The Setup
If you haven't read the start of this story, you might want to start at the beginning.
They relocate you to the Dungeon of the building. A floor with no windows and a few empty tables left behind by the last team that vacated the area. It’s dark and gloomy with fluorescent lighting. You think, maybe this could be a good thing. I’m away from everyone, including Miserable guy and Boss. No office politics. You hated your day last position anyway. So, this could be a fresh start, right? But you later find out that High Potential has also moved down with you and you moan your disapproval. On second thought, it ain't so bad. He lost his cubicle with a view and ended up in the Dungeon too (not that yours had a view in the first place), and the Intern that wasn’t assigned to anyone in particular. Perfect. You have a team of 3. The future of the Company is in the hands of a “seagull” consultant, an Intern who doesn’t really fit into any department and You. Great, that must be really exciting. Perhaps, it’s another way to get you out of the Company. You might be so discouraged after six months, and like your Side Hustle, fail miserably, and leave. First of all, Company doesn’t have a decent brand website that sells anything. You haven’t picked out any Brand to start. You have no customer service, or even a warehouse to pack your orders. Your only experience with Direct to Consumer eCommerce is your little Side-Hustle that isn’t going so well. Maybe it's time to dig up that CV of yours and update it on LinkedIn? Panic.
You request a meeting with Marketing, cc-ed to the entire Category team that Marketing guy suggested. No one reads your email or even agrees to meet with you except a cocky Assistant Brand Manager that was assigned by the Marketing guy. If there’s any Brand that would work, it would be this one, says the Marketing guy. There is so much potential and upside to this Brand, he adds. The reality is, the Brand has had massive de-listings from all retailers in the last two years. Sales have more than halved each year, and it’s now a quarter of what it was two years ago. Now, no retailer wants to touch it with a ten-foot pole without substantial listing fees. It’s a product that can’t really sell with TV advertising. Newer, more nimble competitors were killing it and well, this Brand’s been killed. Despite putting in significant marketing investments behind for two years straight, nothing sells. Amazon doesn’t want it. The average selling price is $5.95. It CRaPs (Can’t Realize a Profit) out, because the selling price is too low and after taking away the cost to market and fulfillment (including shipping) of each order, it loses money on a per unit basis. As icing on the cake, Marketing has taken away the advertising budget, reassigned the Senior Brand Manager to another category, and assigned a young Assistant Brand Manager for ‘fresh ideas’ to rejuvenate the Brand. Really? It’s just another cheap resource to walk the Green Mile - for the Brand to sunset into the place where all dead Brands rest in peace. So, no real damage can be done here. If at all, it sells a couple of hundred dollars a week. Still not enough to pay for drinks on a Friday night with your work friends. But Management keeps it around, hoping to sell it to their competitors at some point. Hey, it’s a Brand that has a long history with loyal consumers, you're told. Unfortunately, it’s a teen oriented brand and people grow out of it, when they erm, un-teen.
You start the meeting by explaining the business model of Direct to Consumer, you show the presentation of the high level important meeting and you ask for collaboration from the Brand team to get things started, i.e. this Assistant Brand Manager. High Potential guy sits in the corner with his laptop open, pounding away at the keyboard. Is he taking notes or doing his emails, you wonder? He looks up every now and then, nods and goes back to his laptop, pounding away. Why do we need him here? This is the weird part of the Company's culture. You go into meetings and there's an army of people. One person speaks and the others type away on their computers at the meeting. No one is looking at the person who speaks. After the meeting is concluded, they all close their laptops and leave for another meeting to continue to same thing. Maybe they should ban computers in meetings, you think. After 15 minutes into the discussion, you feel like you're talking to yourself. Assistant Brand Manager seems uninterested in the project. He doesn’t ask any questions, doesn’t engage. You think, he’s probably too junior to be uninterested in anything. He should be climbing walls, jumping on trampolines and dreaming of rainbows and unicorns. At least he’s not pounding his laptop away. Not like High Potential guy, who, right now, is starting to irritate you.
The first thing you do is to demonstrate the state of play of the current Brand website. You ask Assistant Brand Manager to open up the website. He fumbles a little. It’s pretty evident that he forgot the URL to the website. Was it a dot US or just a dot Com, or was it a USA after the brand name, he mutters to himself. Finally, after going through all his bookmarks, he whips it out and you both look at it. High Potential guy peers over his laptop and starts to get somewhat interested. Ok, there’s an outdated logo on the home page. That’s fine. That can be fixed. Everything is downhill from there. For some reason or another, it doesn’t layout correctly on the browser. There is a banner that rotates very quickly and you can’t catch the brand message. Going into each category, it has four products listed, out of 25, with old pack shots from 2011. Product descriptions are short two lines long. No active ingredient information. No bullet features. No enhanced content. What’s Enhanced Content, Assistant Brand Manager asks. You were thinking of B+ content, but after that question, you didn't bother asking. The only other type of content is two outdated articles that are wordy and boring. You’re tempted to ask this guy what he’s been doing in the last 12 months since he took over the Brand. You hold your tongue, clench your teeth. At least there is a website. No expectations here. You click on it and you get to a world map. You choose the country and you land on an outdated logo with obsolete products that you can’t view from a Phone. It just doesn’t show up. Someone should tell this guy that over 90% of websites are now viewed from Phones. You check on Amazon, same situation. All that’s listed from Amazon’s search results is some Marketplace sellers selling old stock at massively marked down prices, probably bought from the grey market or some auction. The prices vary widely from seller to seller. It’s clearly not something that someone has looked at for a while. There is no Buy Box, only a link that says 'Other Sellers'.
The next thing you do is to check web traffic to your brand site. You pull out Google Analytics and find the website traffic. Something must be going right. Tracking was turned on. There is a god after all. There are about 2 people on the site now, GA says. That’s probably you, and the Intern, sitting outside. The whole of last year, a grand total of 5,000 unique visitors came to the site. That’s about 13.7 visitors to the site daily. You guess that’s Search bots crawling the site and not real people. Hmmm Search bots care about this site?
We’ve been having supply issues, Assistant Brand Manager says. The factory won’t produce more Product. They have an MOQ (that’s minimum order quantity). Retailers are not buying any more stock, so basically, this is toast. How long does it take to produce? 12 weeks, he replies, quite smugly. Is there an Agency that looks after this Brand? You ask. Yeah, but we didn’t renew it this year because there wasn’t anything going on, Assistant Brand Manager continues. We pulled the budget for it and allocated it elsewhere. So, we don’t have any further supply, it takes 12 weeks to produce anything, even if we meet the minimum order quantity, no one knows this Brand site exists, or even bothers to go to it, and we don’t have an Agency. You really want to ask him the question about what he was doing in the last 12 months.
You start to list a few things on the whiteboard. First, we need to get some marketing budget back. With that budget, get the website refreshed, develop a marketing plan, set up a fulfillment service that will ship orders, set up customer service, and get Finance to agree to accept credit card transactions. That looks like a year’s worth of work. Everything is slow in this Company. But you put your bravest front and end with ‘Are you with me?’, almost pounding the table as hard as High Potential guy is pounding the keys on his laptop.
Somehow, Assistant Brand Manager agrees to join the project. Maybe he has nothing better to do? Better than watching paint dry or walk the Green Mile, right? Well, I guess you now have a team of 4. You co-opted someone today. Whoa. You’re not sure if Management or Marketing guy just wanted someone to fix the problems with the dying Brand on the cheap. Whatever it is, you and your new team have some work cut out.
By the way, we don’t maintain these websites, Assistant Brand Manager finally admits. You have to talk to IT. Good luck with that.