Have Shopify Brands A/B Tested Themselves Into Invisibility? Philip Jackson calls it "The Sea of Sameness"

Jay Myers: Future Commerce ran a study a few years ago where they stripped the branding off of every major retailer websites like Target, crate, and Barrel, a bunch of other big names, and they asked consumers to tell to see if they could tell them apart and they couldn't, and they. AB tested. So I mean, we've ab tested ourselves into sameness.

Every store has kind of looked the same. I know this exact feeling same. They sound the same. They use the same apps. They use the same templates. They're using the same AI generated copy. And so the question is, if your customer can't tell the difference between you and your competitor, why would they pick you?

And this is why I wanted to bring my guest on today, because he's been studying this problem for I think nearly a decade. Philip Jackson, he's the CEO of Future Commerce. He's got a ton of other stuff he's doing. He's a host of a podcast. He's got a book coming out we're gonna get into. But future Commerce is a media and research company trusted by brands like Apple, Disney, Target, LVMH, probably many more.

Those are the ones I know of. I and Phil, your thesis is pretty simple, but it's powerful and that's that commerce is culture and the brands that win are the ones that treat it that way. So today I wanna get into, I wanna challenge our listeners how they think about their brand or store and what actually makes people buy from them, from you.

So we're gonna talk about, I think why every Shopify store looks the same. And what actually makes people buy and is AI actually helping? So Phil, let's start with this kind of elephant in the room, if you wanna call it that. Let's talk about this study. I don't wanna go through it again 'cause I mentioned it, but walk me through it.

What did you find? What was the process in this?

Philip Jackson: yeah, it came out of, you know, I spent a decade brand side before I spent a decade agency side in e-commerce. So I spent almost 20 years in the industry and over that 20 years I watched, you know, our industry go from this, you know, wild world where you started with, you could do anything. And websites were very bespoke and very custom to, there was one right way and sort of very religious adherence to.

A set of best practices that Bay Mar, you know, institute had the Holy Book on. And I saw that happen over a very long period of time. I was doing ab testing and multivariate testing in 2007, right? And so this industry has been doing. Research, user research focus fo focus group research and user experience and UI optimization.

For as long as I've been doing large site builds and I've been doing some enterprise work for the better part of, you know, 10 or 15 years. But what I wanted to understand was the law of large platforms tends to. Lead us to averages and we're this best fit average has led us to what I would call sort of the sea of sameness or The homogenization effect.

And the homogenization effect is something that I'm witnessed. I have wi witnessed now, not just in the user experience, which I think everybody understands. But it also exists in the way that we solve problems, right? It exists in the organizational structure. It's in every facet of our behavior in the industry, and it exists at a cultural level.

And so when I say I. When we go to study the consumer behavior, there's a lot of power in us repeating the behaviors, right? So you don't have to retrain a customer how to shop on a website. Everybody know how to shop on e-commerce website. But the pattern interrupt that we all understand now with, you know, thumbs stop and things like that, we understand how to stop people in their tracks.

We understand good friction. What I was trying to communicate, you know, back in 2022 and two, in 2023 when we were doing this. Original research was what is the web version of the good friction? What is the web version of us reintroducing new friction back into the experience where people are actually stopping and thinking about what they're buying?

Because I think brand is the actual differentiator and what we have relegated brand to now, j is nothing more than a logo and a set of typefaces and a bar at the top of the website. And we're in a world where most of the products that people are seeing in their Instagram feed that leads them to a website that can be one click bot with the purple button on a website.

There's nothing different about those products than if everything's being dropped, shipped from the same sources, from the same countries. So the brand is really the differentiator. And so the way that we sort of differentiate is we've gotta stop people in their tracks. They have to feel something, they have to take notice of the experience.

So I'll stop there. And we wanted to quantify that. We wanted to quantify what customers were actually experiencing rather than just leading with that hy hypothesis. Because everybody thinks things, I actually wanna know them, I wanna have data around it. And I wasn't surprised by the outcome, but I was heartened by the fact that I think that we can change it if we decide to.

And I'm starting to see actually glimmers of that, especially with the tools that we have now with, you know, AI and all the rest.

Jay Myers: So many places I want to go from this because first of all, I feel that right now is this crazy time where one question going through my head is how relevant, like websites in general, right? Like people are going to AI to buy stuff. So this is even more of a challenge now, and some people are saying that.

The only thing that matters is your product catalog, or the only thing that will matter in a few years is gonna be the quality of your product data

Philip Jackson: saying, mm-hmm.

Jay Myers: and the actual catalog so that AI can understand it and recommend it. That's, I feel like I maybe wanna go down this path a little bit 'cause okay.

Without going too far into the future, as AI is becoming more and more of the way people find your brand versus. Experiencing it on the site. Is there any, anything brands can do to stand out in that sense?

Philip Jackson: I mean, sure there's tactically there's things you can and should be doing right now. You know, William Gibson said, you know, future is always here. It's just not evenly distributed. So look around. What are we doing right now? A-E-O-G-E-O. These are things that I think are the current arbitrage opportunity.

I'm looking at my site right now, future commerce.com. We have. Hundred 70% more organic traffic today than we did a year ago, and that's all due to chat, GPT and Claude and all of that. Some of that's, you know, that we are appealing more toward ENT traffic today.

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Philip Jackson: I want to treat the agent as a particular type of a consumer of my content, and that means that I have to start thinking of two different types of consumers of my media.

I think that we should be, merchants should be thinking about it as much the same. And so if you're not there already, this is as best of time as any. You should be. This is the arbitrage opportunity that Facebook was in 2016. So you should be already investing there and there's never gonna be a better time than that right now.

But I do think that we have a tendency, Jay and this can sort of answered your question, but in a different way. In our industry in particular, because of the lack of friction. That we have right now in tech adoption. It's very easy to adopt an app, right? It's very easy for us to, it's even easier right now to code tech ourselves.

I, I popped open Shopify the other day and I asked Sidekick for an app recommendation, and it said to me, rather than recommending me an app, it told me it could code it for me. Okay? So that's where we are right now. I just had to accept the terms of service. It's gonna actually write it for me now. So the friction too. adopting tech is very low.

Jay Myers: Yep.

Philip Jackson: We have a conspicuous consumption behavior in our ecosystem. It's a cultural nature that we have, and so we like to consume technology and we like to see what others are doing, and we like to do that, right? So this is like a cultural behavior that we have. I think that's a risk point for us.

We like to know what others are doing and we like to parrot that behavior. A study that I like to point out is that there's federal Bank reserve Bank of Philadelphia did the study about Canadian lottery winners back in 2018 and found out that for every $1,000 in lottery winnings in Canada, the neighbors bankruptcy rate probability increased by 2.4%.

Jay Myers: Wow, what a crazy stat.

Philip Jackson: Let that think,

Jay Myers: I never thought about that, but that makes sense.

Philip Jackson: There's a keeping up with the Jones' Effect that happens to people with good fortune around you, that your perception of what works for them

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Philip Jackson: impacts the decisions that you make every day.

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Philip Jackson: so what works for grooms, right? Or what works for Poppy?

The tech stacks that they have and the blogs that you read or the articles that are being written on x or the threads that are being posted or the Slack channels that you're in, has a absolute effect on the way that you're making technology decisions. And those contexts are not the same context as yours.

Those customers are not the same as yours. Their budgets are not the same as yours. And I know that, we all know that, but our behaviors do not. Dictate that we know that. And so anyway and that's why we have the sea of sameness is the conspicuous consumption. And that's also why I believe that we're particularly risk prone going into this next phase too, is 'cause not only will we adopt the tech, but I think we're very prone to now build a new wave of tech too, which I think has its own risks.

But I digress on that point.

Jay Myers: Well, and you've said that. E-commerce, and you just mentioned this as well too, that has been mostly solved, like from a technology standpoint. It's actually interesting, like I, my first online store was in 1998 and I built it with Microsoft front page and page by page. And actually I didn't even have a checkout.

I only take phone orders. And then I think a couple years later we, I. Connected a, a third party checkout to it, just to process a credit card. I had to have a certain credit score. I had to personally guarantee it to process a credit card. I remember applying for my merchant account and it took 45 days, and I remember when I got approved, I told my, I'm like, I can charge a credit card now online.

Like it was hard now, like you can flip a switch, have a beautiful theme, be taking payments through Shopify payments in. Seconds, zero weight on approval. You can source products so easily. So it's so merchants have been obsessing over like technology forever. Now what? Like now, what do they obsess over?

How do they stand out?

Philip Jackson: We went from dis default skepticism around the order, you know, the online order to default trust and I think that we do that too in new channels, right? When we saw TikTok emerge, there's sort of default skepticism and now we're in sort of default trust and I think whatnot is kind of, there is there's a default skepticism now we're like moving to default trust.

And by the way, those cycles seem to accelerate.

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Philip Jackson: The trust factor happens very quickly because also there's network effects with our factors of trust. When coming back to, sorry, what was your original point? I was,

Jay Myers: when every, when technology is so easy, when everyone can have a super high converting checkout, a great upsell experience, they have great. Email collection flows like their pages load fast. Everything is good. How what now? Like you literally can have a perfectly optimized store. That's not a competitive advantage at all.

I mean, you gotta do it as table stakes, but what should brands be obsessing over then?

Philip Jackson: Yeah. So that's where we really have to reframe the job, right? It's, no, it's not really conversion anymore.

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Philip Jackson: I think the job it used to be, get the people to the site, give them a reason to buy. And that would, that's good enough because we could trust that there was a means of delivering traffic.

And you would win some sort of like bid lottery and that would get you to the site. Like at some point that would but the, now we're on sort of level playing ground.

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Philip Jackson: There's too many brands. Realistically, there's too many brands then our society really can sustain. So how do you win?

I really believe that it comes down to trust. And trust is a facet of brand because that is the

Jay Myers: mm-hmm.

Philip Jackson: So when everybody has the same, you know, when everybody sort of has the same set of tools. And the same technologies. The only thing that is the differentiator is do it. Does it come down to, do I trust

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Philip Jackson: thing, do I trust this brand?

And I think that's why we come back to nostalgia over and over again. That's why Nostalgic marketing works so well.

Jay Myers: Yeah,

Philip Jackson: And it's also one of the reasons why I think that we, I'm so fascinated with recently with things like time capsules. This is a total aside, but.

Jay Myers: I just bought one recently. An actual, I actually like a metal. A metal. It has like rubber seals and it's got screws and it's like about the size of a shoebox and we ha, I told my kids we're gonna put stuff in it. We haven't yet. I, my kids are 12 and nine years old, so they're kind of at a good age.

They'll remember it. They're not three. And so next summer, like my son will probably put in Pokemon cards. They're gonna write themselves a letter. They're gonna make predictions. Will cars be flying when, whatever will there be robots everywhere? They all have to answer stuff. They're gonna put it in and then we're gonna open it whenever at some point.

Philip Jackson: I love this so much. So this is such a hu it's a human truth, right? We love, as much as we love to dig stuff up, we love to bury it too, right? And there's a human truth. Every culture has this you know, this. Cultural nature. This cultural function where we teach our young to this archival behavior where we do, we create like a form of a time capsule.

The two greatest time capsules that have ever been made in the history of mankind that were meant and purported to be a 5,000 plus year projects were created by consumer brands, believe it or not. There's one in New York at the World's Fair. It was created by Westinghouse, which was the Westinghouse Electric company that's now, you know, does a lot of things like power generation.

Sure, they do nuclear power plants, but they also do all the light bulbs in your home. But they created at the World's Fair, I believe, 1938 and refreshed it again in 1968, and they created this brand new. For the World's Fair, this new alloy called Cupo, which is like a copper alloy that was supposed to withstand the elements for 5,000 years.

And what do they put into this time capsule? It's mostly things that people bought in the day and the brands that they put into it are things that still exist today. It's like Camel cigarettes and Remington and and it's like brands that you would recognize. And they're still ones Kodak, like there are.

Enduring logos that are in there today, the Sears catalog is in there on microfiche. There are the things that are in there are it's what we buy is effectively who we are, and that truth is reflected in 1970 and Osaka. At another World's Fair. The company called the Matis Shida Electric Company which is went on to become known as Panasonic, also created a time capsule, and they did the same thing.

It was three year commission and they buried this time capsule, and they filled it with an, again, consumer brands. Because what we buy is who we are. And I just find this so fascinating that, you know, commerce, you know, again, commerce is culture at the end of the day. The job of this industry and what we do is phenomenally powerful, and that is why I think, you know, what we do in this industry is we shape the tastes of people.

We shape the decisions of what people buy. We ask people to part with money for sure, but what people buy. Is a function and a reflection of their nature and their sense of belonging, their semiotics of like by their face facets of their being. And those things are powerful levers for us to wield.

And I don't think that they should be given over fully to algorithms. I think that those are things that our, that we have power to exercise in this world and that makes us cultural change makers in this industry, not just, you know. Executives of D two C brands, I think we have much more power than we know and we should wield it as such.

Jay Myers: Okay, so I wanna dive into this. 'Cause I think people listening are a hundred percent resonating with that. I get it when you say it like. You are what you buy to a large it is a reflection of you. Like you what you buy, your clothing, your furniture, your car, everything. So you say that now to go a little bit more practical on that how can a brand actually approach.

How they sell their products. Is there things maybe that we think we're doing that are building culture but maybe aren't? How can a brand approach this, like this is a, like a truth worldview now, is there a way that they can apply that to what they're selling their products to actually to be something that would be in a time capsule one day maybe.

Philip Jackson: Wow. So I actually do have a lot of thoughts to gather a few, well, we want, we definitely want things to last longer. We want campaigns to be enduring. We don't want our work to have been in vain. Sure. I do think that the world that we live in today looks different than the world that, you know, 1970 or 1938 looks like it's harder today to put, say the Timothy Chalamet, the Marty Supreme campaign into a time capsule.

So how do you put a, what is effectively a series of activations in a moment and capture that into a time capsule? And so the world that we live in and inhabit today is so experiential. I think that's, it's so very different to the world that I think was in the past, that the time capsule of today is effectively media centric. So it's being captured and created in real time by many people all at once. So we're all contributing to it together in real time. So in some ways, instigating people to co-create with you in a multiplayer fashion is part of the time capsule building. So that means that you need your community to be constantly building your brand along with you.

And that's a little bit of a cop out, but I think that's very true. The other part of it is I have this two by two, which I'll send over for you to post up. There's a visualization of the esis, which is sort of like the mimetic behaviors of brands, and we just saw the perfect example of this actually is McDonald's does this really well all the time, whether they do it.

By accident recently, which is the Chris k, the CEO of McDonald's recently did this where he had this video where he is kind of dorky looking and he is taking a bite of the big arch burger. I don't know if you saw this. And

Jay Myers: I didn't, no.

Philip Jackson: oh my goodness. Okay, so you missed while you're launching your product recently, you missed a whole minute on the internet where the CEO of McDonald's sat down.

To launch this brand new burger. They don't launch a new burger very often, and he was gonna launch it. He's kind of a nerdy sort of a guy, and he does all the wrong things that you should just never do. I, he calls it a product. He takes the world's smallest bite of it. This guy looks like he never eats burgers in his life.

He's, you know, he's sort of examining it like, he's like a sommelier. He's like talking about, you know, burger notes and stuff, and the cheese and the crispy onion, whatever. He's just. Kind of giving off a weird air about it on the video. So what happens after that is the whole internet makes fun of him, and it could have been a bad moment for McDonald's.

But what happens instead is every other burger, CEO, from Arby's to bk, to, you know, you name it, I mean, Wendy's,

Jay Myers: Probably

Philip Jackson: all getting

Jay Myers: was in there.

Philip Jackson: They're all getting in on the mix, and all their CEOs are trying to upstage him by doing it better. But what actually happens is he's now established a format

A format that people can easily recognize and people can easily copy, actually makes him the originator, which somehow makes him better.

And if you think about McDonald's. McDonald's did this deftly with the grimace shake. Grimace shake is a phenomenal format. The formats don't have to be complicated. The greatest formats in the world are easily recognizable and easily parroted. Great format is the iPod Silhouette, right? With the black silhouette with the iPod White headphones, right?

Any format that's easily copied and replicated by a community that second, you see it, you know exactly what it is. Those are things that can endure and the community can easily jump in on, and people, whether they're making fun of it or whether they're parodying it, if Saturday Night Live could send it up.

It's a great format and that's easily endurable. What is not great is when your brand spends a ton of time creating things that only could be done by you, and that could only be done at one point in time. That really only live for the moment. And I think we should be really careful to be thinking about our time investments on if we are trac, if we're chasing every single trend. We're putting all of our time and energy into being on trend all the time. You have no time and energy to place into these big bets that are highly mimetic. And so if you're a friend.com or if you're clearly right, they seem to be able to do this over and over again because they disappear for.

A couple months and then they come back with a big campaign. They're not doing it every single day. And I think that's one of the misses of what our modern commerce culture is all about. We're constantly producing brand assets day after day, trying to chase trends.

Jay Myers: Well, yeah it's interesting if I, if a brand comes to me and says, we have a strong brand, it usually means they have a good logo and a good Instagram grid and that, but it's not. I think what they're missing is they don't have that point of view. They don't have that story. They don't have an opinion.

Like a, like an opinion, A position on things. Does that tie into that as well too?

Philip Jackson: So I think people confuse brands with aesthetics and not a worldview, right? So having a point of view in the world is I think the beginning of a great brand. The, we put on a summit every year, Jay called Visions, and we have. The C-suite of, I'd say the world's most culture defining businesses come from.

It blows my mind still by the way that I'm doing this. I feel like I pinch myself every day that this is a job I get to do, but they come and they listen to it, and we curate incredible speakers. We bring people from outside of the e-commerce and retail industry to come and inspire them. Like last year we brought Danny Lee, who's an architect. To come and talk to these people who brought in Andrew Huang, who's a YouTuber, and he's a author, incredible filmmaker, and they just come and speak to us and inspire us about their cultural experiences. Just people that are totally. Outside of our world. And then, you know, we as sort of the Babelfish sort of translate it back to them.

These are people that have incredible vision and I think what we've lost is what is the vision for our brand outside of the next three to six months,

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Philip Jackson: what our dashboards tell us. Do we have an actual worldview of what our, of what the world will look like with our brand in it and what the world looks like without our brand in it, and what the world could be with our brand in, I know it's the like.

There's a joke meme that goes around is like what the world could look like if boomers could pronounce Chipotle correctly. And it's sort of the futuristic world, but that's what you should have. Your worldview is this is what the world could be if my brand existed. And that's the worldview. The other thing is treating customers like a lead instead of co-creators or participants.

That, again, is part of the. Like your brand is, does not exist apart from having people in it, in the modern sense as being part and parcel of your community. And I do think that's such an important part of the modern brand building is that it's co-creative with your community. So it's not just aesthetics it's our, these are much more than the logo today.

Jay Myers: Yeah. And I often say too, it's often what your brand is, what the way other people would describe you, not how you describe yourself. So that's if you really wanna know, ask someone else how they would describe it. And then that's if you're doing a good job or not

Philip Jackson: Could I actually throw out a third option?

Jay Myers: sure. No, you can't.

Philip Jackson: There's just a, I have this book. So we wrote

Jay Myers: ask you about that.

Philip Jackson: Called Lore and this is our newest book from Future Commerce Press. This is a coffee table book. We put out one of these a year. Shameless plug future commerce.com. You can go get this, but, we, we called it lore because I believe every brand has lore, whether it's founder lore you know, or maybe you have a century old, you know, founder, you know, the founder's long gone century old brand. You have lore. Everybody has lore, right? But I think a lot of people think, well, where's the truth of the brand?

And so we dive into this over 300 pages. There's a bunch of angles to take on this. We do have one particular chapter, sort of, in here that's dedicated to something that, my co-founder would call Mytho, which is an extraordinarily big word, and I had to learn how to pronounce it. But it's sort of this concept and this, you know, this idea that, you know, is the brand in the eye of the beholder of the customer.

And I think that's an interesting point of view is it what your customer says about you, which is what you just said. And I think that I tended to believe that was true. If you ask a creative director. director might say the brand is what the brand defines it to be and what the brand book says that the brand is.

Right? And that's how if you do your job right, then the customer will have the same point of view that you have and you've put your brand out into the world and it's received in the way that you've intended it to be.

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm.

Philip Jackson: But I think there's a third option. And the third option is that neither the brand nor the customer actually holds the universal truth of the brand.

That in reality it's somewhere in between and that you're both. Telling a facet of the story of the brand and that the truth lives in the middle. And in that way it's more like mythology in that we're all creating the story of the brand together over time. And that as we're building the story of the brand together over time, it is subject to change over time.

And no one person owns that story, and that means anyone can contribute to it. And in that way. It kind of relinquiss us of all control, and that's a little scary. I think that's a lot scary for brand owners and it's, I think something that we, I think more storied brands understand than we know and newer brand owners don't really understand just yet.

Jay Myers: I, and I think you see this. On with brands that work with influencers and creators like it used to be that you would give your creator or influencer community, okay, here's our brand guidelines. This is how we talk about the product. These are the features and benefits. This is what it does. This is how you can, what you can say on a video.

Now go make a video and go make some content. And what they learned is like creators, they wanna talk about it the way they wanna talk, like the good creators. So what brands are doing now, it's like we're not gonna give you anything like. You go use this product and talk about how you would, and they actually learn so much more.

And then it, you're, you nailed it. Like they end up adopt the brand, like the brand. The messaging adjusts as different creators talk and you often hear brands changing. Actually changing content on their head, like their website or their email copy based off of like creator communities, you know, hex clad has done this and others, and like it's it you're right, you, it is out of your hands to a, to an extent and it's somewhere in the middle.

I, yeah, it's super interesting.

Philip Jackson: It is, but I, when you tell people, actually your brand is more like mythology, literally nobody cares. They're like, how does that help me sell stuff?

Jay Myers: Yeah. Yeah.

Philip Jackson: But I do think that if we, what we are lacking is a sense of a greater sense of awe and purpose in our. Jobs that we're doing. And that is something that we are bringing to the culture of our commerce industry.

And that's something that we're doing it through research and through insights and we're doing that by, you know, publishing, you know, larger pieces of print. I'm helping to elevate the conversation because we have for so long had a much less elevated conversation in our space and I felt like somebody needed to have a.

Higher level conversation and you know, there's, you can get the tactics anywhere. We can all have the tactical conversation. I had that conversation for 22 years. Let's have a different kind of conversation. So I appreciate anytime someone's willing and open to have a deeper one.

Jay Myers: I think it's good. I think it's healthy. I think we are, we live in a society where we just are going for like easy wins and quick hacks and things, and, you know, change starts way back before it, you know, it turns into action like how you think about things and how you approach things. So I think that frame up really helps.

So it's important. I'd love to touch on something you said really early on, and we didn't go into it, but I just made a mental bullet in my head to come back to it. You talked about, I think you called it good friction. I can't remember the exact word you said, but I've heard you talk about this and you, you said friction is misunderstood and we're so afraid of any friction that we've over optimized.

What, tell me about this. What is good friction?

Philip Jackson: I mean, I think we all understand that a little bit of friction's good. You know, I had to put new tires on my car because they were bald. So you need a little bit of friction, right? To little not enough friction in on your tires is a bad thing. As I have said in the past, a frictionless flip flop is dangerous.

Frictionless sex is no fun. We need a little bit of friction, right? Somebody wants friction. But the. What I've seen in my experience, and again, this is my experience, and maybe others have different experience over the years, creating extraordinarily slippery checkouts leads to deleterious effects down the line.

So when people have very quick thoughtless checkouts where they buy a product, especially one that is a around, what I would say is the rings of intimacy is the around you, on you, in you. So when something gets closer to the ring of intimacy where it's like something you ingest, that it's a much more considered purchase.

And if they're, if the checkout process is too slippery, if it's too quick and you make it too fast and it's something that is too intimate, they're much more quick to want to undo that transaction.

Where you start having chargebacks. That's where you start having CX complaints. That's where you start having negative reviews, like the ill effects of the fast checkout, the frictionless purchase, start to reveal themselves down the line.

And so everybody wants a fast, frictionless purchase. Nobody's thinking about what are the knock on effects afterward. I shouldn't say nobody. Many people haven't thought about that. So we, what we have found, what we found in my agency days is a little bit more education upfront for certain product styles.

I, I spent a lot of time in, in nutrition and I spent a lot of time in the supplement space and I did a lot of in footwear, and I did a lot in. Apparel. I did a lot in intimates. You know when you're spending a lot of time in those sorts of categories, you learn where those points of friction are and you learn where to introduce them and to test where to introduce them and find what works for a specific product, for a brand, for a customer, and it doesn't work.

One product, one PDP. There's no one thing to rule them all. It's not a best size, best fit approach. And so you learn to also constantly. Retest your own assumptions on a repeating basis because you can't just set and forget. So that's sort of the big meta overarching idea there.

Jay Myers: I love this because I often, something I think a lot about is like wine. When you buy wine, if you just picked it up at a store or say you're at a restaurant and you just. I asked for a good bottle of wine or something and it just appeared or just brought out, or the server just brought it to you.

You'd have a certain level of appreciation for it, but you might not just go and it might taste good, but you're probably not going to rave about it to your friends. But when the sommelier comes out. And tells you about it and tells you about where it's from and how the, why these grapes are maybe different and their experience with the wine and they give you some information about it.

It raises your level of experience with it and you experience it a different way. 'cause you have understanding on it and you're now, you're also armed with that information to then when you're telling someone about the wine, you know about it. But that is friction. It slows down the process. You didn't get it as

Philip Jackson: Oh, for sure.

Jay Myers: but you're educating them on the product.

Which I think, you know, this is like a ma, like you'll, I think there's no such thing as value. This is a theory I have. There's, you know, Netflix arguably has a billions of dollars of value of, I don't know if you added up the cost of every movie and show, and Netflix, if you were to buy it all, like there's maybe a billion dollars of value there, but some people don't wanna pay $15 a month for it.

So what is value? There's no and some people will pay. A hundred thousand dollars for a comic book, and some people wouldn't pay $2. So there's really no, it's all perceived. It's all perceived. It's what you perceive the value to be of it. And that only comes from education. And we think that as brands, and this is tie this back to commerce, is like we think that when someone buys a product, they've seen the value it in it and they're buying it. And then we think, okay, great. They've bought the product. I win. That's a checkout ching, but it's not. They're in their head.

They're actually. They're a lead. Like they're trying it out. They're not committed. They're like they're just a, just enough to get them through the checkout. And then your job is to continue educating them through the checkout. After the checkout, show a video on the thank you page, email them the second they checkout.

Two hours later, start sending them emails of people that have used the supplements or whatever nutrition product is, and some results. And then there's a placebo effect probably when they get that, whatever supplement it is. So that. They're probably gonna feel better 'cause they've been educated about it.

I think about this a lot and I've never thought about it as like this good friction concept, which I love that framing. Do you, does this like this, like perceived value and real value, like I feel like that ties into this.

Philip Jackson: It does. I actually, I'll use your Netflix example. Netflix example as a tie in. 'cause I think it, it's really apropos to our culture. Netflix is probably one of the greatest. Low friction examples of a service that exist, right? So you know, they, at the end of a show, it auto plays the next right. Also in their original programming original series, they tend to drop an entire season all at once.

So you know, if you get Squid game, you're gonna get all of Squid Game all at once, right? So you can binge the whole thing and see it all in one go. If you wanted day one, squid Game bang, you don't have to get spoiled at all.

Jay Myers: Best way to watch a series.

Philip Jackson: And. Netflix employs some of the largest number of data scientists of any organization on planet Earth.

They know without a shadow of a doubt, and I believe them, that the best way to get people from the start of minute one of a series to the very end of a series, to the credits role at the end is to drop a full series in its entirety in one day. I know that they know that because they continue to do it.

For the last decade, they would do it differently if the data told them otherwise. So let's all agree on that. But what do they lose that can't be measured otherwise, when a show drops weekly, like recently, the Game of Thrones series that has been coming out or severance, when there is a

Jay Myers: Is the news, is the new severance out?

Philip Jackson: no severance recently

Jay Myers: When they, yes. Yes. Okay.

Philip Jackson: episodic series like severance or.

Jay Myers: And they did it with stranger Things.

Philip Jackson: Correct. When you have a weekly episodic, there is something that happens that you can't measure, which is cultural resonance. There's something that happens where people are talking about it, people are wondering about it, fan theories are circulating. You have the

Jay Myers: each episode?

Philip Jackson: come on, there is something bigger that happens on a larger scale that sustains the cultural. Expectation that people have and it hits harder, it lasts longer, and the halo's bigger. And that's something that no dashboard can really tell you. I mean, there's probably a form of social measurement that could tell you something, but the numbers engagement of how many people get to the end of the series would tell you otherwise.

It would tell you that more people didn't make it to the end of the series, most likely. So it would be an. It's, that's bad friction by the dashboard, but it's good friction by the culture measure. And so I think it, it depends on what you're aiming for, but if, for me it would be for longevity of the, you have to probably balance both, right?

You probably just wouldn't go hard in the paint on one. But for me, I think for a brand to make it, in today's era, what we really need to see is like a measure of. There's things that we just can't measure what does extend into these cultural resonances, and to me that's something that I think comes with intuition and yeah, I think it does have that good friction aspect to it.

Jay Myers: That's super interesting. Yeah I think kids. I have kids. Do you have kids?

Philip Jackson: Yeah, I do. Yeah, two teens.

Jay Myers: You know, two teens. Okay. So like when you, when they want something and you just get it for them, the level of appreciation is almost nothing.

Philip Jackson: Oh yeah, it's the same. Yeah.

Jay Myers: They'll get, you know? But if they wait for it, if they work for it, or they save up for it or something they'll cherish it.

Like it's, you know, still there's so many examples of this. Like I, it is like a universal truth. It's like good friction, right?

Philip Jackson: And it's why, you know, in, in a four Peaks you know, so we have a series at of future commerce. Over on Future Commerce Plus, which is an education series Orchid Delson formerly of Common Thread. She taught a series over there about the new, you know, funnel, which is more of like a loyalty loop. And the loyalty loop sort of depends on one of these pieces of calendar management, which is a four peaks planning method, and it's about sustaining interest. It's about keeping people's interest and part of that is you have to give people something to look forward to. We have to have something on the horizon that people are always kind of being teased by and always being sort of looking forward to you, it's either the coming product drop or a pre-order or something has to keep the brand alive and keep it in the back of their minds, and the cheapest, easiest way.

Is the discount. And that's also the worst way. So the that's where I think we. She just explains it way better than I ever could. But she she gives a bunch of examples on how to do this and a bunch of brands that have done it well. Skims does this extraordinarily well with product development and through gags.

But you, there's, we see this a lot today with product development as marketing, but that's a thing that we're seeing play out today over, and over again, is how do you keep your brand alive and resonant in the culture?

Jay Myers: I mean, it, apple did this great with their keynote drops every year and the big releases and every year there's something and you gotta wait for it. And then there's the Mac rumors that come out and everything. Yeah. We're getting close on time, but I wanted, there's a couple, only one or two more questions that I wanted to make sure I get in.

One of them was actually for those listening, I always ask guests, Hey, is there anything you wanna make sure I ask you on the show? One of the things that you wrote was. I think it was, how do you build demand without becoming a con, a content hamster wheel? And I loved that because a lot of merchants I talk to they are literally on a treadmill.

They're like posting content every day. They're sending three emails, they're making reels and tiktoks and whatever else, and they're just like content hamster wheel, and they're exhausted and some of them will burn out for sure. Some of it might be working. I don't know what's, if it's not, what's the alternative?

Why do you, why did you list that as one of the questions you wanted me to make sure I asked? Because I think it's super relevant.

Philip Jackson: Well, I think it comes back to why people continue to tag me in things like I get tagged in multiple things, one of which is time capsule. If there's something time capsule related on the internet, I get tagged in it by people in in my community, people that are subscribers of future commerce. The other is, I am become synonymous with our trademarked catchphrase.

It's the commerce's culture. And I, I really believe that, you know, how do you build demand without becoming a content hamster wheel? It's because content isn't the volume of output, it's the distribution of your belief system. So for me, it's taking one core idea and repeating it over and over again through a variety of formats. And when you repeat it over time. It becomes synonymous with you. And this is, you know, this is what has become core of future commerce as a brand is commerce's culture. It's become synonymous to us as a brand. When with AG one, I think Ag one has done a phenomenal job in repeating their core identity of, it's a simple, you know, one a day, take this packet and it works for, you know.

Achieving your goals of living a healthy life as, and they almost always associate it to something active. You sort of have this life style that becomes associated and they're extraordinarily good at framing it, and they're extraordinarily good at doing it even visually without having to have a, like a catchphrase or a right.

And so when you have one core idea, you can deliver it in many formats and you repeat it over time, you know, the publishing of it doesn't have to be. The recency and frequency bias that I think it, that we tend to believe it does, it just needs to be memorable. And it's not just about the impressions.

I think, again, coming back to what I said before it's about your, the trust factor and the reputation. So I, that's what I think it just as somebody who's created content on the internet since 2013, I've had a podcast since 2014. I've created literally. Maybe 2000 episodes of podcasts Now. I am. It's, it is crazy.

I feel like you can easily there's a, I mean, I haven't even quantified how many short form pieces of content. It's probably. It's probably millions of minutes of content, but when you kind of break it all down, it's really just a handful of core ideas that get repeated over and over again.

And I think if we were to really be honest, if brands really were, to be honest, I don't know that they could say it's a handful of core ideas. I think it's a scattershot of a bunch of things that are mixed messages that are just trying to get people to convert.

Jay Myers: Yeah, I have an analogy that I. I didn't make this up. Actually, our CEO says this all the time. He came from Intuit and PayPal for 10 years. And anyways, he says marketing is like a drumbeat and it just needs to be con like it doesn't to us if we put a message out, we think oh, we can't talk about that again the next week, or gotta talk about something different.

He's no, you gotta beat the drum, the same drum over and over, and we think you don't become. The commerce's culture guy, if you just say it once and but it, but you are, you've worked that into hundreds of episodes and contents that probably come up on talks, conferences, you've, you're beating that drum.

And it's, I think in some ways, to me, that actually takes weight off my shoulders when I think about it like that versus thinking like, brainstorm every week what can we put out this no beat the same drum, beat the same drum.

Philip Jackson: That's right.

Jay Myers: you, it's actually not bad people. You're not annoying.

We, we think that we can't say something more than once, but it's not that at all. You just gotta beat that drum and that's when you become the iconic, like when someone says the name, that's that brand, right? Like a G one has beaten that drum and they're still beating it, right?

Philip Jackson: I mean, it would come back to the, like how long has this, have they been saying I'm loving it over at McDonald's? It's a long time, so yeah.

Jay Myers: If you were advising a Shopify merchant, I don't know, doing like mid-size, maybe five to 10 million million a year they've got a small marketing team, what would you tell 'em to focus on and what would you tell 'em to stop doing given kind of things we've talked about today?

Philip Jackson: Man, well stop chasing trends. I really believe that there's a you know, there's a lot of things that I think people are overinvested in these days you know, everybody's context is a little bit different too. I don't think it's ever too well, I have a friend, her name's Alex Krefeld. I think everybody should probably be tapped into her.

So aside from, you know, future commerce, I think I love when people subscribe to future commerce, but you should definitely be subscribed to know best practices, which is Alex's media property. She has this really great thesis on brands in. The five to 10 million range that you really just need to know who you are.

And if you're dr, if you're direct response, then you need to go all in on dr. And if you're brand, you need to go all in on brand. And so you can't live in the middle. 'cause that's where the middle is, where you go to die. And so if you're, if you really are a brand, then you need to do brand things.

That means you're playing a long game, so you can't do short game things. And so for when I'm talking to brands, I'm talking to brands, I'm not talking to people who are doing direct response. And so you gotta play longer games, and that means you gotta be default alive. And that means taking longer looks and longer out views and having bigger vision.

And that means it's slower. Things are just slower. And so you gotta have more patience. And for me it's, you know, you gotta look for the bigger wins over longer hauls and stop chasing trends. 'cause doing all of these little short bursts, they winnow down your budgets and you leave you nothing left to actually have bigger wins along the line.

So that's sort of my meta. Advice. And I do think Alex is a great person to follow who can give some really targeted tactical advice along the way.

Jay Myers: Amazing. Got time for the quick lightning round.

Philip Jackson: Yeah, let's go

Jay Myers: A Shopify merchant tells you they've got $10,000 to spend, what should they spend it on? Better Ads brand. Where are they spending their 10,000 bucks today?

Philip Jackson: right now. I mean, they should spend it on bold commerce for sure. No, they 10,000 bucks right now. You know what, I actually, I'm. I'm pretty bullish on, you know this, if you have $10,000 I would

Jay Myers: I said 10 instead of a hundred thousand.

Philip Jackson: No it's a tough, it's a tough, it's a tough, I mean, you can always put more money into ads, but I would be testing right now on more a EO.

So I would be doing if you're not, if you don't have like brand radar, if you're not doing stuff like with a refs right now, if you don't have a an a, like an SEO agency, like I would be going and spending money on that right now. 10 K is probably just the entrance fee, but you should probably be doing that.

You should be doing that right now.

Jay Myers: AI generated product descriptions, yes or no?

Philip Jackson: That's a big no, but you should probably be looking at what it is. It depends on the scale of your catalog. I think there's a, an asterisk next to the no

Jay Myers: What's one brand on Shopify right now that maybe most people haven't heard of? Maybe some have, but they, that people should be paying attention to.

Philip Jackson: higher dose.

Jay Myers: Yes.

Philip Jackson: Higher Dose is a rad brand, you guys and my friend over there, Ingrid Millman. Korte is the CMO and she's doing some really sick stuff. They have, you know, they're I wasn't. Necessarily hip to it or, you know, was a believer in it, but they started with like red light therapy products.

But they really expanded into a really large assortment of high considered purchase, like really large a OV appliances for wellness. And this company is growing like gangbusters. They have done a lot in, I think, investing in brand like we've been talking about, but they're growing a professional line as well, and they're doing consumables and I think that they're spending.

They've a lot to grow the site experience and they're converting really well. I'm really impressed with that shop and I've become a customer recently, so I can't say enough about them. And operationally, I know that they're really solid as well, so I know the team, so I think that's one to watch.

Jay Myers: I would agree a hundred percent. Last one, fill in the blank. The biggest thing Shopify merchants will regret ignoring in 2026 is

Philip Jackson: Is a EO I think yeah. Don't regret it. Yeah, answer engine optimization is the thing.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Okay. And before I let you go you wrote in, I always ask guests some fun fact. You're an ultra runner. You run the same amount of miles as your age every year.

Is that

Philip Jackson: That's right. That's right. You leave this to the end. Thank god you left it to the end.

Jay Myers: It would've changed the whole, you know, format of the episode.

Philip Jackson: I'm 45 this year I'll be 46. This.

Jay Myers: as well. We're the same. There you go. Yeah.

Philip Jackson: Also my first website, my first e-comm website was in 98. We should commi commiserate. I feel

Jay Myers: oh my gosh. That's

Philip Jackson: should jam at some point.

Jay Myers: was wow. Was it also built with Microsoft Front page.

Philip Jackson: yeah. It was and it was like a Fox Pro database

Jay Myers: Okay. Yeah.

Philip Jackson: we will have to talk at some point, dude. This was a really dumb thing.

I started a few years ago and I just it gets longer every year. I've got a hundred k that I've done a number of times here in Florida. There's a spur of the Florida Trail that's, that goes through a portion of the Everglades if anyone cares to look it up. It's called the Ocean to Lake Hiking Trail, and about 70% of it is underwater.

And so it's just a grueling run, but, i've found I've sort of fallen in love with the misery of it. And for those who are use the US units, it's about 63, well, it's a little over 62 miles. It's 63.1. But it's

Jay Myers: At kilometers, right? You're saying,

Philip Jackson: a hundred kilometers is about 62

Jay Myers: I'm sorry. Yes. I was thought you were saying 45 miles in kilometer. Yes.

Philip Jackson: Yeah. Yeah. So it's 62 miles, but this trail's about 63 o'clocks in, Hey, I'm gonna, I'll do that this year at some point, probably October, November.

And I'll do that sort of as self-supported run. But yeah I run my birthday in miles every year, and that's usually my launch to a bigger race. And I started that as just a, as a real life turnaround. I've I ne I was not always this way. And so I, I'm pretty proud of that. And if anybody wants to read more about that story, I've got some of that out on the internet.

You can find some of that. If you just Google Philip Jackson running it's, you'll find it somewhere. Yeah.

Jay Myers: Amazing. It's nice that you, well, thank you for sharing that because we all get better from sometimes learning from someone else. So if you inspire one person, well, Philip, this has been incredible. I wanna make sure you're doing a ton. You've got podcasts, you've got books, you've got events. Can you tell me everything that, where people can not just learn about you and go, but tell me everything you're doing.

So if someone's okay, this Philip Guy, I wanna follow him. Where, tell me what everything you got going on and where we can send people

Philip Jackson: Yeah, thanks. Future commerce.com is the portal to everything, future commerce everywhere. So is future commerce on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok. And we do, we have events

Jay Myers: book is available there as well

Philip Jackson: Yeah, future commerce there as well. And so the, if you wanna get Lore, which is our newest book, if you're watching right now, we've got a whole shelf of books up here.

But our newest book is called Lore. It's the red one, I held it up earlier. And that's future Commerce. If you go to future commerce.com, there's the shop link at the top. Probably hosted on Shopify. But we're happy to say that we have a new book coming out at Shoptalk that's coming out.

It's called Strata. And that book will launch on the 24th of March. And so if you are around Shoptalk and that's your jam we have a launch party happening at the Skyfall Lounge. So if you are on future commerce.com, there's info about that

Jay Myers: Is the Skyfall lounge, is that the on the wheel?

Philip Jackson: It's it's at the W

Jay Myers: Oh, the

Philip Jackson: the 64th.

Jay Myers: Okay. What's the concept of the book?

Philip Jackson: Yeah. So the concept of the book is, you know, it's again, following along with Commerce's culture. 'cause again, you have to keep repeating

Jay Myers: Beat that drum.

Philip Jackson: right? So strata, just like in ge Geological, you know, strata, you have layers that build upon layers. And so what we did was we took all of the aesthetics of the last year that sort of emerged everything from Sydney Sweeney to Momani to the.

To the six seven kid to the Costco hotdog. And sort of the tariff debate with, you know, Gina Raimondo and, you know, joining the board of Costco. And so all these things that sort of emerged as storylines from the last year and K-pop, demon hunters and bunch of things. And we've turned that into a really high powered, really like in your face zine and it's 80 pages.

It's. Cool format for us. We have another zine called the multiplayer brand that's sort of similar format, but this is unlike anything we've done before. I think it's kind of loud and it's a little, it's a little edgy. I'm really proud of it though, and I think it has something to say. And it's sort of following in the footsteps of some other great thinkers.

There's, if you know of any philosophers, there's Stuart Brand who's a, you know, a great thinker and sort of the you know, sort of the father of the whole Earth catalog. And then there's. Some other folks he created, you know, some great content literature that this is definitely following the footsteps of.

So would love to see you guys there and would love someone to pick up the book. Yeah.

Jay Myers: Yeah, and I think on your website feature on the top, I think I saw a shop talk banner on there,

Philip Jackson: Yeah. There is. Yeah, there is there.

Jay Myers: for people to find out about that. Okay. So I'll make sure I include that all in the show notes. So

Philip Jackson: Thank you. Thanks

Jay Myers: thank you so much.

Philip Jackson: Jay.

Jay Myers: I just wanna say for everyone listening, if you if you've got value from this episode, make sure you hit subscribe.

We just crossed 85,000 subscribers. Super pumped about that and it's growing. Thank coming from you. That means a lot. Like we're only at. I dunno, a quarter of the episodes you got. So I gotta catch up to you. But you know, last thing to say for this is I had so many takeaways, but if there's one big one, just, you know, you don't have to overhaul your site, your entire store.

Find a place where you can inject your point of view your opinion that. Maybe a competitor can't copy. They can copy the UX and the UI and everything, but put your brand and your voice in there. Remember and tag Phil on social when you do it and tell him about it. So Phil, thank you so much.

Philip Jackson: Thank you brother.