Episode 243: I'm With The Brand (we, the customers), part five

Summary

Podcast Summary: Clotheshorse with Amanda Lee McCarty

Episode 243: I'm With The Brand (we, the customers), Part Five
Release Date: September 18, 2025
Host: Amanda Lee McCarty
Guests: Kim Christensen, Dustin Travis White

Overview:

This episode dives deep into the ways fashion and retail brands (specifically Urban Outfitters, but the discussion is broad) develop ideas of who their customer is, how this has evolved, and how digital marketing and data surveillance now shape branding, targeting, and pricing. Amanda explores the flawed assumptions brands make about their customers, the transition from understanding customers through research to relying on social media platforms’ data, the implications for both consumers and small businesses, and the disturbing rise of “surveillance pricing.” A significant part of the episode is an accessible, thorough conversation with digital marketing consultant Kim Christensen about how digital platforms know you better than anyone – including brands themselves.

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Key Topics & Discussion Points

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1. The Urban Outfitters Case Study:

Timeframe: [00:00 – 21:09]
Amanda’s personal account as a former Urban Outfitters (UO) employee and buyer frames a larger point about brands’ customer myths and realities.

Key Points:

• UO’s early 2000s peak: products like “heinous” mesh shoes, ironic tees, humping dogs shirts, and the “beef curtains” (wide-leg gaucho pants) – all bestsellers [00:00].
• UO’s customer in the company’s own mythology: “22-29, creative, urban dweller, lives in a small apartment, early adopter, artsy, world traveler.”
• The actual UO customer: teenagers and tweens, living at home, shopping with parents’ money, not trend leaders but followers, and they age out of the brand [14:19].
• The company's repeated internal crisis: “Is Urban Outfitters still cool?” led to desperate brainstorming and “hipster task forces” [05:46].
• Disconnect between branding/product decisions and store reality:

  “Really, something that I knew from working in the store… The real customer, the core customer actually spending money at Urban Outfitters was very different.”
  – Amanda Lee McCarty [15:04]

• Result: over-invested in trend-forward, expensive product that didn’t fit the lives or budgets of the actual buyers.

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2. The Double-Edged Sword of Aspiration vs. Reality

Timeframe: [21:09 – 25:46]

• Brands often focus on an “aspirational customer” or “muse” – someone they wish to attract, not their real revenue driver.
• Amanda recalls never seeing the “target” customer shopping, only the actual customers seldom profiled or acknowledged.
• Corporate taboos: Not allowed to discuss customer reality or blame externalities (like weather) for poor sales.

Notable Quote:

“We were losing money on this aspirational customer… building our whole business around this person who didn’t exist—or at least didn’t exist in the store—versus the actual person showing up to buy the stuff. That was a problem.”
— Amanda, [23:36]

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3. How Brands Historically Understood Their Customers

Timeframe: [25:46 – 37:16]

• Past reliance on “monoculture” and minimal segmentation: before e-commerce, people shopped what was available.
• Emotional Branding (via Marc Gobé’s book): the rise of brands creating an “emotional connection” to drive loyalty [28:00].
• The importance of understanding where customers live, what they value, and who else gets a “share of wallet” [31:10].
• Amanda’s teaching of small business owners: customer profiling homework is essential, and “everyone” is NOT your customer.
• The Amazon myth: almost “for everyone” but actually excludes major segments for reasons from ethics to lack of Internet access [40:32].
• Target’s recent DEI miscalculation is highlighted as a “blown up in their face” example of misunderstanding core customers [42:38].

Notable Quote:

“There is no business where everyone is the customer.”
— Kim Christensen [37:19]

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4. The Modern Datastream: Data, Privacy, and Digital Marketing

Timeframe: [63:32 – 112:00]
With Amanda and digital marketing consultant Kim Christensen, a detailed, accessible explanation of how digital platforms now know consumers better than the brands themselves.

The Meta Machine:

• Meta knows everything: Clicks, hovers, device used, time of day, mood, shopping intent, even relationships (via DM/friends/follows), thanks to Meta pixel tracking across the web [68:11].
• Brands upload customer lists: Data from purchases—including something as granular as who bought a “Hello Kitty sweatshirt”—is uploaded and used to build “lookalike audiences” for targeting [72:55].
• Granularity has changed: Meta has reduced some targeting after lawsuits/regulation (especially around health & sensitive data), but still highly targeted by age, gender, location, interest, online behavior, even estimated income by zip code [78:28].
• Algorithmic targeting: Brand doesn’t know the “why”—Meta’s AI just finds new customers by pattern, not by conscious researcher or marketer effort [87:06].
• Small brands benefit, but dependency grows: Meta ads can be the lifeline for small brands crowded out by big players, but now all brands are dependent on Meta/TikTok/Shopify/Amazon’s data “walled gardens” [77:51].

Memorable Moments:

• “Meta knows you better than you know yourself.” — Kim Christensen [68:11]
• “You don’t necessarily always pick your customer. It’s really Meta AI that does it, and it’s based on who it will predict will actually buy.” — Kim [88:37]

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Surveillance & Price Personalization:

• Surveillance Pricing / Personalized Pricing: When online retailers adjust prices based on your data—location, purchase history, even what occasion you’re browsing for (e.g., funeral flights cost more) [114:57].
• Big travel sites, airlines, retailers adjusting prices not just for market demand but your individual signals—affluent zip code, Mac user, browsing behavior [116:04].
• Costs of accessing you as a customer are being baked into prices you pay.

Notable Quote:

“We are giving them our information for free… and we are then also, in a weird way, giving them even more money from our own pockets because companies have to account for the cost of marketing to us via our data in the prices of the products that we buy. And that means, well, this is where massive economic inequality comes from, right?”
— Amanda [112:36]

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5. How to Respond: Takeaways and Advice

Timeframe: [126:04 – end]

• “There are companies out there that know everything about you. Forget about emotional branding. This is like emotional surveillance, right?” — Amanda [126:04]
• Limited actions individuals can take: Use a VPN, clear cookies, disable ad personalization, avoid logging in via Facebook/Google, or ask friends to cross-check prices (with limitations) [124:57].
• Structural, policy-level change needed: advocates for regulation, acknowledges Europe’s regulatory lead, and calls on listeners to pressure lawmakers [126:18].
• The “rage, panic, frustration” of learning all this is normal—but the goal is to move from anger to action, knowledge, and solidarity.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Amanda’s nostalgia/critique for UO in the 2000s:
  “They probably cost the company, like, $1. They were 100% made in highly unethical conditions. I know this for a fact. And I would unpack them… they smelled like carcinogens.” [00:36]

• On the “hipster task force” to save UO:
  “I was chosen to be a part of this, like, hipster task force, possibly because I am really cool, or maybe just because I’d come from Portland—which was literally the coolest place anyone knew of back then.” [05:46]

• On the unreality of the aspirational customer:
  “All of us in buying and design and the art department… the customers in that hardbound book were all archetypes of our friends and acquaintances.” [11:02]

• On how brands are increasingly dependent on digital platforms:
  “Before the Internet and online shopping and social media, companies had to invest a lot of money and time into understanding who their customer was. Now, these days, they might be investing the same amount of money, but they don’t actually know anything about their customers because someone else… is handling it for them, without actually giving them access to the information.” [110:13]

• On algorithmic targeting:
  “It literally knows you better than you know yourself. It knows that you are shopping for a couch before you've even told your best friend.” — Kim [70:34]

• On persistent myths of universal customers:
  “There is no business where everyone is the customer.” — Kim [37:19]

• Amanda, closing frame:
  “With knowledge comes change. There is that first thing that happens after you get the knowledge, which is rage and panic and frustration... But the goal is to get to the next phase: How can I change it—how can I help others?” [129:54]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Urban Outfitters brand myth vs. reality:
  • [00:00] – [21:09]
• Aspirational customer & business misfires:
  • [21:09] – [25:46]
• Emotional branding & the monoculture era:
  • [25:46] – [37:16]
• Amazon, Target, customer not = everyone:
  • [40:32] – [46:28]
• How digital marketing works in 2025:
  • [63:32] – [112:00]
• Surveillance pricing explained:
  • [114:55] – [124:57]
• Advice for listeners, rage to action:
  • [126:04] – End

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Final Takeaways

• Brands’ images of their core customers are often dated, aspirational, or downright imaginary, leading to flawed product and marketing decisions that are increasingly out of sync with reality.
• The data-driven present means consumers are no longer mystery shoppers; instead, platforms like Meta and TikTok know intimate details about habits, moods, and triggers—sometimes better than brands, often more than friends.
• Access to customers has become a commodity and cost that brands (especially small ones) must pay digital giants for—raising questions of autonomy, transparency, and sustainability.
• “Surveillance pricing” is a warning sign of the shifting power landscape: the more data you give, the less control you have, and the more vulnerable you are to subtle exploitation.
• The path forward is a mix of awareness, policy advocacy, and collective refusal to take branding and pricing at face value. It’s not about dropping out, but about getting from rage to effective, informed action.

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For listeners who want practical steps:

• Understand that “free” digital services come at the cost of your data and targeted marketing.
• Use privacy-enhancing tools, support small brands consciously, advocate for regulation—and share what you learn.

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Essential, rich listening for anyone who wears clothes—or shops online.

Transcript

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

By the late 2000s, Urban Outfitters had a problem.

Was it still cool? Or more importantly, did millennials no longer think it was cool? In the early 2000s, when millennials were a little bit younger and I was working as a sales associate in the Portland, Oregon store, the company was practically printing its own money. I mean, if you shopped in an urban outfitter store from like 2002 to, like, I don't know, 2006, 2007, you know, you know these products very well. They were like bubble hem skirts in literally the worst colors ever. Like a weird orange and a weird, like, minty limey green. Still sold so many of them. There were the Amazing Ass flattening jeans, as we called them, that were luxe. That was the brand, which were not to be confused with the amazing Ass blowout jeans, which were the BDG ones. There were those plastic $12 embellished mesh slip on shoes. If you know these shoes, you know, these shoes. Back then, we would just get boxes of them every week. Hundreds and hundreds of them in every color ever. They probably cost the company, like, $1. They were 100% made in highly unethical conditions. I know this for a fact. And I would unpack them a couple times a week, you know, jamming them all into this huge cabinet in the shoe department. And they smelled like carcinogens. And it seemed as if everyone who got married in the Portland, Oregon area in, I don't know, 2003, 2004, got these shoes for their bridal party. These, like, $10, $12 shoes. They have flowers on them. They were bedazzled. As I say these out loud, I'm like, what a heinous pair of shoes. But let me tell you, people loved these, okay? There were huge round tables of ironic fake vintage tees printed on these, like, 50, 50 poly cotton blend shirts in every color of the rainbow. You know, getting lucky in Kentucky. Oh, so hio. Everyone loves an Irish girl. Idaho. No, Utah. That one was purple. We sold so many of those every day. They lived on this huge round table that was like, I don't know, probably 10ft across, just. And like five tiers. Just stacks and stacks of stacks of T shirts with more stacks behind them. Every once in a while, I'll start thinking about, like, how despite the sheer volume of those tees that the company was selling every week back then, I never see them in thrift stores on Depop, etc. And I'm like, where are they anyway? Ironic T shirts, Humping dogs, Lip venom. Everyone's Favorite thing to shoplift those vice do's and don'ts books, throw pillows that smelled like gasoline weed leaf printed thong underwear, another top shoplifted item. And then this was a really heady year for the business. The year the wide leg gaucho pant hit, it was sort of, well, it was wide leg, it was cropped, it was knit, it had a fold over waistband, you pulled it on. It went on to be sold everywhere ever in the next year, you know, Old Navy for example, I remember had them and we were like, well, it's officially over for Urban Outfitters. But we sold so many of them.

[Kim Christensen]

So many.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

And by the way, the staff, we all called them the beef curtains. That's what we'd be like, hey, gotta go restock the beef curtains. There's no more medium left on the floor, man. We were just selling and selling and selling stuff. I mean, there was never a time of day when the Portland store wasn't busy. And back then we stayed open until 10pm and yes, people came shopping in there until 10pm but you know, then I moved to the east coast, became a buyer for the company and you know, there was a recession. But even before the recession, things began to slow down. They began to slow down in the latter half of the 2000s. And it felt kind of fast, I guess, for the company. I mean, the company had open stores in malls, which was shocking when it first happened. We all felt so weird about it. And it had opened a lot of stores in the first half of the 2000s, coming into the second half of the 2000s, even before the recession, there was more competition from both American Apparel, which, trust me, Urban Outfitters was terrified of American Apparel. And, and there was the massive explosion of the original fast fashion companies like Forever 21 and H& M and Zara. And when you got down to it, they sold very similar clothes at a quarter of the price. And to be honest, as a person who worked for that company for a really long time, the quality at these fast fashion brands was not much worse than Urban Outfitters, if, if it was not even just completely the same. So of course millennials were opting for these fast fashion brands or if they had more money, American Apparel over Urban Outfitters. And it was true. Even by the late 2000s when I was working in the home office and no longer in a store every day when I did go into an urban outfitter store, it felt different. Not because the stores looked different, not because the product was really that much different. It was still hyper trendy. It was mostly low quality, definite overpriced for what it was. But the customers in the stores were different. There were less of them, and suddenly they seemed a lot younger, like tween and teenager young. So the company started panicking about this. And, you know, even though Urban is a group of brands, you know, it's Urban Outfitters, it's Anthropologie, it's free people now. It's also nuuly and beholden and terrain. Back then, Urban Outfitters was, you know, and it still is. I mean, it was the. The first brand that existed under that company's umbrella. I mean, it was the flagship brand. Like, it was really important that Urban Outfitters stayed cool and relevant and, you know, highly lucrative. So a group of, and I put this in quotes, a group of cool employees were chosen to participate in these, like, intense brainstorming sessions about how the company could become cool again. I. I was chosen to be a part of this, like, hipster task force, possibly because I am really cool, or maybe just because I'd come from Portland, which was literally the coolest place anyone knew of back then, I still dared to poorly cut bags. Very cool, right? And I wore primarily weird vintage clothes, which was also unusual at that time for working at Urban Outfitters. Believe it or not, it's really hard to say why I was chosen, because I did not. It's not like I had a lot of friends at Urban Outfitters. Most of my work friends worked in the mail room. We primarily got together every Wednesday night to smoke weed and watch Lost. So I'm not sure how cool I was in the eyes of Urban Outfitters, but there I was chosen to be a part of this team that was expected to fix, fix Urban and make it cool again. Anyway, we would sit in these meetings trying to figure out how to get our customer to come back. The ideas were cool, I have to tell you. Like, very exciting. You know, do art shows, partner with more indie brands, throw our own music festival, get bands to play in store, give customers more DIY opportunities, partner with bloggers. And to be fair, a lot of those really did become a reality in one way or another. Like, for example, we even let the Cobra Snake. If you know that name, you're an elder millennial or a Gen Xer. We let the Cobra Snake shoot a special holiday shoe catalog. We did epic events at south by Southwest. We had bands play in stores, and we tried to do local art shows and community events and DIY things in store. And it lasted for a couple years. It definitely seemed like it was a thing. What it did for the business, it's hard to say. But I can assure you the company doesn't do any of that stuff anymore and hasn't for a really long time. But even back then, even as I was sitting in those meetings getting hyped on all the ideas people were putting out there, because it's hard not to get excited about all these ideas, I felt that there was an elephant in the room that nobody was talking about, but everyone knew, and that was this. The person we thought was our core customer, that we focused all of our efforts on that person. That core customer was not, in fact, the person showing up to buy ass blowout jeans and Jesus is my homeboy shirts. And I would say perhaps never had been, or at least not since the 90s, definitely. Even when I was working in the store, when I took a step back and looked at who was shopping there most of the time, who was spending the most money, it wasn't the person that Urban Outfitters thought it was. So scattered throughout the departments of the massive building we worked out of in the Philadelphia Navy Yard. I mean, a huge building that was once used to build ships. Massive, beautiful building, Amazing to go and work there every day, I'd be like, listen, I don't know how I feel about this job, but this office is beautiful and has a lot of natural light. And as my career progressed and I worked at different brands, I was like, wow. Never, ever take the natural light for granted or the Herman Miller Aeron chair seriously. But in that building, scattered throughout the departments, there were these literally hardbound books that were devoted to profiling the Urban Outfitters customer. Where they lived, what they did, what.

[Kim Christensen]

They liked, et cetera.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

And every brand in that era had similar books if they knew what they were doing and, of course, if they had the budget to get it hardbound. But at the very least, there was a binder somewhere that was like, here's who our customer is, or a handout.

[Kim Christensen]

That new hires got.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

And all of us who worked at Urban in Corporate, we knew our customer, the person, the people featured in those books, as if they were real people we know, or at least reminded us of someone we knew. All of us in buying and design and the art department. We were in our 20s and 30s, and the customers in that hardbound book were all archetypes of our friends and acquaintances. And because they were people that we knew, or even us, ourselves. Like, for sure, there was a customer profile in that book that was very similar to me. Rides a bike everywhere Is vegetarian, loves music and travel and making things and vintage clothes. And it probably even said, cuts their own bangs and should stop doing that. But we knew these customers so well. This customer that we were focusing on because it was who we were and it was also because it was so ingrained in us. And here's who our core customer was, according to these books, right? 22 to 29 years old, a creative professional lives in a small apartment in a big city. And that was important because their apartment was so small that they didn't really hang out there much. So they ate out most of their meals. They were always out at bars and cafes and shops and just public spaces. They went out a lot, traveled the world, trying new things. And their most prized possessions, I remember this so well from the book. Their most prized possessions were the little treasures they had accumulated on their travels. They spent their free time going to art galleries, shows, having drinks with friends. Once again, their apartment was too small to hang out in. So they were always out with people doing cool stuff. They like to mix luxury, niche, sort of indie cult brands with lower price point, fast fashion. And they were an early adopter of trends, very fashion forward. They would be the first person in their friend group to wear a specific thing. Of course, there was also information about the kind of music they listened to. You know, the coolest, best music. Right. And you know, just how they felt politically, how they felt socially. I mean, it was, it was all in there. And there were photos of real people that were considered to be very close to this archetype or part of it. So there was a lot of detail. Like I felt these were real people. Every decision that we made in terms of product assortment, in store, merchandising, brand collaborations, marketing, even the music we played in the store, it was all based on this customer. The problem with this customer was that, yeah, that those people profile in that book 100% existed. They rarely, rarely shopped at Urban Outfitters. And it was true, right? Because even though I worked at Urban Outfitters in the store for all those years, rarely did any of my friends who didn't work for the company come.

[Kim Christensen]

In there or people I'd seen around.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

At the Tube, which was the coolest bar at the time, or at shows like they weren't coming to Urban Outfitters. The people who worked at the other cool stores around town never showed up there. Every once in a while someone would and you'd be like, whoa, that's the guy who works at Red Lights, the one who said he only dates models. What's he doing at Urban Outfitters? I mean, it would be shocking, right? And even as I moved to the home office in Philly, like I'll tell you, I think I've mentioned this here before, the people who worked at home office had drunk the Kool Aid very hard and felt like they had the coolest job ever and would say so, right? And it was hard not to feel that way when everyone else around you is saying that. And then you go to like market to see vendors and they're like doing whatever they can to get your business. For me, it was a little bit more difficult because a lot of my friends had either worked for urban and were like, that is such a shitty company. Like what a heinous job that you don't have to work at the home office. But I get it. Or people who were just like, ew, Urban's never been cool and they steal from artists. I'm sorry you have to work there. Or even my boyfriend at the time when I took the job, Baxter, who worked at American Apparel. So not really sure where he thought he was coming from, but he was kind of like, hey, could you not tell my other friends who by the way also work at American Apparel that you work at Urban Outfitters? It's just kind of embarrassing. So coming into it for me, I was sort of like, sort of weird here. I feel weird about this environment, but I also, you know, I gotta support a kid and I gotta support myself and I've had way worse jobs and, and plus it was exciting to learn new stuff and not be on my feet all day every day. These were all major wins for me. But yeah, we were making all these decisions based on this customer that when I even I new to the home office was kind of like, huh, this is weird. I know the people in this book for sure, but like, I don't think they really shop at the store because really something that I knew from working in the store or observing who was walking in and out of the store when I was no longer working in the store. The real customer, the core customer actually spending money at Urban Outfitters was very different. They were not 22 to 29 years old. They were 14 to 20 years old. They were a student. They may, because they were a child, have a part time job. They lived with their parents or in a dorm. They only traveled with family or school groups in non school time. They did homework because, you know, they were in school. They hung out with their family and friends. They did chores that their parents said they had to do because they were children who lived with their parents. They were not creative professionals living in a small apartment in a big city. When they shopped, it was with their parents money. And often they didn't get to make a lot of decisions about where to shop. And I know this because I would ring up these people and their parents paid, you know, like the credit card came from the parents. They were more hesitant about trends until they were common on social media. Because you know how it is when you're a teenager. It's really intense to be the person who doesn't look like everyone else. And also, perhaps the most important thing about who the core customer of Urban Outfitters really was, that I think is a big problem for them now more than ever, is that this customer, this teenage customer ages out of the brand, right? And while I'm not sitting around right now in 2025 having empathy for that company on any level, there is this part of me that is like, I do have empathy for the people who work there in the corporate office specifically. Obviously, I also have empathy for the people who work in the stores. But the people who work in the corporate office, I. I don't know what they're going to do because I'm sure there is tremendous pressure right now because there's no way that the business is good when your core customer is teenagers in 2025, there's so much competition out there for their money, for their parents money, I suppose. I mean, there's Shein, right? Ultra fast fashion, like these ultra fast fashion websites, whether it is Shein or cider or quince, they have sort of infinite assortment. Every single micro trend that has ever come up on TikTok and at a price that is like a fraction of what Urban Outfitter sells. Other teenagers are thinking more, you know, environmentally, are thinking more about shopping secondhand, right? They're thinking more about ethics, sustainability. And so they're shopping on depop and at thrift stores. And urban can't do that either. So I sit around thinking, like, what. What do people who work in the corporate office at Urban Outfitters do now? What, what do they make and sell, right? And I went into an urban outfitter store recently and I was like, wow, this is really sad. I mean, it was empty for one, like zero customers. And all the clothes looked incredibly low quality. They were, strangely enough, which made me feel really old. They're basically like recycled versions of what we sold in the arts at the store, which makes sense because that's a trend right now. But, like, even crappier versions that are priced the same. And they, all of the things in that store could have been bought for, you know, $10 from shein. And, and it just made me wonder, like, what does a brand like that do? What is a brand whose core customer is teenagers and always is? So people outgrow it, they move on. So there's no long term relationship with customers. What does a brand like that do? I don't know what they do and I'm glad I don't have to solve that problem for them. But even back in the aughts when I was there and we were dealing with this like, is Urban Outfitters cool? How do we make it cool again Problem, our biggest issues were really the result of us having a false idea of who our customer was. Because once again, we thought our customer was this cool, in their 20s, adult, creative, hipster.

[Kim Christensen]

Right?

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

And we made a lot of product decisions around that customer. And what happened is, well, we were buying into items that were too expensive for the actual customer whose parents were paying. We were developing products that weren't in line with the actual customer's lifestyle. Meaning like we might sell shirts that have beer logos on them and teenagers can't wear those to school. Right. We were definitely making way too much stuff that was too fashion forward. Because what was really driving sales, and I would see this crunching the data every week, was basics, right? Graphic tees, solid T shirts, the most basic ass blowout jeans, all that stuff was what was really driving sales. But we still had these like epic trend presentations that were super fashion forward and the catalog always had to be super edgy. We used to laugh all the time because so much stress went into this catalog and so much money. But like, part of the aesthetic of it all is that all the photos were really blurry so you couldn't really see anything in it. I mean, you know, this is like pre Hipstamatic, early Hipstamatic, when we were like, we're going to take photos with our phone or our digital cameras and then we're going to make them weird and blurry and vintage looking. Yeah, we were doing that in the catalog. So people would call, they had a number in the catalog and people would call and be like, hey, can you describe in more detail that item on page 4? But that's where we were. We were going very artsy, very forward, higher price point. And that's not really how tweens and teens dress. I mean, we know that we've been that age. And so here we were, we were buying all this Product that was too cool for our customer. And I, low key, loved it because that was the stuff that always showed up in the sales section, which meant that I could go buy it with my discount during employee appreciation and get an additional 40% off that sale price and afford it myself. The sales section was always full of the coolest shit at Urban Outfitters, basically. But so yeah, we were losing money on this. This aspirational customer. That's what the term is. This customer that the business wants to have, that it envisions, it has, that is sort of sometimes called the muse for the brand. Building our whole business around this person who didn't exist or at least didn't exist in the store versus the actual person showing up to buy the stuff that was a problem. And it always felt like we weren't allowed to talk about it. We were never allowed to talk about things, the customer not being who we pretended it was. And we were also never, ever, ever allowed to blame weather for bad sales. So like when Hurricane Sandy shut down all of our east coast stores and sales were, you know, down to last year because, you know, the stores were closed, we weren't allowed to say it was because of a hurricane. We had to make up a reason like, well, it was because we didn't have enough stock in, you know, ass Blowout jeans or whatever. I mean, it was just. There were just all these things that we were never allowed to speak about that if we could, would actually probably get us closer to a solution. Sometimes my co workers and I, we would go out and have drinks and try not to talk about work. But of course you do. And we wondered about this whole idea that we were buying for someone who existed but didn't exist in the stores. We wondered if maybe this was copium. I suppose maybe we were continuing to focus on this imaginary person because if we did, then the entire store, the entire brand, everything we carried would seem more appealing to the actual customers, more aspirational to them. And maybe there is something there. But I mean, we wasted money. We wasted money on stuff for a person who was never going to show up and buy it. I don't know. I don't know why it continued to happen. I wonder if it's still happening now. But here it was. It was the 2000s and once again we were being paid to brainstorm how to make Urban Outfitters cool again, ostensibly to get more of those aspirational adults customers back in the store. The thing is, what we were doing there, well, maybe not the meetings we talked about being Cool.

[Dustin Travis White]

No, no.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Now that I think about it, I've had to go to a lot of those meetings in my career. Every brand is having those kinds of meetings generally. But every place I have worked has always said, we are obsessed with our customer. And by the time I was at Nasty Gal, we literally had a mission statement about helping our customers their best lives. And to be fair, without the customers and their wallets, there is no business. Right? So a business should be obsessed with their customer and more importantly, their actual customer. Right? It does behoove any brand to really, really understand who their customers are. And to be real about it, before the Internet and streaming television and a million different subcultures, there really was a monoculture where most people kind of bought the same things. There weren't as many trends, and everybody was kind of watching the same television shows and kind of listening to the same music on the radio or seeing it on mtv. No one, brand wise, needed to know too much about their customers, except for maybe where they live, lived, and how much money they had. And having their address was so handy because you could send them catalogs in the mail. But otherwise, no one was sitting around trying to figure out whether their customer preferred the Faint or Death Cab for Cutie. Because, remember, before online shopping, businesses kind of had a captive audience. People bought what was available to them locally. Maybe they occasionally drove to the big city or at least a bigger mall to see other options. But that was was so much easier to sell stuff without doing too much digging into your customer's psyche. But the rise of the Internet and emotional branding, it changed all of that. It's no wonder that the first section of Mark Gob's book, Emotional Branding, also known as the Flowers in the Attic of Marketing and branding in the 21st century. It's no wonder that the first section is called it's the 21st century. Do you know where your customers are? Because remember, the whole goal of emotional branding is selling without seeming like you're selling, of building that emotional connection with your customer that leads to loyalty and recurring purchases, maybe even fights with strangers on social media in your honor. And to know how to create that emotional relationship, you have to really, really understand who your customer really, really is. As Gobe wrote, people want to deal with corporations that are responsive and unique to their needs. Basically, a company that knows very specifically who their customer is can cater precisely to them, even marketing to them, in a way that feels so personal, even.

[Kim Christensen]

Though it's not that it feels like.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

An authentic relationship, even though it's not for example, on the topic of selling to women, Gobe said that women wanted the following things as consumers, and let me tell you, as I list them, you're going to picture brands, advertising campaigns that touched on this right? One was respect. He said, acknowledge that women are intelligent and informed and they will respect your brand. Right? Individuality, he said, resist any and all temptation to stereotype. He actually goes on to talk about how women can be mothers and sexy and smart and have jobs. I'm like, yeah, yeah, they always have been. But I love that we have to point this out. And to be fair, I am not the target audience of emotional branding. It was like marketing professionals, probably primarily men at that point, who probably needed to be told this. Another thing he called out which remains relevant today is stress relief. He said, offer solutions or at least understanding of the tensions that prey on women daily. And I still see this in marketing, right? Like whether it's self care, right? Take some time for yourself and do a face mask or look how easy this thing is that you can like get on subscriptions so you can take care of your family better, right? The next one he said was connection. He said, find out what makes your woman tick. You know, this is really that idea of like building community amongst your customer base, of people being like, oh, I'm.

[Kim Christensen]

Just an anthropology gal.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

That's who I am. You know, this is what that is. He also said that, you know, women were looking for relationships. He said, brands that take a sincere stand for something and demonstrate it in real concrete terms will do well with women. I mean, this is cause marketing right here. This is girlboss. And while I couldn't find data on this, although I would love to find it, my suspicion is that if we look at Tom's shoe sales or Warby Parker in its early days when he gave a pair of glasses for every pair someone bought, or many of the fundraiser T shirt apparel collection campaigns over the last decade or so, I would suspect that the vast majority of sales were to women. So this, none of this is a surprise to me. All of this sounds kind of hokey right now, reading it out loud and, you know, possibly because we've been talking about this for a few weeks now, and now I'm like, man, all this stuff is so obvious and contrived. But the reality is that when I am teaching small business owners about understanding their customer, I really am telling them that they need to know a lot about their customer to succeed. In fact, this week I am literally teaching a class about this to a cohort of makers that I've been working with, well, different cohorts, but I've been working with this organization called NEST for like, I don't know, a year and a half now, teaching classes to the makers. And this week we literally are talking about customers. So this is really well timed, even though I totally didn't plan it that way. But one of the things I talk about is here are the things you need to know about your customer and why. For example, where your customer lives, right? For a business, this determines shipping costs, where that business might choose to do pop ups or events, even where a business might open a brick and mortar location like a store or even put their office, right? So location really matters. And I mean, the fact of the matter is it's a little bit less obvious or it's a little less noticeable. Maybe now in 2025, when the Internet and online shopping has sort of, I don't know, it has reached people across the United States, right? But Even in the 2000s, when I was working for Urban Outfitters, location really determined how trend forward a store might be. And so we sent the most edgy, most indie, cool, expensive things to the stores in New York and la. We definitely tiered our store assortment based on geography. Like it really determined who our customer was. We had stores that were in college towns and what we sold there was different than the stores, you know, in New York City. And we had stores that were in warm climates versus cooler climates. And so we sent the warm climates sandals and sunglasses and swimwear kind of year round. But obviously we wouldn't send that to Chicago in December. And so geography really, really matters. What else? Other brands that the customer shops from, AKA what we call the competitive landscape. Not only is it important to understand who else is getting a share of a customer's wallets, a brand also wants to know where they fit into that equation. And that determines things like pricing and product assortment and marketing and even customer service policies. One of the reasons that like everyone ever started offering free returns and fast and sometimes free shipping is because first Amazon did it, then maybe like your Target, Walmart, they did it. And then it trickled down to more apparel kind of brands. And then if like the Gap is doing it or Urban Outfitters, then your small brand has to do it too. And suddenly everybody is offering these services. That all starts with understanding where else a customer shops. Because if a customer is getting free shipping one place, they kind of want it everywhere. So understanding where else a customer shops is just like super important. Understanding what matters to a Customer and their perceived lifestyle. This can help brands with decisions about business practices, sustainability issues they want to speak about on social media or not. Perhaps the cause marketing that they want to do. It can also help them filter out whether or not a product is the right fit for their customer. Or it can help them refine their product offering to make it more appealing. Some examples I would cite here is, you know, going back to our totally super imaginary customer at Urban Outfitters. They lived in a small apartment in the city. Well, we're not going to sell them like lawn furniture, you know, or even really furniture in general unless it's like very apt. Appropriate, like a futon. And you know, that's an important part of understanding your customers so that you aren't completely making stuff that they can never actually use or buy. Of course, on the inverse, because our actual customer was even younger, right? It's funny that we sold so much drinking related stuff. I guess that was for more of.

[Kim Christensen]

The college students that worked there.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Also, it's really important to know where a customer gets their entertainment, their news, their social media interaction because this can help a brand focus their marketing. Right? If a brand's customers are primarily on TikTok, they don't really need to be posting on Twitter. If a brand has a lot of Instagram users, obviously they want to be taking out meta ads. They can reach their customer there. And so knowing where people are is really important for reaching them. When I am teaching about customer profiling to small business owners, I actually make them do a whole homework assignment where they outline the answers to these questions and I show them how to use social media and surveys to find the answers to these questions.

[Kim Christensen]

Now, interestingly enough, every time I ask.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Someone in one of the classes I'm teaching or a new client who their customer is, they usually answer everyone, which is the wrong answer. There is no brand where everyone is the customer. Sure, anyone could buy something from any business at any time. There's no discrimination here. But every brand does have a core customer segment that is driving most of its sales. And that core customer group shares many, many characteristics. So it's important to understand them in order to reach them and offer product that they want to buy. If you try to reach everyone, and literally everyone ever, what you end up is a, a bunch of stuff you end up scattered in many directions. You're sort of wasting resources all over the place. And it's just, it's just not efficient for any, any business of any size. Even huge brands like Target or Walmart or Amazon, even They don't have everyone as a customer. And while everyone could buy something from any brand at any point, the true customer and focus of those businesses should be the loyal recurring customer. There is no business where everyone is the customer. And I even going back to like Urban Outfitters and them sort of just completely having their core customer like profile in the wrong age group. They could have actually perhaps if they had leaned into like, hey, our customers are teenagers. I mean, I'm sorry but like back to school, school supplies and like get dorm room room stuff and, and like, yeah, maybe that sounds less cool, but it probably would have been more lucrative for the business. That doesn't mean that people in their 20s couldn't come in and buy stuff or people in their 30s or 40s or older. Anyone could come and buy things at Urban Outfitters, but they could have maximized their sales and their resources by just focusing on who was really shopping there. Now you're still kind of probably like, Amanda, everyone goes to Target, everyone goes to Walmart. Well, let's take a case study of a place where it seems like everyone shops. That's Amazon. Okay, why would it seem like Amazon is a place for everyone to shop? Well, nearly infinite assortment of everything. They have random no name brands that are mostly a bunch of continents. And then they also have nationally recognized brands, like brands that you know from other stores. They, at least in the past, often have the lowest prices. And while I would argue that they do not have the lowest prices now, the perception is already there and people assume that they do. They have pretty much every category of product that you can imagine, no matter how niche. And of course with that just thinking like they kind of have everything and they have every brand. And it would seem like everyone shops at Amazon, like Amazon has everyone as a customer.

[Kim Christensen]

But.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Only about 80% of American households have a prime account, which would right out of the gate imply that not everyone shops there. And who might not be a customer. Let's list who is not shopping there. Right? People who are concerned about ethics and sustainability. That's a growing group. People who prefer to shop small and local. Also a growing group. People who don't like what the brand is offering currently and or are concerned about the knock knockoffs and counterfeit products on Amazon, which has become a massive problem. People who don't like Jeff Bezos. That's a pretty big group. People who don't have a credit card or a fixed address and so can't really shop online. And that is a bigger group of people than you think. People Without a smartphone or Internet access or people who are uncomfortable shopping online. There are a lot of people who will never be the Amazon customer or maybe were in the past, but are not now. And Amazon is not trying to market to everyone out there. Amazon's not like, hey, let's try to beat this Jeff Bezos thing or let's try to, you know, make people feel better about the quality of the stuff that we're selling. No, no, no. Amazon is marketing heavily in two ways. Convenience and this. Perceived value and low prices. We talked about this in the last episode. I mean, this is a, this is a way that you build loyalty with a customer, Right? That reliability of always being able to find everything and get it easily no matter where you are. That builds an emotional connection. Right. Not with everyone. Right. But with a specific group of people who are like, I just need things to be easy, convenient and affordable. Those are my priorities. Those are not priorities for every single customer out there. Right. And those aren't priorities for a lot of people, period. But they are for a specific group of people who will continue to shop at Amazon basically, no matter what. Because that's, they need that convenience, they need that ease, that reliability to feel good in their lives, basically. If Amazon truly wanted everyone to be its customer, which, trust me, they're having meetings where they're like, not everyone is our customer, customer. And that's okay. It would have to start addressing all the issues I just talked about. And the fact is, even if Amazon was like, we're going to fix this Jeff Bezos thing, we're going to stop being like bad for the planet and workers and sell crappy stuff. Imagine love that for us. But let's just say Amazon decided to do that. It's still, it would not work for, in their favor. Okay? Because then people might be like, ah, Amazon's too woke. I don't want to shop there anymore. You know, I'm going to tractor supply or whatever. The fact is that society is more divided than ever. And so there is no way that any brand could ever reach everyone. And in fact, I'm sure you feel the same way. I'm pretty skeptical of brands that never take any stance on any issue ever. They're not doing that because the people running those companies or working in those companies don't have opinions on this. Trust me, they do. They are not taking stance because they don't want to lose customers, because they will lose customers. Right now let's look at Target here. Target is a great example. I don't know who if there was any real, real serious thinking about this, or perhaps I'm a massive underestimation of its customers and its customers values. But by dropping its DEI initiatives, it made a very significant and very clear decision. It decided, and perhaps not by thinking this through the whole way, that customers who were anti DEI were a more lucrative base for them and it would be worth alienating customers who do care about issues of systemic racism and discrimination. My feeling, because I don't think it was a good decision, right, Sales data seems to indicate that this was not a good decision. My guess here is that someone thought hard about this, I hope, and what they really thought was people aren't going to care about this. Our customers don't care about this. It's a good look for us, it gets us in with the administration, but it's not going to make people stop shopping because they don't care about this enough, right? Like they basically leadership at Target underestimated who its customers were and what mattered to them and how committed they were to that. And so this came back and it's blown up in their face, right? Like their business is not good. They thought, which, and this is something that sometimes when I'm having a very cynical, depressing day, that I also will think they thought that people are always going to prioritize cute stuff and low prices and convenience over values. And honestly, there is nothing that warms my heart more, that gives me more optimism than every time I read another article about how Target's traffic and sales.

[Kim Christensen]

Are bad right now.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Because what it says to me is that people do care more about other people than the funness and ease of shopping. And that is a huge deal. In fact, every time I read something about Target and how their business sucks right now, it makes me think, yes, we can dismantle Fast Fashion, we can get rid of Amazon, we can force change on these brands or force their demise. And that is huge to me, right? So I love it, I love it.

[Kim Christensen]

Keep it, keep it going.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

But making that emotional connection with your customer as a brand, selling without selling, that means really understanding your customer, anticipating what they want before they even know it, being right about it. Right? Because Target wasn't right about it. They underestimated their customers. You need to speak to your customers about things that matter to them in a way that speaks directly to them in a voice that they want to hear. And yes, there is a mixture of art and science to this understanding, which, as I said, Target did not have it right. It's interesting to me that for Most of this century, Target has positioned itself from a branding perspective as the more liberal, cozy, cuter, stylish, better version of Walmart. And yet suddenly, earlier this year, it was like, it doesn't matter. I just, like, I can't, I can't. If anyone who works for Target would like to anonymously tell me how other people working in corporate feel about this, I would love to hear from you, because I just have so many, so many questions. Anyway, in the 2000s and 2010s, big brands had teams that worked on this kind of stuff, meaning understanding the customer. It was often part of the marketing team, but it kind of depended what the company was. And like at ModCloth, we had a whole consumer insights team. And these teams would look through data, they would lead focus groups, they would create surveys, they would even just hang out in stores watching customers shop. Every employee who was remotely involved with product or merchandising or marketing had to know these details very well to succeed at their job. And it was pretty normal to interview with new companies and be forced to answer the question, who do you think our customer is? Maybe if you were super lucky I made it to the next round of interviews, you could spend, I don't know, 10 to 20 hours working for free creating a project for that interview process that proved that you understood this customer. It was a really big, big deal. How brands do and do not understand their customer has changed a lot in the last decade, thanks to social media and browsing data and so much more. Now it's almost less about emotional understanding and more about knowing you as well as you know yourself. Now it's almost less about emotional understanding and more about knowing you as well as you know yourself or knowing what you're going to do before you do it because of what you've done in the past. And today we're going to talk all about that. And buckle up, kids, because it gets gets a little dark. Don't throw your phone in the river. It's going to be okay. Welcome to Clothes Horse, the podcast that has folded more ironic fake vintage tees than you can ever imagine. There is this Conway Twitty song that Dustin and I have listened to many, many times. We're going through an old country of, like, the 70s and 80s phase right now. And in it, he says something like, he's held more women than most eyes have ever seen, which is complicated. I have many questions about that. How many women have most men seen? I don't know, but I have folded way more T shirts than most bodies have Ever worn. I can tell you that. I'm your host Amanda and this is episode 243, part 5 in an ongoing series about brands and how they influence our identities and drive consumerism. In part one, we explored the meanings of brand and branding along with the history of branding. And I also revealed some brands that are really just like licensed zombies at this point. In part two, we unpacked the concept of emotional branding and how it has influenced our own relationships with brands building and how it has influenced our own relationship with brands building large communities of strangers who are brought together because of where they like to shop and what they like to buy. In part three, we unpacked cause Marketing and why it's really not that charitable. I still feel kind of bad, like I ruined something for everyone, but I think that's just my innate people pleaser. I just need to avoid that. In part four, we talked about how brands use convenience, nostalgia and hope to market to us. And we examined part of a recent WGSN trend report about the emotions of consumers and and how to market to them. Today we're going to talk about us, AKA the customers. What brands know about us and how will they sell to us more sneakily than ever now, as I initially outlined this series, I thought this would be the second to last installment of I'm with the Brand. And in this episode I would share all of your stories and thoughts about everything we discussed so far. But as I was researching this installment, I realized that it was bigger than I imagined and I needed to bring in an expert. So in this episode I am excited to say that we have a very special guest. One of my favorite people in the world. It is my good friend Kim Christensen, who some of you may know as my co host of my other on a very long hiatus podcast, the Department. Like me, Kim works as a consultant with a variety of small businesses that would not be able to afford her full time and her specialty is digital marketing. We actually share a lot of clients and so I see the impact of her work very clearly in the data and she is going to explain to us how brands, along with the help of every social media platform and kind of the entire Internet, how brands market to us now and how it's very, very different. And after that I'm going to talk about surveillance pricing, which actually ties into it. Now next week we're going to take a break from the branding series to talk about mending. I know that's an abrupt tonal shift, but I promised the guests that their episode would come out in September. So that'll be coming next week. And after that, I think, of course, this will always change because who knows where this journey is going to take. I think there will be two more installments in this series. In one, we're going to share your stories and we're going to talk about the other emotional trends in that WGSN report. In fact, we're going to look at that report even more with more scrutiny because Ruby of Slow Fashion Academy has access to a WGSN subscription, and she sent me the entire report. Ruby, you are the MVP of this branding series. Thank you so much. And wow, it's really long. Also, as Ruby pointed out, there's a ton of really horrible AI generated art in it, but it feels, honestly, after reading it, not to spoil it for you, even more sinister than I initially imagined. So we're going to talk about that and we're going to share all your stories, and I think they actually all tie together really nicely. After that, the next episode. After that, we're going to use Glossier as a case study of emotional branding, and we're going to go go deep into it because in Mark Gob's book, which man crams so much stuff into one volume, he also talks about store experience and packaging and the ways you talk to customers on social media, et cetera. So Glossier is such a great example of emotional branding IRL and succeeding, at least for a while. So not to spoil that. So we're going to be talking about that in the hopefully final installment in the branding series. Although I'm low key having so much fun doing this that if there's like 30 more episodes in this series because more stuff keeps coming up, I'm not mad about it and I hope you feel the same way. So that said, keep sending me your stories about brands you used to be obsessed with or why you aren't anymore. Maybe you still are a brand that disappointed you, a brand you love now because of something they did or didn't do. Or maybe your thoughts on cause marketing. I promise that I'll be sharing all of this before we finish the series. Oh, and P.S. i think you are gonna have a lot of feelings after hearing this episode, so just stay tuned. As I've mentioned before, you can record these thoughts as a voice memo on your phone and send them to me, or you can write an email. My first choice is always gonna be sending me a voice memo. I'm really challenged reading someone else's words. It's like a weird connection between my brain and my mouth because I literally write out every single episode of Closed Source in my own voice, the way my brain and my mouth want to say it. It's very easy for me to read my own work, very challenging with others. And so sometimes it takes like many takes and I get really frustrated. So if you have the chance, record it for me. I would love it. Anyway, don't DM me on Instagram, okay? I'm probably gonna miss it. I have an auto reply on there anyway. Just email me. My email address is always in the show notes, but just in case you don't see that, it's Amandaosehorse world. I actually heard that only 1% of listeners read show notes. Sometimes as I'm spending 45 minutes putting all the links in there, I'm like, will anyone ever click on these such as life the last thing I just wanted to mention before we get going. Just a reminder, clotheshorse is coming to the west coast in October. I'll be doing a show in Seattle on 1023, in Portland on 1026. Links to get the Tickets Tickets are in the show notes. It is really happening. I bought our plane tickets. I booked a place for us to stay. We worked on a whole bunch of merch stuff this weekend. I have a lot of other fun surprises up my puff sleeve for these episodes to make them super fun, super memorable and just a way enhanced experience in comparison to listening. So please get your friends together. Come, let's spend some time together. I think we all need that more than ever right now.

[Kim Christensen]

Now.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Let'S take a moment to thank some of the incredible small businesses who keep clotheshorse going via their generous Patreon support.

Slow Fashion Academy is a size inclusive sewing and pattern making studio based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Designer and fashion professor Ruby Gertz teaches workshops for hobbyists and aspiring designers so that anyone can learn the foundational skills.

Of making, mending and altering their own.

Clothes clothes several times per year. Ruby offers her flagship Sloper Workshop, an in person two day pattern making retreat where you will learn how to drape a set of basic block patterns that capture your unique shape and proportions. You can also use these basic block or sloper patterns as a foundation for infinite styles of garments that are custom made to your body's one of a kind contours or compare your slipper to commercial patterns to see where you might need to alter the shape. Shape. No more guessing at full bust, flat seam or sway back adjustments. Start with a foundation that fits. Ruby also provides professional design and pattern making services to emerging Slow fashion brands and occasionally takes commissions for custom garments and costume pieces. She has also released several PDF sewing patterns for original designs under her brands Spokes and Stitches and Starling Petite. Plus. I just want to also add here.

[Kim Christensen]

On a personal note that right now.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Ruby is actually working with me me to create a one of a kind unique to me special dress that I will be wearing for all future clotheshorse events including live episodes later this year in the Pacific Northwest. I am so excited to work with Ruby because she is so talented and so knowledgeable about all things clothing creation. Check out the schedule for upcoming workshops, download PDF sewing patterns and learn about additional sewing and Design Services at www.slowfashion.academy.

[Kim Christensen]

And it's important for me to tell.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

You that that's slowfashion.academy Selena Sanders a.

Social impact brand that specializes in upcycle clothing using only reclaimed, vintage or thrifted materials from tea towels, linens, blankets and quilts. Sustainably crafted in Los Angeles, each piece is designed to last in one's closet for generations to come. Maximum style minimal carbon footprint. Shift clothing out of beautiful Astoria, Oregon with a focus on natural fibers, simple hard working designs and putting fat people first. Discover [e-mail] late to the party Creating one of a kind statement clothing from vintage salvaged and thrifted textiles. They hope to tap into the dreamy memories we all hold. Floral curtains, a childhood dress, the wallpaper in your best friend's rec room. All while creating modern, sustainable garments that you'll love wearing and have for years to come. Late to the Party is passionate about celebrating and preserving textiles, the memories they hold and the stories they have yet to tell. Check them out on Instagram 8 to the party people vino vintage based just outside of LA, we love the hunt of shopping secondhand because you never know.

What you might find.

Catch us at flea markets around Southern California by following us on Instagram Vino Vintage so you don't miss our next event. Dylan Paige is an online clothing and lifestyle brand based out of St. Louis, Missouri. Our products are chosen with intention for the conscious community. Everything we carry is animal friendly, ethically made, sustainably sourced and cruelty free. Dylan Page is for those who never stop questioning where something comes from. We know that personal experience dictates what's sustainable for you and we are here to help, guide and support you to make choices that fit your needs. Check us [e-mail] and find us on Instagram ylanpage lifeandstyle Salt hats purveyors of truly sustainable hats. Hand Blonde, blocked, sewn and embellished in Detroit, Michigan. Find us on Instagram althats Thumbprint is Detroit's only fair trade marketplace. Located in the historic Eastern Market. Our small business specializes in products handmade by empowered women in South Africa making a living wage creating things they love like hand painted candles and ceramics. We also carry a curated assortment of sustainable and natural locally made good goods. Thumbprint is a great gift destination for both the special people in your life and for yourself. Browse our online [e-mail] and find us on Instagram thumpprintdetroit. Vagavan Vintage DTLV is a vintage clothing, accessories and decor reselling business based in downtown Las Vegas, Nevada.

Not only do we sell in Las Vegas, but we're also located throughout resale.

Markets in San Francisco as well as.

At a curated boutique called Lux and.

Ivy located in Indianapolis, Indiana. Jessica, the founder and owner of Vagabond Vintage dtlv, recently opened the first IRL location located in the arts district of downtown Las Vegas on August 5th. The shop has a strong emphasis on 60s and 70s garments, single stitch tees and dreamy loungewear. Follow them on Instagram vagabondvintagedtlv and keep an eye out for their website. Coming fall of 2022.

Let's get started by jumping into my conversation with Kim.

[Kim Christensen]

I have a very special guest joining.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Us to talk about how much brands.

[Kim Christensen]

Know about us and it's someone you all love. It is Kim Christensen. Kim, do you want to remind everyone of who you are?

[Dustin Travis White]

Oh, gosh. Well, Amanda and I used to have a podcast. I hate. Yeah, I hate saying used to.

[Kim Christensen]

I know it's on hiatus.

[Dustin Travis White]

It's just like a long one, guys, that's so busy. It's a lot of work. But we had a podcast called the Department and we've worked together in the past before and I've actually been on this podcast right in its infancy.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Oh my gosh. You were.

[Kim Christensen]

That's right. To talk about ecosystem E Commerce. Wow. Yeah. And Kim and I work together almost every day right now, actually. We share a lot of different clients. And the reason I knew that Kim was the person I wanted to talk to about this is because Kim's specialty, even though we both started our careers in buying, we have gone in sort of different directions in terms of how we what our specialties are and how we help clients, which is why we work together on a lot of clients because we do two different things. And Kim's specialty is digital marketing. And you know, we work with a bunch of really cool people who are doing cool things. And nothing amazes me more than when I see how whatever Kim does with advertising on, like, digital advertising and emails and whatnot, how it, like, immediately just makes sales blow up for these brands and small brands who would normally not have access to these kinds of things. Like, it's incredible. You know, I think a lot about how. How you and I worked for all these horrible, evil corporations where we actually learned really smart things, and now we help cool people, small brands, people who are nice, like, grow their businesses. Yeah, it feels good, right?

[Dustin Travis White]

There's nothing that feels better than helping, like, a good. A good part. A good person who was working really hard at behind the scenes building their brand. And most of the time we come in and, you know, people are struggling and you're like, okay, I know exactly how to fix this.

[Kim Christensen]

Yeah, exactly. Because we've been through it. Right. And this is not stuff. I would say even if you went to business school, you wouldn't know the things that we know.

[Dustin Travis White]

Yeah, you definitely have to experience that.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Yeah.

[Kim Christensen]

Yeah.

[Dustin Travis White]

And to be clear, also, it doesn't work for absolutely everyone.

[Kim Christensen]

No, it doesn't. Yeah, for. Of course.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

And there's this. There's so much, much.

[Kim Christensen]

There's so much specificity in terms of what that business does and who their customer is and what their product is and how people will respond to the photographs. And I mean, it's like, so. It's so complicated. But one thing that is really interesting to me that I don't know much about, I only know what I hear you talk about in meetings is how you can really focus marketing on specific customers. And this episode that you're gonna be a part of is talking about how companies, brands, whatever you want to call it, their knowledge of their customer is so tied to their branding and their marketing, even their pricing. I hope everyone listening to this knows by now that when we use a social media app like Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, that it is free because we are the product. Right. Everyone knows that by now. Do you think everyone knows that by now, Kim?

[Dustin Travis White]

I. Yes. I think even in the back of your head, you probably know, right? You probably know that.

[Kim Christensen]

And what we mean by that is, like, our data, our behavior is being sold right to brands for marketing purposes and also access to us for advertising. So tell me, if you go into the back end of Meta business suite or whatever to start placing ads for a client, how granular can you get with this stuff?

[Dustin Travis White]

Well, I mean, it has changed over the years, it actually used to be, I think in 2016, when I first started doing this using the Meta, you know, Facebook and Instagram platform, you. You could really segment into a very granular segmentation. And over the years they have pulled that back, you know, between lawsuits.

[Kim Christensen]

Oh, interesting.

[Dustin Travis White]

And things, yeah, there's a lot of, like, regulations now. And so having transparency towards people and their data has become less and less and less. And they even just went through a process of doing an. An even finer tooth comb of removing things that you could target, like from smaller brands. You know, it's. They all basically lumped them together into this one segmentation called, like, women's fashion brands. And then you had to change all your ads to like, like to remove anything that now they no longer offer. And so it has gotten much, much more opaque. But, you know, the basics of Meta's data collection, just so you know, is Meta knows everything about you. Like, they. They're basically creating like your own digital identity. And they know what you click, they know how long you hover, they know what you save, they know what you share, they know what you scroll past. They even know, like, your mood. Like, are you up and just kind of like, dicking around or does it seem like maybe you're a bit depressed and maybe in a shopping mood? Does it seem like maybe you broke up and in a shopping mood? Like, it kind of has this, like, finger on the pulse of who you are, what you do, how you shop. They know your connections, your friends, your groups, who you're dming. They also, through different pixels. These pixels are these things that brands will put on their website that tickconnect, Meta and Shopify also has one. And they basically have this interconnected web. They are able to then track anyone that's got a pixel. They can track all the data. So if you're on another website that's a Shopify website or has a pixel from, from Facebook or Instagram, Meta, it'll track you. And that's one of the reasons why it's able to target you with all these things. It literally knows you better than you know yourself. It knows that you are shopping for a couch before you've, like, even told your best friend, you know, so.

[Kim Christensen]

No, it's so weird like that. Yeah, I mean, I think we've all had that moment where we're like, is the phone listening to me? Right? Or every once in a while, because Dustin and I are obviously using the same IP address and whatnot. He will definitely get an ad that was meant for me, on his phone, you know, it'll be like, really obvious, like some women's clothing brand or like some hello Kitty thing or something. But, I mean, it is interesting that you talk about how it's. Even when you're not using Instagram actively, it is tracking who you are and what you're doing. Because I'm sure everyone who's listening to this had that experience where maybe you were looking at something on your computer.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

On a web browser, and then you.

[Kim Christensen]

Grab your phone to go down and make some lunch, and while your lunch is cooking, you're scrolling and you're getting ads for the thing that you were just looking at on your computer.

[Dustin Travis White]

How wild is that exactly? Yeah. And there's another thing that. That they can track or use to track to. So as a retailer, as a brand, and as a marketer myself, this is one of the biggest things that you do is you upload your customer lists. So you would pull your customer data. If you use the. This is very technical. But the mail platform, Klaviyo, you're able to actually integrate it. Otherwise you're pulling lists and you're uploading, like, your data, your customer, your VIP customers, people that have purchased once, people that purchase twice, people that haven't purchased, people. You know, like, you can literally push all that data into Meta, and it wants you to do that so it can help the algorithm. But it is one way also that, you know, maybe Meta is not pulling it themselves, but, you know, the brands are putting these things on there constantly. And so they're constantly building profiles based on all the data that's being uploaded from the brand.

[Kim Christensen]

So, brands. Let me get this right, because I.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Didn'T even know this one.

[Kim Christensen]

So you're saying if I bought something from a specific brand, and maybe I even bought from them a few times, they have then taken that data and shared it with Meta. What does the brand get out of that?

[Dustin Travis White]

The brand gets better targeting.

[Kim Christensen]

Oh, so they might retarget me or my friends.

[Dustin Travis White]

Yes.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Okay.

[Dustin Travis White]

They are able to create what's called a lookalike audience. So what you do is you. You upload your diff. It could literally be like something as granular as, like, like someone that bought this hello Kitty sweatshirt, you know, like that is the data audience. But it has to be a big enough data audience that Medic can use it to create what they call a lookalike audience, which is someone that's very similar to this person that purchased. And then you can go out and you can send ads to those lookalikes that is wild.

[Kim Christensen]

So when you say that like you could go in there and you could segment a brand's ads to women's clothing brands, cus audience. This is the kind of data that that's taking. But maybe before it could have been even more specific. You could have been like reformation audience or something like in the past you could have got.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

That is, you can, you can still.

[Dustin Travis White]

With the really big brands like Anthropologie, Everlane, J. Crew, anyone that's got a, like a huge data list, they, you can still.

[Kim Christensen]

Target those and they're absolutely sharing their data with meta. Right? So even if you'd never used meta in your life because you know there are people who don't use social media for a variety of different reasons, nonetheless, your data, when you shop from say, anthropology, is going into the hopper at meta and being used to target people.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Who are similar to you.

[Dustin Travis White]

Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. They've got some integrations and they're connecting customer data, they're doing VIP lookalikes. You know, that's the whole. That's the game is, you know, creating different audiences. I mean, the goal with Meta is to acquire new customers and to get brand awareness out there. This is easily one of my number one levers that I use to acquire new customers because it's the most affordable option and it's actually opened up a lot of doors that small brands never had before. And so this is like basically create a massive leverage to scale small brands if you do it properly.

[Kim Christensen]

I rarely see ads from big brands on my Instagram, but I definitely see small brands that I probably was not aware of before, to be honest. Like it works for sure. And obviously like for everyone listening, like advertising is where meta makes its money. Money, right? It's how we're able to use these platforms which cost an unimaginable amount of money to create and maintain and even host the data. It is how running these platforms that are free to us is wildly popular, and I mean not popular, profitable, and makes billionaires out of its founders. Right? Like that's where the money comes from. And you know, I use social media like in many different ways every day. I'm a chronically online person. But I do think it is important for us to remember that nothing is free really and that includes these platforms. I mean, this is the price of it. I think it is probably going to be extra shocking to people to hear that when they buy stuff that's their customer data is going in there too. But it is part of this massive machine now as the, as you mentioned, Kim, like I'm sure people are listening to this, like, are like, well, I think it's really messed up that like small brands are a part of this or whatever. But my thought on it is these brands will not exist without using these tools as well. And that is just the reality of it, you know, like it gives them, I mean Kim and I work with people who we have seen. This is the unlock to them having a business that is financially and emotionally and physically and creatively sustainable for them is being able to leverage these tools with the help of Kim, to bring in enough customers to like help them make an actual living off of their, their work.

[Dustin Travis White]

Yeah. And and to not just have to rely on wholesaling which has a really low margin. So if they are able to actually connect with new audiences, these small brands, to connect with niche audiences to you know, know to sell their hopefully more sustainable product affordably, you know, now it's not just for million dollar companies, it's now available to, to everyone.

[Kim Christensen]

Yeah.

[Dustin Travis White]

I mean of course it does force people to play into that system that really thrives on surveillance and over consumption. But for small independent brands, meta ads can actually be a lifeline.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Oh for sure.

[Kim Christensen]

I mean we work with people who, before that, I don't think that the business would have been sustainable for that much longer. And that's how brands go out of business. Because they can't find enough customers or people forget about them because they're being drowned out by all these bigger brands who have the budget, who probably are run by shitty people.

[Dustin Travis White]

Exactly.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Yeah.

[Dustin Travis White]

So to go a little bit granular on how brand segment adds, just for your knowledge, I can give you a little bit more detail. So you can do demographics. This is a way that you can go in, you can be like, okay, I want an age range, gender, which I really don't know how they do gender.

[Kim Christensen]

Sometimes I wonder about that too because.

[Dustin Travis White]

It'S really just male. Female.

[Kim Christensen]

Yeah, it's very old timey guys.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Yeah, it is.

[Dustin Travis White]

Yeah. But sometimes it's literally just like I have like a women's brand and I'm like, let's please just send that. Let's just show this to women because for obvious reasons. Yeah, I don't want to, we don't want to waste budget on having things go to the wrong demographic. You know, you can do location obviously and you can actually do like kind of income. You can brackets as in top 5% of income in this area, top 10%. But it's kind of like location based like zip code based. It's not necessarily who the person is.

[Kim Christensen]

Right. And that kind of like income, demographic stuff by zip code is like widely available information out there by the way. It comes from the government and the census and whatnot. Like it's not, not that's not like mysterious dark information, but it is definitely being leveraged in advertising.

[Dustin Travis White]

Some things, some things are very like, they will not offer it like it used to be available. Things like health, your health, if you have any sort of sickness, diseases, you have any sort of disabilities, you cannot, you can't target this at all. And you used to be able to, but because of different regulations it is not available.

[Kim Christensen]

That is so interesting because I did not even know that. But I do remember a period pre2016 where I would get a lot of ads for people who had celiac disease. Like products and treatments and books and stuff. That makes sense.

[Dustin Travis White]

You know, you can, you can target interests. So interest is that stuff that's like if you're into, if you're in probably into like gluten free or you know, that could be something or if you're into different types of music, sustainable fashion is one, Ethical fashion is one. If you're into knitting, if you're into types of music, you know, you can, you can target that different type. You know, we like to go to museums, things like that. And I do that a lot for a lot of my, my brands is you know, interest based. And that seems, it's very wide, it's very vague but you know, it kind of, it can help target behaviors you can do online shopping habits if someone's really engaged, if they shop at different locations, their device type, their travel frequency, if they're like frequent travelers, things like that. So you can definitely, you know, behavior is easy. You can do like I said, the custom audiences so they would upload their custom lists, Meta matches it and then you can then retarget those customers or create the lookalike audiences and then meta, the algorithm will naturally retarget you. So it'll literally be like, you know, there's a sweater that's been stalking you for weeks. That is Meta's algorithm seeing that you've, you've engaged with this product and there's an interest and there's a seven day window for your conversion for it to say that it converted you. So if you have engaged with this ad and were shown the ad and engagement that you had, there's a seven day window and you purchased it and then it will say okay, this is a this is a purchase that we can credit to it to meta.

[Kim Christensen]

How does meta get paid for this?

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Like, what's the fee structure?

[Dustin Travis White]

Sure.

[Kim Christensen]

It's complicated. Yeah, right.

[Dustin Travis White]

That's much more complicated. You know, they really are. The cost for these ads is usually based. It's really complicated because you can set it up a couple different ways. But the way that I usually do it is that, you know, you're just, just you're asking medic to go out there and, and get the lowest price for a conversion and have the highest conversions or the max value. And when you're running these ads, you launch them and they just kind of need to run for a little bit and they may or may not work and you want to have it be at a cost per acquisition that's profitable for the company and a roas like a return on your ad spend that's, you know, two plus, you know, over two is much better. But you know, when you're starting out, it's nice to, you know, at least be getting your money back.

[Kim Christensen]

Right.

[Dustin Travis White]

And Meadow will. You can see what the CPM is, which is basically the cost per 1000 views use. And if a CPM is high, it means that either it's a really niche market and the, the cost to show a thousand people this ad is. Is high is going to be hard and it's going to be more expensive. And that's not always a bad thing because sometimes you have a really niche audience. Like if you're a B2B company and you're targeting, you know, very small group of people, it's going to just cost you a lot more. But some ads, they just have like very little interest. And meta's like, I don't really want to show this and it's going to be expensive.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Wow.

[Dustin Travis White]

Because they really only want to show. They want to show things that people are engaged with that they like. Because, you know, if they're getting a bunch of people are seeing a bunch of crap, they're not going to want to be on the platform. So they'll, you know, it's. There's a. There's a lot of things that go into it.

[Kim Christensen]

Yeah. I mean, we've come a long way from those ads that would be on the sidebar of Facebook that would be like, like 10 secret trip tricks to a flat stomach or Obama says money for single moms or whatever.

[Dustin Travis White]

Now that's just on like different weird websites. Yeah.

[Kim Christensen]

It's only true social or something.

[Dustin Travis White]

Yeah.

[Kim Christensen]

So does meta get paid more if you buy something? No.

[Dustin Travis White]

No.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Okay.

[Dustin Travis White]

No.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Okay.

[Dustin Travis White]

No. They're just. They are just pushing the ads up because essentially you'll be like, all right, here's $60 a day. Okay, let's see if you can come back. You know, generally what you're doing is you're going in there and you're being like, all right, the average purchase that my customer makes is $150. You really want to be spending $150 a day, because your cost per acquisition is likely going to be $40, $50. And you want multiple conversions, and you want everything to optimize. And as it optimizes, you get a better rate. And it's. It can. It can find the right people and it knows what it's doing. And technically, you're supposed to have 50 conversions formatted to perfectly optimize. And so you do need to be putting money in there. Like, you're putting a lot of money in there. Yeah, like, just starting off with, like, 20 bucks is not going to get you very far.

[Kim Christensen]

No, no, definitely not. And. And I also pay to play. I definitely, like, have worked with people who have tried to do these ads themselves, and it was just like playing a slot machine. Like, you really need someone like you who understands the economics of it, but also the strategy of it. Yeah, it's not for everyone.

[Dustin Travis White]

Now, one of the biggest changes, okay, so the algorithm for Meta is always changing. The targeting is always changing. Something literally always changing, half the time broken. There's always a glitch. Meta might be one of the most painful platforms to you, but it's the most effective.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

It is.

[Kim Christensen]

It is glitchy. As someone who spends a lot of time. It is a glitchy.

[Dustin Travis White]

Oh, so glitchy.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Yeah.

[Dustin Travis White]

But AI has become probably the biggest change to the platform and how. How AI has been able to target customers. So AI decides kind of who sees what. I mean, you can obviously target, and it will take that as, like, a recommendation most of the time. But the algorithm, what it does is it doesn't just show your ad to everyone. It actually picks the audiences, especially based on. On who has previously bought all of your lists. How the pixel, like, what the pixel has seen in the past. An AI algorithm basically tests these small little groups and then quickly learns who is going to be most likely to kick, click, buy, engage, whatever your conversion that you set, it was, and it will continuously refine that delivery in real time. So it's going to, like, your ad will find its best audience, really, without you having to tell it exactly who they are. And in most cases, you don't. You. There's like, it's called an A plus audience. And you basically just go in, you create an audience that's literally like, go find them. But maybe they're women and they're over this age, or maybe they like, they're looking for a sweater or whatever it is. But Meta will find that audience because it knows how to find them and it wants to find the most optimized audience. So you don't necessarily always pick your customer. It's really Meta AI that does it, and it's based on who it will predict will actually buy based on everything it knows about every million, you know, billion people on the platform.

[Kim Christensen]

I mean, that's pretty wild. When you said, like, look for a customer who is looking for a sweater, right? That is real and very frighteningly specific because that means it knows you were looking at sweaters on the Internet, you personally, Right? And like, one, it's very terrifying. But two, this is a very different world in terms of like customer data, customer profiling, marketing to your customers than 2010, I would say. I mean, it is like, back then, everywhere I worked, if they were big, they spent money on consumer insights where they were literally surveying people, having focus groups. When I was at ModCloth, we had an entire department that did consumer insights because this was still pretty early E commerce era. And they literally would do things like, like you have, we're giving you a $500 gift card and we're just gonna record your screen while you shop with it. I mean, like, wild stuff like that. And we would learn a lot that we would never know. Like, we found out that, you know.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

A lot of our customers wanted dresses.

[Kim Christensen]

For church, for example.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

That was. We were like, what's that mean?

[Kim Christensen]

You know, for example, we would have never known that. But I bet now if you were like running ads for your brand and somehow Meta would be like, your product assortment is similar to what these people who are shopping for dresses for church are looking for. And you wouldn't even need to know that people were looking for dresses for church.

[Dustin Travis White]

The thing is, that's one of the things with some of the transparency acts that have come out is you actually do not have access to any of.

[Kim Christensen]

You don't know any of it, right? Yeah, it's crazy.

[Dustin Travis White]

You used to do. You used to be able to go in and see your audience and they had these hyper specific segmentations that were like empty nesters who live, who were rich and travel a lot. Literally, like hyper. And they had these crazy Names. I remember that they used to have this. It was so cool to see. You do not have any access. The brand has no visibility. It's extremely opaque. And that's what I think what they want to continue to be is we literally where you just put creative up a bunch of different types of creative and just let them deal with it.

[Kim Christensen]

Well, it makes brands more reliant on them because they don't have any of that data. And that was the other thing I wanted to talk to you a little bit about because another element of digital marketing is emails. Right. And I can see stuff about customers in Shopify in data, you know, and if you dig around, you can see who buys them the most stuff or who bought this and that or where they live. But you can't get like super nuanced like that either unless you put in the work to stalk these people.

[Dustin Travis White]

Yeah, exactly.

[Kim Christensen]

Right. And so like most, most companies are not going to invest in that at all anymore. When we're talking about whether it's a small brand or a big brand, it comes down to like budget. And it is cheaper to just let Meta find people for you than for you, you to do the work with the customer data. You already have to learn more about your customer. So in a weird way, brands know less about us than they ever have. But Meta knows everything about us. And TikTok too, I'm sure.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Yes. Yeah.

[Dustin Travis White]

And they're using it to make more money for themselves.

[Kim Christensen]

For themselves, right. Yeah. So it put, it creates this reliance on them. Like I don't think you can put the genie back in the bottle for any brand out there right now. Now, like they have to do this.

[Dustin Travis White]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, like I said, Shopify also has a pixel. And so Shopify, it's like a web where Shopify also, if you are on like a higher tiered plan, it's called their Shopify Plus. And it's really expensive.

[Kim Christensen]

It's really expensive.

[Dustin Travis White]

Yeah. But one of the things that they offer is this, like it's an audience. It's called Shopify audiences and it will create these potential audiences based on their own data that they have. You don't have access to who these people are, but it essentially pushes that audience through Meta and you can then target that audience.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

That's fascinating.

[Dustin Travis White]

And it's okay.

[Kim Christensen]

It's fascinating though. It's just interesting how, you know, reading emotional branding, as I was telling you, what this series talks about a lot is it was like you need to know your customer, you need to understand that them deeply and psychologically and appeal to them emotionally. And you need to invest money in that, like learning about them and getting to know them and meeting them where they are. And then just a few years later, it's like, actually, you don't need to know anything. Just give us your money. We'll make sure it goes to the right people. You'll never get any of this information. It's like if you went to the doctor and they were like, okay, all right, here's your prescription. Cu. And you never got to like, like, know the diagnosis. Yeah, it's. It's pretty, it's pretty, pretty wild.

[Dustin Travis White]

Well, there is, there is something just for that, you know how you're talking about how you'd screen record people you'd pay for, for them to watch, you know, to watch them shop. There's now a bunch of apps. They're called the Heat map apps. And they will record interactions. They're not sharing who it is, but there's free ones. Microsoft has one called Clarity. And you essentially just put it up on your website and you can go in anytime and literally watch people in real time shop your site.

[Kim Christensen]

Wow. I mean, I was wondering. There were a bunch of these different apps that give cash back to customers for basically, I mean, recording their, their purchases.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Right?

[Kim Christensen]

Like, Rakuten is a big one, but there are many other ones out there. I mean, that's where that data is coming from. Once again, if some company is like, hey, guess what? You can get 2% back on this purchase from this website. It's not like charity. What you're selling them is they're. If they're like, you get 2% back on Sephora. What they're doing is recording where you shop on Sephora and how and who you are also.

[Dustin Travis White]

So.

[Kim Christensen]

And like figuring out the intersection, like, oh, she seems really into anti aging creams, you know, let's like sell her more of that.

[Dustin Travis White]

Yeah, exactly.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

It's wild.

[Kim Christensen]

It is super wild. And that is why it feels like the phones are listening to us. They're not really listening to us. They're watching us. And we are letting them do that. And I am not here to like freak people out and be like, you should quit the Internet. I think we have. I don't know, it kind of is what it is and we're all part of it now. But this is, it makes it. It's all designed to get you to impulse purchase things, right? Because it's serving you at the exact moment where that is an emotional fit.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

For you and it predicts it predicts.

[Dustin Travis White]

How, it predicts the likelihood of you purchasing and it's gonna bet on you.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

It's wild.

[Kim Christensen]

It's wild. I mean right now it must be so interesting because you know, everybody is very depressed and stressed out and Meta knows that for sure.

[Dustin Travis White]

Oh yeah, for sure.

[Kim Christensen]

Yeah. I also wanted to tell you, Kim, which I've been talking about in this series, it's that WGSN put out a report like last month, not about like fashion trends, but more about, about like social marketing branding trends that are all based on emotions and the emotional state of consumers right now. And I think we're gonna be seeing a lot of that coming our way right now. Where these ideas of like strategic joy and really like civic engagement cause focused kind of stuff that actually reminds me of like peak girl boss era marketing, Tom's kind of marketing. Like I think we're gonna see a lot of this give back stuff and like, do you remember when we were at Nasty Gal, did you ever in a meeting have to chant a mission statement at an all hands meeting?

[Dustin Travis White]

Oh God.

[Kim Christensen]

It was something like we are on a mission to help women live their best life or something. It was on the wall in the cafeteria too.

[Dustin Travis White]

It was the wall in the cafeteria?

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Yeah.

[Dustin Travis White]

We always had to sit next to it.

[Kim Christensen]

But it was like this era that like businesses had to have a mission. You know, I feel like that we're gonna see this coming back in a big way in the next couple years.

[Dustin Travis White]

Interesting. I wonder if it would be like led by like more Gen Z where they're like re reliving it or bringing it back. I don't know.

[Kim Christensen]

Yeah, I don't know. Just like low rise jeans. They haven't lived through it first. Do we think we're gonna see a resurgence of girl bossery?

[Dustin Travis White]

I hope to God no.

[Kim Christensen]

I hope not too.

[Dustin Travis White]

Yeah, I mean it was so catastrophic. I like, nobody's ready for that.

[Kim Christensen]

Nobody is ready for that. Yeah. You know, all of this is scary. The surveillance of it all and how much they know about us. But sometimes I think we can manipulate it to our advantage. Maybe, maybe I'm just trying to like have a more positive outlook on it. I don't know. Coping. I'm coping.

[Dustin Travis White]

Yeah. I mean you can, you know, you can check your ad preferences if this is something that's concerning to you. You know, you can see and edit what Meta thinks your interests are. I believe like in, in your different apps you can, you know, opt out of, you know, data sharing on many levels. I know they keep updating that because privacy and security is actually really, really big because they keep getting. Having huge lawsuits.

[Kim Christensen]

Yeah.

[Dustin Travis White]

You know, and then of course, supporting consciously, you know.

[Kim Christensen]

Yeah.

[Dustin Travis White]

Follow and shop brands that align with.

[Kim Christensen]

Your values and engage with their content. Yeah, absolutely. Show meta that we're interested in that stuff.

[Dustin Travis White]

Yeah. It's not like you can actually fully opt out.

[Kim Christensen]

You can't. Unless you want to quit social media altogether. And I'm still telling you when you Google something, it's also serving you preferences.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

So it's true.

[Kim Christensen]

Unless you've never used a computer or a phone before and also never bought anything online. 9. You're already opted in start.

[Dustin Travis White]

I mean, you know, if. For the mail, you know, mailers, remember when you get those. And you probably still get like catalogs and things like that.

[Kim Christensen]

I still get so much junk mail. Yeah.

[Dustin Travis White]

That is also. That's literally brands that are uploading purchase histories, credit cards, things like that. Like, it's a slightly different. It's less like, like IP address and email address. It's like credit card statements and addresses and that's how they're able to create their own segmentation. They've been doing this for years in a totally different way.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Oh, totally, totally.

[Kim Christensen]

I mean, back in the 80s and 90s, one of your best assets as a company was to like sell your mailing list. It was worth so much money. And if you were like Delia's, you could sell your mailing list to Alloy or something, you know, for a big chunk of money and then they could mail everyone.

[Dustin Travis White]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Kim Christensen]

It's pretty wild. So, yeah, I guess what we're saying is it's been going on for a long time, so just don't panic.

[Dustin Travis White]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and if you don't like it, don't shop it, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's not much you can do because now this, you know, Instagram and Facebook are basically just selling your attention and your. Your emotions and your. What's happening in your life. Your, you know, pregnancies, marriages, breakups. If you're doom scrolling like, it's. It knows it's selling you.

[Kim Christensen]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And just to be clear for everyone, we're not talking about TikTok, but it's the same there too. In fact, from what it seems that their algorithm is better at targeting than Instagram, but I'm sure that that will change over time. It knows it's disturbing.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Even more niche.

[Dustin Travis White]

I mean, they know all the videos. Like, if you're like watching a bunch of, you know, videos on Dog training or if you're watching videos. I mean, I think it could just segment to a point of just.

[Kim Christensen]

It's ridiculous. I don't use TikTok very often because I. I'm not like a video person. Honestly.

[Dustin Travis White]

None of my clients can produce a video. You know that.

[Kim Christensen]

Oh, I know, I know. Just imagine if you had to deal with that too. Yeah. And I also just like, I was using it for clothes horse, and I was like, you know what? I haven't been bullied by teenagers since I was a teenager and I'm not into it right now. It's still sucks. So I stopped posting there because I was like, I. I'm pretty sure this guy who's harassing me is like 15 and it feels inappropriate, you know, Like I just. He shouldn't. He shouldn't be someone old enough to be his mom.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

And.

[Kim Christensen]

Yeah, so I just like have opted out of TikTok. But I did really try. There was like a few week period where I was like, I'm gonna get into using TikTok. Not from a close horse purpose, but.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Just as a huge.

[Kim Christensen]

Because people are always raving about it. And the first time I opened an app, it made judgments about me based on like my age and my gender and my location, for sure. And for the first few days, all I got, I swear to God, Kim.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Were ads for these jeans that would.

[Kim Christensen]

Allegedly snatch you when you put them on, they were like weird, stretchy jeans that snatched you. And I was like, this is offensive. Like, I can't. I'm not getting into TikTok.

[Dustin Travis White]

I guess because of that.

[Kim Christensen]

No, they were just crappy. Like Temu jeans that snatch you. They were like, I don't know, like skims meets jeans.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

They look miserable.

[Kim Christensen]

But they just kept showing me stuff like that and like, just everything was depressing and I was. And then it was like, oh, we think you like videos of birds talking. And I was like, the first bird talking video. I was like, that's amazing how that bird talks like that. But like 20 deep. I was like, this is not who I am either.

[Dustin Travis White]

You don't know me.

[Kim Christensen]

You don't know me.

[Dustin Travis White]

I want cats. Give me cats.

[Kim Christensen]

I want cats. Cute things occasionally. A talking bird.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Yeah.

[Dustin Travis White]

Fake fruit.

[Kim Christensen]

Exactly. It didn't show me any fake fruit at all. I think it's an underserved community on TikTok. But yeah, anyway, so I was like, I'm not into this. Also, I hate videos, so. But yeah, I mean, all of these pla. Pinterest has so much of your data as well. They know it. They know that you're thinking about, you know, planning your wedding right now and you aren't even dating anyone. Trust me, they know all this stuff. And that's just the price of using these free platforms. In fact, anything you're using for free has a price attached to it, which is your information.

[Dustin Travis White]

Yeah, that's true.

[Kim Christensen]

Well, thank you Kim for taking some time to teach us about about this stuff. Hopefully everybody's not freaking out right now.

[Dustin Travis White]

Or snoozing, just falling asleep.

[Kim Christensen]

No, they're gonna wait till they hear about surveillance pricing now that I'll get them riled up because I've been riled.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

About it all week.

[Dustin Travis White]

Amazing. Well, I'm so glad I'm not there for that. Yeah.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

If you're enjoying this episode, then this is a great time to remind you that my work here at Close Horse is made possible by the support of listeners like you. Just like NPR and these great small businesses.

Please go give them your support.

Blank Cass or Blanket Coats by Cass is focused on restoring, renewing and reviving the history held within vintage and heirloom textiles by embodying the love, craft and energy that is original to each vintage textile. As I transfer it into a new garment, I hope we can reteach ourselves to care for and mend what we have and make it last. Blank CAS lives on Instagram @blankcas and a website will be launched soon at Blank Casual located in Whistler, Canada. Velvet Underground is a velvet jungle full of vintage and secondhand clothing plants, a.

Vegan cafe and lots of rad products.

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Thank you so much to Kim for spending some time with us. She did a much better job explaining how it all works than I ever could have, so I am super grateful that she agreed to help us out. Something that really strikes me about all of this. I was thinking it when I was talking to her. I was thinking about it after we talked. I was thinking about it when I edited the conversation. I was thinking about it in the shower last night. It's Just been on my mind mind so much. Before the Internet and shopping online and social media companies had to invest a lot of money and time into understanding who their customer was. Now these days, they might be investing the same amount of money, but they don't actually know anything about their customers because someone else, aka Meta or TikTok or Google etc is handling it for them, them without actually giving them access to the information. And that puts them in a position where they are extremely reliant on these platforms forever. Which means that these platforms can dictate any price they want, any terms they want in order for these brands to get access to their customers because they have all the cards, right? What that also means is that the.

[Kim Christensen]

Cost of the access to the customers.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

While we customers are paying for that.

[Kim Christensen]

Too so much like we're actually paying for free shipping, we're actually paying for.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

All those deals, deals, deals. And we're actually paying for all the.

[Kim Christensen]

Free returns and we're actually paying for all the stuff that these companies overproduce and never sell.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

We're also paying in the prices we.

[Kim Christensen]

Pay for those companies to get access.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

To us via our data. So in this really weird way, not only are we giving our data, our information for free to these social media companies, to shopify, to Google, to basically.

[Kim Christensen]

Every platform out there that we use in one way or another, not only are we giving them our information for free, free, which is highly lucrative to.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Them and that they can therefore use.

[Kim Christensen]

To make money off of other companies.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

We are then also in a weird way, we're giving them even more money from our own pockets because companies have to account for the cost of marketing to us via our data and the prices of the products that we buy. And that means, well, this is where massive economic inequality comes from, right?

[Kim Christensen]

This is how there are billionaires and then most of us can't afford to.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

See a dentist because we're in this loop of a select people selling our data and taking our money in a roundabout way. And it's just don't throw your phone in the river even though you know it feels, it feels like the best idea right now. Furthermore, brands don't have to work as hard to create that emotional connection with their customers because the algorithm already knows their customer's emotional state and when to best target them, which is a little scary. So in some ways it's almost like, is this, is it rip, Emotional branding and hello, predictive analytics. That's what this whole thing is called. Well, maybe not completely yet, because there are brands that still Rely pretty much entirely on IRL shopping. TJ Maxx is a great example. So while they may want your data to figure out where to open the next new store or what brands you really like to shop, they still have to work a little harder to get you in the door by getting you all juiced up as a maxinista. But for companies that exist entirely online, or who get a vast majority of their revenue online, their success does rely on access to your data. And in many situations they're going to be in this weird, I don't know, symbiotic, but also like kind of unfair relationship with the owners of that data. So as I mentioned in our convo, one newly emerging problem with our massive data trails is surveillance pricing. Or as proponents of it like to call it, personalized pricing.

[Kim Christensen]

Oh, that sounds nice, right?

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Yeah, it's not good. Okay, what is surveillance pricing? Well, it's basically when online retailers, and that includes airlines, lines, travel booking sites, really anything that you can buy online when they adjust prices specifically for you based on data they have collected about you. And that includes browsing history, location, purchase history and more. For example, you could search funeral arrangements and then start looking at plane tickets and the airfare will be higher because the airline knows that you can't really shop around like you've got to get a ticket to go to this funeral. In another very real life example, Target was using customers location via their phone and raising prices on items online to be higher than the in store prices. As customers got closer to the store in hopes of discouraging them from ordering online. They wanted them to come in the store, buy that thing there, and maybe buy some other stuff while they were there, that might seem kind of harmless, but just the fact that the technology exists that allows Target, someone who is not your friend, not even a person, to know where you are at all times, that's pretty scary, right? Earlier this year, the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC released a preliminary report about surveillance pricing and it and it's pretty wild. Like companies even have access to our mouse movements and our abandoned carts to figure out how to sell to us and price appropriately. So since then there has been a lot more conversation about surveillance pricing. For example, a February investigation by SFGate writer Keith Spencer found that when he was looking at hotel rooms, using different browsers and GPS geographical locations, he found major differences in pricing. Specifically, the prices offered when browsing from Bay Area locations were higher than they were when browsing from less affluent cities like Phoenix and Kansas City for the same hotel rooms. For the same window. At one point, the same hotel room in Manhattan cost $500 more when browsing in the Bay Area. How did he do this? He doesn't have some, like, magic ability to fold time and geography. He used different IP addresses with different geographical locations associated with them. He also used different devices, different browsers. And he did all of this testing in the same two hour span searching for hotel rooms for the same place and the same time. Valentine's Day weekend in New York State. And like I said, when he was using an IP address that said he was in San Francisco, he was offered prices that were significantly higher than when he used an IP address that said he was in Kansas City. The other thing I learned from this piece, which I'm going to share in the show notes, you should go read the whole thing because it's very fascinating is while we think that there are many different options out there for booking travel online online, we're actually kind of just dealing with two conglomerates. As Spencer explains, two travel companies dominate the online travel agent Expedia Group and Booking Holdings. Booking holdings owns Booking.com, priceline and Kayak, while Expedia Group owns Expedia Travelocity, Orbitz Hotels.com and has made a majority stake in Truvaco. And I will just also add for you, if you use your credit cards, travel booking portal, like, you know, I have an American Express card, they have a travel portal. If you use those portals, they are usually actually Expedia. So there really aren't that many places to buy, you know, hotel rooms and airline tickets and rental cars online. You're really looking at two companies, which is why the pricing is pretty similar. Similar. The fact that they could be pricing based on our location is pretty scary, right? And we don't have a lot of options out there. We kind of got to take the price that they give us. Now the travel thing doesn't necessarily surprise me because back in 2012, the Wall Street Journal reported that Orbitz, who is owned by Expedia Group, at least now is Orbitz had realized that Mac users were more likely to book more expensive hotels. They've clearly never met me. So they began to put the nicer boutique hotels at the top of the search results when a customer was using a Mac. Now back then, it's interesting. This is 2012, right? Everyone is like, this is a genius movie move. More brands should be using predictive analytics to sell to their customers. And to be fair, in comparison to the price shifts found by Keith Spencer, it does feel Kind of innocent, but it's sort of like that was just the beginning of how our data is being used to sell us stuff. This summer, Delta Airlines, who doesn't know.

[Kim Christensen]

How to read a room, apparently bragged.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

That it was implementing AI to create personalized pricing for all of its customers. It was going to, I want to say they were going to implement the system in about 20% of its like, infrastructure by the end of the year and continue to grow it over the next couple of years. The company told investors that this AI pricing would mean that they no longer had to price match other airlines, which by the way, is bad for customers. And instead the company would use data to predict how much a customer was willing to pay for a ticket, which would then bring in billions of dollars in extra revenue. Of course, after news broke about this, the airline backpedaled, saying that it would just make pricing more efficient and personalized. Now, of course, they never said it was going to save customers money, but it was never going to save customers money. Okay, back in August, literally on my birthday, What a gift. NPR's Weekend Edition aired a seg about surveillance pricing that really got me thinking. Like I have been thinking about this since then and I knew I had to include it. In this series. Reporter Adrienne Ma talked to Sam Levine, who is the former director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. I'll share a link to that for you to listen for yourself. It's only five minutes. You should totally do it. Here's something that Levine said that really stuck with me when he was asked, asked, what would you say to some people who are a little skeptical that surveillance pricing really is the problem that people like yourself say it is? He responded, well, companies are certainly telling lawmakers that surveillance pricing is nothing to worry about, that it's all about discounts, that this is all about consumers saving money. But that's not what they're telling investors and it's not what high price priced pricing consultants are telling companies. You know, the reality is companies in ately are in the business of making money. They are not going to use expensive, sophisticated technology to lower prices on people. You know what? He is right. Access to our data and the technology that processes it is expensive and that means it has to be worth using. We already see that advertising on social media platforms is worth the cost to brands because the data steers customers almost directly to checkout targeting us before we have even said anything out loud about buying something. These platforms know us better than anyone in our lives because they See the desire for something emerging when it's barely a thought to us. Imagine if the price could also change as we became more committed to making the purchase. Could it go up or would it go down? My bet here is that in most situations it would go up because they're spending so much money to reach us. And Delta Airlines saying that, oh no, this, all this money we're spending on AI, it's just to give customers a better experience. That is a lie, because why would they spend that money? Also, not to be negative Nancy here, but like, what was the last time airlines really worried about customers having a good experience? Sorry. So if you are getting riled up by now, which you probably are, you're asking what can we do to protect ourselves from our data being used to sell us stuff? Okay. Well, there are things that can help, might help, particularly with the pricing aspect of it. One is that you can use a vpn, which is a virtual private network. A VPN hides your location and browsing activity and you can find free VPN services. Although I would ask, why is it free and what is the catch? You're probably paying with your data or there are low cost subscription services. So that's one thing for you to consider. A lot of people feel like you should be using a VPN these days just to protect yourself against fascism. It's definitely something I've been thinking a lot about myself. Next is you should clear your browser cookies regularly. This can help limit the amount of your browsing data that is visible to sites that are collecting it. You can browse in incognito mode, but it is important to note that when Keith Spencer was doing his investigation into hotel pricing, incognito mode did not result in lower prices. You could use a different device to check prices or even ask your friend to check the prices on their devices. However, if the Internet knows who your friends are and what devices you own, and trust me, it does know that it might not be very helpful. And so, yes, you can use these things, they might be helpful for a while. Most certainly someone's going to figure out a way to get around these. I mean, that is just the reality.

[Kim Christensen]

Of life right now.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

So if you're freaking out and you're thinking about throwing all of your devices in the river, I want you to take a deep breath. Think about Flowers in the Attic, for example. How old were you when you realized that book was about insects?

[Kim Christensen]

I was like 30.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

How did that go over my head completely? I don't know. But anyway, think about something else. For a little bit, right? And then, okay, I think Levine gave some really good advice in this NPR interview. Here's what he said. He said, unfortunately, this is not an issue where consumers can protect themselves. The fact of the matter is, you know, people can take steps to better protect their privacy online. They can limit what they share. They can be mindful of what apps they download. But most of us rely on using digital services. And there's a whole market run by data brokers that has profiles on just about every single American these companies can use in order to set prices. So there's really not much that individual consumers can do. This really requires a response by policymakers. He went on to say that while it seems unlikely, at least right now, now that the federal government here in the US Will do anything about it, states can regulate this kind of thing. Europe is already doing a lot of regulation around consumer data. Other countries will hopefully follow. But it doesn't happen if we don't ask for it, which is where being a concerned and annoying citizen comes into play. Call your representatives, tell them how you feel about this. If you're looking to minimize your data sharing, which you should, you should be concerned about that. There are a few things that you can do that are pretty simple. One is you can turn off location tracking. Two is you can disable ad personalization on social media apps. This is not a tech podcast. So just do an Internet search to find out how it's not hard. And don't link your social media accounts to third party apps like don't use Facebook, Facebook to sign into Orbitz, for example, which of course I have totally done. And now I have to figure out how to undo that. But don't do that with any new accounts. You know, ultimately the genie is out of the bottle on this. I don't think that you need to quit social media or give up Internet access. But what you do need to do is recognize that, yeah, there are companies out there there that know everything about you. Forget about emotional branding. This is like emotional surveillance, right? And it's no coincidence that certain ads are showing up in your feed when you know that, it makes it a lot easier to resist them. To give things more thought, to maybe just keep scrolling past it. And that's the point of this series series to shine a very bright light on the mechanisms that are keeping us shopping and keeping us loyal to brands. With knowledge comes change. There is that first thing that happens after you get the knowledge, which is rage and panic and frustration. And I'm going to tell you Like, I have been experiencing all of those emotions to an epic level this year for sure. But really, since I started working on Clothes Source, the more I learned, the more I upset I was. There were times where I felt like I was going to go outside and scream at the sky because I couldn't take another person falling on their sword for sheen on social media. Like, it was just so frustrating to me. The anger was sort of like shutting down any real, like, intellectual progress, emotional progress that I could make on that issue.

[Kim Christensen]

And.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

And one day it just sort of like, fell into place for me where I was like, you know what? Being angry, it's part of the process. It's normal. It's okay to go through that phase. Let yourself feel it. Being sad, panicked, all part of the process. Do it, do it, do it. But the goal is to get to the next phase where you're like, okay, I've had the feelings. I know the feelings now. What can I do? How can I change it? And how can I help others around me make those changes, too? Right? That's where I am right now. That's where I want you to be right now. That's where I want all of us to be right now. Because we need to get to that next step where we are like, okay, what do I do? How do I get others involved? How do I get others to do it? We're going to make this change. And that is the. That's really my. That's my drive for. Everything I do with Closed Source is like, let's get us all there and let's start. Start working to make things better. So please keep on listening, keep on telling your friends, Go out inside and yell at the sky if you want to, but know that we.

[Dustin Travis White]

We're.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

We're going to make a big difference. We already are. I see it happening, and we just need to keep it up. Thanks for listening to another episode of Closed Source. Written, researched, edited, hosted, all the things by me, Amanda Lee McCarthy. If you liked what you're hearing, of course, please leave a rating. Please leave a review. Please subscribe. Please tell your friends if you hated.

[Kim Christensen]

This episode, if you hate me, if everything about me is nails on a.

[Amanda Lee McCarthy]

Chalkboard, please don't listen anymore. There's so many other podcasts out there. Trust me, you're gonna have a much better time without me. If you'd like to support my work financially, there are many ways you can do that. You can find that all in the show notes, including there's merch, there's ko fi, there's Patreon. There's a whole kinds of stuff. Go check it out. Lastly, but of course, never leastly, thank you so much to my other half, Mr. Dustin Travis White, for our music and our audio support. And I will talk to you all next week. Bye.

[Dustin Travis White]

Sam.