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Steve Laughlin, Vice President and General Manager for the Global Consumer Industry at IBM

This week we are joined by guest Steve Laughlin.

Steve is the Vice President and General Manager for the Global Consumer Industry at IBM, where he leads the company’s retail, consumer products, and wholesale distribution channels.

Join us as we explore brand transformation, the importance of micro-moments, and Steve’s key takeaways from IBM’s 2020 Consumer Report.

Episode 62 of RETHINK Retail was recorded on Feb. 6, 2020.

 


Hosted by Paul Lewis
Researched, written and produced by Gabriella Bock
Edited by Trenton Waller

Post Transcript

Paul Lewis:
In today’s episode of RETHINK Retail, I’m joined by my guest, Steve Laughlin. Steve is the General Manager for the Global Consumer Industry at IBM where he leads the company’s retail, consumer products, and wholesale distribution channels. Steve, thanks for joining us today. Can you start off by telling us a little bit about your background and your role at IBM?

Steve Laughlin:
Sure. I’m excited to be here with you today. Well, first of all, I started my career in retail. I was a manager in a store at Sears in South Florida. I then went back to graduate school. I was actually the very first summer intern ever at Office Depot’s headquarters. David Fuente, who was the CEO that took it from three stores to I think almost 800, hired me when they were right at about 200 stores. And I had an offer when I finished grad school to join them as an assistant buyer and I decided to go off into the dark side of consulting and joined Ernst and Young, then joined IBM. And I’ve been at IBM for a very long time and worked my way up.

Steve Laughlin:
And I now am the Global General Manager for our business, focused on what we call consumer industry, this whole value chain, serving these clients that serve consumers. And thrilled to be doing that.

Paul Lewis:
Yeah. I imagine, given that background, that you’ve seen a lot of changes over that time frame from the early days at Sears and Office Depot to where we are today in this digital age.

Steve Laughlin:
Well, I think some people would say it’s changed a lot, but some things stay the same. It’s still about meeting customers where they are. Back then it was in the stores, it was in the catalog, it was in the call center, and meeting their needs and having associates that are ready to do that are trained. And in some ways, it hasn’t changed much, just you meet them in different places than you used to. Today, you might meet them on a social media site, you certainly meet them on a mobile phone, you meet them on a website. And you still, by the way, definitely meet them in the store an awful lot.

Paul Lewis:
Yeah. Physical retail is still the dominant form of retail transactions, but I think you’re right. I mean, the fundamentals haven’t changed. The nuances and the way that you are meeting consumers and engaging with them and supporting them is changing and evolving rapidly, but the fundamentals of the retail business of being a strong retailer that has the support, the connection with consumers is the essential ingredient.

Steve Laughlin:
People have been running around saying the store is dead and there’s an apocalypse and all this for a long time. And we’ve been saying something different. We’ve been saying stores matter, but you have to make the matter. Two years ago, we did a study with the NRF that came out and actually focused on millennials. And it said, millennials actually really want to be in stores, but they want an experience. So it said, the role of stores is evolving. It’s not about that this is the place where you go just simply to get product, get it fulfilled, to do a transaction. But that they want to go and feel a sense of belonging, community, experience, learning, a lot of different things.

Steve Laughlin:
And the data was clear, millennials wanted to go to stores. And by the way, that learning has been reinforced. There was another study this year by another body that showed the same thing. So stores matter, but you have to make them matter. And I think that where we’ve seen retailers struggle and maybe even fail is, I would argue is where they’ve had difficulty making their stores matter. And then where we see retailers thriving it’s where they’re making their stores matter. And you see for every store that’s closed, there’s more that have opened in the last several years.

Paul Lewis:
Yeah, that’s so true. I always look at, if we go back to those early days of retail, what the store’s purpose was, was very transactional. It was, did you have an inventory and did you have a point of sale device that I could purchase it from? But those two functions of stores have been largely improved by online, infinite selection of inventory and sizes, immediate comparison of pricing, and easy checkout. So now stores have to evolve into that next level, like you said, an experiential level that offers the consumers something for that experience that’s beyond just the simple transactional. So I think you’re spot on with that.

Steve Laughlin:
And you start to think about, whatever your business you’re in, you start to think about, “Hey, in my business, is my product, is my offering, my inventory, is it take-with Bonobos? Think about the impact Bonobos has had. I’m kind of a tall man. How much of what I buy in men’s clothing is what I call take-with? How much do I need today. I spent a decade going around and talking with clients about, “Hey, you really ought to serve the big and tall, the short, the large man.” And the conversation was always, “Ah, the inventory cost, the inventory risk. We can’t have all that inventory now.” I was like, “Well, you don’t have to, you can have one of each size, one of each color, one of each pattern.”

Steve Laughlin:
And then all of a sudden here comes this company that says, “Oh, and you can also have one of each fit,” another dimension. And so they applied what you just said, the internet model, and they turned the business model of men’s clothing on its side. Because the thing they recognized was men’s clothing, it’s not so much a take-with business. I mean, how many men buy the jacket that they’ve must have today? They’ve got to take it home with them? Well, they don’t. So these weren’t rocket science ideas, but these were ideas that somebody said, “Hey, you know what, we can do this differently.”

Steve Laughlin:
There was a lot of players with incumbency in these markets that they could have thought about it differently as well, but didn’t. How many new stores opening versus stores closing model is this ideation, this new thinking, this turning these business models on their sides and looking at the problem differently. Because guess what? It turns out that a lot of inventory isn’t convenience or take-with inventory. And then you look at other categories like DIY, do it yourself where, Hey, that’s a pretty intense convenience take-with business probably. So I think that’s where we’re in this era of technologies enabling people to more than generationally maybe, more generationally rethink the business models and the role of the store.

Steve Laughlin:
You’re right, when the stores started, the store was everything. The store was where you kept the inventory, it’s where you did the transactions, it’s where you did fulfillment, it was the primary place where you met and interacted with your customer. And all of those assumptions maybe aren’t true anymore. And those who questioned those more and more of those assumptions or those that ideate and reinvent and can do it in an agile fail forward way, they’re thriving and winning.

Paul Lewis:
Now, that’s exactly right. A lot of the successes we’re seeing are new brands. They’re often are born digital, they don’t have that entrenched mindset, they’re open to examining and rethinking everything. And by having that different mindset, that different approach, they’re seeing a lot of success out there. So I couldn’t agree more with what you’re saying.

Steve Laughlin:
And ironically though, there are even some old brands that traditionally we would have considered maybe manufacturer, wholesalers, that would have primarily gone to market to the consumer through retailers, they would have been wholesalers that have gone now, DTC, direct to consumer. They’ve gone online, they’ve opened their own stores. And by the way, there you go. Stores opening while other stores are closing. And you think about all those brands that are well known, brand names that have opened their own stores. And by the way, even a few that have opened and now closed their stores because they maybe don’t need them anymore. But well-known brand names that have opened their own stores that line malls and airports around the world because they’ve gone direct to consumer.

Steve Laughlin:
Now, why? Well, because they found that they could present their brand promise to the consumer more effectively, they could present their complete line assortment. I’ll give you an example of one. You think of Lacoste, Izod, the alligator and the shirt that I don’t know how many years ago lost market share and left North America, but then it was so popular. I’m not a young guy, but when I was, nice school having a Izod shirts and the collar turned up with that alligator. But then like a lot of things, it was not the thing anymore. But then when they reentered the US market, they didn’t reenter the US market through department stores or other retailers, they reentered the US market with their own stores.

Steve Laughlin:
And if you go into those stores, you experienced Lacoste like you’ve never experienced it before. They have multiple cuts, they have tremendous basic color palette, and then they have seasonal color palettes. And you do experience their product offering like you never experienced it before. And that’s what they’re able to present to you by having their own stores that they would never, ever be able to present to you through another retailer. And so these brands are making the decision that, “Wait a minute, we shouldn’t just be a brand company that manufacturers and wholesales, but we should control our brand. We should deliver our brand and our product directly to the consumer so that we truly have the consumer understand what we offer, and so frankly, we capture more of that consumer’s share of spend.”

Steve Laughlin:
So, I think so I think again, we’re seeing a beyond a generational transformation, we’re seeing a very step function change in the model. And it’s because, again, as you said, I don’t need all the inventory at a store because that’s where everything happens anymore because I can digitally communicate with the consumer across the world in a way that wasn’t possible when the model of modern manufacturing, wholesale and retailing was created 80, 90, 100 years ago. And so everything’s up for grabs.

Paul Lewis:
So true. It’s funny, I had an Indochino on the show before and their model, I mean they have stores, but again, their model is custom made suits. So the idea is you’re going into a store, you’re selecting fabrics, you’re getting measured, you’re getting a high-end customer service, but you’re not going to walk out of the store with a product that’s going to come six to eight weeks later. So absolutely true. And then the other point that I love is, in one hand we’re talking about, it’s imperative for some brands and retailers to innovate in order to survive. But on the other hand, we’re also saying it’s an opportunity.

Paul Lewis:
This is a time for transformation that can actually elevate your brand, change your relationship with your consumers, change your brand positioning, and actually be a renaissance for many established companies with the right positioning and the right strategy.

Steve Laughlin:
Absolutely, and that’s the point. Apocalypse, no. Renaissance, yes. And if you think about it these businesses, the whole model was based on averaging. Mass marketing was based on averaging, we’re marketing to the masses. We’re putting the product, the brands, they’re putting product in stores that are going to appeal to the most people. So the reality is that if you look at these, as you call them, the born on the web companies, those companies are driven by focusing on smaller segments of people in a very targeted way, very often, very data-driven.

Steve Laughlin:
And so I would argue that there’s a little bit of a chicken egg conundrum here, but the reality is that we know more about consumers today than we used to. You could argue computers have cookies and therefore we track consumers better and understand them better. Or you could argue that consumers, because there’s so much more information, I use the cable television example when I was little, I went from five television channels to like immediately 45 when we got cable to, if you have dish or direct TV of hundreds. And all of a sudden, you can start to understand consumers in a much more detailed way.

Steve Laughlin:
So it’s a chicken egg thing that consumers actually aren’t this homogeneous mass group. But therefore you can start to target their needs in a far more specific way, and companies are. And these companies that are born on the net, that’s exactly what they’ve done. And they can focus on these segments and deliver to them very economically successfully because it doesn’t cost the same amount of money to start a company. You don’t have to have distribution through traditional retail. You can get things sourced, you can market on the internet. There are very different costs to start a company than it used to be 30 or 40 years ago. And so you can serve this very small segment.

Steve Laughlin:
And so if you think about it, the legacy retailers that were used to serving the masses they’re disadvantaged because do I want to be served as an average or do I want to be served by somebody who’s focused on me in a more detailed way? And I think that’s what we see, is that those, whether they’re the direct to consumer brands that are old school brands that have gotten the new religion or whether they’re the new born on the web brands that started with the data-driven focus, there’s great success in not playing the averages.

Paul Lewis:
Yeah. I mean, I think that if you go back again, we go back to those early days, it was Sears and Office Depot and things like that. We had an environment that not only were stores the inventory center, so you could only stock the hits, if you will, but also advertising was on those five channels. And you could only advertise the hits, you couldn’t advertise for something that would only hit the small segments. So what’s happened is we’ve opened up the long tail and personalization and customization to specific needs. And that’s an exciting opportunity.

Steve Laughlin:
And there’s still tons of opportunity to drive it more. We’ve opened up the long tail on inventory. Now, by the way, I think we’ve played the long tail on personalization as much as we’re going to, because of the push back on privacy and everything. And I actually would argue… By the way, we’ve gone further than we needed to because I would argue that with our most sophisticated clients, they’ve realized there’s a law of diminishing returns. Once you get customers into what we call customer lifestyle clusters, so instead of demographic segments, once you get them into a customer lifestyle cluster…

Steve Laughlin:
And that’s by the way related to some of our current research with the NRF. And a by the way, we do all this work. I’m on the board of the NRF. We started doing all these collaborations with the NRF but we’ve identified these micro shopping moments. And so once you understand their lifestyle cluster, you can start to understand these micro shopping moments, which maybe we can talk about. If you understand the lifestyle cluster, you don’t need to understand them that much more personally because if you understand their lifestyle cluster, then you can start to focus on the context of what they’re doing and when they’re doing it. And then the other element that’s missing in our book that’s where the huge upside is, is what I’ll call hyper-local.

Steve Laughlin:
And I’ll put it this way. If you think about, go back to that 80 years ago or 100 years ago when there was a store and there was a proprietor. And you can pick your retailer that started a store, that proprietor they knew when they did that work, to say, “Okay, what am I going to carry? What are going to be the hit in my neighborhood?” That averaging is what they did. And I like the way you said it, I’m going to steal that from you, we made sure majored on the hits. They knew a couple of things. They knew their customers, they knew their customers by name. The local grocer knew my great grandmother and knew she was from Ireland. And when she came in, he’d say, Hey Mrs. McLaughlin with the right brogue.

Steve Laughlin:
“You always have this meat on Fridays, but I think you might like this new cut of meat I got, you out to try it for the stew.” And that was knowing the customers and that’s what we’ve tried to do personalization with technology. And my point is, we’re done, we can’t go any further there. But they knew something else, they knew the neighborhood. They knew the area around the neighborhood, that this is different. They knew what was going on, they knew when there was new, like new apartments being built. They knew when there was a new business opening up and it was going to drive new traffic.

Steve Laughlin:
They knew if you were in New York City, they knew when the new subway line opened up and was going to drive traffic. They knew school was in session, they knew that if this weekend that the Catholic Church parish was going to have a big event. So they knew all these things about the neighborhood. They knew how the weather would affect, different kinds of weather, was going to affect sales. They knew the neighborhood. We haven’t done much with that. Now, we’ve done some things, we acquired the weather company a few years ago. We do a bunch of things with weather because everybody knows weather affects my sales either good or bad and everybody makes excuses.

Steve Laughlin:
We actually can show people with the data the real effect. But we call this hyper-local and it’s everything I’ve described; events, local rents, the economics, the demographics, if you’re in the city, what kind of people live here, therefore, what cats and dogs do they have? Therefore what kind of dog food, what kind of hair products should you stock? All kinds of thing, it can drive assortment. It can drive demand planning, we can help drive down forecast here, but hyper-local, the proprietor knew the neighborhood. There’s huge upsides still whether it’s around store or whether it’s around the context of that shopper who happens to be in the, let’s say, this, this lifestyle cluster of the young single highly athletic and therefore, this is probably a micro-moment related to their post-athletic activities. So there’s tons of upside still in using more data.

Paul Lewis:
Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that you touched on is your work with the National Retail Federation, and I know you were just at NRF obviously last month and you have a study that you’ve done in partnership with them, and you touched on this for just a second, consumer shopping in micro-moments. What do micro-moments mean and how do retailers want to capitalize on these?

Steve Laughlin:
Well, as I said, we’ve gotten into this habit of every two years doing a real big study. And as I said, two years ago, the big aha was, “Hey, millennials are screaming at us, they want to be in stores but they want to experience, the stores matter, but you have to make them matter.” This newest one, we surveyed almost 19,000 consumers and I think it was 28 countries, so it’s a global consumer-oriented survey. So it’s just statistically relevant. And there was kind of three big aha; one of them was this micro moment’s piece. There was a couple of others, which is overall shopping behavior is changing, micro-moments was one that with all this digital enablement, so in simple speak, everybody’s got a mobile phone in their hand, so there’s a shopping device in everybody’s hand always that every week some 70 plus percent of people engage in micro-moments of shopping, which is at some point, they’re shopping.

Steve Laughlin:
And so understanding that, how do you engage in that? And I’ll give you a simple example of it in just a minute because I had a client where they were like, “Oh my God, we’re not involved in this the right way.” And so that means that shopping doesn’t happen the way it used to, shopping has to happen like some in the grocery business, people went on a weekly shopping trip. Then shopping was while they shop, maybe there’s a replenishment trip, the shopping is bifurcated. They might replenish every once in a while with a trip to a club store, then they may be doing daily meals with a stop at a grocery store. Or they may be now when they leave the gym, they may be grabbing a quick high protein meal somewhere.

Steve Laughlin:
So if you don’t understand these micro-moments, they may be pre-ordering it. They may be looking for something they can pre-order and pick up. And if you don’t understand these micro-moments and how they shop, you can’t engage with it. But if you do understand these micro-moments that when somebody leaves the gym, they’re going to look for something they can order, pre-order on a mobile device and pick up quickly because they’re trying to get to work, and if you don’t understand that micro-moment, you’re not going to get to participate in that micro-moment.

Steve Laughlin:
That if you don’t understand that this is a working mother whose husband had travels and therefore when he travels, since she’s going to use a meal subscription service, therefore, that is three days a week and it’s four portions a meal, that’s 12 portions. And if you’re a grocery retailer, that if you don’t have a way to offer this female buying decision-maker, that meal service in a micro way, that you’re going to lose that business that you traditionally have had from that family, which is exactly what happened in my family except that I was actually the shopper and my wife took over that shopping and those 12 meals a week, left the local grocery store and went to a succession of subscription meal services as my wife journeyed and discovered which one she likes the best.

Steve Laughlin:
So that’s what I mean by those micro shopping moments, and they’re all across, whether it’s in apparel or it’s on social media, so if you as a retailer or a branded company doing direct to consumer, if you don’t understand not only the micro-moments in your business, but I would argue, if you don’t understand the customer lifestyle clusters, if you don’t understand your customers and if you don’t understand the lifestyle clusters of your customers, and then understand in general about micro shopping moments and then understand how you engage in the right touch points in those micro shopping moments, you’re losing out on a lot of business. Does that make sense?

Paul Lewis:
Yeah, exactly. I think what I hear you saying is you have to have all three. Any one of them can help you and move it ahead, but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. If you understand their lifestyle bracket, if you’re able to categorize and understand their fundamental needs, if you understand what’s going on in those micro-moments, and then if you have the way to connect and reach them and satisfy those needs, if you have all three of those components, there’s a huge upside to any one of those components by themselves doesn’t afford.

Steve Laughlin:
Right. And then there’s one other dimension we call triggers. We can also trigger demand triggers. We can also look and again you know what it is as you get better and better. So any of them you’re going to do better and better, more of them, it keeps getting more precise. So then triggers is, we know that some of this bring hyper local into this, hyperlocal data, and you can think of as hyperlocal analytics. And by the way, you can’t do this manually, we help clients build AI and machine learning models to drive this because you have to do this at scale. And this isn’t something you have people sitting around doing.

Paul Lewis:
There’s no people in the back room just tracking.

Steve Laughlin:
Yeah. With green eye shades and stuff. No, this is stuff, you build these models and engines, but then it’s the context of understanding demand triggers that says when…. So here, take a local event, a marathon in a city, that we know, and by the way, we’re not geniuses, we learned this stuff from early work with clients. So this is all stuff we started learning with clients, and then building on top of. But when we were first trying to digest massive amounts of data and we were learning how to crunch it. So this is originally, like five or six years ago we actually were looking at a marathon. And so we looked at the 20 items that had the greatest sales increase that directly correlated to the marathon.

Steve Laughlin:
And it was interesting because at this client, only two of them had any promotion. What do I mean by promotion? I mean point of purchase, that means they were on an end cap, on any kind of like, marathon display, anything, in a circular, meaning in the newspaper circular, any sort of call out online, any price discount, trade promotion, two out of 20 had any promotional activity whatsoever. Of the 20 items that had the greatest sales lift that correlated to the marathon. That means the marathon drove the sales lift. Now, by the way, that also means that guess what, they got sales lift and so did their competition, it was equal opportunity for everybody.

Steve Laughlin:
Now, if they had done more promotion, they would have been able to capture more share of that sales lift than their competition or from their competition. And so we would consider that then a local event and a demand trigger. And that’s what I mean by a demand trigger, whether it’s definitely a demand trigger. Obviously, when it rains, umbrellas sell in New York City at drug stores, that’s obvious, but there’s lots of demand triggers, less obvious ones. And so we work with clients to identify demand triggers. How do we do that? Well, we take like three years of sales history and then we take all these demand, all these exterior events and we go back and correlate this stuff.

Steve Laughlin:
And we identify demand triggers at a store skew level, not just at a category or a group level, but at a store skew level. And then by the way, going forward, we’ll build AI machine learning to keep learning and to keep it current and everything. And so you can start to incorporate demand triggers into this. And so then you layer in customer lifestyle clusters, you layer in hyperlocal demand triggers and you start to be able to do some sophisticated stuff. Now, this is all still in its infancy, but you can start to say, “When I understand these kinds of things, I can drive some sales lift with this, that I can drive a couple of points here and a couple of points there.”

Steve Laughlin:
And that’s what I mean by, I go back to that sole proprietor. I knew their customers, but they knew their neighborhood and there’s a whole ton of upside available from this. We’re doing things with clients where we’re taking forecast air, and when you say forecast here, it’s a big deal at a store skew level. We’re taking forecast here to store skew level and lowering it like 20 points, and it’s because of this hyperlocal data because if we can figure out where to put inventory at a store, skew level, not at a chain , but at a store skew level with this kind of data, same idea. So it’s the frontier, it’s tons of upside still available for retailers.

Paul Lewis:
Wow. There’s a lot to digest there. I would swing it just a little bit. We’ve been talking a lot about what I would call the back office, artificial intelligence, data analysis, projections based on all those things, let’s switch. I know in your recent study with those 19,000 consumers around the world, you talked about what are the new shopping technologies that consumers are most interested in. What are some of the findings in your report?

Steve Laughlin:
Well, this is interesting, I said this earlier, are we learning more about consumers or are consumers changing? And the truth is, this definitely told us consumers are changing and the reality is we’re able to learn more about them. So this is clear, consumers are changing, and they’re changing in a material way that I think it’s time for retailers and brand companies to pay attention to. So it’s one thing, the micro-moments thing, so definitely technology is causing people to change their shopping behaviors. But more importantly, the stunning, stunning finding was that this idea that values have become as important as value, meaning that 41% of shoppers are now shopping based on being value-driven, purpose-driven, and they care about is what I’m doing environmentally sound? Is this sustainable?

Steve Laughlin:
It was quantitatively, it’s supported work, we had done a couple of years ago where we saw that people want it to belong to a brand, not wear a brand, belong to a brand. That they wanted this brand alignment, but this was huge. And the reason is, a year ago I was at the World Retail Congress in Amsterdam, and I remember we were in one of the boats going to a dinner, and we were talking about this sustainability and everything. And what we had heard people say was, “Well, I hear you, but when consumers start voting with their wallets is when we’ll start paying attention to it.”

Steve Laughlin:
And so this is what was stunning for us. Not not only did people tell us that this was important to us, but now the consumers started telling us they’re voting with their wallet, that a 70% of the respondents that said that they were conscientious buyers told us that they would pay more for things that were aligned to being environmentally sound, sustainable. The things that were important to them, that they would avoid making purchases that they felt were to the contrary to that. So the point of this is, it’s reached a tipping point, that’s reached a tipping point.

Steve Laughlin:
And that means it drives a couple of things. It drives that retailers need to be able to beat, provide transparency and traceability. Also work we’ve done in the food industry around food trust that provides traceability and transparency about where do things come from and how have they been treated. I think it’s going to accelerate. The fashion industry is one of the most environmentally intensive industries in the world.

Steve Laughlin:
So you see these fashion companies leading the way with reducing their resource intensity because if you take these two in our industry, take food and apparel, and those two areas are really environmentally intensive, and you see leaders stepping out for Levi’s, two that come to mind that just have been at the forefront of doing things to become sustainability leaders, and there’s more to be done. So that’s one, and I think consumers may not know the words behind it, they may not know about blockchain, and they may not know these words that enable it, but they’re expecting retailers to provide transparency and traceability.

Steve Laughlin:
And then there’s things they expect in the store to and around their shopping experience to provide that experience in the store. And again, they may not know the words behind it but they expect that innovative experience in the store as well.

Paul Lewis:
Yeah, absolutely. I think it cuts across every area, both in the store, and even online, I think that brands could do a better job of saying, “Hey, do you want a bundle, all your orders still arrive on the same day and the same packaging?” Cut down on packaging waste and things like that. So there’s the product sourcing itself and then there’s the delivery of those products, whether that be through shipping or a pickup in store or the store itself. And brands have to get better at communicating what they are doing. Again, like you said, the transparency of it and communicating that to consumers so consumers can make informed decisions that they feel good about.

Steve Laughlin:
Think about you. Your point you just made is a great one. Think about this rush to, I’ve got to have two-day delivery, now, I want to try to have some one-day delivery. And it’s been a rush to do that, but I don’t know about you, but I travel and I order things and I can’t tell you how often I come home and there’s stacks of things that I’ve ordered because I’ve been away for two and a half weeks. They certainly didn’t need to be there the next day or in two days, and so to your point, this idea of sustainability and giving the consumer a choice to be more sustainable, there’s going to be an advantage. And our data shows there is going to be an advantage to those players that start to get focused on this because I got to tell you, I was stunned how quickly it happened.

Steve Laughlin:
When the team started showing us this data and we saw values-driven consumers, equal to value driven consumers. And look, that doesn’t mean that every time they make every purchase decision, but when you start seeing something like this, I was like, “Oh my God, the time has come. It’s here.” And again, you’ll see those same thing, we’ll see the leaders, the leaders will be in front of this and we’ll see laggards that at some point will start paying the price for it, I think like most things. It’ll be the same thing, is it a renaissance or an apocalypse, we’ll have new terms for it, I’m sure.

Paul Lewis:
So Steve, it’s been great having you on the show. Thanks for sharing your insights into all of this. Obviously, you sit on top of a wealth of data and experience. And I know our listeners appreciated getting a small window into some of that. We’re going to put a link to your recent study that you did with the NRF along with podcast, so anybody who wants to download the study will be able to do that. And again, thanks for being on the show.

Steve Laughlin:
Thank you very much for having me.