t know their customer. In the golden age of marketing (yes, I’m thinking Jon Hamm) personal experience, intuition and opinion formed the groundwork for high-converting campaigns. Market research, too. But there’s a fundamental difference between the great campaigns of yesteryear, and modern marketing: access to real-time customer data.

Most eCommerce brands are still playing from a version of the block-and-tackle handbook that transformed sales to marketing in the 1960’s. Back then, brands couldn’t communicate directly with their customers or track consumer behavior in real time. Ultimately the opinion of a seasoned executive was necessary to influence action. Nowadays we can evaluate live customer behavior at each stage in the funnel, conduct A/B tests on the fly, and access nearly any KPI from an interactive dashboard on a subway car. We know exactly who the customer is, what they want, and how they convert – but culturally, we’re stuck in 1965.

If we truly want to convert more customers, shouldn’t we be letting customer data dictate new initiatives, and treating opinions like the bubonic plague? What’s going on here?

The problem isn't lack of intelligence. It’s cultural. We’re human beings, and our natural state is emotional decision making. Simply put, we think we need opinions.

Wall Street

I’m just going to say it: the court of personal opinion has no place in eCommerce initiatives. Human beings are imperfect, flawed, and naturally biased. Instead of arguing with each other like elephant seals, the most successful eCommerce teams take a page from stock traders, and separate emotion from decision making. They evaluate customer behavior, and use factual insights to guide interventions – whether or not they personally like it, or agree.

That’s hard. Even harder when the stakeholders are experts on the product themselves, because they assume they are the customer. It’s not to say experience is a bad thing, but it can be blinding. As a marketing director, the feedback from a pro athlete means far less to me than the heat map analysis and conversion data of 10,000 lay buyers. I might really like the pro athlete – in fact I might agree with them – but their feedback falls into the category of opinion by default, not fact.

Like Wall Street, eCommerce is a momentary market, shifting rapidly and requiring constant analysis. Unlike traditional marketing campaigns where quarters are invested in the launch of a single SKU, the sales funnel moves quickly. The key to successful initiative planning is operating with the right data from the start, and this makes opinions the #1 enemy. In fact, incorrect opinions about the customer are the root of almost every eCommerce blunder we’ve been privy to.

The Solution

In our industry, it’s normal for opinions to be presented as fact. From the end user standpoint, it's actually our job. We need to sell the tennis racquet, even if the competitors’ is technically a better product. So we show the consumer that ours is superior, even though it’s objectively not.

But on the inside, we cannot let feelings drive our decision making. As humans, we have plenty of theories, and personal biases, but these aren’t allowed in the Zulu situation room. Like an investment broker evaluating a fund, we follow a series of rules to determine if the initiative is worth the investment – and the first is that initiatives can be based on hypothesis or facts, but never opinions.

• Options: beliefs based on personal experiences
• Hypothesis: thesis based on factual evidence
• Facts: something that is known to be true
  ‍

Years ago, I was inspired by Taiichi Ohno’s approach to root cause analysis – commonly known as “The Toyota 5 Whys”, which I highly recommend reading about. The idea is that by repeating “why” five times, the nature of a problem, as well as its solution becomes clear. At Zulu, we’ve adapted this as a checksum to eliminate opinion-based initiatives.

At the start of any initiative ideation we ask “why” until we reach a data-centric fact. If that happens within 5 rounds, we green-light the initiative. If we reach an opinion, the initiative is thrown out. If we reach neither, it goes back to the drawing board.

Here’s an example:

Update lead magnet popup: Opinion-based initiative:

1. Why? The client asked for it to be removed
2. Why? Chad says their buyers hate pop ups
3. Why? Chad thinks popups are hurting conversion rate
4. Why? Chad ran a company in 2012 where this was the case

Update lead magnet popup: Greenlit initiative:

1. Why? The client asked for it to be removed
2. Why? CVR consistently dropped .5% while the popup was active

Opinion Soup

The call on Tuesday was classic opinion soup. More of bisque really – thick chunks of personal assumptions garnished with ego, and served with a side of under-baked bias baguette. A solid 1/10 stars, and all because both parties based their argument on personal experience and opinion, not facts.  This lack of customer understanding wastes time and resources at established brands, and we recently watched it tank an early-stage startup. If you’ve done a few laps on the agency circuit, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

As marketers – specifically eCommerce marketers – it’s more critical than ever that we keep opinions out of the kitchen. This is not to say opinions are completely worthless. In the creative space, intangibles like experience, vision, and taste must take the upper hand, but this comes as part of the initiative, not a reason for it. Even then, the best marketing creative is intelligent, and developed around facts about the consumer.

I think the most important takeaway here is to ask “why”. Think about the rationale behind each new initiative, and work to understand its purpose: “Are we updating the checkout flow because Chad doesn’t like popups", or “because popups are factually decreasing the conversion rate by half a percent”

Oh, and if you’re Chad – please try to do better. Spend some time studying your customer, or ask your agency for help. Ultimately, you need to decide if your opinion needs to be right, or if you just want your company to succeed. Like Wall Street, emotion and opinions have no place on the trading floor. 🫠