We went out to several growth marketers we have gotten to know through our TechCrunch Experts initiative to find out how this year’s supply chain challenges are affecting their planned efforts, given we are just 22 days away from the formal start of the holiday shopping season. We spoke with the following people:
- Julio Lopez, Movable Ink’s director of client strategy and retail practice lead.
- Marketer Hire’s CEO and co-founder, Chris Toy.
- Tuff’s head of operations and growth marketer, Kristin Dick,
- Dipti Parmar, Dipti Parmar Consulting’s founder.
It will take time to fix the global supply chain disruptions we have witnessed so far this year. Even when vaccinated workers return to work, a slew of impediments persist truck driver shortages, shipping port congestion, and a lack of empty shipping containers and the ships that can transport them. “There were revisions made to forecasts based on the reality that there’s no knowing what issues we would have heading into Q4, as far as supply chain,” Lopez said in a quarterly earnings call. Dick said her business moved advanced campaign start dates by 2-3 weeks to maximize order flow and satisfy consumer expectations, and aims to rely more heavily on SMS and email marketing than in the past.
“From a marketing standpoint, what is going on with these firms is all strong, solid foundations,” Toy recommended. “A lot of stuff, to be honest, you should be doing all year.” These marketers prepared for the Christmas shopping season by considering marketing fundamentals and understanding how to pivot at a moment’s notice. Are you one of them? Please fill out the poll below if you know of a growth marketer we should know about.
Not only is a pandemic a major concern and supply-chain difficulty, but we are also dealing with natural disasters. There has been flooding, as well as fires. Many factors are influencing retailers’ capacity to manage their supply chains. Not everything from items created to things blocked at ports of entry due to a lack of workforce or shipping containers to carry stuff over here from China reported.
This is something that a lot of retailers are concerned about, and if you listen to certain earnings calls from the past quarter, you’ll hear that predictions were adjusted based on the reality that there’s no way of knowing what issues we’ll encounter in Q4 in terms of the supply chain. I believe it is critical for retailers to be aware that their marketing strategies, as well as the SKUs or lines they were hoping to spotlight at a specific moment in Q4, may or may not be available. They will have to adjust their marketing schedules to accommodate for inventory that could or might not be available. As a result, data and its value become even more crucial in this context.
