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BRAVE COMMERCE
Philips' Laura Briggs on Unifying eCommerce, Driving Category Growth, and the Power of Empathy
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How does F1 turn data into insights at 200 mph? AWS is how fans get inside the strategy.
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AWS powers next level innovation for millions of businesses.
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In my UK role, I always, always sat there and said, but the UK is different. We need something special. And now my perspective is so different. Going through the journey that I have, yes, there is something different that is needed, but it is not everything. And there is way more synergy and way more similarity across geographies, across customers, different categories that we can use. Just go and talk to the people that you're going to be working with. Find out about them, understand what makes them tick. Trust me, when you come to those conversations where you're talking about the content of the work, it will pay back tenfold.
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Welcome to Creative Commerce.
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I'm Rachel Tippograph, the founder and CEO of Micmac.
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And I'm Sarah Hofstadter, chairwoman of Profitero plus.
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And this is a show that talks about what's relevant in commerce for the world's biggest Brad.
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Rachel, welcome back.
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I missed you so much.
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What.
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What is this? I forgot this environment that we're in.
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It's actually we've already flipped the script. I'm doing the opener. Usually you ask me a question first, but I'm like so thrilled that you're finally back. Guys, we've had some really great intern co hosts and we pre recorded a bunch of episodes. But my gosh, it's life has not been the same without Rachel Tippograph. And I think we are so happy to have her back. How has maternity time off introducing a human being into the world changed your perspective on commerce, my friend?
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On commerce. I mean, now I understand why the parenting baby industry is a trillion dollar industry. It is wild the amount of brands that are out there. And I do think we should get the founder or CEO Babyliss onto the show because that is a gold mine there. But outside of that, I mean, parent leave has been absolutely transformational for me, both personally and professionally. So my wife and I, we had a son. His name is Sydney Drew, and he's a great little guy. And all the cliches are true. I mean, I fell in love with him the moment I met him. And I feel complete now as a human. It's very strange.
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I get you're getting really worked up here. The first, I don't know, I guess five years of this podcast. I talk about my kids all the time. And now we're gonna have a more balanced podcast because we're gonna be hearing.
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All the Sid stuff a hundred percent. And then from a work standpoint, I mean, that has been truly eye opening for me. I had not stepped away from Mic Mac in 11 years. And the reality is me stepping away was actually good for the business. The business performed. My leadership team led the day to day and they really demonstrated how capable they are. And it just became clear that I don't need to be involved in certain work streams or decisions anymore. It's allowed me to reorient how I spend my time within the business.
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Oh, this is very interesting because a, this will certainly help you achieve a closer modicum of balance, but also will be interesting to see how you use that at home. Because if you don't need to be involved in everything, whether at home or at work, being able to lift your foot off the accelerator and just observe might change your perspective on a lot of different things a hundred percent.
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I think it's made me a better partner to my wife, Sammy. And I mean, I'm 11 weeks in, so it's still the honeymoon phase, but we'll see in the next 200 episodes how I do.
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I think there's something about the things that happen to you personally and what that does to impact the way people lead. I was a manager before I was a mom, but not for very long. I had kids really young, and I believe that the way that I've led over the course of my career has pivoted based on how my children have grown and the age and stages that they've been in my marriage. So much of what we do in our professional lives are molded based on the relationships that we have and the personal stuff that you bring to work. I think people can divorce that. I actually think that's unhealthy. So there are a lot of learnings that come from people, from the things that have and part of their formation and how you bring your work home and how you bring your home to work. And I think Laura Briggs at Phillips is a very good example of that because you can listen to the entire podcast episode today and understand what inclusion means to her, what empathy means to her, what strength means to her, what clarity means to her. And then when you get to the bravest thing, a lot of it just kind of ties it all together.
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Yeah, this one you gotta listen to the end for the whole story to reveal itself. So let's bring Laura onto the show.
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Today. After much coercion, we are happy to have Laura Briggs, head of E Commerce Excellence at Philips. Welcome to the show, Laura. So happy to have you.
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Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here. Very excited to be chatting to you both.
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Well, I'm sure our listeners are excited to hear from you as well. So let's get in it. Philips spans global markets, product categories and channels. You guys are everywhere and anywhere. As the head of E Commerce Excellence at Philips, it's gotta be difficult to have one, maybe two overarching goals that work no matter what you're trying to do, that transcend silos, create alignment across such a diverse organization. How did you do that while still maintaining a level of precision?
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So let me zoom us in a little bit because I think Philips is enormous and consumers see the Philips brand on lots of things out in the public domain. But we have two parts of the organization. That's Royal Phillips, which is the piece that I work within health systems business. I don't go near that. I'm very much on the consumer goods. Much more relevant to this podcast. And then within the consumer goods piece, we basically have three business units that we work with. So we work across philipsonicare, Philips Avant, which is baby, and then also grooming and beauty beauty products. So there's a lot of things, for a start, that people see out there for Philips that isn't directly relevant. So perhaps the task not quite so enormous. But still, for sure, Sarah, a lot of what you say is totally true. I think for us we have a universal focus on category growth. So that makes it quite simple. We recognize that we need to work in partnership with customers and category growth is obviously the thing that we need to be collectively working towards to deliver that win for everybody. There's always, and I think there always will be a need to be choicefulness between top and bottom line. I can imagine in many organisations and we are not unique in that, that there's always a desire for both. And I think choices need to be made at different moments on different things with where we get there. But the other way that we tend to work to try to give that focus to everyone in the organization is to look at what we call source of business around any particular product category or business unit area. So really trying to think the shopper, what is the need of that shopper? How do we unlock that? And that can be really varied for us depending on which category we're working with. So we try to have that category growth focus across everything. Working with the win win with the customer, but also knowing that we need to be clear about that nuance where it applies.
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If category growth is the main objective, there's a slew of leading indicators that you probably track as a business to figure out are you getting even near growth. And it's not just you who's probably tracking these things. You also have cross functional stakeholders. You mentioned your customer and that's even an external partner. So if we just focused internally, if the organization wants to drive category growth, what KPIs are you looking at both within your world of E commerce and then how are those shared cross functionally across the organization?
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Yeah, so I always say I think E commerce is a team sport. It needs that cross functional effort to deliver on it for sure. And therefore that universal understanding of what we're trying to do and the KPIs around it are so, so important. We also love to like bamboozle ourselves with acronyms both internally and externally. If anybody would like to pick between GEO and AO anytime soon, I would be eternally grateful. Please and thank you. Because I think there is just that complexity around what are we looking at, why are we looking at it and also the language that we're using. So one of the ways that we focus on it within our team, particularly for E commerce at Philips, is to think about documented frameworks. So actually let's decide how we're going to look at things. Which KPIs are we going to do, why are they important and make sure that we at least have that consistently written down somewhere. However, I would heavily caveat that that's probably about 10% of the job to be done because writing it down is great, but you need people to read it, you need people to understand it, you need people to embrace it and work with it. And that's quite challenging. Like for myself and the team, we're quite a relatively small team within the scale of the organization and the amount of people that are working within our go to market and as you said Rachel, across all of those different functions that need to play a role in that team sport. So there's lots of tactics I would say that we use to try to do that. We have communities of practice that we run on various different areas. So that might be one area of E commerce execution around like for example retail media or digital shelf. Those are things where we would bring together people and talk and try to use that to bring that consistent understanding and repetition of the message, I guess. And then the other thing that I feel quite personally passionate about is understanding the perspectives of all of those different stakeholders. Like everyone shows up to things with a whole different history of how they got to where they've got to, a different understanding of what we're talking about. And I always feel taking a moment to understand that and bring it forward in a way that's relevant to that person from the job that they're doing, the things that they're trying to achieve. That for me is the sort of the magic piece of getting people to come on the journey with you, of driving that consistency.
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I love what you just said in terms of listening and understanding my ex.
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Executive coach is always like, rachel, you and I right now are not having one conversation. We're actually having eight conversations. When you multiply all the variations, that's actually happening. And so you know, in this room right now we're actually having 24 conversations.
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Yeah.
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And so the change management piece Coupled with the metrics is clearly what can help lead to category growth. But I love getting into the details a little bit. What are the handful of KPIs that you actually think are important to measure the effectiveness of the business?
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As an E Commerce excellence team? We were brand new out the box about two and a half years ago. It was a global function that didn't exist before. And we've really started with digital shelf. And that's I guess my call because I'm a marketer at heart. My background is all in consumer marketing, but I firmly believe that all your upper funnel investment can be wasted if you're just not there visible on the shelf when the shopper wants to shop. And we have to prioritize and start somewhere. So digital shelf has been the big thing that we've been working on so far in the journey that we've been on. So that's making sure that we have great availability, great content, strong ratings and reviews which actually historically we've been really good at as an organization. And then obviously that critical visibility piece and how do we play in the organic and the paid space to get there? There's a whole raft of other things that we can look at and we do try to bring customer relevant KPIs into that as well. So if we're working with somebody like Amazon, we will look at what are their KPIs that they're looking at for availability. Not only what we see to really do that in partnership with them, but for me that's the foundation and that's been our focus so far. But there is way, way more than that. That would be a longer term vision for me.
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You and Rachel were just talking about this whole idea of listening and also aligning around these KPIs. But one of the things I'm kind of hearing as a theme is a little bit of empathy and inclusion. You have to be listening to other people and you actually have to empathize with the challenges that they have in their day to day jobs and figure out how to include them in that. Because when cross functional work happens with lots of different voices and lots of different needs, it can often get dominated by one perspective, by maybe the louder people and the people with the strong point of view and maybe a higher degree of self confidence or whatever. How do you lean in to find the quiet ones and ensure that their voices are heard? And maybe some are even leaning out because they don't understand and they don't want to look stupid. How do you find those moments or Those people that might not necessarily be as engaged but their involvement is going to ultimately be critical and their inclusion is going to create a better outcome.
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So I am a big believer in seek first to understand. That's a big thing for me and that's how I encourage our team to show up to conversations. And it's a strange one because it was a personal learning for me. I used to be very, I'm still quite task focused but I want to get stuff done. Why do I need to have all of these conversations? Let's just get on and get things done. But what I've learned over my career is that if you take the time up front to understand those perspectives, understand people's past experience, understand what they know, what they don't know, everyone's showing up just knowing what they know and not knowing what they don't know. So my career path at Philips, I joined in a UK role and I will hold my hands up. I came through UK through region into a global role, but in my UK role I always, always sat there and said, but the UK is different, we need something special. And now my perspective is so different going through the journey that I have. And yes, there is something that different that is needed, but it is not everything. And there is way more synergy and way more similarity across geographies, across customers, across different categories that we can use, but it's all about building that shared understanding. And I think those conversations, like, they don't seem like they're the urgent work, but one of the things I would always say to anyone that's stepping into one of my teams is just go and talk to the people that you're going to be working with, find out about them, understand what makes them tick. You might not feel like it's going to pay back, but trust me, when you come to those conversations where you're talking about the content of the work, it will pay back tenfold in not having that noise, because you know how you need to explain something to that person because you know how they're showing up to that conversation. And I just think, yeah, it's underestimated how powerful something like that can be. Equally, there is always going to be like a point in time where somebody does need to step in and make a call on certain things and not everybody is necessarily going to like those decisions. But again, you use the word empathy, Sarah, and I think that's exactly it. You have to to deliver those decisions with empathy a little bit as well, to make sure that you're not disengaging people equally as you go through something.
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Just curious. Philip's in office culture or virtual workforce.
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We are moving back to being a more in office culture. But it depends on where the team is. Like my team is based in three, four different global locations. So it depends on how you're working and I think what works for those teams. Yeah, but there is definitely more of a move back to in person working. And I think there's enormous, enormous benefit in situations like this. You know, you cannot beat an in person coffee chat. There's just something that's not the same. Doing those things on teams. It can work, but it's not the same. Not sound magic.
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I ask that because it's so transactional in this highly virtual world. You know, speaking of transactions and getting work done, because you did say you like to get work done in your sort of global function. It's clear you probably have to work with hundreds to potentially thousands of employees across Philips. How do you go about creating processes that can scale for a full team or a full organization as opposed to just the power users?
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Yeah, not an easy challenge is the first thing I would say. But I think knowing who you are looking to enable is the first really important thing. Like who are the Personas that you're going after. So Sarah and I have met because we have started working with Profitero on Digital Shelf in the last 18 months. And that's a great example of kind of what we've done here. We know that there are those super users. We know there are, there are hands on keyboard people in regions who are looking at how can I influence our performance on the Digital Shelf? And that's where everything that we see in the user interface that we have from Profiteer is brilliant. Like it works phenomenally for them. There's alerts set up. It's just serving those needs equally. We found other Personas elsewhere in our organization that need something different. And that's where what we've had to do is build kind of parallel solutions and look at how can we provide information at a helicopter level to a business unit globally who wants to understand how are all my regions and all of my customers performing and is there something that I can do at that helicopter level to try to influence more broadly what's going on. So I think it's challenging because it creates almost complexity in what you're doing. Rachel. But the Persona piece and what that person needs and then designing for their needs I think is how we tend to approach it.
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A
I really appreciate that. And also I appreciate your shout Out. That is not sponsored. Thank you very much.
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D
It wasn't, I promise.
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It's interesting you use the helicopter analogy, largely because often when helicopters take off and come down, it creates a lot of dust. Sometimes that actually creates an even bigger fog. So I want to give you a blue sky question. If you were asked to build a brand new commercial operating model from scratch, no legacy baggage, what would be the first thing that you would do to put in place to ensure shared goals, unified language and the inclusivity that we've been talking about?
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I love this question. It totally plays to my creative brain and I don't think I'm going to give a revolutionary answer, but it comes from my history and background. I've worked in sales, I've worked in marketing. I've worked across both of those functions in my time. And I would burn the divide. That's my big thing that I would do. I just think we've seen that there's organizations that have started to do this by creating like heads of growth and those kind of roles. But I genuinely have experienced where those two functions are kind of at odds with one another. And all that that does, in my opinion is distract from getting the job done. Because actually it doesn't matter if you're a salesperson or a marketing person, you're all trying to achieve that same goal, that category growth in our case. And I think that coming into E commerce, that's what's been so fascinating because it almost forces this issue because of that team sport, because of that cross functional need to deliver it well. So that would absolutely be what I would do. But I think, and this will be an analogy lost on anyone that hasn't seen taken. It requires a particular set of skills in the worlds of Liam Neeson. Like it needs that balance of understanding of brand and customer. And I think that's the challenging piece. It's fine to say this is what I would do in theory, but to really truly make it work, you have to have that sort of symbiotic ways of working and that symbiotic experience within the teams and really importantly within the leadership to recognize that actually neither customer nor consumer is more important. Otherwise it just won't work in reality.
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Yeah.
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And I've lived through transformations where we've been in places where we had very separate teams across sales and marketing working theoretically together, but not really much more against each other. And there's some super simple things that you can do to just bring them together and get them both to talk about the big picture and Actually just come to a far better outcome when you work like that. So that is my blue sky answer.
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Well, the beautiful thing, as you said, is that it's actually starting to happen.
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Yeah.
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I would say more often than not they're PE backed organizations, but hopefully we'll continue to see that trend move into the public sector.
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Yeah.
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C
Laura, we gotta ask you our famous last question. What's the bravest thing you've ever done?
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I've reflected on this question. My easy answer is land to snowboard as an adult, which is no mean feat because I think learning to do something like that as a child, you just bounce. Right. As an adult, you really, really don't. And it's come with a fair share of bumps and bruises. But when I reflected a little bit more deeply, actually, I think the bravest thing I ever did was walk away from my marriage. And that's probably a very deep and very controversial answer. But it allowed me in a way to become the person that I've come today. It was super, super scary. It wasn't something that I thought I would ever do, but actually it was a moment that gave me the opportunity to go on such a journey of self discovery. And I think that's also been something that I consider myself quite brave to do because I think when you look inwards and you really think about yourself, you have to look at the ugly stuff as well as the nice stuff. And that's definitely not an easy task.
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C
Laura, thank you for sharing. Being vulnerable. I think there's a lot of listeners who probably have a same shared story and that is brave and we're happy for you.
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Right.
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It seems like it's bringing you joy.
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Yeah, we got there eventually. Always a rough road. I think these things are not easy. But yeah, the bravest moves tend to work out all right in the end.
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As a child of divorced parents, sometimes even the kids know when it's time for things to. To end. I can say for sure the decision by both my parents were super brave because in certain cases it's just a lot easier to sweep things under the rug. And you trip on the rug one day and you say, oh crap, I need to do something. And that might be too late. So good for you and bravo to you and thank you for both the vulnerability as well as everything that you've shared today. I think you foster a culture that allows people to be vulnerable and allows people to bring their best ops to work. So thank you, thank you, thank you.
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D
So much for having me. It's been a delight if you like.
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C
What you heard and you want to think more and hear more about the global local dynamic at large corporations, go check out a recent episode we did with Mars Wrigley's Neil Reynolds on global digital commerce. And if you also like what you heard, please tell a friend. Write a Review Share on LinkedIn thanks for listening.
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A
How does F1 turn data into insights at 200 mph? AWS is how fans get inside the strategy.
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AWS powers next level innovation for millions of businesses.
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D
Hi, I'm Jackie Cooper, Global Chief Brand Officer at Edelman and the host of Touch of Truth, a new podcast launching on the Adweek Podcast Network. My dad gave me this incredibly smart piece of advice. Meet everyone once. As a result, I've met some of the most fascinating and inspiring people on the planet. Now on Touch of Truth, we're coming centre stage and sharing the mic to experience stories of truth, insights and visions for the future that will challenge your way of thinking. Touch of Truth is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes come out every Tuesday. I do hope to see you there.