Episode 309: How to Communicate Your Value Proposition to Customers With Andrei Faji of Shopgate

Episode Summary

Marketing isn’t about taking advantage of people — although that doesn’t stop some brands from taking an exploitative marketing approach. Andrei Faji, the Vice President of Global Marketing at Shopgate, wants to do the opposite.

“We’ve intentionally decided not to go down that path. We found that we had a real opportunity to level-set and get to the bottom line around what actually matters,” he says.

On this episode of Tech Qualified with Justin Brown, Andrei talks about what marketers should really focus on: starting and maintaining conversations with consumers, especially now in light of the pandemic.

For Andrei, marketing is about communicating your organization’s value sincerely, with the goal of solving a problem rather than selling a product or service. To do this, it’s important to create a message that accurately reflects your company, one that every employee can get behind.

Andrei applies this to Shopgate’s strategy with direct response marketing, which he feels cuts through the noise of today’s digital chaos.

“Direct response allowed us to put together some unique offline campaigns to really get in front of decision makers and make a real statement,” Andrei says. “I think one thing that we as marketers sometimes take for granted is the power of being bold and making a true statement, knowing full well that not everybody is going to respond to that statement, but the statement still needs to be made because you need to put a flag in the ground.”

Guest Profile

Name: Andrei Faji
What he does: As the VP of Global Marketing at Shopgate, a company that develops retail and commerce software solutions, Andrei works to expand the company’s reach and refine its brand positioning.
Company: Shopgate
Noteworthy: “I really believe that marketing begins with laying down the foundation around a set of values, and the values within an organization are the first step in creating that foundation for marketing.”

Key Insights

Marketing begins with establishing your brand’s values, says Andrei. The next step is communicating those values. However, he doesn’t believe this requires convincing potential consumers of anything. According to Andrei, consumers will come to you when your message resonates. This is only possible when a company develops a message that aligns with its mission and culture.
Andrei’s approach to the pandemic has been to avoid any sense of exploitation or desperation. For him, it’s a chance to see what truly matters: maintaining a sense of community, understanding that businesses must change their mindset and returning to a feeling of normalcy. “A lot of the conversations we've been having, both from a marketing perspective and in engaging with our community, are centered around those three things.”
Cutting through the noise of today’s content-saturated world is a marketing challenge that Andrei thinks about a lot. It’s hard to stand out unless you have exceptional content or a well-known reputation, he says. Because Shopgate didn’t have either when Andrei first joined the company, he had to start from scratch. Along the way, he found that direct response marketing was effective for getting in front of the right decision-makers. “One thing that we as marketers sometimes take for granted is the power of being bold and making a true statement, knowing full well that not everybody is going to respond to that statement,” he says.

Episode Highlights

“Amazon is incredibly relevant in terms of defining and setting a new trajectory towards consumer expectations. We don’t really know exactly what the world is going to look like in the next few months or years ahead, but we know that there’s going to be some shift in terms of the flexibility and ease of experiences that customers have been able to put up with from other merchants because they were like, it is what it is. I think now customers are going to be a lot more selective. And merchants are going to be in a position where they’re going to have to adapt to change a lot quicker.”

“Omnichannel is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s a must-have. And we’re seeing today that the companies who have had some logistical work and setup around things like curbside pickup or ‘buy online, pick up in-store’ — they’re able to keep the lights on, they’re able to still do business.”

“The first thing that we had to focus on when I came in was our core messaging and our unique selling proposition. We had borrowed a lot of things from the past evolution of our company and tried to fit them into the new world that we’re in and that wasn’t working. I didn’t do any paid advertising, didn’t really do a whole lot of outbound marketing, really just focused, the first two quarters, specifically on building strong messaging, aligning our sales team around that messaging both in Europe as well as here in the U.S. and then we just started picking up on outbound activities.”

“We had a campaign that we were doing where we were targeting shoe retailers. We wanted to tell a story around our value proposition. We created these custom branded shoe boxes with our logo, and then when you opened up the shoe box, there were a couple of items that were all related to their industry. The story around the shoelaces was, ‘Let us help you tie your online and in-store shopping experience together.’ With the shoe brush, it was ‘Let us polish your existing systems to make them shine.’ Every single one of those things actually traced right back to our core value propositions and what makes us unique compared to other retail software providers. It was our way to make a statement around who we are, what we believe in and how our belief system ties directly with your industry.”

“Marketing is not just the marketing team. It should not be just the marketing team but any person within an organization that has the ability to touch the market, whether it’s an engineer who is hopping on the phone with a client and helping them walk through a technical issue or a customer support person responding to an angry client email or obviously a salesperson taking a prospect out to lunch. All of those things are marketing. There’s a certain amount of care that has to be incorporated into the ethos of that organization so that every person who is interacting with the market understands what that mission and vision really look like and what that expectation needs to be. One of the components that we pride ourselves from an internal perspective is we do what is right — not what is easy.”

Episode 309: How to Communicate Your Value Proposition to Customers With Andrei Faji of Shopgate

Episode Summary

Guest Profile

Key Insights

Episode Highlights

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