Remodista Discusses community, COmmerce + Artificial intelligence with OSF Commerce at Days of Excellence in RIO

We were excited to be invited to one of OSF Commerce's Days of Excellence where they celebrated their global clients, shared their new products, and sought out perspectives on innovation. The global nature of this conference was made clear when, at a casual dinner, we realized that the business leaders dining were from 12 different countries. Whether you are a mid-size merchant who is just beginning your digital transformation, or a large global enterprise who is well into their digital transformation, understanding the future of the direct-to-consumer global business was a driving theme. Building business strategies around expert, trusted community members for guidance is the key to future growth.

These Days of Excellence were filled with innovative insights, networking and fun group collaboration. Our panel included; Kelly Stickel, Founder and CEO of Remodista, Chris Hooven, SVP Sales and BD for OSF Commerce, James Bruce, Sr Digital Strategist, OSF Commerce, and Jeff Milbourn, Head of Technology at Nugs.net.

Community, Commerce and Artificial intelligence

Our discussion, at Days of Excellence in Brazil, kicked off thinking about how artificial intelligence, community and subscription can expand on the way you sell to a customer.  It opens up the number of potential revenue streams in unexpected ways looking at community as a business model. This is a great way to get a lift of those significant commerce platform investments, where the typical push and pull of marketing has stalled.

In our experience and research, community as a business model allows members of an ecosystem to do business together while maintaining guardrails and parameters that allow the group to focus on a greater purpose that will benefit all involved. The success of this concept relies on the trusted status of the community—so its members feel comfortable sharing and engaging. Trust between consumers and businesses allow the support of other businesses by sharing connections with their customers. If the consumers trust the business, they are more likely to trust another business affiliated with it.

A community environment with meaningful and relevant content can support and enhance trusted relationships. Trust includes alignment of interests and goals. If your mission aligns with the beliefs of your customer, and they support what you stand for, you are more likely get traction with them and to build loyalty with them. Providing access to activities, experts, practitioners (like athletes) and each other can keep consumers engaged without directly selling products, making them more likely to purchase a product from a trusted community. The more time they spend engaged with a brand’s community, or communities connected to the brand in a positive way, the more likely they are to purchase or refer.

Community enables a company to have a dialogue with their customers in a way that goes beyond just selling product—if customers trust you, they are more likely to think that your motives are beneficial to them. Then they will be more open to listening to and engaging with content around your messaging and how you support them in their lives.

At the same time, AI has become a must-have feature of the solution, and when you think about the potential power of combining it with community and commerce --the growth options are endless. 

Here are Places You could be investing

• Community - connecting community platforms to your commerce and CRM systems, properly categorizing so sales can use softer sell approaches
• Commerce - product recommendations, abandoned shopping cart alerts and offers
• Service - chatbots that offer first tier customer service support 
• Marketing - lead scoring, customer journey tracking and customer segmentation using big data analysis and analytics
• Social - tracking and understanding sentiment and driving brand ambassadorship
• Pop-ups - live customer engagement with hardware that provides data about the movement of customers

advice as you innovate

As we all aim to innovate, the business struggles with challenges and obstacles, here is some advice the panel gave.

• Make sure you have a stakeholder who has multi-year buy-in and the propensity for risk.
• Be prepared for stakeholders to ride the brakes when things are in motion.
• Be prepared for tension, as it is part of the process and not something to be eliminated, but managed.
• Time is limited, so it is important to use tools to prioritize and stay organized like (trello, JIRA, basecamp, wrike).
• Unless you have dedicated R&D budget, avoid distracting projects. Focus where the money is, to solve your budget constraints.
• Demonstrate a correlation between delivered projects and revenue. Beware your digital marketing leakage looking at track brand, conversion and acquisition.
• As you look for or prepare for innovation, think of it as an operational overhaul where you can remove manual redundancy while aligning the business objectives. 

Fun & Enlightenment - Samba School Tour in RIO

The Africans started to participate in the festivities from 1833 after the Emancipation Bill was passed. The Africans brought Canboulay to its festivities. Canboulay was first played on August 1st, Emancipation Day , but subsequently took place after midnight on Dimanche Gras, the Sunday before Carnival. This was an inspiring community experience to learn about the culture and history. 

The visual design of RIO inspires

Learn More About Community Strategies

If you are interested in learning more about community, commerce and AI strategies, send us a note.  With our community experience, and partners like OSF Commerce, we can help you launch a community for today, that can evolve and grow, to be a thriving deeply connected and trusted community for your tomorrow. 

Community Inquiry