Marc Adelman [00:00:05]:
Hey there. My name is Mark Adelman and welcome to the e commerce collective, brought to you by GM two, where I sit down with some of the best and brightest people in e commerce and hang for a little bit. Maybe we learned something. I know I will. So come on and hang with us. Today. We are hanging with Mick McCarthy. Mick, you've been shaping brands as a chief design officer for decades.
Marc Adelman [00:00:30]:
You're a serial entrepreneur, and now you're going out on a journey, founding your own agency onward, that brings a wealth of experience, your vibrant point of view, and a passion for making the digital more human and compelling. You have a healthy obsession, a contagious obsession with making brand experiences more human. What does that mean to you? Tell us about that point of view a little bit.
Mick McCarthy [00:01:07]:
If you're in the industry, it's about platforms. And these are the funniest words, too. Platforms, partners, merchants, storefronts and customers. Wow, that sounds really exciting. Right? Let's talk about platforms and partners and what is a merchant? Well, a merchant is a brand. What is a storefront? A storefront is experience. What is a customer? Customer's human. It's a person.
Mick McCarthy [00:01:32]:
It's people. So why don't we stop thinking in that order of platform, partner, merchant, storefront, customer, and let's start thinking about people and brands and experiences and platforms. So why don't we start with people? Why don't we start with understanding people, doing research and finding out what they need from their brands and their brand's products, and start developing ideas around those people?
Marc Adelman [00:02:02]:
Yeah, I think that that kind of point of view is necessary to cut through and kind of get to the heart of what needs to be great for a brand. Right. They need that compelling experience.
Mick McCarthy [00:02:15]:
Yeah. They need to understand what people want, what people need, the behaviors of what's compelling them to make decisions, to create products, create experiences, tell stories around those products and those purposes, which I think is something where we like to start with it onward. And doing that kind of ethnographic research or an understanding of customer or within the space or sentiment towards creative or sentiments towards the vertical in which these brands are working with and how they work with other brands and buy their products can generate new knowledge and insights into brands that's going to inform those design and creative decisions, features and functions and technology as well, like developing a real human centered roadmap.
Marc Adelman [00:02:59]:
Research is a huge part of, I think, your approach, and it relies upon that northern star of the customer, the voice of the customer. So I know that that's. So as you're kind of shaping onward now in the team, like, tell us a little bit of your approach and how you bring research into those important steps of bringing brands to life.
Mick McCarthy [00:03:22]:
Like, always taking into consideration the people in the audience of how you deliver the information, how they want to hear it, where they're at and how they're behaving to do that.
Marc Adelman [00:03:33]:
Everyone wants to hear a story, right? Everyone wants to hear a story. And not just all these facts.
Mick McCarthy [00:03:37]:
Tell a story. Don't show a service blueprint. Show that to their UX designer or their technologist. Don't show it to the C suite. They don't want to hear it. I love it, but, yeah. And that onward is that onward is like, we really want to find, you know, we want to find brands. And we're really in the business of, like, sometimes disrupting brands, thinking internally and helping them educate that there are ways to differentiate outside of, you know, aesthetic driven, creative or emails or plugging in a new, the best in class new review system is like, by going out and talking to your customers, seeing what they really want and what they need.
Mick McCarthy [00:04:17]:
It's very simple. You just ask a client, have you ever met your customer or talked to your customer? They'll say, we do surveys and we look at reread reviews. I said, actually, have you ever talked to your customer? And most of them say no. And they said, well, I also say, how would you like to meet your customer for the first time? And they're like, well, what does that mean? And I explained what user experience research is and how that drives strategy. And it can drive strategy not only for the immediate goal of what they might have hired us to do a website design, but it has lasting effect across all channels related to creative and experience, including retail, that it draws down into. So you get the value add for just, you get the value add in the commerce space when you're thinking about commerce of the redesign replatform world, but with onward having research strategy and kind of design thinking and creative at the forefront, driving all of our design and development decisions, any customer anywhere, on any platform at any time, becomes a potential candidate for our services. And solving a problem for them as.
Marc Adelman [00:05:22]:
A user is just going through that experience. It's brand storytelling. Product storytelling. Storytelling comes to the forefront. What do you think? Essential ingredients. When you're helping a brand, let's say they have a very standard, uh, type of presentation of brand and product, and that's a gap for them. Right. Um, tell us a little bit about, you know, how you try and tell that client about what brand storytelling is and the importance of it.
Mick McCarthy [00:05:55]:
Yeah, well, there's two types of brands. There's brands that are actually rooted and have a story organically or authentic story. I use a lot of quotes because I think these words are funny. And then there's brands that don't. They need to back a story into it. You know, somewhere in that methodology, you can pull a real, you can pull a story out, but it's a lot harder and it's somewhat fabricated. And those are the ones that I think, in the end sometimes win out because they sometimes have, you know, more money behind them potentially, you know, to. For marketing dollars, for eyeballs, more for celebrities, for partnerships and personalization, things like this.
Mick McCarthy [00:06:45]:
And those are, those are great, too. We do a lot of those. It's just a different type of work and it's a different type of emotionality that you have to put into the work to create that story.
Marc Adelman [00:06:57]:
Brand storytelling is something that I think you and I can talk a long time about. It's something that, like, it just drives you into anyone who's interested in the entrepreneurial journey, right, whether they're watching a podcast, reading a book, whether it's in a movie, whatever, right? Like, understanding the inspiration of that, all of that comes to life in brand storytelling. So a little bit of a pivot from there. But now it's more your brand and your brand storytelling. You're a person of, you know, like vision and principles. When you show up, when you're hiring, when you're putting that team together, there's a vision. There's kind of core principles behind that. So I'm interested to, obviously, we've worked together.
Marc Adelman [00:07:49]:
I've experienced you putting teams together and getting them inspired and kind of aligned to that larger vision. So now you've got the. The paintbrush, right? This onward is yours and your vision. So tell us a little bit about the core principles and values of the agency.
Mick McCarthy [00:08:08]:
So, you know, just like always, just putting people first, putting relationships and brands, connecting with people first. I want to be proactive in what goes into that design and that build related to research and putting people first. I don't love to quote Jared spool, doing it, creating a business around a to do list and a bag of money and being reactive like that, where you might give us a to do list, we don't really agree or want to question in some way. And we're going to push our clients and disrupt their thinking in some way to try new ideas or new processes or evaluate different principles. We could be looking at onward is based on the unexpected, grounded in insights and deliver strategies and creative and design and engineering and builds related to those insights that we delivered. Our brands really focusing on action over perfection, always doing the best with what you have at that time. It's kind of a principle, you know, what we can do and small by design, we really want to create. I hope we don't grow into something that I don't recognize financially, I hope we grow into something we don't recognize.
Mick McCarthy [00:09:18]:
But spiritually, no, I don't. I think that our industry, back to the, you know, the industry as I see it, I really want to create teams of cross functional subject matter experts across research strategy, creative design, engineering, conversion rate optimization and things like this instead of multidisciplinary singularity. Contributors.
Marc Adelman [00:09:40]:
To me, you're all about setting up framework, allowing people to really wrestle and wrangle these things on their own. My question to you though is more about inspiration for you when it comes to sources of leadership and work culture. Inspiration, you know, maybe what's more recent for you or where do you go now with this new chapter? Like what? What inspires you when thinking about leadership and culture for onward, be nice.
Mick McCarthy [00:10:11]:
Set principles and values. Hire people that align with those principles and values. Get them the resources to do it. Get the heck out of the way and celebrate them when they do it.
Marc Adelman [00:10:22]:
Yeah, yeah. I'm sure there's a lot of different folks on the team who like to solve different types of problems, but is there like a central types of problems that you think the team loves to solve?
Mick McCarthy [00:10:34]:
When a brand comes in and says there are no sacred things and we want to explore everything, those are the ones that are really exciting. And so that was the one you can go and say, hey, let's go. Have you ever done research? Have you talked to your customer? No. What is that? And they educate them and they go, great. What is that going to do for us? Well, that's going to inform your brand strategy you have likely. These brands are often plateaued. They've kind of dated out. They don't have to talk to z or millennial audience.
Marc Adelman [00:11:06]:
What would your advice be? A little bit to say, hey, you might not believe in investing this, but here's why.
Mick McCarthy [00:11:12]:
I would presented a different type of presentation, competing well known agencies within the space and was awarded the business for two x what the other companies were bidding because they realized the value of putting the strategy in place to drive the creative. And it was going to have influence across not just that site, but all channels across Amazon or Instagram, TikTok in store, and everything else that they had to rethink how they communicated with their customer and told their brand product story based more on purpose and position and personalization and partnerships and collaborations than the old what we'll call four p's of bottoming out on price and promotion, pulling price and promotion levers until you get to the bottom.
Marc Adelman [00:12:10]:
In the end of the day, you have to create a compelling brand experience. Right.
Mick McCarthy [00:12:13]:
You have.
Marc Adelman [00:12:14]:
That's the task. The task to be done. It's a competitive world out there. You have to create a brand experience. Well, thank you so much, friend, for taking the time and chatting. I always enjoy our chats. I always learn a lot, not just a little. And yeah.
Marc Adelman [00:12:29]:
Hope to talk soon.
Mick McCarthy [00:12:31]:
Thank you. It's been fun.
