How a Robust Content Strategy Like e.l.f Cosmetics' Can Push Past Market Uncertainty

Jade McQueen: Thanks, Lisa, I'm thrilled to be here today. I'm based in Los Angeles. As you mentioned, I oversee retail and CPG for Box globally. Basically, I'm the ambassador for all of our retail and CPG customers internally at Box. I work closely with our go-to marketing team as well as our product team to make sure that we deliver what's best for retailers. 

In my experience, I'm able to share best practices and how the industry is changing. I'm very fortunate to work from a global perspective, and hopefully provide answers and insights into how the biggest brands in the world today are operating.

A bit about Box. There's a short answer to what Box is and a long answer, I'm going to start with the short one. Box is a cloud content management platform — think of it as one place for secure content management, workflows, and collaboration, and where structured and unstructured content come together. It allows you to collaborate, share, and, ultimately, get work done.

Johnston: Let's set the stage and talk about content. Now, I know this means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, depending on the business and where in the business they work. I want to start with the basics: what is content? It sounds simple, but it's not. Why is it so important to consumer goods and retailers? How does this translate differently across the industry?

McQueen: Absolutely. Content has changed so much just in the past year. Any file that is being put in the cloud that is worked with from a day-to-day basis — an agreement, employee form, marketing plan — is considered content. In the retail and CPG space, it's everything from the research and development building a new product to the delivery campaign, the trailer, the commercial to sell a product.

Johnston: With the companies you're talking to, where are they struggling the most? That’s going to be different depending on the company and where they sit, but where are you seeing some of the biggest obstacles?

McQueen: There's a few. The first one is as the world changes, still having to deliver results and getting to market. Having distributed teams is not easy. A lot of legacy solutions are not delivering that speed-to-market. Being able to have access to files from a mobile perspective, and yet be able to protect them, can be a challenge without the right solution. 

The other thing is that keeping a level of engagement and transparency to the consumer is difficult when the world is uncertain. Think about the supply chain issues that a lot of retailers and CPG companies have had in the past year. Being able to quickly solve those issues and still deliver a product is also a challenge.

Johnston: With challenges come opportunities, right? We hear that all the time. What are the opportunities that have emerged in the last several years with the pandemic?

McQueen: What's interesting is that we've talked about digital transformation forever at Box. It means so many things to so many different people. From a retail perspective, especially coming from a brick-and-mortar perspective, the CPG business is trying as much as possible to get product into the hands of the customers. 

A few opportunities that we saw last year: the direct-to-consumer business has grown in so many ways. For example, Nike now has a direct-to-consumer, but not as much in the stores, and is able to truly understand what customers want. They lure them in by launching the mirror, which all of a sudden gets a lot of data. The opportunity is to understand the customer better.

Last year and the years prior we heard a lot about security issues with customer data, or even merger and acquisitions deals happening and being released before they were ready to announce it. 

The opportunity is to find a new way to change the way you work while still delivering — by securing the files, understanding what content is — and creating an environment for customers to see that you are a trusted company that is protecting data as well.

Johnston: Recently we were talking about the future of work. The future of work is here. I'm going to ask you to dust off your crystal ball and talk about the future, what are your expectations? What are your expectations or predictions for how this is going to continue to change?

McQueen: A few things in terms of change. Last year and the year before, there was about 10 years worth of innovation in three months. With folks having to start working remotely, a lot of companies were desperate to find laptops. That particular aspect of remote work is not going anywhere. As it doesn't go anywhere, as a CIO, CISO, CTO, you have to provide workers with the best tools. 

We see what we call a best-in-class approach, which is having the best in the cloud, collaboration tools, content management platforms, and making sure that is secure. That is not going to change. A lot of companies are going to pop up that are providing different solutions.

Ultimately, what clients ask is, "How can I have one solution that's going to help me across my entire ecosystem from inception of a product to delivery of a product?" That's not going to change. The need to secure that is going to be even stronger. We touched on security. Again, the exposure that we see, whether it's IP information or personal financial information, the need to protect that is also not going to change.

Then, lastly, based around the idea of being able to still push a diverse and inclusive workforce. Being remote, there are a lot more opportunities to do so, and there’s a big push or shift towards the wellness of workers as well — making sure the mental health aspect is taken care of. 

Johnston: It is really exciting, it's reinforcing a lot of what we're hearing from companies as well. I'd love to get into use cases. What are you seeing when it comes to today's consumer goods companies and retailers who are trying and succeeding — and maybe not so much succeeding — when they're modernizing content operations to be more competitive?

McQueen: I see it in so many different ways. When it comes down to it, there is another element where successful companies have been able to make sure employees are safe and actually working closely with compliance regardless of where they are — whether it's being compliant in the warehouse, the store, making sure that employees and customers are protected. 

Companies that are able to have a direct line to employees via mobile, or use a system like Box, for example, to collect information on COVID testing, given that Box is a hit by compliance solution. Companies are also investing in internal communication using tools like Slack, to be able to foster a collaborative environment that is going to lead to people doing their best work. Productivity is number one. 

The second use case is around R&D. As it develops faster, you have to get to market faster, and create an environment. Think of it as a virtual room for your R&D needs. Because of the security that we have around Box, for example, you're able to build an environment focused on designing with the solutions that you love designing with. 

People that cannot be in a room and build a product are now able to see it and extend it for manufacturing. That's an opportunity that prior to COVID, you had to be in the same realm, there was never an option to collaborate internationally on launching a product.

Those are the two big use cases. One other use case is around another trend, which is the M&A.

When you buy a digital first company, smaller companies come into a big environment and bring that digital first experience, which ends up transforming the entire organization. That's an interesting reverse of circumstances, but it won’t go anywhere anytime soon. 

Johnston: I’d like to flip this around a bit. Can you tell me about the companies that haven't been prioritizing this? What are they risking?

McQueen: It's very difficult because typically in the retail CPG space, only 1.7% of spend is actually IT and infrastructure spend. What you're risking is creating an environment that is not going to be able to contain the demand because, the good news, is there's a lot of demand. 

Last year alone, the NRF mentioned there were over $473 billion worth of investment in retail that customers were willing to go through. Most of the country is still dealing with a pandemic and nothing has actually changed. The holiday season was one of the most successful holiday seasons with retail up more than 6%. If you're not modernizing, you're behind the times and not able to meet the demand.

The first thing is that you're not going to be agile. Creating that agility, which ultimately is going to help sell faster, are the challenges. The other thing, which is probably a big one, is trusting the cloud. When we talk about cloud content management, that’s every file, every document, every piece of content such as the organization.

We spend a lot of time at Box educating folks on the importance of protecting that content, the importance of protecting IP.

Johnston: I'm going to push you a little bit. I know you mentioned you’re working with companies, are you able to provide an example? If you can name them, that's great. If not, could just provide something that you worked with as seeing these benefits.

McQueen: One of my favorite companies is e.l.f. Cosmetics, which has been a customer of Box for the past few years. It's been interesting because they are a company that actually sells through a lot of friends' companies, such as CVS or Target.

When building a marketing campaign, which is another one of the use cases, agencies actually come into the environment.

They're able to control more of the collaboration, have transparency, and the real-time edit that they're able to see and share to all of the stores they work with. What ends up happening is their message is very aligned, their products are exactly where they need to be. They're able to build a content strategy around Box, giving them the freedom to focus on what they want to do, which is the best product. 

All of the partnerships, whether a new deal with a Target or CVS, all the financials are protected in Box and only accessible to the individuals that need to see them.

Those are a few examples of how a company, that you may not recognize as an innovative company, is changing how they work and embracing the future. Given that there's a lot of unpredictability, the best thing to do is give the team and the company the best chance of succeeding by having the latest tools and by having all your apps integrated so that you don't have to focus on technology. 

No one that gets into the retail business is doing it because they want to manage files. Technology should not get in the way. e.l.f. Cosmetics is a perfect example of technology not getting in the way, but enhancing how they operate and create.

Johnston: e.l.f. is a great example, they are true digital innovators. Kory Marchisotto was actually a CGT CMO of the Year last year, we’re certainly big fans of them as well. 

McQueen: Other companies are doing this as well, but I love how they've been able to use video content to enhance the brand. They're able to jump on a lot of the new platforms, such as TikTok, and use influencers.

To be able to create a video strategy or content that takes the brand from a single platform to being able to promote the brand on many different platforms, and be inclusive of all customers, is another opportunity that e.l.f. has done an incredible job.

Johnston: I don't want to derail us, but I'm not sure if you saw e.l.f. was featured on a Jeopardy Daily Double. During our CGSM Sales and Marketing Summit, Kory shared with us how they were able to capitalize on that moment. Within a few days, they were able to change all of their branding — or maybe it was even a day — very quickly.

McQueen: 100%. I love that. The opportunity is to be able to be agile and meet the demands of the future. We don't know what the future holds, but at least give yourself the best chance and the best structure. You need to have a simple solution that allows you to collaborate. It has to be secure, protect your PII and personal information. Then, it has to be mobile. Every solution in the market, including ours, focuses on making sure customers get the most value out of the solution.

Johnston: I want to get into the weeds a little bit. Even though people aren't getting into retail to move around files, these are facts of people's jobs. Let's talk a bit about protection. Protecting proprietary R&D and design files with granular access permissions and classification policies. 

In the name of getting granular, why is this important? What are you hearing when you're talking with retailers and consumer goods companies about how they're handling this?

McQueen: Before we even get to that, I’d like to mention that global cyber attacks have increased greatly in the last year. You hear a lot in the press, but there are a lot that you don't hear in the press. That's the first challenge. 

We know they're growing and they're going to keep growing. That's one of the biggest things. Whether you think of malware detection, ransomware, what I'm hearing is that they're trying as much as possible to create an environment of zero trust, where actual workers are educated in a way where it is part of their day-to-day work. 

There's a lot more classification around the content that we see in Box. This is because a lot of CIOs and CISOs are trying to educate their teams. There are external threats, but sometimes there is unmalicious sharing. For example, any M&A activity that's happening and someone accidentally sharing a file.

Obviously, with Box, we've been able to do so. We have an offering called Shield that was launched about two years ago, which helps with malware detection to discover and contain it before it becomes a data breach or has a significant loss of files.

I don't see this security issue going anywhere anytime soon, simply because of the amount of data — data is one of the most valuable things that retailers have. Ultimately, you mentioned the future of work and people not coming back to the office, companies have to educate the teams. 

With something like Box Shield, it runs in the background, the team doesn’t actually see it run, but it gives peace of mind knowing that the IP is protected and that there’s an opportunity to prevent any attack. A tool like Box can help with that.

Johnston: When you talk about the companies that don't prioritize this, they're exposing themselves to risk. But what are they not planning for when they're not modernizing their operations to prepare for this?

McQueen: Sometimes, if we take it back to content, people don't understand, or are not prioritizing, how powerful content is. Oftentimes, we think of data as data leaks around customer data and credit card information. Realistically speaking, you have to stop protecting content from inception. 

For example, if you’re a big apparel company and launching a new shoe or any product, you've invested money into that. Protecting those designs, protecting financial information is so important.

From a trust perspective, partners will not trust you if they’re aware you don't have a secure system to protect the data. Customers definitely will not trust you as well. Look at the past two years — the most successful brands have been brands that customers trust, where there's transparency in the process. 

There's also a trust that their information and the quality of the product they will deliver will resonate and meet their needs. This is a great opportunity for CISOs and CIOs to have conversations with the lines of businesses, the executives, to figure out a strategy that's going to deliver trust through security.

Johnston: Can you share examples of the companies you're talking with who are doing just that?

McQueen: There are absolutely so many. That's the exciting part, people are realizing that is something they need. One company is an international apparel company that has grown online and also has brick-and-mortar stores. With the brick-and-mortar stores, they've used Box as the hub for all of the design and construction plans. 

Being around the world and not hiring teams that you may know, Box is a trusted way to deliver the plan. They're able to track at every single level, who's looking at the plans, how they're looking at it, and manage through workflows the process of opening a brand-new store, which tends to be a sensation for this particular brand.

I've also seen this around the direct-to-consumer process. A lot of brands are going directly to consumers and all of a sudden, they're ingesting credit card information. Being able to have that allows marketing execs and business execs to focus on taking care of the business, knowing this is absolutely 100% secure.

I've seen that with a lot of the direct-to-consumer brands we're working with. The last one, a lot of major retailers grow by acquiring companies that are smaller than them. For those incoming companies you never hear about what's happened before. Now, if the information is in Box, you know about financial data when folks want you to hear about financial data, so that the launch is powerful.

Johnston: We've talked about tracking, security, and collaborating. Can we talk about streamlining? How are all these technologies, how are these operations, how are they streamlining marketing launches across marketing teams, brand teams, legal teams?

McQueen: Working across different teams, you have different apps and different solutions that are used. Successful teams are able to work in an environment where apps are integrated. One of the environments we see often is the combination of Box, Slack and Okta, or Box, Slack and Adobe. 

Think of marketing teams collaborating, bringing in different agencies. They'll start collaborating on Box, then some conversation will happen on Slack. Next thing you know, they designed the concept and are editing in Adobe, and then launched it via Box to all of their partners. All while knowing exactly when someone has looked at it and understanding what versions of the product as a campaign we're looking at.

That's a simplified example where collaboration workflow and being able to integrate with all the apps is helpful. It's going to help get to market faster, but ultimately goes back to transparency. For a supply chain example, a lot of solutions don't have mobile access. 

If you're a supply chain manager and all of a sudden have to change the source of where the manufacturing is going to happen, being able to do that on a mobile device is very helpful — the ability to get the latest updates. 

Being able to have that collaboration happen in one platform with the legal team when onboarding a new vendor, getting an agreement, and working that agreement — whether it's Google or Microsoft — in one platform is incredibly helpful. All this leads you to getting to market faster.

Johnston: I'm sure we're all aware of the use cases where you have someone building something in Slack, maybe taking it offline, and then you have all these working in different places. What about the companies that aren't prioritizing this? What are they opening themselves up to?

McQueen: It's a lot of exposure. You're allowing yourself not to know where your content is and opening yourself to vulnerabilities that end up being beyond your control.

All of a sudden, you have what we call shadow IT, which has been a theme for a long time because at the end of the day, people are more productive when they're working from home and they're going to get their work done.

The idea of providing approved solutions, where the security standard is your standard, is one of the ways to reduce exposure. Many people tell me, "Hey, I'm going to get the work done." You'll see different teams, especially around marketing, going and finding their own solutions, paying for them out of their credit card, and IT has no idea.

Johnston: Some of this has always gone on, and people are always trying to find the ways they'll get things done, but there are a lot of new considerations, new types of data, new things to worry about when it comes to remote working. New processes to be mindful of that maybe they didn't two years ago. From the companies you're talking with, what are you seeing?

McQueen: In terms of processes, it's the idea of not all being in the same room and brainstorming. That particular process is probably one of the processes we talk about the most. We talk about it with many different customers, on how to create a collaborative environment and capture those notes and ideas.

Something that we've worked really hard on at Box is building something called Box Notes, which helps capture those notes in real-time to get creative. I see other solutions going that way, as well.

Another opportunity is how to get to a place, from a talent perspective, where you’re able to attract all kinds of talent. People want to work in a secure environment and know they're being protected. If you are in a brick-and-mortar environment, knowing that you have the proper compliance and getting that information right away in real-time is another opportunity that a lot of clients have taken.

Johnston: We like to close with some best practices. What are your tips to achieve buy-in from key stakeholders when implementing new processes and technologies?

McQueen: It's always difficult for anyone to say, "I'm going to change the way that I work." Change management is the biggest challenge. There has to be a certain level of investment, and no one likes going to the CFO to ask for money. I can imagine how other people feel. The opportunity is to tie manual processes that already exist into digital processes. 

Take onboarding for example, if you're able to show to key stakeholders the speed to market you can get to, the agility you can create, the exposures you can reduce, there is no money that can protect against that. The conversation is challenging. How do I bring this up? Personally, I talk about the best brands in the world and how they're doing it. I also talk about the manual processes that, by digitizing, are going to help the entire business.

In most companies, marketing teams tend to be the early adopters of new technologies because marketers will market all through the year. Especially right now, you're marketing on many different platforms. They're meeting the need of where customers are to market. Those teams tend to be teams that help drive change across the entire organization.

Johnston: For people just starting out, what do you want to tell them they shouldn't be afraid of? What are some of the misconceptions when it comes to modernizing content operations?

McQueen: The misconception is that it's going to be hard and take a lot of training. Good solutions, like Box, do not require training. It’s intuitive. It’s built for teams to understand right away. It’s not cumbersome, there's no install that needs to happen. 

There is always a fear of, "Oh my gosh, I'm going to have to change everything and how I work." You're not, you're just going to digitize it and make it easier for yourself. You're going to create a lot more transparency around it.

Johnston: We talked about change management. Have you seen change management improve or change as a result of the pandemic? Do you think things have gotten easier or harder?

McQueen: I would say both. Things have gotten easier in that being able to work remotely is bringing a consensus of having to use digital solutions. That's the opportunity and what I've seen change. However, what has not changed is the need to be able to get in the room, get on the call, and talk about it. I don't think that will change. We saw so much transformation happen overnight. 

The challenge is how to go from that moment, to making it a movement? In that moment you needed to get on Zoom, needed a solution like Box to collaborate. How do you build a content strategy around that?

That’s a conversation we have moving forward. It’s all about how to make the entire business digital, even if there is a brick-and-mortar presence. It's from consumer engagement to the way that you onboard vendors, the way you collaborate internally and externally. 

Legal teams are going over agreements online and expecting those solutions to be fast, have versioning, but also be able to access from anywhere, at any given time. That's not going to change. That's the exciting part. We're making the business open to more people with easier technologies. It's a challenge for us, we have to make sure that at any given time, our technology is simple, intuitive, but also secure.

Johnston: How are you working with retailers to address the influx of seasonal hiring and onboarding?

McQueen: We recently launched something called Box Sign, which is an e-signature tool. We created a few features, including one called File Request where we understand that seasonal workers are not knowledge workers.

Many retailers are saying how hard it is to actually find employees. They have to go back and try to recruit from former seasons. If your process is digital, that’s a lot easier to do versus having to go through manual applications. 

We've seen some of the biggest retailers digitize millions and millions of applications so that they can have that process. This also helps with protecting the workers.

In the last two seasons, seasonal workers had different challenges — it has to be compliant, making sure that merchandising is done the proper way, protecting themselves, but also making sure that if they have a health scare, that incident is recorded and is reported right away. Technology plays a huge part in being able to accelerate that process and keep employees safe.

Johnston: If you had to leave our audience with just one or two points, what should consumer goods companies and retailers be mindful of when looking at the technology to modernize content operations?

McQueen: Technology has to be used by real people. I've never met an IT team that said, "Oh, we have too many people on our team." Most IT teams in the retail and CPG space are very lean. "My team is too big," or "Oh, my budget is ginormous," no one has ever said those things.