Transcript - Kevin Thompson

Joshua Williams: Retail Revolution is a special, limited podcast created specifically for "Retailing and Service Design," a unique course that is part of the Fashion Management graduate program at Parsons School of Design in New York City. Each episode features in depth conversations with guest experts in omni-channel retailing with myriad perspectives: technology, consumer engagement, data analytics, merchandising, and more. We pay special attention to the short- and long- term challenges and implications of COVID-19 and potential opportunities to rethink retail's future. Retail Revolution is produced by Joshua Williams and hosted by Christopher Lacy, both are Assistant Professors in the School of Fashion at Parsons.

Christopher Lacy: Welcome to Retail Revolution podcast, where we discuss all things pertaining to retail and service design. I'm your host, Christopher Lacy. And with me today is chief brand strategist, Kevin Thompson. He has been named to Forbes as the "CMO Next" List of 2018, and has written multiple articles on the ideas and strategies around consumer engagement: some of which include how tech can interrupt the luxury customer experience, how to use psychology to refresh the rebrand experience, and why consumer research needs to be your top priority.

Thank you so much, Kevin Thompson for joining us today. 

Kevin Thompson: No problem. It's great to be here. Thanks. 

Christopher Lacy: So, Kevin, I'm going to kick it off to you. I want you to tell our listeners about you and your career trajectory because it's quite an interesting story. 

Kevin Thompson: It is an interesting story. That's a good way to put it. I think it's been a curious career path for me, and I think I I've benefited from a wide variety of experiences, in a number of different fields, that sort of helped me propel through different roles. I'm Canadian originally. I finished my masters in Vancouver and I was recruited to come to New York City just a few months before September 11th.  I arrived in New York City and started working for a Gates Foundation think tank, that was part of the New York City Board of Ed. And it was a fascinating time, I think a traumatic time, of course with my 11 happening, and I was asked to join The New York City Board of Ed at a time when they were trying to reimagine what education meant in New York City.

And to look at a big failing institution and try to reimagine the value proposition for the Board of Ed and for schools like Morris High School, where I was stationed for the first year in the South Bronx, which had, you know, a 70% dropout rate and a shockingly bad daily attendance. It was a difficult time.

And, you know, really, I was thinking a lot about how to manage the message that would convince students to come to school every day. What was the value proposition in coming to high school for kids who really didn't believe that it was worth their time or worth their energy. And that's what I think is most interesting about my career path, that sort of being the common thread that has stuck through moving away from the education field. I left to start my own business and I opened a designer men's wear boutique in Soho. That transitioned into an opportunity to join Gucci, just shortly after Tom Ford had departed the brand and they were rethinking about brand value and brand messaging and understanding consumers and building a customer experience think tank that didn't exist before for a very storied luxury brand. But I think the brand was about 84 years old when I joined. I moved from there to Moncler, another storied brand from Europe that has this very cult-like following and customer loyalty that is almost unparalleled in my experience.

And then another luxury retail brand, I was at Barneys New York as head of customer experience and development there. Building out the thinking behind building relationships with consumers, and why that is a value and why that matters now. And I think particularly, I'm sure this is something to touch on in the discussion, why that is a particular importance and immediacy in the current environment. 

And then I stepped away from luxury retail, sort of. I was recruited into a role at Simon property group, which is one of the largest REITs in the world. They own shopping centers. And again, it was this sort of critical time for shopping malls. Thinking about the role they play with consumers, whether they're still valued the way that they were, you know sort of in the heyday of this sixties, seventies, eighties, when the shopping mall was functioned as almost community center and gathering place for people of all ages and all demographics.

And we launched Simon as a consumer facing brand, which was new. It was new in the industry and a challenging undertaking. And then I moved from there to residential real estate and I stepped back into the luxury space; a space that I I'm probably most comfortable with because these are consumers I've been talking to and thinking about, and researching for a long time now, for well over 15 years. And I joined Sotheby's International Realty as the Chief Marketing Officer and spent the last three years there. So, yeah, a curious journey. 

Christopher Lacy: And a fun one. 

Kevin Thompson: Yeah, it has been fun. I think it's been really interesting to me when I look back and I think about those common threads of what are the things that sort of carry through.

And I have this history of joining companies when they're at a turning point and trying to reimagine or think about where they need to go in the future; and how they interact with consumers; and the role that relationships and loyalty; and the value proposition; and an understanding of brands, you know sort of DNA; and the core messaging behind why a brand exists. And so, it's been fun to do that in a number of different industries. 

Christopher Lacy: Did you ever think, you know a boy in Canada, from a farm...

Kevin Thompson:  I grew up on a dairy farm in Southern Ontario. Did I think that I would land at the CMOs Sotheby's international Realty now?

No, I didn't even know what Sotheby's international Realty was. 

Christopher Lacy: Isn't that funny? I was thinking about because I was the same way. Well honestly, I think I thought I would be performing somewhere on a stage.  I knew that I liked retail, but I didn't think that this would really become my career and understanding why people behave the way they do, would be of such interest to me.

Kevin Thompson: And yet, you know, performin g as a teacher in front of a classroom is very much performance on a type of stage, I think, a more serious stage. But yeah, I think the curiosity for me has always been how people interact and why they interact the way they do and the choices they make. And, you know, when I went to university in Southern Ontario for my bachelor's degree, and I studied social geography, which was really the study of how people move around the planet and why they do and where they go certain places and how their behavior changes as they adapt to new environments. And all of that makes sense to me now to be in the position that I'm in now and having started thinking about that so long ago. 

Christopher Lacy: Well, when you think about that and considering your career and how you've navigated through it, And we're looking at a luxury consumer or any consumer, what have you seen in the last five years that you were like now that's a big shift? 

Kevin Thompson: Well, I mean, of course the biggest shift is the role that e-commerce plays in the retail space and luxury brands. And you know this we were both at Gucci when e-commerce was launching there.

This was a brand that, like I said, had been around for 85, 86 years when they had to launch a website, you know, they're only interaction with consumers have been in person up to that point. People coming into the stores for this coveted product that they aspire to own so badly.

And, you know, the transactions themselves were not complicated.  Gucci had the “it bag” that season. And so, people would run into the stores and almost throw their money down and grab the handbags and run out the door. We didn't even have to ask them their names. You know, it was simple and straightforward.

And I think companies like Amazon turned that world upside down and all of a sudden you had brands that were connecting with consumers in their homes and getting to know them before they ever set foot in your store. So, all of a sudden, if you're a brand that has four decades relied on the in-store experience that brick and mortar experience and you hadn't even invested in that. 

When I joined Barneys New York, the role of Head of Customer Experience didn't exist. It wasn't a thing. It wasn't a conversation that they had had prior to my role being created. So, there was no conversation around really getting to know consumers and finding out how to play a more influential role in their lives outside of the four walls of your brick and mortar stores. So, e-commerce, you know, and of course this started over a decade ago. I think in the last five years, what has changed so dramatically is the speed at which brands have been able to influence people's lives.

I mean, you look at the rapid rise of brands like Uber, for example, and their ability to come in and disrupt an industry that had operated the same way for a very, very long time. So, I think that the acceleration there, and the idea that all of these brands now and the brands that I've worked for, are really trading in time as a commodity time in front of the consumer.

That is the commodity that these brands are transacting in. And I think that is a different world from, you know, 10 years ago, certainly 20 years ago. 

Christopher Lacy: I want to unpack something that you mentioned where you said the idea of customer experience. And now we talk about it so much, you know, we've been able to abbreviate it, it's CX.I mean everyone is like, what's the customer's experience, what's the customer's engagement. But you make a point. I mean, when you and I were back at Gucci, we couldn't have told you some of our top clients and we've talked about it when you got to Barney's. It was very much the same way.

Kevin Thompson: Yeah.

Christopher Lacy: Obviously, the recession changed that because when that 2008, 2009 recession happened there was a desire, like, you know, everyone thought, Oh, we don't know who our clients are. We need to start redirecting and leveraging CRM information, really looking at customer experience. 

Kevin Thompson: Yeah.

Christopher Lacy: I want to ask you, when you think about that process, what was the most challenging part of a process of going, we need to implement a true customer experience program? 

Kevin Thompson: So, the hardest part was that we had no data. You touched on it, when I got to Barney's, I know this was after we were starting to recover from that downturn 2010, 2011, and I took a look at the top 30% of, shoppers at Barneys New York store.

So, these were customers that were spending $25,000 a year or more in one of our stores. And for over, I think it was close to half of them, we didn't have a phone number for them. We didn't, we couldn't call them and ask them how they were doing. A sales associate couldn't pick up a phone and say, Hey, how are you doing? I have some new arrivals. What can I do for you? How can I create a better brand experience for you? We couldn't even reach out to them. We didn't know, like you said, who they were. And so, building a customer experience in the absence of that kind of data is very, very challenging.

We really had to start from square one and say, okay, let's get the data first. And then we have to start reaching out. We have to equip our sales associates with the skills to do that because obviously if they didn't have the phone numbers, they weren't doing it. They weren't building a relationship outside of that customer walking into the store and being physically present with them.

So this was a whole new mindset and that was immensely challenging. And this is something that has been common throughout my career path, too. I've landed at brands that have been doing business the same way for a very long time and changing that mindset can be incredibly challenging. What we were trying to do at Barneys under Mark Lee and Daniella Vitale direction was shift the culture of a company that had been doing business the same way for 75 years.

And that's a very, very hard thing to do. I think you need leadership buy in, it's essential. You need to understand what designing your customer journey is going to look like. That, you know, we're all talking about CX right now, but I think the conversation for many brands is still in the very early stages. Everyone knows it matters, I'm skeptical about how many brands are really well equipped to build an effective and meaningful customer journey map. I think most are challenged to do so. There's a really interesting conversation that's happening now about the gap between experiential data and organizational data. So now that companies have, we have, e-commerce and we're connecting with consumers on their mobile devices and we're planting pixels on their phone and we're tracking their behavior.

We're capturing all this data in almost a “big brother-y” kind of way. So, we have all of this organizational data, but we don't have a lot of the true experiential data. There are very few brands in my experience that have sat down with consumers and said, tell us about what your experience with our brand is. Tell us what you believe our brand, how you believe our brand brings value to your life. 

Christopher Lacy: I love that you used the term, how does our brand bring value to your life? Because, you know, I would say one of the biggest challenges I'm noticing with some existing brands and even with startups that are coming into this is they're very product focused.

And so it's like, yeah, we make product and we sell it. But the other part is, is what is your mission? And what are your values? And those have not always been established. And they're not always, you know, in a world of transparency, it's odd to me if that's not readily available for consumers to see.

Kevin Thompson: I think it speaks to that gap. There was a survey done not very long ago and forgive me I'm not sure who did it, but it was something like 82% of CEOs believe that their brand delivers an amazing customer experience but only 16% of consumers believe that brands do that. There's this massive gap. I think there are still a lot of brands that are out there saying, well, if we make good product, then people will just want it.

And I think that that's not necessarily the case anymore. I think there are great companies. There are companies that have delivered. Solid reliable, dependable, products that are falling by the wayside now that are declaring bankruptcy. Or you look at a brand like Sears that had such a lock on middle America for so many years. They had Kenmore, they had Craftsmen. If you were in a home where your parents had Kenmore appliances, you grew up, you bought Kenmore appliances. If your dad or your mom had had Craftsmen tools, you grew up, you bought Craftsman tools. And I think they had such a lock on it, that they stopped really talking to consumers about that value proposition or they never really bothered to in the beginning. They just said, we're here, we're dependable ergo, you need us and that's not the case anymore. 

So, that goes back to this idea that brands are trading in time as a commodity, right? If you're not in front of consumers reminding them that they need you, or that you can help improve the lives they're living via, you know, a really effective understanding of your customer journey and understanding the touch points, and where to reach them and when, and how often. If you're not doing that, you can make the best product in the world and no one's going to care. 

Christopher Lacy: When you talk about customer journey and really looking at your organization and it's that time to have an analysis done, and you and I have done this work and many times I think we could probably do it in our sleep. Now, when you look at analysis, what are the most important things that that analysis needs to say about the company in its current state to form what the strategy is going to be?

Kevin Thompson: So, I think you have to start with an understanding of why your company exists? Why your brand exists? What is the reason? Are you doing something that is singularly unique in the market? Are you doing it in a way that no one else has done it before? Are you doing it at a better price? You can do exactly what your competitor is doing, but you offer greater value just in terms of price. You know that's not often the conversation in the luxury space.

We're really talking about how we deliver something that is extraordinarily unique to consumers that they simply believe no one else can get. And so that they're going to have something that is unavailable to others and they attribute value to that. So, I think that understanding that "why messaging" is really, really key. You have to, you know, sit down with your stakeholders with your senior leadership team and you say, why are we all here?

You know, when I was at Sotheby's International Realty, I did that exercise. And it was interesting because when we ask some of our SLT, why we exist as a brand, they said to buy and sell homes. And I disagree. Because it has to be more than that. If it's just to buy and sell homes, anyone can do that.

You can buy and sell a home from your living room now. You can transact as an eye buyer and you can sell your home in a matter of days. And you know, the money's in your account in less than a week and off you go. It has to be more than that. If we're going to ask clients to pay the highest commissions in the industry, for agents to do the heavy lift that is understanding the Sotheby's international Realty brand, there has to be more to it.

The next step is, you have to take that message to your consumers or to who you believe your targeted consumers are and ask them if it's real. Does that sound true? Does it ring true to them? And get their, you know, their response is vital. And at the end of the day, you can choose to listen to it or not.

But I believe you have to ask. I think that consumer research is something that brands should be doing all the time. It's not a one and done thing. You can't do focus groups three years ago and have that guide your strategy today because consumer behavior is ever changing. 

Christopher Lacy: I agree with that. You know, I think even more so now is understanding what the consumer's behavior is going to be. Because we were speaking with Brandon Roe the other day, who like you really has leaned into what the luxury consumer is about their behavior. And I asked him, how do you see luxury consumers changing as we navigate through this pandemic? And I'd love your thoughts on how that'll change? But we've redefined what luxury means also over the last five to 10 years. So, will that change? And how will this consumer change? 

Kevin Thompson: Yeah, it is going to change. I think the change, the first wave of the change started, you know, five, six, seven years ago when we saw luxury consumers becoming really concerned about the value, they are receiving for the dollars they were spending. You know they were still spending at very high levels.

You know, those Barney's shoppers that were spending $25,000 or more, we're still spending that. And every time we delivered on our customer experience promise, they spent exponentially more each time they visited the store, which is phenomenal and was telling us we were doing the right thing.

But the level of expectation from the consumer was that we were going to deliver more than we had ever done before. So, if you were a Barney's New York credit card holder, when I arrived at company, you got discounts using your card. You know, there were promotional days there.

It was very discount focused. And I thought that was misdirected because we were talking to consumers who were spending tens of thousands of dollars. When they visited our stores, they don't care about a 10% discount. They don't care about 5% discount it. So, we had to look really carefully about what was driving their behavior and what we heard was I want more from the brand. I love Barneys. I'm passionate about Barneys, New York; I want them to be a part of how I'm living my life. 

So, I think that was the first wave. I think what we're going to see now, what the current pandemic is doing is causing people to think more critically. And consumers are really digging into brand behavior and holding them accountable in a way that is unprecedented.

I mean, if you look at the sort of cancel culture that we're in now, where if brands make a mistake, and it happens in the public sphere and it happens online, the willingness of consumers to band together and ban those brands from their lives is really extraordinary. That's just that we've just never seen this before. 

So, I think that the sense of urgency around. Getting the messaging right, connecting with consumers, being genuine about your connection and what you believe you provides them as value is more important than ever. So, I think this is like part two of that evolution. The timeline is shorter, the urgency is greater.

And we're going to see, when we start to come out of this pandemic, hopefully over the course of the next several months, a wave of bankruptcies in the retail space, a huge wave and it's unavoidable. You know, I think these are generally companies that we're headed down this path anyway, but it has accelerated and shortened the timeline.

So, companies that were on the verge of collapse, a brand like JC penny is teetering. If I was a betting man, I would say they're unlikely to survive this. There's going to be a huge wave of bankruptcies. Now that's going to open up space for exciting new entrepreneurs. And new brands and new companies that are thinking differently and thinking customer first and experience first.

And I think that's exciting. It is. It's unfortunate that through part one of this behavioral change that started happening a number of years ago, a lot of brands sort of closed their eyes and said, no, we will just continue to do business the same way, we don't need to change. And the whole industry changed around them. 

Christopher Lacy: Hmm. That's very true. I love that. You said that the whole industry changed around them. Then it brings to question, are department stores even still relevant and are they important? This idea of, I go into a space and I'm engaging with tons of different products from tons of different brands. And you and I have worked multi-vendor and we've worked mano brand. I've always said, I have an affinity for mano brand because I always liked how the service level was in a mano brand. I think that was always just me. I like that clear direction. 

So, what do you see as kind of the fate of the department store you know, as we move on?

Kevin Thompson: In the news over the past couple of days about, about Neiman Marcus is sad. It's not shocking. The role of the department store has been changing for years now. And I think, you know, again, going back to my experience at Barneys New York, what Barneys did well for so long was that they tried to be in the middle of that. They, they were not mono brands. But yet the Barney's New York experience was singularly unique in the department store sort of realm.

they didn't do shop-in-shops. They weren't, you know, a lot of department stores that you go into now it's like walking into just a smaller version of a shopping mall because everybody has their own licensed boutique and their own branding, their own staff, their own style. And so you're actually, what what's happening is, you're walking into these stores that have created dozens of mini little customer experiences that are all somewhat different because they're all, you know, Dior staff are trained by Dior corporate. Gucci staff are trained by Gucci corporate. And they have their own selling ceremony.

They have their own brand experience. And so, you lose this ability to connect meaning to the larger brands, like a Neiman Marcus or a Saks Fifth Avenue. And that's risky territory because when, when times are tough and things like pandemics happen, you know, and they will happen again. If you have not built a meaningful connection, consumers are easily swayed by other brands that are willing to step in and say, I will play this role for you.

Christopher Lacy: As we come out of this pandemic as well, when we consider the sheer size of a lot of our big name department stores that we've come to know over the years, I think of myself going back into, you know, as we go back into physical retail spaces. Do I want to be in a space where that many people can be in it?

Like I find myself thinking, you know, from an operational perspective, from the customer experience perspective, what is this going to look like for those stores as they reopen? Because it's a big undertaking, right?

it is. And I think, I think we're going to see as a shift in design thinking. You're absolutely right.

People are going to be more conscious about being in large spaces with lots of people and how that makes them feel. And so, I think we're going to start to see these spaces designed to allow for a greater sense of intimacy and privacy and, you know, brick and mortar is not going away. Right. But you know, Amazon and the big players, you know, for a long time, I heard everyone saying and there were all kinds of headlines: CNN, about how brick and mortar is dead. You know, shopping malls are over. They're not. They needed to evolve, and they weren't, they were a little bit slow in that the vast majority of shopping pandemic or no is still going to happen in physical spaces. We still have to go to the grocery store regardless of what's happening right now.

So, the stores that are able to build experiences that make us feel safe and secure, which are the primary. You know, that's what's most important, right now, today. Those stores will continue to have customers line up. They might line up six feet apart, but they're still going to line up to go into those stores.

I think we're going to see this design thinking change; I think. And again, that goes back to what we touched on earlier. Understanding your customer journey is vital if you're going to change the physical space that they come into and understanding what is meaningful to them is really vitally important.

Now in the U S there's sort of an added layer of challenge on top of that because we have too many stores. There's about 37 square feet of retail space per capita in the United States. It's the highest in the world. Number two, there's a tie for number two Australia and Canada and they have about I think I just around 20 square feet per capita, we built too much. Right. There are too many shopping malls. Are shopping mall is going to die completely? No, of course not. You look at Woodbury Common, you know, a Simon property that was part of my portfolio. It's the number three tourist destination in New York City, which is crazy to me because it's not even in New York City.

Right. 

Kevin Thompson: It's 45 minutes North of New York City. And yet the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building and Woodbury Commons are the top three traffic drivers for tourists in New York City. If you get the experience right, they will come in droves and Woodbury is the perfect example of that. 

Christopher Lacy: So, I want to talk about, you know, with you, because you've worked with directly in marketing. But when you were in your role of customer experience, the same as me, we were actually part of the operations team, right. And I always find that interesting because what we did, if you think about what we did, in some organizations that really would have been in HR and other organizations it would have been in marketing. But for us, we were an operation, which I have to say was quite beneficial to us. 

Kevin Thompson: Yeah, I agree. I think what was great about that, and we're talking about the organization at Barneys here. So, I think what was great about that SLT was that we were also very closely tied to the marketing team.

So, we weren't operating in silos. We were partners with marketing. So, if they were doing promotions, they were relying on us to provide definition and build out the customer experience around or promotion to help understand. The opportunities for success or the challenges that they're going to run into.

So, I think this is something that is changing a lot right now, for many, many brands. You know, certainly my experience at Sotheby's International Realty, you know, IT lived under me as Chief Marketing Officer, which I was kind of surprised by when I first arrived at the organization. Because I had never seen that before.

And driving traffic to the website was the top priority for the brand. because that is what Sotheby's international Realty is. It's 50,000 book your properties from 72 countries around the world listed online. You have to go online to see them. So, it made sense that it was.

The core focus of marketing and where the bulk of my budget was allocated. However, you know, I also was intimately partnered with the operations team and worked with them every single day. There wasn't any, there was never a conversation that happened in the absence of some sort of operational input. So I think a lot of these SLT roles are getting redefined. Now there are companies that are doing away with the old definition of Chief Marketing Officer and creating chief customer officers. 

Christopher Lacy: Umhmm.

Kevin Thompson: And, you know, the traditional role of COO is evolving now too. And it's a little more hands-on and connected to brand and understanding brand value.

Look at the end of the day, the brand is the most is the greatest asset you have because that's what you use to influence behavior. And so, those things have to be sort of stitched together now in a way that they were not before. 

Christopher Lacy: So, as we see that, you know, organizations are making a true effort to make sure there are no silos.

And we understand it's much better when these cross departmental functions are working together, especially when it comes to data and leveraging and appropriately. Do you think that we'll see more collaborations between brands and other brands is as we move through this pandemic? And the reason I bring that up is when we look at how China has navigated the pandemic. You have Budweiser working with DJs to create in house parties, for people who are in self isolation. You know, and they realized, okay, we need to target this group of people because people who were going out to bars were the ones who were drinking our beer and how do we get them? So, let's have a DJ, DJ, and then we send people here. 

Kevin Thompson: Or how do they, as a brand, maintain relevance in their lives if they're not going to bars anymore for a while, right? 

Christopher Lacy: Right.

Kevin Thompson: What role does our brand play if they're all staying at home? 

Christopher Lacy: Yes, I think that's gotta be really top of mind for them. 

Kevin Thompson: That's why I do think you're right.

I think it will drive further collaboration. I mean that had started already, right. We had a lot of brands and certainly in the luxury space, you know, there were lots of partnerships with young up and coming designers and creative thinkers and people who are looking at the experience differently because their goal is to tap the new clients, right.

To feed the top of the funnel. The new Gucci shopper, who is going to be the new LV, Louis Vuitton shopper. The new Dior shopper. Because these are big story brands that are doing very well. If you look at a company like Chanel, that's doing better than it's ever done in the history of the brand currently.

And you, they've been very, very thoughtful and critical about partnering with artists and musicians and DJs, to your point. And I think those collaborations will continue. They'll come and they're going to happen more and more often because brands are trying to. Again, we're playing in time as a commodity, right?

So, if we can partner and share our time that's to a mutual benefit. You know, I think the thoughtful, critical analysis of who you partner with and how, and when, you know, there needs to be, or then there will be more emphasis placed on that as well. You have to think very thoughtfully about making it feel genuine and sincere. Because if you're partnering with another brand just to get in front of consumers that you think should be buying your product, and that's the sole purpose behind the partnership, that's going to feel pretty flat to the consumer and you know, the worst thing you can do to the modern consumer and millennial and gen Z is.

Leave them feeling manipulated. 

Christopher Lacy: I think manipulated is the best word that could be used. 

Kevin Thompson: Yeah. They know how valuable their time is. Right. They're they're on their devices, 24/7. If you're wasting their time, they're very quick to dismiss you. So you know that you, you need to be, and I'm saying you as brands, brands need to be very careful not to do that.

Christopher Lacy: So, when we talk about how brands engage or are engaging with the global community and how we have before and now looking at this particular situation, do you think there's going to be the rise of local culture? Because we don't really see ourselves being able to travel so much. So, what do you kind of see in the behavior? Because a lot of the US luxury market came from foreign countries. How do you see this kind of reshaping? How we all are engaging with our ecosystems on a local level? 

Kevin Thompson: I mean my hope is, you know, I tend to be optimistic maybe even somewhat naively. So, my hope is that there is a greater focus on sustainability and thoughtfulness and, you know, the environmental impact of our behavior coming out of this. I think for a lot of people, there's just a greater sense of we're pushing things to the limit collectively, as humans on this planet. And if we want, if we are going to continue to want these beautiful things and these luxury products and to aspire to live a life a certain way. Can we, you know, how do we sustain that, so that this remains for our children?

And it's very, you know, I think if you think back to sort of the rampant consumerism of the eighties, there was no thought put into, or very little thought put into where products were coming from. How they were manufactured? The chemicals used; how were they were disposed of what the impact of all of that on the environment?

And that's not very long ago. And I think that that has changed dramatically. This idea of sustainability in the luxury space in fashion in general, because fashion is a massive global polluter. 

You know, how do we shift, how these goods are made? I still want the beautiful things that I've always wanted, but I'm thinking more now about what goes into making them.

And am I willing to spend my hard-earned dollars with a brand that is not thinking the same way that I am. So, I think that sustainability is we're going to see a huge uptick in that conversation that had started anyway. I mean, if you look at, you know, local, and I was having a conversation yesterday about farm to table. And we're talking about personal chefs going into luxury homes and preparing meals for people, and that's been around for a while now. But now the request from the consumer or the client is, I want, you know, a chef that does only farm to table or non-GMO or macrobiotic or, you know, whatever it is. And the expectation is that they can deliver. So, it's sort of, it's like next level thinking in the realm of sustainability and smart practices from business. 

Christopher Lacy: I don't think we could have ended on a, on a better thought the world.

Kevin Thompson: That's right. Let's leave it there. 

Christopher Lacy: It really is. It's like that. And that it really is where we are. And I think, you know, that's how we have to think about it, you know, to your point, the sustainability and the localization of things are going to be the more so important. Because you know, generation Z, who's experiencing this right now. This is, I would imagine, far more impactful on them than it is on me. Because I've lived certain experiences in my life. I've graduated and went to prom and...

Current experience is shaping their behavior in the way that, you know, our behavior was shaped in our late teens and twenties.

This period of time is shaping behavior that they're going to carry through for the rest of their lives. So it's happening at a very formative time, which means their approach to all of this, you know, the hard wiring, or the portion of the hard wiring that happens sort of cognitively during that period is going to stay for the rest of their lives.

 That is different for us. And certainly, you know, when you think of our parents' generation. When I arrived at that Simon property group, and I said, Hey, let's, let's think about some new ways to do business. And they said, no, no, no. A lot of people said no, we've been really successful 35 years. We don't want to change anything. We just want to keep making the same amount of money. And I knew that was going to be impossible, but it was really hard to convince some people of that. Many people, because they just had not known anything about that. 

well, Kevin, I have to tell you, this has been a great conversation. I'm glad you made time for us today. 

Kevin Thompson: No problem. 

Christopher Lacy: For our listeners. How could they reach out to you in the future and know what's happening in your world or get advice on anything? 

Kevin Thompson: If you want to know more about me or see anything, you mentioned some of the articles that I've published at the top of this conversation. You can go to cheapbrandbuilder.com.

that's me. That is my digital portfolio and my contact information is there as well. So cheapbrandbuilder.com is the best way to reach out. You can just ask questions. You can take a look the work that I've done. There are the articles. I publish the video content. The digital content that I've created over the last several years, is all there as well. So, feel free. 

Christopher Lacy: Thank you so much, Kevin. There, we have it. Kevin Thompson, Chief Brand Strategist, joining us today. Thank you. And I hope you have a great rest of the day. 

Kevin Thompson: Thank you. Great conversation.

Joshua Williams: Thank you for listening to this episode of Retail Revolution. A very special thank you to everyone who has helped make this podcast possible, our guests, our students and fellow faculty at Parsons School of Design, especially in such an extraordinary and unprecedented time. Our theme music was composed by Spencer Powell. 

Be well and stay tuned for our next episode.

www.RetailRevolutionPodcast.com