At Front Row, Accelerating New Routes to the Consumer

Consumers today frequently multitask across digital channels, creating a 32-hour day for the average American — with 13 hours spent using tech and media, according to Activate Consulting’s Technology and Media Outlook 2024 report — and transforming the way customers engage with brands in 2024.

In fact, the report identifies “Super Users” — now 24 percent of the US population, growing by 2 percent in 12 months — who spend more than 18 hours a day across digital media, including social, e-commerce, video, gaming, podcasts, live events and more. While this presents a battle for attention share, it also presents an opportunity for brands to meet customers in the new spaces where they are spending time.

Indeed, the work of acceleration company Front Row explores a cohesive approach to connecting with those customers at critical stages in the path-to-purchase. Front Row is the culmination of years of collaboration between five separate agencies, formally uniting in 2023. Each agency brought with it its own competencies and expertise, spanning marketplace support, e-commerce management, brand expertise and content creation, digital marketing solutions and business intelligence. It counts Rare Beauty, Sephora, Ouai, Kosas, Glow Recipe, Summer Fridays, Youth to the People and Dr. Dennis Gross among its clients.

Central to its strategy to drive growth among its brand partners is its proprietary technology, Catapult, which provides partners with real-time insights, enabling informed decision-making across their e-commerce management.

It’s a timely investment. The e-commerce landscape has become increasingly complex, from TikTok’s ascension as a key platform and a primary source of shopping queries among younger cohorts, to Gen-Z losing active attention for online adverts after just 1.3 seconds, according to a global study by Yahoo and OMD Worldwide.

Now, BoF sits down with Christopher Skinner, Front Row’s chief brand officer, head of marketing and creative, and former founder of School House, to understand how brands can combat these challenges, the iterative approach required for effective commerce management and how to compete for share of attention.

With so many distractions in today’s digital landscape, what can brands do to capture and retain attention share?

It starts with understanding your own brand reasoning and the community, sub-community or culture with which you are truly trying to connect. There has to be an understanding that you cannot launch a brand and speak to billions of people, globally. Instead, really understanding what you bring to the table from a brand perspective is the baseline — it will inform how and where you then speak to your audience.

To capture their attention requires the right visuals, messaging or solutions that play into existing communities and their conversations. New brands or new products that seem immediately successful — on fire, in terms of consumer attention — haven’t leveraged a secret platform, channel or tactic. Instead, they have a deeper understanding of why they are doing what they are doing — and who they are doing it for. That level of connectivity means that they command attention versus demanding it.

What are some common challenges businesses face when managing their presence on marketplace platforms?

The most prominent challenge is the fear factor. We often hear the same questions from brands, “Could marketplaces cannibalise other business? Will this impact my brand? Could this become a drain on resources for my team?” We have a lot of brands not on Amazon directly, even though they are being sold on Amazon by third-party sellers. They are effectively letting someone else take the cash home with them. We have a lot of conversations about how important it is for brands to really own that channel.

Brand erosion is the second greatest challenge. This is where brands can get a little stuck doing things themselves. If you just try to take your D2C approach and replicate it on Amazon, it would be akin to taking Instagram content and putting it directly on TikTok — the behaviour is not the same and the results won’t be either. What we do is dig into the shopping behaviours of each category, because how consumers shop for skincare and haircare, for fragrance and colour cosmetics, is all different. We take those insights and marry it with brand codes — the output is what we call “optimised creative”.

When a brand experiences a spike in views on TikTok, we see a near equal rise in searches on Amazon.

At Front Row, we work with several brand-centric businesses for whom brand codes are critical. It is our job to show them how we can take their brand identity and, utilising our AI insights and our SEO and performance teams, optimise their content for conversion performance while staying true to those brand codes.

How are different channels and formats providing new routes to customers in 2024?

Platforms are indirectly much more interconnected than brands realise — navigating these routes requires an awareness of that. It’s critical that brands really think about 360-degree marketing. For instance, Amazon doesn’t simply sit apart from the rest of your business as its own isolated channel. In fact, one key piece of insight we have uncovered is that when a brand experiences a spike in views on TikTok — be that a viral video, increased search or just more conversation and online buzz — we then see a near equal rise in searches on Amazon.

At Front Row, we place emphasis on the creative elements behind Amazon. Creative was actually one of the largest departments at Fortress Brand — now Front Row’s Marketplace Partnership — when I first met co-founders Alex and Matt Beer. We put a lot of emphasis on expert creative, expert copy. We have amazing SEO copywriters that work day-to-day with our insights team, performance team and design team — it’s all part of building the brand as much as building market share.

What is an example of best-in-class strategies in managing these multiple routes to the customer?

Clean beauty brand Ami Colé is definitely a brand that stands out. We worked closely with founder Diarrha N’Diaye to build out its positioning, packaging and visual identity, leveraging Diarrha’s personal and professional experiences. Her own career in beauty provided a strong starting point, as did her drive to engage and serve people with melanin-rich skin.

As a business, she is also methodical and steadfast about building awareness and driving conversion with limited resources. Her first focus was launching a digital flagship and building an engaging social community — her expansion is very methodical. I believe many brands feel like they have to check all these boxes and be on every platform. Instead, brands should focus their time, attention and investment on areas where they can be the best, not third, fourth or fifth best. I would even apply that methodology to distribution — you don’t need to be everywhere. It is about creating magic with significant, impactful moments.

How does Front Row support clients in brand building?

Front Row’s Strategy and Design division, formerly known as School House, is dedicated to helping clients build, evolve and express their brands. Our expertise spans across brand creation and evolution, packaging and product design, in-store visual merchandising, retail design, as well as campaign and content creation. Our approach to brand building emphasises clarity in point of view, visual codes and consistent messaging. These elements are essential for creating a strong brand presence and ensuring it remains salient in the minds of consumers.

Brands should focus their time, attention and investment on areas where they can be the best, not third, fourth or fifth best.

A common pitfall for many brands is the tendency to become bored with their own branding efforts, leading to constant reinvention. While this may satisfy internal creative desires, it often leaves consumers needing to reintroduce themselves to the brand repeatedly. By maintaining a consistent brand message and boldness of visual code application, we help our clients build lasting connections with their audience and achieve long-term success.

We have supported the launch of notable disruptor brands such as WYN Beauty by Serena Williams and Future Society, and helped to strengthen established brands such as Dr. Dennis Gross Skincare, Kosas and Devacurl. Our work in retail design has also enhanced in-store experiences for brands like L’Occitane, Elemis and La Mer.

What challenges does your proprietary tech, Catapult, aim to solve?

Catapult was built for us as a SaaS product to help make informed decisions based upon insight from data received from Amazon. Like any sort of retail distribution channel, you have an enormous amount of data coming your way — often fragmented, and difficult to make decisions from. Historically, working on brand side, we had to pull together sales reports, key findings and top ten SKU lists manually.

Amazon is so nuanced when it comes to truly leveraging insights — we knew that we needed a platform that would help us help our brand partners to optimise performance. In real time, our partners can head to Catapult to see results for themselves. Use-cases even expand to product development — we can use it to pull all testimonials and reviews, and rank them to help improve formulations, packaging and even delivery formats.

We have also released a new multi-channel report which sounds simple, but the ability to pull reporting from multiple channels and display one holistic perspective of your business’ health in terms of sales, is no small feat. Today, we can do a lot of bespoke reporting for enterprise organisations who want to see a certain metric.

This is a sponsored feature paid for by Front Row as part of a BoF partnership.