Néstle: Agents Don't Feel a Brand, They Compute It

[00:00:00] Gloria DeCoste: Agents don't feel a brand. They compute a brand. Right? And in order for an agent to compute a brand, meaning that, hey, I, as an agent, need to find whatever is relevant that this person is looking for. That comes to life in the form of product data, product attributes, and that all sits on technology.

[00:00:24] Kailin Noivo: Super excited for our podcast today with Gloria. Gloria talks about her long-standing career and seeing marketing evolve from everything print to everything digital to now potentially everything agentic. Super excited for today's episode.

[00:00:38] Kailin Noivo: Welcome to another episode of The Ecommerce Toolbox Expert's Perspective. Joining us today, we have Gloria DeCoste. Welcome, Gloria.

[00:00:47] Gloria DeCoste: Hello.

[00:00:48] Kailin Noivo: So, Gloria, maybe start off by introducing yourself. Give us a bit about your career journey. As of late, you're most recently the Director of Ecommerce at Nestlé, but maybe take us through your career journey and how you ended up in that role.

[00:01:00] Gloria DeCoste: Yeah. Fantastic. So, I'm a marketer at heart. I started 17 years ago at Nestlé as a marketer at Purina and fell in love with marketing, and that stayed at the heart of everything I've done. But I also have a pretty big affinity for things that are new in general. So, I have done digital marketing, social media as that started to come out, and then I really fell in love with ecommerce as that really started to grow in grocery. And at that point, I was in with Nestlé USA. So, I've been with the company for 17 years across those kind of big fields of marketing, digital marketing, and ecommerce.

[00:01:42] Kailin Noivo: Very cool. And I'm assuming when you started at Nestlé, your most recent title didn't really exist, right? Director of Ecommerce. Or maybe it was just off the ground. So, maybe talk to us about some of the career changes that you've seen in marketing just in general, right, with the introduction of digital as a channel and all of that.

[00:02:02] Gloria DeCoste: Yeah. It's really kind of funny because on the marketing side, when I was in brand management and social media was up and running — and I'll mark my age a little bit on this — we were saying and asking ourselves at the time, like, should brands be in social media, and how do we do that, and how do we talk to consumers? And those roles just didn't exist. And I raised my hand to be a part of it. I like to run into the fires. And so, really from that point on, almost every role that I had, there wasn't an existing title for it at the time. And it was really just a matter of being willing to try and the first to kind of jump in. Let's go try whatever this is new, and then let's build best practices out of it. So, that's really been my MO for the last about 12 years of my career.

[00:02:56] Kailin Noivo: Very cool. And now it's kind of one of the latest platform shifts coming in. That might be the biggest one of them all, which is AI. Tell us a bit about that high level. Where did you kind of start feeling that for the first time in your role? Was it more on the operation side, or was it more in, like, how traffic patterns are changing? Talk to us a bit about that.

[00:03:17] Gloria DeCoste: Yeah. I think everything in marketing should start with consumers first, right, and following consumer behavior and not be chasing just a capability because it's cool or it's a bright, shiny object, but really having smart participation. But I think when you see consumers start to utilize a capability en masse, that's when we can actually make choices for our brands to be sure that we're moving to where the consumer is. So, in the case of AI, I would say a year ago, maybe even 18 months ago, we heard so much in our industry how AI was changing a lot in the background — maybe of the capabilities is where we kind of felt it more. As agentic commerce has emerged in the past 12 months and done leaps and bounds in the past six months, right, this has been around consumers jumping in and using agents to help them find products, to make choices in their buying patterns. And this is only going to accelerate, I think. So, this is, I think, a very, very big groundbreaking way, all rooted in consumer behavior.

[00:04:36] Kailin Noivo: Do you think different categories are gonna feel it in different ways? Like, do you think there's, like, for example, commodity versus luxury? Like, do you think those traffic patterns will look different?

[00:04:45] Gloria DeCoste: Yeah. I mean, from the studies that I have seen, counter to what we've seen in the past — so let's start in the past. Digital really had a frontrunner affinity toward luxury. We saw beauty. Think about the makeup try-ons from Sephora. L'Oréal has always been such a big frontrunner. And grocery was a laggard, right? And I was at Nestlé, so I really cared about grocery. Now what we're seeing is almost the flip opposite, because consumers are using agents to perform repeatable actions. Right? So, these repeatable actions are, let's say, your household goods. Everybody buys toilet paper. Everyone buys coffee. Everyone buys those items that you are on repeat. That's really an easy thing to assign to an agent. One of my former coworkers used to say, I'm probably not gonna ask an agent to pick out and close the transaction for my engagement ring. But it's really easy to say, look, I buy pizza every week, and my kids love it, and that is gonna be on the repeat. So, we really were looking at this idea of repeatable purchases being the frontrunner and probably some of the earliest categories into agentic ecommerce.

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[00:06:28] Kailin Noivo: It's actually an interesting perspective. So, what you're saying is kind of like, at the beginning, it was actually more the specialty items that were kind of taking off on the Internet, and now it's kind of almost the opposite when it comes to agentic, right? Like, it's more on the commodity side. Right? Frequency, things like that versus, like, experiential commerce. Like, experiential commerce — early kind of data is pointing it doesn't really do that well when it comes to agentic commerce. Is that more or less in line with what you're saying?

[00:07:02] Gloria DeCoste: I think the agents are being used across all the categories. People are having conversations with agents across everything. But where can the transaction close? Like, what will be the first amounts of transactions that consumers are actually going to trust their agents to not only pick it out, put it on a list, but close — like, do the purchase for me. Here's my credit card. You can make my grocery list and close that list and have it delivered to my house. Like, there are a lot of reasons to believe that those will be the first transactions in agentic.

[00:07:40] Kailin Noivo: I mean, it makes sense, to be honest. I'm not gonna send an agent to go shopping for, like, an upcoming wedding I have. Like, that seems farfetched for now. But, like, to your point, the grocery list looks 80% the same every other week. Right? So, no, that's that's really cool. On the operation side, where did you kind of see some of the first use cases? I mean, customer service comes to mind. That one kind of, like, started off in 2022, 2023. And Salesforce just recently acquired Fin, which is, like, Intercom's rebranded business. So, that clearly kind of, like, took off as a predominant use case — call center, customer service. But maybe outside of that one, what are kind of some of the dominant use cases you saw on the operational side?

[00:08:21] Gloria DeCoste: On agentic? On the agentic side?

[00:08:23] Kailin Noivo: Yeah. Exactly. Like, where is AI actually, like, reporting? You know what I mean? Like, ad creative, things like that.

[00:08:29] Gloria DeCoste: Yeah. I mean, this is all over the place right now. We're in these early days. One of my favorite graphics is, like, early days of search. So, it was like Google. It was Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, and they were all kind of really pushing to be a frontrunner. And if you had taken a snapshot in time back then, you might have said, like, Yahoo is probably gonna be your number one search engine. Ended up being Google. Right? And so, it's like we're in that space right now, and I think there are two things. There's a race to who can really get the transactions of the consumers. So, there's that part. And so, we're seeing certainly Walmart, Amazon — they're in this race to be the first to gain the transactions. And then we're seeing, like, just within the LLM models themselves, them saying, hey, do you want me to put this list for you? Want me to get this into a cart? You're starting to see that. So, I think it's very early days. So, that's the first part — is, like, how do we kind of get into carts? And then the second part of AI is how do you get the measurement? So, we're seeing tools like Ozma or Shopt Detail Page. Like, many of those are trying to help CPG brands — a lot of them that are not direct to consumer — to help them actually get the data and the visibility. But I really think it's early days. I think that's going to be one of the hardest things for many companies: is how do they get the data? How do they understand — are they reaching people who are having conversations with agents?

[00:10:16] Kailin Noivo: Yeah. No. It makes sense. I think, like, analytics is one of the predominant use cases. I read an article the other day called, like, intelligent SaaS is dead. And what that really meant was, like, if you were just an intelligence layer on someone else's data — like, you take your, I don't know, core ecom platform data, pull it into, like, some sort of, like, dashboard with insights — that, honestly, that is going to be really, really hard to compete against. Because if you take the same data and you send it into an AI system, it's gonna just do a much better job of providing insights. So, analytics is definitely one of the first areas that we've been seeing get consolidated. But yeah. No. It's really interesting. I know it's gonna be hard to really, like, answer this one, but we were chatting a bit about the role that you kind of ultimately ended up in isn't the role that existed when you started at the business. Like, we're seeing things move really quickly. What role do you think doesn't exist today that'll exist in, like, two to three years in ecom?

[00:11:16] Gloria DeCoste: Well, that's a really good question. I do believe that the intersection of marketing and technology is one that many companies are not yet looking at. As consumers start to use agents more and more — and they just will, like, right, we know if you go into Google today, you don't get a list of websites anymore. You really enter into a conversation. So, we know that that's going to happen. The truth of all that is that agents don't feel a brand. They compute a brand. Right? And in order for an agent to compute a brand, meaning that, hey, I, as an agent, need to find whatever is relevant that this person is looking for. That comes to life in the form of product data, product attributes, and that all sits on technology. And so, this intersection of marketing, messaging, and the technology that will drive ultimately visibility of the future — I think that those roles are going to grow pretty significantly, at least for the companies who lean in and take this new wave seriously.

[00:12:30] Kailin Noivo: Interesting insight. Just building on that, I think, to your point, like, there will likely be a role or software that kind of stamps each data source as a system of record. So, for example, you have your order data in your platform and your return platform. I've already seen at ours just at our scale — because there's different systems that have similar data, I could run a query on our average return rate, and you can run a query, and we get different answers. And that's gonna create operational drag in a business, because you're going to end up like, okay, well, what is our CAC on mobile? Right? Like, what you have in yours, or is it mine? Because we're connected to all the same data sources. Right? So, I think someone's gonna have to litigate that, and I'm curious if that's like a role where it's almost like you're building your source of truth from a data standpoint, and you're stamping it. And, like, you're, like, the governing body of, like, deciding, okay, no, our discount rate comes from Shopify, but our return rates come from this, and our stock comes from the ERP. And I can totally see that, like, spiraling out of control, because now you could ask any question you want.

[00:13:46] Gloria DeCoste: And I think, you know, the five building blocks, in my opinion, in ecommerce is — well, you start with a foundation of good brands before you get into any building blocks. And then on top of that, you have really good product data and structured content. You have strong availability and fulfillment. You've got the strong demand generation, retail media, a way to have outreach. You have data as the fourth. And then you've got this kind of, like, omnichannel orchestration that connects all of those touch points. And then how can those work without really masterful technology and data synchronization? And so, those who are going to leap forward are the ones who really understand that, who build their brands around that. Think about a brand today that is like, okay, upper-funnel media, really important, still drives a lot of the business, especially if you are in a CPG where you've got the majority of your products still being sold in a physical store. Right? Now you are spending a ton of money for that upper-funnel media. Let's say GLP-1s. We all see this all the time. Right? Wegovy and Mounjaro and all those. And then we go and have a conversation with our agent. We say, tell me a little bit more about these GLP-1s. Which ones might be right for me? I'm not talking about a brand yet. And what that agent starts to compute for me may not be connected to that upper-funnel media at all. Right? And I might end up talking to my doctor about a completely different product. Now, it got me into the category. And so, what could end up happening is that all that expense, all the upper-funnel activities, are just driving category growth but via a competitor. Right? And so, that connection of being able to make that leap down to, like, hey, did we actually turn this into a conversion for our product — that's where that kind of omnichannel experience is so critical, and we've gotta do it through the data.

[00:16:10] Kailin Noivo: Very, very interesting. And what do you think, even stretching out over the last 10, 15 years — like, what do you think stays constant on the other side of this? Right? Like, what are kind of some of the guiding principles that, in your opinion, will not change over the next couple years?

[00:16:27] Gloria DeCoste: Yeah. Well, I'm a marketer at heart, so I think brand building does not change. You've gotta have a great product. You've got to really know your consumers. You have to know how your product is used. You have to know when it needs to evolve. And then you have to know that part of that — knowing your consumer deeply — it goes back to what we talked about in the very beginning, in the opening. If people are having conversations with agents about your product, as an example, or they're going into Alexa and doing it within a platform, you have to really understand how that happens. And so, those fundamental concepts don't change at all. That still all needs to be true. But adding in that layer today of, like, okay, well, consumers are using a lot more of agents. They are using LLMs, and that's where many could fall behind if they don't gain that intelligence of where and how their consumers are using it. And are they adapting so that they can be the first that an agent recommends to their consumer?

[00:17:32] Kailin Noivo: Yeah. It's interesting. I got tagged in a call the other day, and someone found our company through ChatGPT. Like, that's still — not that it's surprising to me, but it's like, oh, wow, okay, like, that's interesting, especially in the B2B space. Because that's where people live when they — or that's where people work out of, if that makes sense.

[00:17:50] Gloria DeCoste: Yeah.

[00:17:51] Kailin Noivo: I bet you there's more tokens consumed B2B than B2C. Maybe I'm wrong on that, but, like, do you know what I mean? Like, basically, I don't really use too many, like, outside-of-work tokens. Like, okay, maybe, you know, like, what type of light bulb should I get for this light or whatever once in a while? But in terms of staying in B2B and looking for that, I'm definitely way more active myself. But, no, it's super interesting. Gloria, as we look to wrap up, what do you think some of the most overhyped trends of this year are? And I mean, not to guide you to an answer, but, like, where would you caution people to maybe not buy into the hype just yet — and not necessarily into AI, just in anything at all? I'm still seeing some AR experiences in commerce and things like that, so I'm curious just broader than AI.

[00:18:42] Gloria DeCoste: Yeah. I mean, look, smart participation in this, like, future world is important. You cannot take your eyes off of the fundamentals that we just talked about, or even just in ecommerce, really having, like, a strong ecommerce experience still holds true. That's not going to change. We still have to have our brands present in a visible and attractive way. That will not change when it comes to ecommerce. But I think, like, kind of overdoing it — I heard this in one of your episodes, on the Ollie episode. This idea of kind of not trying to overdo and make too bespoke the experience of any product. Because I really do believe — and that resonates a lot, because it's easy to get so hyped up into, hey, what's happening on the fifth image in a product detail page? Those types of things. And if we can make it really cool and experiential, like, we just have to keep our eyes on: does that actually drive conversion? And so, I think that you've hit on this before in your podcast — not chasing the bright, shiny objects, but not overlooking the places where consumers really are driving conversion.

[00:20:10] Kailin Noivo: Very cool. Well, it's nice having you on, Gloria. I really appreciate you taking the time to hop on today.

[00:20:16] Gloria DeCoste: Yeah. Same. Thank you.

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