Steve Madden – Branded & Private Label Operating
Dynamics – 28 July 2021
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Specialist: Mark Friedman (MF)
Title:
Moderator: Nyree Hinton (NH), Third Bridge Sector Analyst
Former President, E-commerce at Steven Madden Ltd
Agenda:
1. Footwear and apparel consumer trends
2. Steve Madden's (NASDAQ: SHOO) digital and e-commerce strategy
3. Wholesale operating environment
4. Sales channels, competitive dynamics and the threat of Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN)
5. H2 2021 expense control initiatives outlook
Contents
Q: How has the landscape changed for apparel and footwear in D2C, particularly for some of the companies
that were late to the game vs some that you think were well-suited to take advantage of the D2C trend?
3
Q: How has coronavirus accelerated the D2C trend and exposed some of the unpreparedness or weaknesses
in this dynamic?
4
Q: There has been a huge shift to digital and e-commerce. What is the ROI there? When you’re spending
money to get your product, to get your name in front of consumers in a digital atmosphere, how much better
or more specified has that helped you target customers, or is it whoever can spend the most can drive the
most traffic?
4
Q: What are some of the strengths and weaknesses of Steve Madden’s portfolio of brands and categories?
5
Q: Could you discuss the strategic rationale of Steve Madden’s heavily centred wholesale business vs retail?
What is the right mix for a brand in the industry given the challenges that some have in retail and wholesale?6
Q: What does wholesale do for Steve Madden and its ability to control pricing and brand image or consumer
perception? A lot of legacy brands fall out of favour with some of these younger consumers. What are some of
6
the challenges of controlling pricing for Steve Madden in wholesale?
Q: Could you elaborate on Steve Madden taking a step away from Macy’s and pushing back on some of that
control that Macy’s wanted to hold on online presence?
7
Q: What are the strengths of Steve Madden’s supply chain capabilities, especially given all of the bottlenecks
throughout the past 18 months? I think Gap had an issue where it couldn’t get the product out the door for
about three months. Where are some of the strengths in that supply chain? What do you think needs to be
strengthened?
7
Q: Could you give us an idea of Steve Madden’s private label business and how the business is taking
advantage of this area of the market?
8
Q: How are you assessing Steve Madden’s ability to stay relevant? You mentioned its ability to give its
product in the whole value chain, from Saks Fifth to some of the lower-tier retailers. Why is the business able
8
to do that and is that the right strategy, in your opinion?
Q: How would you assess Steve Madden’s ability to really capitalise on some of this growth that many of
these American brands are having overseas, perhaps in Asia? What is that market dynamic of getting your
brand in Asia and taking advantage of the opportunity there?
9
Q: What are you learning about consumers online regarding trends that are being provided from the data? 9
Q: Are brands being reactive to some of the data out there? How is that data being used to drive more sales
and to really understand the consumer?
9
Q: How has that environment, in marketing spend and as a brand, changed as to where you decide to spend,
given the rise of TikTok but also the sheer market power of Facebook? How important do you think
partnerships go along with that digital marketing aspect?
10
Q: How does the media-mix aspect pair with when you have a portfolio of brands? What have you observed
in Steve Madden’s ability to be agile in moving marketing spend across all of their different brands?
10
Q: What have you noted from some of these competitors and the ones who are willing to overbid and
overspend and have a large marketing budget and marketing spend? Could you elaborate on how crucial that
11
might be to driving the growth of some of these brands?
Q: What role does Amazon play when being able to get a product into every channel?
Q: Could you discuss the reluctance some retailers or brands may have to put their product on Amazon,
given they might be a competitor a year later?
11
11
Steve Madden – Branded & Private Label Operating
Dynamics
Transcription begins at 00:00:01 of the recorded material
NH: Welcome to Third Bridge Forum’s Interview entitled Steve Madden, branded and private label operating
dynamics. I’m Nyree Hinton and I’ll be facilitating today’s Interview with Mr Mark Friedman, former
President, E-commerce at Steve Madden.
Mark, before we get started with today’s Interview, please state I agree or I disagree to the following
statement: You understand the definition of material non-public information and agree not to disclose any
such information, or any other information which is confidential, during this Interview.
MF: Yes, I understand.
NH: Thank you, Mark. Could you start by giving the audience an introduction of your background and various
roles you’ve had in the industry?
MF: I’ve been in the direct-to-consumer industry for my entire career, starting in direct mail and then moving
into physical retail as well as digital. The last 20 years have been heavily dominated by digital. I’ve worked for
a number of multi-title, multi-brand catalogue direct mailers that were morphing into internet businesses. I’ve
worked for Brooks Brothers and then also Steve Madden. I spent seven years there as the President of the e-
commerce business.
[00:01:18]
Q: How has the landscape changed for apparel and footwear in D2C, particularly for some of the companies
that were late to the game vs some that you think were well-suited to take advantage of the D2C trend?
MF: I think the part of the question around change, we’ve had seemingly every year, there’s change. We can
talk about the COVID period as well, but if you look back to, let’s say from the time that I started at Madden,
which as 2010 or 2011, in those days websites were oftentimes either very branded and were not all that
commercial or you had ones that were extraordinarily commercial. This goes not only for the footwear
landscape but for apparel and other businesses. I think over time, you found a happy medium. Certainly, that’s
what I saw when I was at Madden. We found a happy medium to make a website the lead store of a business,
also the one that helped to extend the brand, especially for businesses that were not doing or spending a lot of
money or traditional media. You wanted to be able to story tell, you wanted to be able to transact, you wanted
to be able to support customer service initiatives, you wanted to be able to talk about your credit card
programme and your loyalty, a one-stop shop, the world of brand X. That’s continued to evolve. There’s new
feature and function that’s been added to these sites over time, certainly capabilities around buy now, pay
later, and then all of the things that accelerated, buy online, pick up in-store, buy online, pick up at kerbside,
those types of things have continued to evolve. Then, with the advent or the continued evolution of digital
media marketing, as Facebook and Instagram have become the engines that they are, you saw are heavily
reliant, obviously, on the search engines, Google and Bing and what have you, but Facebook and Instagram
play a huge role, as well as some of the other, whether it be TikTok or Snap or things like that.
Tons of changes over time, you asked about early adopters and late adopters. Steve Madden was clearly an
early adopter of a lot of this e-commerce stuff. Their first site went up, I don’t know, 1997-98, didn’t look
particularly good. If you go back and looked at it, but they were players, they were early adopters of being able
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buy online and return in stores. They were also very early adopters of having customers buy online and then
product being shipped not only from a centralised DC but also from their stores. They were very early in some
ways and in some ways they were late, and we can talk about that as the discussion continues. Hopefully that
helps. Feel free to ask more questions around that if you like.
[00:05:07]
Q: How has coronavirus accelerated the D2C trend and exposed some of the unpreparedness or weaknesses in
this dynamic?
MF: This goes not just for Madden but for so many businesses that were, you think back to putting together a
website, there’s obviously the technology platform and things that have to happen there. I think as we saw,
that could be done remotely. There’s a creative element, a photography element that most businesses were not
prepared to deal with early in COVID. You need to have people, you need to have groups of people working
together. If you’re an apparel business and you’re doing on-figure model, maybe on-location modelling, all
travel stopped so you couldn’t do that stuff. I think the whole creative and photography execution was
something that really got thrown for a loop in these businesses. I wouldn’t call it unprepared. Nobody expected
anything like this to happen, obviously, so I’m not sure that people would have been prepared to handle
creative execution remotely. That was one piece.
The second piece is customer service. Most businesses, a lot of businesses have thought over the years about
how to do decentralised work-from-home kinds of scenarios, but that was a significant change. Most people
didn’t want to take that risk or go through that effort, and so when you couldn’t get people into a call centre
because there were stay-at-home restrictions and you couldn’t put people together, that became a problem.
Most businesses had to scramble, set up work-from-homes stations, get computers to people, get computer
access for people and passwords and logins and remote. If you wanted to take credit cards over the phone for
remote-work agents, that was a big compliance issue. That was a big thing also that many businesses, most
businesses were not prepared for. The other aspects, the digital marketing, that’s pretty much able to done
remotely. You have people working with other agencies or whatever. All of that is all technological. As long as
people were prepared with Zoom or Microsoft Teams, or whatever their version was, you were able to get that
done. I think in product-centric businesses, being able to be a designer and having to collaborate with other
people, the supply chain, getting samples and things back, you needed to get people in to actually create
samples, that was a difficult thing. You couldn’t do that remotely. From cradle to grave, beginning to end, just
about every aspect of the business was impacted by COVID.
[00:08:26]
Q: There has been a huge shift to digital and e-commerce. What is the ROI there? When you’re spending
money to get your product, to get your name in front of consumers in a digital atmosphere, how much better
or more specified has that helped you target customers, or is it whoever can spend the most can drive the most
traffic?
MF: You’re not talking specific to related to COVID, right? You’re just talking about in general?
NH: In general, and then if you have a perspective from how COVID has changed the digital marketing
landscape, happy to hear that as well.
MF: I think during COVID, the digital landscape changed quite a bit. There was I don’t know how much more
traffic, but there was a ton more traffic on all of the sites, whether it be Amazon or Google or just in retailers in
general, because think about nobody was going out and any shopping that they needed or wanted to do
happened digitally. I think we saw a pretty significant increase in the cost of digital media. Higher demand is
always going to drive pricing up and I think we saw that. Cost per click went up, fixed placements on affiliate
sites, RetailMeNot and Coupons.com and things like that for affiliate marketing, went up. That meant that
Private and confidential 4
your return on your investment might have decreased, but to offset that, you just had so much more traffic
and, in many cases, the return on the investment, the revenue was increased faster than the costs were going
up, so your ROAS, your return on ad spend, actually improved in some cases. I think it also sped up some of
the places that brands would spend their money. When you feel, I don’t want to say flush, but when you feel
like your performance is going well, you start to test into secondary and tertiary kinds of advertising vehicles,
and I think there was a lot of that trial that went on, which people might not have done if COVID didn’t exist.
Now the real question, and I think this is a big part of what we’re seeing now in a lot of businesses, especially
as at least for the months of May and June 2021, as people have gotten back to work and got out and done a lot
more vacationing and whatever, I think there are certain businesses online that are not performing as well
depending on what they sold. Whereas so many businesses had this COVID bump last April, May, June and
July, they’re not quite seeing that same level of performance. New customer acquisition is becoming more
difficult and then you’ve got the whole component of this, all those customers that you acquired last year, are
they going to rebuy, are they going to behave like a traditional customer in your business, or were they one-
time kinds of buyers, it was opportunistic for them because they had a need, and will they now come back and
shop with you again?
[00:12:27]
Q: What are some of the strengths and weaknesses of Steve Madden’s portfolio of brands and categories?
MF: Again, I follow them as a consumer, I follow them as an interested party, it’s a public company and so I
read their quarterly reports, sometimes I listen to their calls, so all this information comes from public
information, and, actually, they released Q2 earnings this morning, which were quite good, certainly in
comparison to last year Q2 which was the height of the pandemic. Their Steve Madden business, especially
driven by their own retail and their e-commerce, is particularly strong. This whole business is driven by Steve
and his designer team and them hitting right the fashion that consumers want, and he’s had a long career of
being able to do this and they continue to do it. The Steve Madden brand is strong, certainly across their own
retail and e-commerce. Their wholesale, they’ve traditionally been the one or two market share shoe provider
in most of the departments that they are in. They are challenged, obviously, by department store volumes and
number of doors being down, which, like a lot of businesses, is forcing them to figure out other ways and other
places to sell, whether it be on marketplaces, whether it be in their own stores, whether it be in their own e-
commerce. In Madden’s case, they’ve been more aggressive internationally over the last few years.
That’s the Madden brand, and then they’ve been acquisitive. They bought a sneaker brand a few years ago
called Greats. I have no idea how that’s performing, but it seems like a natural fit. I had actually pointed that
business out to them while I was still there, it was a standalone business. The sneaker category continues to be
a strong category, has been for a lot of years, and they’ve taken advantage of that. They bought a business
called BB Dakota, which is an apparel business. They had long wanted to become more of a lifestyle brand, as
opposed to a shoes and accessories business, and I think they’ve diversified a bit with that acquisition. They
own Betsey Johnson, which I don’t think is a particularly strong provider for them from either a revenue or a
profitability perspective. I view that as a down-trending brand, but I don’t know anything specific. While I was
there, they bought Blondo, which was a waterproof shoe business. I know they’ve tried to expand that. I think
it’s very core in the waterproof area to them. I think it does well. They also have a licence, I think it’s still a
licence in North America for Superga, which is a sneaker brand. That seems to do okay. Then they also own
Dolce Vita, which plays in the same channels as Madden does, so wholesale, they have a website, though they
don’t have any stores and I don’t know if they’re carrying Dolce Vita in any of the Steve Madden stores. I may
have missed a brand. I can’t think of it at the top of my head.
Then remember, within Steve Madden, they have a number of sub-brands. They have Madden Girl, they have
Steven. One of the things that has always been interesting to me about the Madden business from the day I
walked in is they were able to sell up and down the food chain, all the way from Saks and Bloomingdale’s to
Macy’s, all the way down to Payless in the day and DSW, and then having a whole, what they call Landed
Branded, a private label business that performs very well as well. They just do a great job in that full scope of
retail.
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[00:17:16]
Q: Could you discuss the strategic rationale of Steve Madden’s heavily centred wholesale business vs retail?
What is the right mix for a brand in the industry given the challenges that some have in retail and wholesale?
MF: I don’t know that there’s a right mix. Maybe people that are smarter than I know what the perfect mix is,
but I think it’s just dependent on what’s out there for you. You try to go out and get as much business as you
possibly can and if you think back to the beginnings, Madden was a wholesale company that happened to have
retail and an e-commerce business. I don’t know what the numbers are today, but if you look at just Steve
Madden the brand, exclude all the other brands that they’ve bought, back in 2010, of that brand value, 80% of
it was done at wholesale and the other 20% was done in their own retail stores, and that was some
combination of full-price and factory outlet and their web. Of that 20%, the web was probably 10% or 15%.
Then, as over time they opened up more retail, they were pretty aggressive in factory outlet retail, which
traditionally has a better four-wall profit than full-price retail, simply because the leases are less expensive.
The factory outlet business was made for a company like Madden because they had a strong supply chain They
were able to take silhouettes of products and you could make it at one level of quality in a full-price store,
perhaps a little bit less with less embellishment perhaps, and sell it in a factory outlet store and perhaps make
more margin overall.
Your question, I don’t know that there’s a perfect mix, but as the industry ecosystem has changed, they’ve had
to become less reliant on wholesale and more reliant, let’s say, on their own e-commerce business. If you look
at their public information, certainly from the time that I’ve left to this most recent quarter, they just have
skyrocketed that e-commerce business. That has happened because of the continued evolution of the market
conditions and then they made a lot of right decisions. They re-platformed the business to Shopify,
relaunched, while I was there, a loyalty programme. They’ve really ramped up since I was there and they
added another level where you pay for a certain level of service. They added free shipping to it and some other
bells and whistles. That’s been good. I’m getting off track, but you asked what’s the right mix. There is no right
mix in my mind. It’s really dependent upon the market conditions and if there’s less business to be had in
wholesale and you want to continue to grow, you either try to do it through acquisition or you organically do it
through getting better at what you have available to you, and that’s your own retail and e-commerce.
[00:21:08]
Q: What does wholesale do for Steve Madden and its ability to control pricing and brand image or consumer
perception? A lot of legacy brands fall out of favour with some of these younger consumers. What are some of
the challenges of controlling pricing for Steve Madden in wholesale?
MF: Before I go onto the pricing, I think you’re right, one of the major issues of being a wholesaler is that it’s
very hard for you to control the story, the storytelling of what your brand stands for. You sell shoes, you sell
them at Nordstrom or anywhere, for example, you go into a department, there’s no storytelling. They have a
sign that says Steve Madden, they put a bunch of shoes up on a table. There’s no branding, there’s no
storytelling. You either know who the brand is or you don’t from the other advertising that gets done, the other
branding awareness that’s done either digitally or through traditional media. Being able to control your story
through wholesale is really tough.
As far as pricing goes, that’s a whole other thing. Very difficult to do that. I think that was one of the biggest
challenges I had while I was there. We were heavily dominated back then by wholesale. Whatever the retailers
wanted, whatever Macy’s wanted, they got. They used to yell and scream if we were running a promotion on
the site. Somehow they had short-term memory that they were running 20-off, 30-off, 40-off every day in their
stores and online, yet when we tried to do something online, they wanted markdown money for it. I think
that’s the ongoing give and take between a brand and retailers. I don’t want to use the word control pricing at
all, but certainly, if you’re the brand, you want to have a good working relationship with the retailers. They
Private and confidential 6
understand the price that you’re trying to get for your products and try and have it as consistent across
channels as possible. That’s made doubly hard now because we’re in a, I can’t remember the last time in my
career where we’ve had a period of inflation like we have now. We’ve got supply chain issues, you’ve got
impossibility of getting goods from offshore here on a timely basis and for the same cost. The costs are rising,
yet the retailers don’t want to, don’t feel like they can pass it along to the consumer, so a brand, a company like
Madden gets pinched unless they can find other ways to make up for those increased supply chain costs, either
through overall G&A reductions or more efficiency in their marketing spend or any place else in the P&L.
[00:24:38]
Q: Could you elaborate on Steve Madden taking a step away from Macy’s and pushing back on some of that
control that Macy’s wanted to hold on online presence?
MF: I don’t know if I’d characterise it as Madden taking a step back. I don’t think it’s that at all. I think that,
like I said before, you take what you can get, so a brand like Madden or any other business that’s selling to the
retailers, they’re going to continue to push and be in as many doors as the retailer will allow them to be in.
They’re going to try and get as much space on the floor as the retailer will give them. Many of these retailers,
they’ve reduced the number of stores that they’ve had as their business has declined, but I wouldn’t say that
Madden is walking away from it. They’re taking what they can get and then they’re saying, “Okay, we were
doing X before, now we’re doing 90% of X with the wholesalers. How are we going to continue to sustain
growth?” As I mentioned, you either sustain growth by stealing share in the fewer doors that you’re in, so
that’s being competitively advantaged through your design and your branding and what could be a quality
play, could be a loyalty programme, what have you, or you get growth from your own retail. In some cases,
maybe opening doors, in some cases I think you see closing some doors, opening other doors in different kinds
of spaces.
One of the unique things about Madden’s retail is that almost every store is different and unique in footprint
and all, and then you’ve got an e-commerce business and then you’ve got international. I think if you go back
and look at public information, Madden, I think, bought, recently, part of a JV or the balance of a JV that they
didn’t already own in Europe. While I was there, they bought their Canada distributor, they bought the Mexico
distributor. They have a JV in China. I don’t know for sure, but I think if you looked at their overall geographic
splits, over time, international has grown while US may have grown at a slower rate. Then they’ve been
acquisitive, which we talked about earlier.
[00:28:21]
Q: What are the strengths of Steve Madden’s supply chain capabilities, especially given all of the bottlenecks
throughout the past 18 months? I think Gap had an issue where it couldn’t get the product out the door for
about three months. Where are some of the strengths in that supply chain? What do you think needs to be
strengthened?
MF: I don’t know much about the supply chain in how they get goods from offshore to here, but a couple of
things clearly have changed. When the tariffs were put into place from China, like a lot of companies, they
moved production out of China to other countries. I have no idea what the split is by country of origin, but it
feels like they’re less reliant on any one country than they were pre-tariff. Maybe, and this is a hypothesis,
maybe the fact that there were those tariffs, it was bad for the short term because it was a margin hit, but
maybe it helped them explore and find other manufacturing capabilities. That’s one piece. The second piece is,
and everybody is dealing with this, how do you get your goods today from point A to point B, where there are
limited containers and the cost of containers are going up, the prices of raw materials are going up, so that’s a
whole big challenge.
The other thing that they’ve always done well, they have a sample room that they talk about, Steve talks about
a lot, in their corporate office in Long Island City, New York. It’s 100 feet from Steve’s office and literally, he
Private and confidential 7
and his team are working in his office to develop product. They walk in, there are 20 or 30 people that actually
can produce samples. They knock them out quickly. They can create a bunch and take them to a store in New
York and put them on a front table and essentially, in days, they can get a quick read of whether something
will sell or not. They use that as their testing lab and then ultimately get it manufactured in bulk wherever
they’re ordering from. That’s definitely, the barrier to do that if you’re a brand is not a big deal, but a lot still
don’t do it, I believe, and they’ve used it to their advantage for years.
[00:31:18]
Q: Could you give us an idea of Steve Madden’s private label business and how the business is taking
advantage of this area of the market?
MF: I guess it starts with their designs. They’ve got a wide array of designs across price points. Silhouette,
actual materials that are used, they’re great at design, and then they are really strong at getting things
produced. They’re very good at iterating a silhouette that works, so they find a boot that works, they could
produce it for X dollars, USD 10, whatever it is, and sell that in their full-price and maybe in their wholesale
channel. Maybe they modify it a bit, they can sell it in their factory outlet channel. In many instances, they’re
selling the same shoe in full-price and factory outlet at exactly the same price. Then they can take that winning
silhouette and bring it to any of the private label programmes that they have, and perhaps it’s made for less
money because of manufacturing capabilities, maybe it’s taken to a lesser, I don’t know this to be the case, but
just logically it could be taken to a lesser manufacturing facility so the costs are lower. They could modify the
substance that it’s being made out of and then take it to a Target or a Walmart or a Costco or anybody else that
may be interested in having a private label programme. Private label is a function of having strong
relationships with the retailers and then having a design pipeline and a supply chain pipeline. If you’ve got
those things, you’re in business.
[00:33:33]
Q: How are you assessing Steve Madden’s ability to stay relevant? You mentioned its ability to give its product
in the whole value chain, from Saks Fifth to some of the lower-tier retailers. Why is the business able to do that
and is that the right strategy, in your opinion?
MF: I don’t think that they’re trying to be more premium. I think that they have a place in the market. I think
that they are just continuing to lean into that place in the market and steal share from other providers, other
brands. You steal share because it’s all about the product. Marketing matters for sure, but it’s all about the
product. The designs, the consumer knowing what they’re going to get, so a price-value relationship. They’re
not a low-end provider, they’re not a premium provider, and I think that if you asked customers what they like
about Madden, it’s about the fashion. They don’t talk a lot about comfort, though there’s some product that’s
more comfortable than others, but it’s really more about fashion. It’s really about that price-value relationship.
If you buy a sandal and you’re spending USD 59-69 and you wear it for a season and it no longer is wearable,
you haven’t made a huge investment in that shoe. They have a very wide range of customer following. It’s
predominantly a women’s business, though they’ve tried for a long time, and I don’t know the statistics, to
grow the men’s business, but even in a lot of these stores, you walk in, it looks like a women’s shoe store that
happens to have a men’s department. Their sweet spot is clearly women’s and they’ve just continued to…
they’ve got a young girl following, a high school, college-age girl, but they go all the way up to a 50-plus-year-
old woman. It’s less about the age, it’s more about the psychographic and the mindset and the fashion sense of
the consumer. Sure, they’ve got a ton of really high heels that, generally speaking, an older woman might not
like, and it might be for younger, but they’ve got tons of sandals, tons of boots, and it’s really about the
customer’s mindset, not their age.
Private and confidential 8
[00:37:42]
Q: How would you assess Steve Madden’s ability to really capitalise on some of this growth that many of these
American brands are having overseas, perhaps in Asia? What is that market dynamic of getting your brand in
Asia and taking advantage of the opportunity there?
MF: With respect to Asia, they have, I believe, this Chinese JV. I don’t know how long it’s been, it’s been a
while though. That’s clearly one of the areas of growth, and, generally speaking, internationally is an area of
growth for them. I think internationally, it’s also about the business model that they have. Again, years ago, it
was a distributorship kind of a model. They retained oversight for the branding and the imagery and supplied
all of that to those regions, but early on, for a long time, they abdicated the e-commerce rights in those
regions. I think that made for a hard thing to do. If I’m starting a business today and I have druthers of doing
it internationally, even if I do some distributorships, I want to control all of e-commerce on one site,
Stevemadden.com, Markfriedman.com, call it what you want, and then let consumers come to that, have an
experience that’s specific to the region of the world, whether it be language, it could be, in some cases, the
creative execution is different. Certain things that work in the US, don’t work in the Arab Emirates, so you’ve
got to be sensitive to that. I lost my train of thought to your question, but I think that this is not about them…
oh, you were asking about international and Asia. Yes, so, I think that they have opportunity to grow that
business outside of the US, for sure.
[00:40:11]
Q: What are you learning about consumers online regarding trends that are being provided from the data?
MF: I don’t know how much you know about this, but with the recent iOS 14 release, that’s made tracking of
customers’ interests and customer performance digitally much more challenging. I’ve seen businesses working
with Facebook and Instagram seeing their reported performance be reduced by half simply because of the
tracking changes that have happened. That’s making it more challenging to determine the return on
investment of spend that you make. There’s that change. You’d didn’t ask about that, but that change is going
to require brands to get smarter about first-party data that they capture from customers, whether through
loyalty programmes or through the checkout process, when a customer actually places an order, and you’ll
have to become less reliant on third-party data, simply because there’ll be less third-party data available for
you to be making decisions about. Prior to the iOS 14 changes, there was a lot of information, even if it wasn’t
specific to Mark Friedman, about my habits of shopping across the internet, and it gave tremendous ability to
be targeting people. I’m sure you’ve seen, you go to a website, maybe you don’t shop and then almost
immediately, if you’re on Facebook, in your Facebook feed, you’re seeing an ad from the brand that you were
just on their site. Then, as you go onto other areas of the internet, you’re followed around by these ads. There’s
tremendous ability to be able to target people, but that’s changing a bit, so you’re going to have to become a
little smarter.
[00:42:49]
Q: Are brands being reactive to some of the data out there? How is that data being used to drive more sales
and to really understand the consumer?
MF: The data that’s out there, as you put, are the whole building blocks of digital marketing. If I want to put
dollars on the table through Facebook and I’ll use Facebook/Instagram as a platform, because that’s the way
they manage it, you decide you want to spend USD 1,000 on Facebook, there are a litany of tactics that you can
use and they help you to guide where they think you’re going to get the greatest return on your investment.
There’s also, there are different tactics that you want to use depending upon your goals. If you’re looking for
top-of-funnel brand awareness, there are tactics for that and metrics to evaluate that. If you’re looking for top
of funnel, it’s brand awareness, it’s traffic. You’re not necessarily going to get a purchase from that brand
awareness near term. You might not see benefit of that until further down the road, but if you’re looking at
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mid-funnel, that’s a combination of brand awareness and performance, and then if you’re looking at bottom of
funnel, like a re-targeting programme, you’re strictly looking for, “For every dollar I put on the table, can I get
USD 3 or USD 4 or USD 5 or USD 10 back for that spend?” Having the ability to target consumers, either
through lookalike models, so some capability of determining who are my customers today, what do they look
like, where do they shop, how frequently do they shop, what is their geographic and psychographic make-up,
and then going to find other people that look like them, those are all things that are out there for you to be able
to take advantage of, whether it be using Google or Facebook/Instagram, or even the other platforms that we
talked about. It could be Pinterest and Snapchat and Twitter, and certainly TikTok is a big player, a big space
for people now, too.
[00:45:46]
Q: How has that environment, in marketing spend and as a brand, changed as to where you decide to spend,
given the rise of TikTok but also the sheer market power of Facebook? How important do you think
partnerships go along with that digital marketing aspect?
MF: I think you have to play all of this like a portfolio. Again, a lot of it is based on just the strategy of the
business. I’ve seen businesses that say, “Jeez, I’ve got USD 1,000 and that’s all I’m going to spend,”
notwithstanding that that USD 1,000 may be driving highly profitable revenue. You’d be surprised how many
businesses still, today, because of their cash constraints or because of their philosophy or whatever, are only
spending what they think they can spend, notwithstanding how much they could spend and still make a profit.
Once you get over that, I think most marketers are looking at a portfolio of spend, “I have X dollars, I’m going
to spend this much on Facebook and Instagram, because I have a certain ROAS target that I’m looking for, and
I’m going to spend this much on other platforms and this much in traditional media.” There’s still direct mail
that plays a part of this. It could be over-the-top TV, OTT media. Depending on who your target audience is,
“Do I want to spend on Netflix and Hulu and Spotify and things like that?”
It really comes down to, which we’re not going to go into here, but attribution, to some degree. How do you
attribute the sale? Are you attributing the sale on a last-click basis or with some other multitouch attribution?
That’s the 64,000-dollar question, is what really drove that sale? Depending upon how you think about that,
that helps you to determine where you should be spending more money. I think that’s probably, if you talk to
people from a marketing perspective, beyond, “What’s the creative I use in each of those channels and how do
I iterate on that creative quickly?” the biggest challenge they have is, “How do I measure the performance of
that creative or that message?” because that really tells you where you should lean into. Oftentimes, I see
businesses, they feel like they figured out the attribution, but then they don’t use that information to really
change the media mix. If I go off and spend a whole bunch of money across 10 pieces of media, and I’ve
actually been able to figure out, at least I think I’ve figured out, what was performing well, I should be taking
money out of the thing that didn’t perform as well and leaning into the things that did. You’d be surprised that
a lot of brands are still very slow to make that media-mix change.
[00:49:21]
Q: How does the media-mix aspect pair with when you have a portfolio of brands? What have you observed in
Steve Madden’s ability to be agile in moving marketing spend across all of their different brands?
MF: That’s a great question. I do not get asked that very often. I don’t know that I’m going to be able to
answer it specific to Madden, not because I know anything, I don’t think I know anything about how they do
apportion spend. When you look at one brand, so just go to the conversation I just gave you, when you have
one brand, let’s assume I have 10 different tactics that I can use, and I can talk about this because I’ve worked
in a number of multi-brand businesses, and this is a struggle. I’ll come back in a second where I was going.
One of the challenges is that many businesses that are multi-brand usually have the lead dog, the lead
business. In Madden’s case, Steven Madden brand is the lead brand. From a dollar-volume perspective, they
probably get the most resources, they probably get the most ad dollars, maybe not on a rate basis but they
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certainly get the most ad dollars. If you look at things as a zero-sum game, you sit there and say, “Alright, I’ve
got X amount of hours to spend on a brand,” even though I’ve got people running each of these brands, there’s
always going to be some resource contention and the brands that are the biggest wind up getting the most
time. I’ve run multi-brand businesses, and I always gave more time probably to the detriment of the smaller
businesses.
If you go back now to the fact I have brand one, I have 10 tactics to spend, maybe I come up with what the ROI
is of each of those 10 tactics. Now I have brand two, it’s a lot smaller and I know what those tactics return.
Oftentimes, nobody is looking across brand. Nobody is saying, “Jeez, I need more money, so I should take
some money out of the smaller brands use it to fund the bigger brand, because I’m going to get a bigger return
on the investment.” Those decisions are really hard to make because you have brand managers that are all
fighting for their own brand, but it is a zero-sum game and the businesses that are really effective are the ones
that have figured out not only attribution within a brand but also thinking about which tactic across brands
makes the most sense to fund.
[00:52:21]
Q: What have you noted from some of these competitors and the ones who are willing to overbid and
overspend and have a large marketing budget and marketing spend? Could you elaborate on how crucial that
might be to driving the growth of some of these brands?
MF: I’m not sure I understand the concept of overbid, but I think businesses spend what they feel like they
can in order to drive their overall bottom-line and top-line goals. What you and I may say, “Jeez, they’re
overbidding,” they may say, “Jeez, I’m not overbidding, I’m bidding exactly what I should be because I know
the lifetime value of my customer.” Every business has a different philosophy. I’m not really sure I can answer
this question of how to address businesses that are overbidding.
[00:53:40]
Q: What role does Amazon play when being able to get a product into every channel?
MF: Amazon was an important aspect of the business while I was there, from a traditional 1P wholesale
perspective. They were selling Amazon very early, and as Amazon became more important, we created an early
hybrid relationship where we taking data feeds, a kind of early marketplace. We were giving them a feed of
products that were on our site in a 3P kind of an environment. We were consuming the order and we were
shipping it from our distribution or our stores just like any other order we would do. That’s an important
distinction for how Madden got started. I think that Madden looked at Amazon as any other retailer that they
were selling to and we had products that would sell well there. For a long time, Amazon was the fastest-
growing wholesale account that they had. Think back to 2012, ’13, ’14, ’15, even then the department store
businesses were declining and although their online businesses were growing, they weren’t growing nearly as
fast as Amazon. I’ll say this generically, I think many brands have figured out that, and it’s probably lesser so
today but back then, there was very little overall between customers that were buying your products on
Amazon and the ones that were buying your products on your website. It was a little difficult to figure out
because you didn’t get details of who the customers were, all you knew was where you were shipping the order
to, but Amazon is an important player for most brands.
[00:56:25]
Q: Could you discuss the reluctance some retailers or brands may have to put their product on Amazon, given
they might be a competitor a year later?
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MF: I think there’s still some healthy scepticism. I think as time has progressed, there’s less and less of that
healthy scepticism. People have felt that they’re generating more business by working with Amazon and it
outweighs the negatives. I think that if you are a niche player and have a very specific product that doesn’t
have wide appeal, you’re probably okay to go on Amazon because, jeez, if you’re selling, I don’t know, pick
something that’s really out there, Amazon is not going to go into that business. They’re more interested in
being able to generate the revshare from whatever selling you could do. Think back to apparel. Amazon does
quite a lot of private label apparel and, for that reason, many apparel businesses were afraid to give them that
information, allowing them to sell and to give them that information over the years, but look at the size of their
business, look at the growth of their business. It’s grown tremendously and it seems with each passing year,
the people that were sceptical have relented. You have others that have pulled back. I think I’m getting this
right. I think Nike has pulled back over time and Adidas has pulled back over time in what they will or won’t
sell on Amazon, but I’m a shopper of Amazon. It’s one of the first places I go for anything that I want, even if I
don’t end up buying it there.
[00:58:43]
NH: Just about out of questions, but I think that’s a good place to end the Interview. Let me just close by
saying thank you, Mark, for your time today, and thank you, clients, for joining Third Bridge Forum’s
Interview. If you would like to speak with our specialist, Mark, then please let your relationship manager
know. Have a good one.
MF: Okay, thanks very much. Have a nice day.
Transcription ends at 00:58:58 of the recorded material
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