S4E1: Brian Walker - Adapting to Dynamic Market Changes

Welcome to Commerce Famous, a podcast that celebrates the celebrities of our industry. Join us for a conversation with the taste makers in ecommerce. In their daily lives, these are just normal everyday people like you and me. But to us, they are commerce famous. Welcome to season four, episode one of Commerce Famous.

This season is gonna be focused largely on complex commerce, and these are these are the complex use cases in ecommerce from b to b to even some of the ones in b to c, things like regulated industries or businesses with huge catalogs or very unique, merchandising use cases. So joining me today is a very special guest I've known for many years. His name is Brian Walker. Brian, welcome to the pod. Thank you, Jason.

A pleasure to be here. Well, let's bust right into it. Why don't you why don't you start off with a little bit of an introduction? You you're, you're an ecommerce veteran. E we talk about a little bit the reason we invented this commerce payments podcast is because there is no hall of fame for ecomm, but there should be.

And so this is our way of kinda talking about people who who would probably be first ballot hall of famers, a little bit about their experience and their journey, and share a little bit about their view of the future. So, Brian, why don't you maybe start off by, introducing yourself and kinda how you got into ecommerce? Well, I appreciate the, the shout out. I I, you know, I'd I'd feel quite honored to even be mentioned amongst all the, the possible OGs for the inaugural hall of fame. I'm not sure if I qualify, but it's just nice to be mentioned.

There you go. You're modest. That's why I'm I, I got involved in e com, you know, way back in 1997. I was actually running a small sort of manufacturing and and and catalog business focused on apparel for the education market. You know, you're talking about, you know, the, the logoed, you know, apparel and tchotchkes, you know, for for various high schools and small colleges and things of that nature.

That's what we were doing. And, of course, had a bank of of salespeople working the phones, and I launched a b to b website focused on serving the education customers. Naturally, early days, but schools had the Internet, and I thought this would be a much more effective way for us to basically more efficiently be taking orders and, you know, maybe get a leg up on some of our competitors to to kind of build out, some capability. A lot of the sort of expected things happened. You know, there was it was more challenging to launch and support than we'd envisioned, and all my salespeople walked out on me because they thought, you know, I was trying to replace them.

Naturally, you know, we kinda got through that. And, you know, it was a modest modest success, but certainly, you know, user adoption, you know, was was also a challenge. Right? You know, people adapting to this new channel when they were more accustomed to looking at a printed catalog and and phoning someone up. That led me actually to jump over into retail.

I had worked at Eddie Bauer previously as a buyer, earlier in my career. I had actually then turned into a supplier of of Eddie Bauer doing, manufacturing of of some of their programs over in Asia for them, stayed in touch. They were actually a customer of mine at the catalog company doing some, doing some, you know, corporate apparel work for them, for some of their corporate, clients. And they said, hey. We're gonna start, an ecom division of some kind.

They actually called it interactive media at the time. The first project was actually an interactive CD ROM even before the website, and they invited me to join. So I think I was, like, employee number three or four of this new interactive division, kind of coming back together with an old mentor of mine, someone who was very influential in my career, Sally McKenzie. And, we launched eddiebauer.com, first as an AOL store, and later as its own.com. My role was sort of jack of all trades.

So I had to figure out all kinds of different things, from merchandising to marketing, sourcing vendors to support us. And so it was, in a sense, a startup inside of a a larger organization. Bauer did have a lot of incumbent sort of strengths and advantages as a cataloger with retail stores, omnichannel before we use the term. Yep. And, you know, Bauer along with a number of other competitors really in in many respects kind of, forged the path, trying a lot of different things, and and ended up developing, you know, a a very meaningful, ecommerce business.

Bauer is its own story. You know, what's happened to that brand and so forth is is, unfortunate, I would say, but, what a great learning experience. Commerce famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open source ecommerce platform for mid market and lower enterprise merchants. More than 50,000 clients already process over $25,000,000,000 in annual GMV through Shopware. Find out more about Shopware and the best value in ecommerce at shopware.com.

I don't wanna drain my whole CV here on your No. No. No. Because let me let me interrupt you. Actually, I I don't want to either.

You've been at so many stops, but I do wanna drain on a couple of things. So the fact that the fact that you were you had a you had I don't know if you've taken this observation, but you've had a front row seat to what is some pretty big meaningful changes in the way that business is done. The first being at Eddie Bauer, which is a tier one retail in North America, trying to figure out how to adopt ecommerce. And the AOL versus the .com, that's a big strategic moment in the history of the Internet. So that's kind of point one.

You had a short stint at classmates, which was, by the way, February, which was exactly when people were talking about what's gonna happen with social media and how's this actually, in classmates at the time, was the largest social network online. Hard to hard to imagine. And my role was to kinda product manage, if you will, a couple of new sort of business lines. One would have looked a lot like LinkedIn. One would have looked a lot like Facebook.

The company ended up getting acquired, and it was sort of a media play. So those didn't materialize, but what an interesting opportunity, interesting experience. Absolutely. And then you got which I just I love your background. This is why I wanna spend a little more time.

Then you got some experience at Amazon. And and not that everybody else gets it too because a lot of people have worked at Amazon. You were there in 2005. This is when Jeff Bezos was really talking about your margin is my opportunity, the everything store, really trying to figure out how to make Amazon work. And if I'll and you know this, but they were deeply unprofitable.

Stock market was kinda taking decent care of them, but they were disrupting because there was not a tax on selling products in in The United States. So you had at least a front row seat to a whole bunch of really critical things. Yeah. Indeed. And my my role was, again, sort of a jack of all trades working for the enterprise services division, which was selling the commerce platform to retailers to use to run their .com.

So, obviously, Target, Marks and Spencer, for Toys R Us. Books, Toys R Us, and so forth. Naturally, that didn't quite work out. Worked out by Amazon. Well, it was also the period of time when, Amazon launched the marketplace, which was quite controversial, moving from kind of an auction concept to really an integrated marketplace, which was actually quite controversial at the time within Amazon.

Obviously, proved to be a a masterstroke. And it was also the time when AWS launched. They were actually just on the other side of the wall from me, and we were about the same size little division trying out things, right, at the time. So it was a really interesting time to be there. And then I, went to Expedia where I took on more product management roles with the with the, you know, sort of recreation of the, user experience and the platform at Expedia.

And then I did a startup for a period of time, which is actually how I ended up at Forrester after I Yeah. Was launching a, software business, enterprise software solution that was focused on product information management, actually, as a SaaS product. Others later, were quite successful doing that. In my case, it ended up being a business that was sort of bootstrapped around professional services, wrapped that up, deciding that wasn't really what I wanted to do. Wanted a role that gave me an opportunity to look across the market, take advantage of my experience, perhaps even build a little bit of a personal brand, but even more importantly, kinda survey the market and understand what all is happening.

And, I got introduced to to, Carrie Johnson at Forrester, and that was a tremendous opportunity at a time when, really, even the definition of a commerce platform was still being defined. What needed to be in the platform, what didn't, how how it was gonna work, how that market was gonna shape up. And my experiences up to that point, gave me a really interesting vantage point on that. So it was a it was a it was a great fit for me personally and, it was a great run, that I had at the Forester. Let's unpack that because I actually think there's still this That's when we met too.

Right, Jason? Say that again. That's where we met. Exactly. Yeah.

Exactly. I'll tell actually, I'll talk about that, briefly. So we got, a review. Digital River was the company I was working at the time, and, you had done, a Forrester wave. For those who don't know, there's Gartner who does their Magic Quadrant and Forrester who does the wave.

And these are essentially a place where people who don't spend all of their time and energy thinking about ecommerce for they can go as a trusted resource, read the research, and figure out what the right solution is for their business problem and need. And so Forrester and Gartner in my mind are kind of the gold standard as it relates to the most unbiased is is, for the most part, an unbiased view of the of the of the market. You agree with that? Unbiased? Yeah.

No. I would agree with that. I think, you know, there's a lot of there's a lot to unpack there, but I would absolutely defend that perspective. I'd also say at that time, you know, industry research firms had a huge, role to play. Today, perhaps less so, given kinda the information landscape we all live in today.

But at the time, you know, I'd say, you know, those two firms in particular, had a had a pretty big impact on, technology sourcing and decision making as well as trends and understanding what was happening in the market as a whole. So, yeah, I would agree with that. Well, so a couple of points I wanna talk a little bit about Forrester, because a lot of people rely on these analyst firms, but actually think it is pay to play. And I've been doing this long enough to know that it really truly isn't. There's a membership that companies have with Forrester or Gartner, but the role of the analyst is really disconnected.

Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I think there's a misconception. Yeah. That's what I was referring to as well. I think there is a there is a natural bias, especially amongst those who don't perform up to the expectations they might have, that it's pay to play.

That is not true. But, you know, companies that are investing in time with analysts, which can come from paying for things like advisory days or, you know, other opportunities they have to spend time around the analyst, like, you know, having them at their events and so forth, which does cost some money. Gives them an opportunity to influence the analyst. I think this is still true, certainly true in my day. You know, as an analyst, I did not wanna know how much, any particular vendor was was spending, with with the company, with with the with Forrester.

And I think most analysts would would probably be similar. I really took it very seriously that, my role was to be unbiased. But naturally, you end up forming some relationships, you know, and perhaps, you know, you may try to not be influenced, or, you know, but there's a sync that might happen, right, in the terms of ideas and how you think and how, you know, that, particular vendor may be taking your ideas and running with them, which which might also influence you. So there is a, perhaps, a a more passive, subtle type of influence that can come Yeah. From from that, but it is not pay to play.

And just spending more money with one of these research firms is not going to improve your score or your results. And there's not a quid pro quo there at all. Yep. And I found the exact same. And to your point, you know, one of the things that that companies who do a good job with analyst relations do is they try to meet frequently.

They try to understand what what the agents sorry, what the analysts view the world is going. And those companies that can kinda translate what they heard back into their results and make sure the a the the analysts see it usually do well. But it has more to do with active management and relationship building than than pay to play in my view. Yeah. Agreed.

I think another thing that people need to recognize is that, you know, these research firms are not, you know, really picking winners and losers. They're picking shortlist. You know, you can think of this as a way for, for shortlist to get created, But recognize that today, there's a lot of other ways those shortlists get created. Right? And you actually made a little you sort of misspoke there by saying agent, you know Yeah.

I did ask that. Yourself. But it's like, well, that's actually, you know, perhaps there's some some some truth to that. Right? Because more and more people are gonna be interacting with, you know, answer engines and so forth around b to b software selection and and finding the right solutions.

Or maybe it's not, always gonna be, you know, the larger platforms that that emerge. And there's a whole sort of, you know, aspect to that we can kind of unpack as well in terms of the the market dynamics. But but I think there's, you know, there's there's absolutely a role for the industry analysts, but you can sort of see it in the stock valuations, and the the business results of those various industry research firms. There may be a waning of influence as things continue to evolve. And, frankly, there's also an emergence of independent analysts, and I would count myself as among them, who are using platforms like Substack and others, to disseminate their ideas.

They might have a little different business model attached to it, but, but nonetheless, there's an opportunity there. And then, of course, large consultancies and and so forth have long provided a lot of advisory services as well. And so then you end up with, you know, these these analyst firms and the the quadrants and the waves kind of being a derisking kind of validation component versus maybe influencing the upfront decision making, which is the whole other topic. But yeah. So it's a it's a changing landscape for sure.

Well, one of the things I love to do is to take a look back at previous waves and quadrants and see who the players were. So I'm gonna play a little game I didn't tell you what's coming. Oh, no. You four twenty ten. I think if I looked at your LinkedIn, you played a role.

You were an analyst or a senior analyst or a principal analyst. I can't for sure tell. Who was the leader in 2010, q four, in b to c ecommerce platforms? And then by leader, I mean strongest market presence, strongest ability to execute. I'm I'm gonna get this wrong, but I'm gonna guess ATG.

ATG was number two Okay. Which is now Oracle, which is now being Sunset, and I believe give give me give me some other names. I'll tell you where they're playing. It was either IBM or Hybris then, I'm guessing. Yeah.

IBM was one. Hybris was essentially maybe two or three, and a and Oracle ATG was the third, followed by an upstart called Demandware, who was probably fourth. Mhmm. The only other two names on the whole thing that are still in business is Inner Shop, a German competitor of ours, and Elastic Path, a business that's still still kicking today. Everybody else has either been acquired or or is out of econ.

Mhmm. Isn't that crazy? Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Amazing. World changes. Amazing to think back on. Yeah. So anyway so it's a pretty good segue.

So obviously, the world of analysts are changing dramatically. The value they add is is still there, but it's probably in a different way as you articulated well. Maybe talk a little bit about the democratization of expertise and and what you're specifically doing with your substack and how you're you know, you've got some things going on. Maybe share a little bit about how you're staying engaged in the community and adding value. Yeah.

You know, two and a half years ago well, I think I actually started my substack maybe three years ago. I was you know, I'm a later stage career guy. I had a great run at Bloomreach, but four years in decided I was ready for a change, after leading marketing and strategy at Bloomreach. And I think, you know, a lot of people who are listening to this may have listened to your most recent, episode from the last season with Raj and kinda know the story. It was it was a it was a great outcome.

I actually kinda wanted to get back to my analyst roots, so I'd started writing a substack, to kinda share a a point of view. I made an interesting choice by pairing cocktails with my industry analysis, you know, as a way to give somebody a reason to open up, every, every email, every issue for something. You know, give them something that's interesting, like the the history of a cocktail or or how to think about making it or a technique and so on because I'm a I'm a mixology enthusiast. Fast forward to, to, after leaving Bloomreach, I decided to continue the Substack. But what's really paying the bills is strategic advisory work that I do with the technology community.

So the Substack stack and the podcast are certainly a way for me to get my point of view out there. I do not charge for that. I've got a partner, Bill. Bill and I do not charge for our content. We describe this as narrowcasting.

We are really looking to target, relevance to, to industry leaders in the technology and services market. We're not actually even really overtly trying to communicate to brands, retailers, b to b operators, with our content. It's been very successful, very thankful for that. And it gives us an opportunity to really, you know, put our put a point of view out there, get conversations started, talk about, you know, where we think things may be headed. And this past year, of course, we're writing a lot about kind of a future view, of the technology and services landscape.

You know, kinda looking out a number of years versus what's gonna happen short term, which I think is very difficult to forecast. But if you look a little further ahead, you know, perhaps things actually are a little bit easier to sort of recognize some of the profound shifts and changes that are likely to happen. Yeah. Well, I really enjoyed actually one of your most recent posts on the agentic era, what's coming. And what I like the most about it is you kinda start off by taking a little bit of a look back.

And, obviously, now that you've shared a little bit about your personal experience, you've had a front row seat to what is monumental changes in our industries. You were you were early in marketplaces. You were early in social media. You were early in direct to consumer for these retail brands. You stopped at a mobile company along the way.

I mean, you have a pretty valuable point of view on these things. So maybe share with us a few of the kinda key points that that you hit in that research, of it's cocktails and commerce, by the way, for those of us. We'll put a we'll put a a link in our in our show notes so people can can go and and participate. Yeah. There's there's a lot to unpack, but I'll I'll try to just sort of summarize.

You know, I think the, as you pointed out, I've been fortunate to ride, sort of the ecommerce wave, if you will. And there's been a lot of a lot of different kinda aspects to it, but you can sort of, like, think of that as, like, a multi decade transformation that took place. But, honestly, you could sort of say, hey. Up until, you know, a few years ago, maybe you'd say 2022. You know, things have kinda stabilized and maybe even gotten a little boring, you know, in in some respects.

A lot of the solutions market had commoditized. There wasn't a lot really happening, you know, kind of objectively. And then all of a sudden, right, everything has sort of changed. And now we're in a sense, you know, we swept been swept back out to sea and a new wave is coming. Alright?

And so it's a very interesting time, to remain, you know, active in this market and be thinking about what that, implications of that are. And I think, you know, certainly backing up, you know, if you think about, you know, b to c, naturally, people are very focused on AgenTic Commerce. And when I say AgenTic Commerce, I'm talking about the answer engines and their evolution, you know, researching and buying on behalf of, you know, consumers. And there's a lot of lot of noise and there's a lot of speculation. A lot of people are, you know, very, you know, sort of bullish about that transformation.

I think it's likely to happen over a longer period of time than some are forecasting, but there's no question that the website may never be as important as it was yesterday. And it's not just the answer engines, it's also the impact of marketplaces and social commerce. All in a sense, kind of changing the way in which consumers think about discovery and buying, through, through various channels. And this sort of Agentech capabilities in a sense and orchestration and the evolution of the technology stack, is in a sense facilitating that transformation. So the direct to consumer website, and kinda marketing engines, they're still important and they will remain important, but they may not be as important as they were yesterday as we continue to see this transformation.

Unfortunately, for some, maybe fortunately for others, I think the hyperscale kinda marketplaces are likely to continue to strengthen. We actually see that in the results. You know, and here I'm talking about, obviously, in the West. Right? We're talking about Amazon, we're talking about Walmart, we're talking about Timu, and their impact, even though they've, you know, certainly with the elimination of de minimis had to to to sort of perhaps, do some resets.

But these hyper scaled marketplaces paired with social commerce and paired with the answer engines, this is gonna continue to really transform the b to c kinda landscape. I think that noise around agentic commerce though, in a sense, kinda masks something that that I did write about in that most recent issue, which is the rise of AgenTic Systems and how the tech stack itself is gonna become increasingly AgenTic, with various agents, and AI within different solutions interacting to kind of share data, share intelligence, share outcomes or predictions. We see the rise of new market intelligence kind of solutions playing a role. We see, you know, the rise of what we've called, commerce GPTs, you know, also a rising this is sort of the next evolution of search and product discovery solutions paired with a lot of unstructured content, perhaps even simulation of data to to to improve the models. And then orchestration on the back end, you know, that which is obviously order orchestration, data orchestration to tie, different, you know, agents together.

That evolution, again, we're very early, in that in this sort of move. Not many solutions are truly agentic yet even though they may have added an MCP server. Yeah. But we're gonna see this playing out over the next few years, and we're gonna see that start to happen. And that's gonna enable brands, and retailers and b two b companies to really rethink how they operate, and obviously, you know, perhaps automate some significant portions of it while, doing optimizations, around the front end experience, how they show up in these marketplaces, and actually catalog enrichment, and facilitating a a fairly complex back end fulfillment and supply chain and and promotional environment and so forth.

So that's a that's a big evolution. In b two b, which we haven't really written about yet, but will very soon, we're starting to do that research now, we see that, you know, e commerce has, in a sense, never real and I count myself among those who always was predicting the next big b to b e commerce wave, right, to to to come. And that there was it was just a matter of time, and if b to b companies could just kinda get their head out of the sand, right, they would be investing in a self-service channel, and this is the path forward. And a lot of b to b companies also bought into that and invested, but it's never really materialized. We're still kind of operating, depending on which b to b company you talk to.

They're gonna say something probably between four and ten to 12% of their sales are going through their self-service channel. Far under At most. Yes. Yeah. Far under what they originally may have forecasted or expected or built their plans around.

And I think it's it really relates to the the buying process and how the buyers in b two b actually work and the role of procurement and so forth. And the fact that, like, existing channels like email and the contact center, still play a very big role, in in how they work. Right? And how they wanna want want to, to send in their orders. There's obviously, in many cases, use case expertise and other things that they also wanna validate in the process of placing orders, or it's just more efficient for them to just shoot off an email.

And, and so, with AgenTek now and process orchestration on top of that, we actually see that, there's some solutions emerging that are actually, kind of, you know, what they're terming autonomous commerce, starting to, develop solutions that in a sense might sort of skip self-serviceecom and start to automate a lot of these legacy channels. Yeah, self-service will will also be a thing, but, we're start gonna start to see, Agentic capabilities that automate the legacy channels. We'll also see MCP agent to agent type interactions between procurement systems and selling system selling systems and so forth starting to emerge as well. And where you may see a high degree of automation, and even legacy EDI type interactions really being more highly automated. So in b to b, again, it comes down to the sort of a more agentic systems design.

And in a sense, we may end up kinda skipping, e com and b to b in some respects. Yeah. Kind of like how, you know, a continent such as Africa, you know, sort of skipped laying out, you know, landlines and fiber and went right to mobile. Right? Yep.

Yep. Yep. Skipped bank accounts and went right to digital banking. Yep. Right.

And it's like, oh, this is sort of, like, skipped a generation of of technology, but still had this massive, sort of transformation, in terms of how, you know, people did business. So in b to b, we we see that that trend having a a pretty big impact. And and certainly, process orchestration paired with AI will you know, you kicked off the podcast talking about complex commerce and all the different ways in which, you know, that might play out amongst regulated industries as well as b to b and so forth. And, you know, there's no question, that we're at this point in time where, AI and AgenTic systems are gonna start, you know, having a a profound impact. Automating, improving customer experience for both human, but also agent, here over the next, say, two to five years.

And so we're at this point in time where the existing landscape, just like you look back at an old wave report, the landscape that we, we're we were sort of looking at in 2022, you know, will look dramatically different, you know, three to five years from now and probably a completely different different set of patterns and players are likely to emerge, you know, over the course of that time. You're you're exactly right. That's actually part in part why I do it. A lot of people think there's no you know, like, let's just say Shopify is so dominant and they're so good in these kind of simple use cases for e commerce. Well, in X numbers of years, there's going to be another paradigm shift because we all thought that IBM, Oracle, and whomever were gonna be unbeatable ten years ago.

And so the paradigm shift will happen again. That's the ultimately inevitable. Now I do wanna pick up on one thing. So so obviously you do cocktails and commerce as a fun way to drive value to the community, to have a conversation, you narrow cast. But you and Bill also have a business, Strategy EM, where you go off and consult businesses to really think about what's next, how to build the right stack.

Can you talk a little bit about that value prop, what Strategy EM is, why you're doing it, and and how people can get in touch with you? Yeah. We have a we have a funny little website. If you do go to our website, definitely go to the about us page. That'll give you a senses to our vibes.

Oh, no. But, look, we we, most of our business comes to us through word-of-mouth and the the network. We work with companies really around defining and clarifying how they're kinda going to market and how they're communicating. We, kinda go back to first principles and like to focus first on the problem, so they may have a an interesting technology solution kind of market opportunity. It's not just early stage companies that we work with though, we also work with large established public companies, who may be trying to wrestle with having a multi product value proposition and kinda having a kinda lack of clarity on what they stand for, or need to evolve, you know, how they're communicating to the market or their product strategy and so forth, in the face of AI.

And we do advisory services focused on, yeah, defining and clarifying the problem, the value proposition, and the product and go to market strategy, for these organizations. And we've been very fortunate. We've had very steady, stream of work. No real hiccups other than, you know, perhaps one that, that we created, by taking a little bit of a a a a break, late last year. And, it's been it's been terrific.

The, the variety, the kind of, challenges the different organizations are facing, the competitive landscape, and the evolution of the sort of technology that we've been talking about here makes it a very interesting time, to be doing this kind of work. And we, you know, deploy a number of different kinds of frameworks to kind of explore, how to, how to help these organizations, reach customers, demonstrate value, and and have an impact. Amazing. And so if people wanna get in touch with you, how do you recommend? Go to the about us page and take a picture smoking a cigarette and something like that.

It wasn't lit, just to be clear. Brian at Strategy Em. That's, strategyem,uh,.com. It's, the plural of strategy. Right?

Stratagem, and, or LinkedIn. Those would be the ways to get get in touch with us. Ryan, I really, really appreciate you doing me a favor coming on the pod. I I just wanted our listeners to really appreciate the journey you've been on and the things you've seen. You're a little bit like Forrest Gump, kinda having a a seat at the table at a lot of major change inside of our industry.

So thank you. I appreciate it. Well, thank you very much for having me on, Jason. Be well.