One of the defining things of 2020 is the way it's affected businesses, pushing many rapidly into ecommerce and reinventing their whole marketing pitch along with it. "Some people are really hurting, but here we've had strong, unprecedented growth," Joel Goodsir told CMO.

With people confined not just to Australia, but their houses, there's been a renewed interest in home renovation. People have been literally looking at their own four walls and deciding they needed to see things differently. And with less money going to travel, dinners out and even spending on a work wardrobe, there's been funds available for those long delayed house projects. 

But with the likes of Bunnings in your competitive landscape, it's no easy task to get people away from the well-worn path of driving to the local store when the home renovation bug hits.

Marketing effectiveness

"A year ago you couldn't buy a can of Dulux Wash & Wear online and pick it up from your local hardware store or paint shop," said Goodsir. "Eommerce wasn't live for any national retailer. It was a curious, but unsurprising reality that yet again the home improvement market, a $24 billion behemoth, hadn't kept pace with other retail sectors like electrical, grocery and fashion," he said.

Goodsir had been envisaging a paint ecommerce  website  for a  decade, wanting the UX capabilities to help the customer through what can be a tricky purchase. Inspirations Paint was the first ecommerce site to have selectable paint colours with the logic to automatically calculate the required base. The site launched in December 2019 with over 50,000 colours available online.  

"This innovation was paired with a devastatingly strong pick-up promise: tinted and ready in two hours nationwide," said Goodsir. "Bunnings offers 'next day' collection. This is not to say that the hardware retailer's ecommerce stores are not selling paint, they are and probably at higher levels than Inspirations Paint; however, we are fighting hard as a smaller niche player and we know that the customer experience shoppers are having on our site is superior.

Goodsir put his leadership skills into action to persuade 90 franchisees and 600 staff across 130 stores to process online orders within two hours. "They do it daily now with 97 per cent fulfillment." Little did the business know what was in store as 2020 has unfolded. "To say it was strategically imperative to have ecommerce in place in late 2019 was an understatement," he said.

Influencing change

"With so many shiny new initiatives rolling out, sticking to an overarching strategy is more difficult and can more easily be derailed," Goodsir explained. In the past 12 months, he has championed the alignment of key new marketing and CX initiatives to ensure that they reflect overarching strategy.

Integrating, aligning and focussing new advertising campaigns, store designs and a new website, among other things, with the first three initiatives sharing a fully aligned focus on a specific range of speciality paint projects. "In our ads, on our website and in our store layouts customers will see the same five non-wall paint categories (Woodcare, Marine, Metal, Concrete and Decorative Effects). "These five categories deliver higher margins and reinforce to customers our paint specialist credentials," Goodsir said.
 
These programs are not isolated to marketing and involve all other departments including finance, operations, HR and IT. "I have been relentless in engaging other departments to deliver these programs in a unified way," he said. Goodsir also noted that stakeholder engagement is critical in a franchised business and the Franchise Advisory Council (FAC) has been engaged and involved with every aspect of these programs.
 
The results speak for themselves, with uplifts in financial and non-financial measures across the business."I'm a believer in more communication not less. With this in mind I have used every communication channel available to me and my team to bring stores and their staff on this journey (intranet, meetings, animated  video training, hype reels, internal magazines/newsletters/sales planners and more), to win their hearts and minds to deliver on our guiding philosophy of personal attention to your painting project," he said.

Data-led marketing

In 2009, Goodsir declared to his CEO, after a meeting with one of its agencies, he wanted a single view of the customer and for its customer communications to be based solely on customers' behaviour, banning SPAM and delivering relevant, useful, actionable information which would increase satisfaction and drive profit. "At the time I had no idea how to do it," he said.

"CX didn't really exist as a concept and the martech stack was not yet a thing. Since then, Inspirations Paint's technology stack and capability has been coming together." It now includes a new ERP/POS system, launched in 2012, transitioning to a new CRM, but  with customisation to allow customers' colours to be recorded for life (a world first innovation), marketing automation was integrated in 2017, then CX measurement system came in 2018, the new website and ecommerce platform in 2019 and, finally, review management in 2020
 
"All of these  technology implementations have been integrated together to deliver a single view of the customer to Inspirations Paint. We have now been able to achieve what I imagined back in 2009," Goodsir said.
 
"We no longer SPAM customers, instead they receive tailored offers based solely on their search behaviour, email response behaviour and purchase behaviour. And thanks to this, open rates have gone up as high as 54 per cent and clickthrough rates as high as 36 per cent. Unimaginable a few years ago," he said.
 
"We've closed the loop on the path to purchase, we advertise more efficiently (no longer spending on customers already in our database), we ignite re-purchase with increased frequency and spend levels and, most importantly, we obtain satisfaction (and dissatisfaction feedback) in real-time."

We can now action this feedback quickly to drive improved online reviews and to recover from any service failures. National NPS scores have grown to 84.6 immediately post­ purchase and store owners, managers and staff are actively involved in driving this every day.

CX capability

In 2019, the business embarked on a customer experience program, which has since manifested itself into all of Inspirations Paint's touchpoints. "In particular, CFX stands for Customer First eXperience and it's the culmination of a year's worth of customer interviews, store designs, stakeholder engagement, store prototypes, funding models which is now rolling out to all stores," Goodsir said.
 
"We wanted to design stores to deliver the very best shopping experience for both trade (B2B) and retail (DIY) customers, integrated with our online offering that fed into growth." After countless workshops, 60 hours of in-depth customer interviews and a competitive store design pitching process, the business had its new store design. A prototype was built and tested in one of its Sydney stores.

The design addressed and sought to eradicate the myriad of pain points customers had identified. "They said the stores were hard to shop, cluttered, messy, illogical, worn, dirty, cluttered, confusing, intimidating, did I mention cluttered? We had nine different types of ceiling paint in six different locations," Goodsir said.
 
"We also analysed our most successful and profitable stores to see what they did in terms of store design, which delivered better outcomes for customers and better business results. We found that 50 per cent of their sales came from 'non-wall paint'. This was surprising, most stores non-wall paint  sales  were  less  than  30 per cent. The new store design heroes these five specialty paint bays on entry (Woodcare, Marine, Concrete, Metal and Decorative Effects)," Goodsir said.
 
The motto for the new store design is" 'we do the hard yards to make shopping easier for the customer'. "This means displaying products by category not brand, ensuring pricing is always present, merchandising is ordered, service and tinting is separated and there's info panels which demystify complex product categories."

COVID-19 innovation

Inspirations Paint's click and collect Website went live in late 2019. Once the pandemic hit and the initial lockdown occurred in March 2020, many customers didn't want to leave their homes to shop or even to collect their online orders. "Inspirations Paint needed click and deliver and fast," Goodsir said.
 
What would normally be a four- to six-month development and implementation, was turned around in 27 days and click and deliver went live in April 2020. The promise was next day delivery, free until 30 June. "This enabled our stores to trade through the lockdown even when retail customers were prevented from entering stores. In July delivery sales made up 50% of all online sales," he said.
 
One of the biggest challenges facing CMOs during the pandemic was the effect on advertising. Many were told to drastically cut their advertising budgets. For us, I knew that as long as we were allowed to trade, cutting advertising was the wrong course of action. As competitors and other advertisers withdrew their advertising I held firm," he said.

"I made the case that the pandemic was like any other economic crisis or downturn and that if we kept investing in brand, we could achieve Excess Share of Voice (eSOV), which is proven to benefit brands years after the crisis."

Inspirations Paint kept investing and actually increased ad spend in May/June, the winter period when it usually goes quiet. The pandemic had halved Metro FTA TV prices and we embarked on a campaign in capital cities it had never been able to afford to advertise in (on FTA TV) before: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane.

"This initiative was reported on by Mark Ritson, in the Media & Marketing section of The Australian newspaper, on Monday 18 May 2020, who praised the campaign, the marketing strategy and my leadership."

Cross-functional collaboration

Goodsir said that back in the 90s as an undergrad marketing student, he learned about the Triad of Service Delivery - the triangle of marketing, HR and operations working together to deliver excellence in service settings. "The model resonated with me and has ever since. I actually believe it's the foundation CX came from," he said.
 
"Inspirations Paint had a challenge," he said. Its competitive advantage was service excellence, but with Bunnings encroaching on its territory, it needed to act." It was necessary for Inspirations Paint to rekindle it's service leadership In early 2019 so I brought together the heads of HR and operations and we devised a plan," he said. "It started with understanding our secret sauce, why was Inspirations Paint's service so good back in the day? How can we get it back?"
 
The business went on an unprecedented national roadshow, hitting 15 locations in four weeks. The heads of marketing, operatings and HR rolled out training to over 100 store owners and managers. "We showed animated role plays of on-brand and off-brand behaviours, we facilitated live role plays and gave managers the skills to  train the 5 Golden Rules on the job and via our elearning platform," he said.
 
"We now measure the 5 Golden Rules daily via our post-purchase surveys and have seen Customer Satisfaction scores rise in the past year from 81 to 84.6."