Scaling Commerce: How Commerce’s CMO Builds Growth in a Connected World

0:00:09.2 Kailey Raymond: Welcome to Builders Wanted, the podcast for people shaping what's next in customer engagement, technology and growth. Today's guest leads marketing at one of the fastest growing platforms in E Comm. I'm joined by Michelle Suzuki, Chief Marketing Officer at Commerce, a company enabling brands to sell everywhere, build seamlessly and scale globally. With more than 25 years in B2B and technology marketing experience, Michelle has built high performing teams, transformed growth engines and led brands through expansion, acquisition and digital evolution. Today we'll explore what it takes to market at scale in the AI era, how data and creativity combine in growth engines, and why building the future of Commerce means thinking beyond the storefront. Let's get into it.

0:00:53.4 Producer: This podcast is brought to you by Twilio, the customer engagement platform that helps businesses turn real time data into seamless, personalized experiences. Engage customers on their terms across SMS, voice, email, WhatsApp and more. Power every interaction with AI so conversations feel natural, not robotic. Adapt in real time, delivering the right message on the right channel exactly when it matters. That's the power of Twilio. More than 320,000 businesses from startups to Fortune 500s trust Twilio to transform customer signals into conversations, connections and real revenue. Reimagine the way you engage with your customers. Learn more@Twilio.com Michelle welcome to the show.

0:01:42.5 Kailey Raymond: I'm really excited to have you here. 

0:01:44.7 Michelle Suzuki: Thank you. It's good to be here.

0:01:46.4 Kailey Raymond: This should be really fun. We're going to start off and kind of get to know each other a little bit better. I know you've worked at major technology brands and are now leading marketing at Commerce. What does being a builder mean to you in the world of commerce platforms?

0:02:00.4 Michelle Suzuki: For me, being a builder is being someone who sees possibilities where other people see barriers. So for me, it's all about what's possible and whatever you put into it, you get out of it. And I think that there are lots of reasons why not, but if you can always find the opportunity inside of change, you'll always end up coming out on the positive side.

0:02:26.4 Kailey Raymond: I love that it's a reframing of within any momentum, any change, there is always going to be something for you. There's always going to be a pocket for you to learn, for you to grow, for you to stretch and ultimately build. You know, throughout your career you've guided growth, transformation, scaling. What's a core principle that you always bring into your role?

0:02:52.8 Michelle Suzuki: I think this kind of reflects back on the first question is so many people are afraid of change and I think there's always so much opportunity in change that fearing kind of the unknown is really a liability. And embracing change and the possibilities that come with it is something that I think for me has always been a highlight of my career. Not always the easiest thing to do, but always something that really makes a difference in kind of your overall outcome and your overall perspective.

0:03:26.2 Kailey Raymond: Totally. And as a marketing leader, pretty much the only thing that you can have a sure bet on is that in two years, the world is going to change and you're going to need to be able to move and change proactively alongside of it. You know, you've seen trends come and go, and you know, Commerce supports a range of customers as well, from small startups to global brands. I'm wondering how you think about leading marketing in a way that serves such a diverse set of customers.

0:03:56.1 Michelle Suzuki: Yeah, that's a really good question. For us, it's really interesting because we have three different products that sit underneath the Commerce umbrella. We've got BigCommerce, we've got Feedonomics and Makeswift, and they all sell into different audiences. So in each of those audiences, you also have a buying committee that you need to appeal to. So it probably includes the CMO, the head of digital marketing, perhaps the CTO, sometimes the CFO. So it's interesting the way that you need to change and adapt the messaging to each of those different personas inside of your ideal customer profile, and then do that times three for all of the different products inside of the portfolio. You know, it's always so important in marketing in general to go to where your audience is, meet them where they are, give them the information that they need in order to be effective in their role and satisfy what it is that they're looking for. So for me, that's of course all about doing research and really understanding your audiences and being able to speak to them in the right kinds of ways. And that is the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity in marketing.

0:05:11.5 Kailey Raymond: Yeah, I mean, you're speaking my language right now. Obviously, buying committees have feel like they've grown like tenfold since I started my career. What is it like 22 is the number right now in a committee? Totally unbelievable. And a lot of what you're talking about is some folks that you need to get in front of are C Suite. And those aren't necessarily the easiest people to kind of get their attention. So meeting them where they are not always the easiest thing to do. I'm going to ask you a little bit more about that later on in the conversation. It's a big change in marketing, I think of switching from a lead based model to in a lot of ways, an account based model. Like how do you think about making those switches? But first I want to talk to you about just the commerce landscape in general. So it's evolving incredibly fast. Omnichannel, you know, marketplaces, direct to consumer, these are all things that we're all familiar with. What shift do you think is the most critical for brands to think about right now?

0:06:11.8 Michelle Suzuki: Yeah, it's so interesting. I was just having a conversation earlier today about this. AI is front and center in everyone's minds and it's changing the way people show up to work, the way they do the work that is on their plate. And it's also interesting that it's changing the way people shop and buy. The buying part, I think still has a little ways to go, but agentic commerce is really kind of at the forefront of everybody's talk track right now. So how much is AI going to be involved in making those purchase decisions or offering up suggestions? So, for example, I have a niece who's 20, she goes to NYU. I know she likes going to concerts, I know she likes gold instead of silver. So I know there are a handful of things about her, but I have no idea what to get her for Christmas, for example. So the rise of AI as a helpmate, I think in shopping is something that is just emerging and it's something that everyone in the realm of commerce is very interested in. Like how do I get involved in that conversation? How do the agents find me and my brand?

0:07:20.3 Michelle Suzuki: How do I stand out amongst all of the competitors in this space? So agentic commerce really is kind of front and center right now for payments providers, for the answer engines. Search engines, of course, are still in the mix. Still the majority of searches are done on traditional search engines. So what is that role that AI is going to play and how much of it will be influencing the purchase decisions that are made a year from now, two years from now, five years from now? You can imagine how much it will change and disrupt. And that is the biggest trend that I'm seeing right now.

0:07:57.9 Kailey Raymond: Yeah, no kidding. The possibilities there, it can kind of bring me in so many different directions to ask questions for you about. But the way that we think about AI kind of changing the commerce landscape just feels like it's probably the fastest moving industry right now in many, many ways. I'm wondering if you have any like initial data points to tell you, like how AI referrals or whatever are kind of changing for you. Like, I'll give you an example. Right now we're seeing referrals from LLMs convert way higher than from other channels. So there's this really interesting trying to trust component that's embedded within an LLMs. But it changes the way that we need to create content and the way that, you know, we're kind of like feeding information back. So any insights you can kind of share alongside that?

0:08:45.8 Michelle Suzuki: Yeah, for us, it's kind of interesting in that we have so much authority on our websites, kind of with traditional search, and we've put a lot of effort over the years into traditional SEO. Along come the large language models and the agents that are out there hunting and pecking and trying to find the right kinds of information. We've seen a drop, as has everyone, a drop in organic traffic. And we've seen a rise in these answer engines producing results that are relevant for us. So what we're trying to do is really tap in. We've got a new vendor that we're utilizing to help us optimize how it is that we're showing up in the answer engines. We're tracking against what we think are the right kinds of guidelines. It's still so new that you're not exactly sure what kind of best practice looks like. I talked to a lot of my CMO colleagues about this, and it's a topic just at the forefront of everybody's thoughts right now is how do we show up in the answer engines and how do we make our content the most informative, the most authoritative? There are changes that we're making to our blog, for example.

0:09:58.5 Michelle Suzuki: So it's no longer blog posts written by an anonymous source or a content marketer. It's written by someone with authority in the company who is a thought leader who we can pin the activity too, because that's really important to Answer Engine. So there's a lot that's changing. There's still so much that's unknown, but we're trying our very best to keep up with it.

0:10:21.1 Kailey Raymond: It's this really interesting dynamic that's happening now too, where like, levers like brand become incredibly important because LLMs like to cite authoritative sources. And so all of these kind of like old and new channels are interacting in really interesting ways. And one of the things that I'm also really curious about in space is like agents purchasing on your behalf. Not just the research itself, but in the future, like, what's the authority that we're giving an agent to actually purchase things for us and what that does to like identity.

0:10:58.1 Michelle Suzuki: It's interesting because I often think about this example of my niece. I'm trying to figure out what to get her for Christmas already. And I think, I think I am a good aunt, very good aunt. So I go to Perplexity, for example, and I ask, okay, this is my niece. She likes gold instead of silver. She loves going to live music concerts, she goes to nyu. She's a size seven shoe. You know, here's all of the information about her based on this kind of relevant demographic data that you have of her tastes. What would you recommend for me to buy? There will come a day very, very soon when the LLM will come back with suggestions and can ask me, what would you prefer to buy for her and do the transaction right there or even autonomously make the decision and make the purchase? If I trust it enough. So where does that line begin and end? I'm not exactly sure yet. I don't know that anybody knows. But there is such a profound opportunity, I think in the market right now. Everybody's trying to get to that gate of we're the first ones there. We know what the answer is.

0:12:05.1 Michelle Suzuki: And I think a lot of the functionality inside of Feedonomics, this feed management solution that we have, is so AI forward for us as a company that it's really helping us help our vendors to manage their inventories and the way that they're presenting on the answer engines and is a really exciting space for us to be in. So I think there's a lot that's going to be changing over the next months and years, but it's an exciting, interesting future.

0:12:34.3 Kailey Raymond: It's fun. It does feel like for the first time in a while there's like actually totally new questions that we have to ask. There's always kind of new things that we can fret about, but like, this is a step change in terms of that. And it kind of brings together two different ideas in marketing, I think as well with, you know, this kind of idea of the content you're creating, the thought leadership being the feed to these LLMs to be able to drive citations like this creator work, meeting this data. How do we bridge the gap between data driven marketing and creative marketing? You know, you've talked about this before. You've emphasized this, like, how does that combination show up at Commerce?

0:13:15.5 Michelle Suzuki: I think in my history, you know, I've been doing marketing for about 30 years and I think that there's always been sort of two very different aspects of a marketer. One is either you're a brand marketer so you're really creative and you do all of the brand work and it's amazing and you connect emotionally with people or you do demand and you're doing demand generation. You're looking at all the quantitative data. You're understanding where it is people are coming from, where they're hitting on your website, the way they're interacting with you, the content they're consuming, how quickly they watch videos, all of those kinds of things. So how do you take kind of the qualitative and the quantitative, or how do you take the brand versus the demand piece? I think it used to be that if you could do both, you were kind of a unicorn in the marketing world. But I think what we're seeing now is kind of emerging of all of these skills of doing both brand and demand. They are merging into one universe because you really can't make good creative decisions without good data behind it. So even as we launched our new brand Commerce, we wanted to go to market understanding, kind of where we stood at a foundational level as we launched the brand, what the recognition of our companies was versus where it would be then moving forward and understanding how people affiliate different keywords with brands and the emotions that they feel, it's important for us to gather those kinds of data points, how they react to the brand and those kinds of things.

0:14:50.6 Michelle Suzuki: So I think for me, it's very much a merging of the brand and the demand side into really being so data driven in all of the decisions that you're making. Even something as important as choosing a color palette, you can use data to help you drive those kinds of decisions.

0:15:09.7 Kailey Raymond: I couldn't agree more. We've been on this endeavor this year to invest more in brand, and my team runs performance marketing. And you know, we're seeing these, this direct correlation and interaction between these two things where it's like you're doing this really creative and interesting thing. It feels a little bit like, you know, a few years ago people would have said that it's fluffy or whatever, but now I feel like a lot of companies are investing way more in brand. And guess what? You're seeing your demand efficiencies rise.

0:15:39.6 Michelle Suzuki: Absolutely.

0:15:40.4 Kailey Raymond: You know, it's an obvious thing when you state it now, but for a really long time there was this over reliance on performance marketing and underinvestment in brand, and now I think folks are flipping the switch a little bit on that. We've talked about this a tiny little bit, which is kind of this like infrastructure side as well as this kind of like front end. Side of the commerce of, like, a lot of builders, I would say, are thinking about the front end, the experience of actually purchasing something, you're purchasing something for your niece, but underneath that, this infrastructure of all these robots talking to each other is built on APIs and this ecosystem underneath it. Right. So, you know, I'm wondering, how does your marketing strategy reflect this broader ecosystem which kind of combines these two things.

0:16:26.7 Michelle Suzuki: The front end and the back end? It's sort of like that brand and demand element is how do you make this holistic ecosystem that is really productive for the experience and really driving what that looks like as you put together your overall strategy. So I think of our website as we were kind of rebranding to commerce, as we were putting that together, it was really important for us that we represented visually this beautiful brand. But on the back end, we needed to have all kinds of different functionality. And it was important for us to have the optimal customer experience, for us to have an investor relations section that was always updated with the most relevant live data, a PR section. I mean, there's all of the important data tracking that we have on our website that gives us all the relevant detail, making sure that we have forms and automation incorporated. It's so important to think holistically about what it is that you're meaning to deliver and incorporating all of those elements together so that there aren't jagged hard edges between them. But it's all one entire ecosystem that presents something that is more comfortable and relative to what it is that the user is hoping to experience with you 100%.

0:17:53.5 Kailey Raymond: I think one of the things that we continue to think about a little bit associated with this is like the website is your front door. How do you think about your front door as an opportunity to gain as much information about this person as possible and present them with really relevant things up front. So immediately my mind goes to like the death of forms, like this dropdown menu that we've presented people for so long of, like, here's all your options, like, assuming that they know what our product names are. And I don't know, maybe there's a future in which unstructured prompts or the information that we're taking and sending into our systems to be able to create completely tailored, personalized experiences for somebody up front, which I think is just like a really interesting, exciting future.

0:18:43.4 Michelle Suzuki: Yeah, I mean, it very much leans into this agentic universe that we find ourselves slowly but surely, kind of, or rapidly but surely coming into is this structured and unstructured data and making that really Available to anyone at any time for any reason. So that it shows up in the large language models, it shows up in the answer engines, it can show up on the homepage of your web website, it can show up on the front door of your shopping experience, it can show up in one of the co sellers that you have for your brand. There are so many different options now and you just need to be available and accessible regardless of where your customer is in whatever method and manner they are looking for.

0:19:29.4 Kailey Raymond: Super easy, Michelle. You got this no problem. Incredibly complex problem to solve. Totally. You know, part of this complexity too. You've been talking, talking about this rebrand. We're talking about, you know, data kind of passing back and forth to places. But part of this too is like how you show up in different places. Consistency with relevance. You have again these different business segments you operate across the globe. You kind of just underwent this transformation. How do you think about maintaining that consistency and relevance across all of these different people you're trying to talk to?

0:20:05.2 Michelle Suzuki: Yeah, I mean that is a lot of the reason why we decided to rebrand the company. BigCommerce is our ecommerce platform and was the name of the overall company. Even though we also had Makeswift and Feedonomics as part of the offering at the company, we found that it really kind of pigeonholed us into this like e commerce platform universe instead of really representing kind of the fulsome experience that we were offering that included this new era of agentic commerce. So much of this AI forward message that we represent with our Feedonomics brand, how do you show up to those answer engines? A lot of these questions that we've been talking about today, it's not merely about we're creating a storefront and setting it out there and hoping that people come to it and purchase from you. It's about showing up wherever they are and for whatever reason. So I think us rebranding as Commerce kind of broadly represents us and our desire to really mature and represent the industry as a whole and what's possible and of course then represent our three child brands as well.

0:21:19.7 Kailey Raymond: Yeah, totally. It makes a ton of sense this idea of like a house of brands, right. Of like here's this one overarching entity. There's a ton underneath that and we can tell those stories as well. I'm wondering if you have an example or of something that maybe didn't go as planned but maybe taught you something really important that you're still kind of hold on to.

0:21:45.5 Michelle Suzuki: I think one of the things that I learned early on in my career and have unfortunately echoed a couple more times in my career, is assuming that you really know a lot about your audience that you're marketing to, you are not your audience. And I think it's easy for a marketer to fall into this trap of thinking, okay, I buy stuff online, so I know exactly what it is that this person needs and wants because it's reflective of me. So creating Personas and creating messaging architectures and creating assets that you think are really relevant because they reflect you as a buyer instead of reflecting kind of a Chief Digital Officer at a major retail brand or reflecting a CTO at a hunting or outdoors brand. There are lots of different examples of where we put ourselves kind of in a tricky situation because we made assumptions about an audience that we weren't exactly precise on. So, again, this brings me back to the more you can use data to inform your strategies, the better. So really understanding who you're marketing to, what their likes and dislikes are, what their wants and needs are, and then creating content and architectures around what it is that they need and how you solve the problems they have is the absolute best way to do it.

0:23:13.5 Michelle Suzuki: It's going data driven. You cannot go wrong. Yeah, and unfortunately, I've made that mistake a few times.

0:23:21.7 Kailey Raymond: I think we all have. Of the shortcut of like, yeah, well, I'm a person and I buy things. And so I know this. That's kind of like an interesting balance question, which is like, we always have this need everywhere in marketing. It kind of feels very cute. It's like, one day it's like, okay, we need to turn this on or we need to turn this off. And there's always, you know, something kind of new coming our way. So there's this real need for balancing this speed, this rapid scale with balancing this, like, doing it right. Making sure that there's, like, maintaining some semblance of, like, integrity and foundation in what we're doing. So can you walk me through how you strike that balance?

0:24:08.0 Michelle Suzuki: It's hard because there are so many pressures to get things kind of out the door really quickly. I think especially in this era of agentic commerce, there's so much of, you know, we want to be able to plant the flag and be the first ones on the field and really mark our territory. So there is just kind of this tripping over yourself to get to market with the best partnership, with the best message, with the best customer example. And while speed is definitely something that is informing AI in general, you can't go too quickly because then that's when you start making mistakes. And I think that being as methodical as you can be while going as quickly as you can is the best way to do it. Because if you go too fast, then you just trip over yourself and then fumble on the field. Whereas if take a breath, really understand what it is that you're doing. Even with AI kind of up in the air and you not being exactly sure what the payments ecosystem is going to be doing, or really understanding what the answer engines are going to be doing, taking a breath, really understanding your partnerships, getting the right customers in the right place with the right solutions and then going to market with that, rather than tripping over yourself.

0:25:31.0 Michelle Suzuki: Taking your time and doing it right the first time is super important. It's hard to keep expectations met while doing that, however. And I recognize that that's an ongoing challenge for marketers all over the world.

0:25:46.7 Kailey Raymond: It is. Thank you for recognizing that challenge that marketers have. It's very cathartic for me to hear that from a marketing leader, but it is really interesting. The point you're bringing up around AI, the thought that I have around this is like AI is only as good as the data that you're serving it. And so what you're talking about with the messaging frameworks and the campaign architectures and the, you know, making sure that your infrastructure and your data is good, that's the slowing down to speed up. Like that's the thing that's going to allow you to actually drive efficiency and scale in the future. Because if you don't do that, you're going to get a bunch of slopes. Probably not going to be a really good outcome for you. There's a ton of AI pilots that are failing right now and there's probably a reason for that. Like, did we slow down enough to know what good looked like?

0:26:36.4 Producer: You know, yeah, Great customer experiences aren't magic. They're built. And Twilio is the platform that helps you build them. Every customer action, browsing your site, opening an email, reaching out to support triggers instant AI powered personalized engagement across sms, voice, email, chat and more. No delays, no guesswork, just the right message at the right moment. From automated messaging to seamless authentication to hyper personalized customer journeys, Twilio's customer engagement platform powers millions of interactions daily, helping businesses drive loyalty, optimize marketing spend and create experiences that people remember. Twilio is the ultimate toolbox for customer engagement, ready to build experiences that matter. Visit Twilio.com I'm wondering if you have.

0:27:31.8 Kailey Raymond: An example of a campaign or a launch that you're really proud of. Like, what made that work.

0:27:39.6 Michelle Suzuki: I am really proud of the launch that we just did with the Commerce brand. When I first got to the company I started in January of this year, they had already started kind of exploring a rebrand, wanting to unify BigCommerce, Feedonomics and MakeSwift underneath a parent brand. So really there was a little bit of footwork done, but not a whole bunch. So one of the first things I did was bring in an amazingly talented brand leader named Denise Bruhns, and she cobbled together then a crew of people, including an amazing creative director named Alicia Herbert, and they created from nothingness. They created a strategy and a go to market and a color palette and a logo and messaging and positioning and our reason for being and a vision and a mission. And it was such a beautiful thing to see. Kind of from nothingness sprouts this beautiful, robust vision of what it is that we can be as a company. It was just so meaningful to me to have such amazing talent on the team who could really bring it all together visually, strategically, methodically. And we did it in record time. Speaking of, like, tripping over yourself to try to get things out, we did it in four months, which is just unbelievably fast.

0:29:13.7 Michelle Suzuki: But I feel like if it's sort of meant to be, it will all come together. And it really did. And I have to say, the work that Denise and her team have done is incredible. And we wouldn't be where we are today without them. They are amazing. It's beautiful work, and I think that it's also super meaningful. And so I'm really, really proud of that.

0:29:36.8 Kailey Raymond: That pace. Talk about the balance there. To be able to do something with some sort of, like, sturdiness in that pace is just. It's really incredible on a shoestring budget, too.

0:29:51.2 Michelle Suzuki: So even more kudos to the team.

0:29:54.0 Kailey Raymond: I love it. What's the envelope Season? So I'm sure that team is going to say, hey, Michelle, what are the purse strings for next year? Oh, I love it. That's. That's unbelievable. Having recently done a rebrand here, which we thought was fast as well, I think four months beats this one too. So, like, well done. Unbelievable.

0:30:14.6 Michelle Suzuki: Yay.

0:30:15.1 Kailey Raymond: Thanks. I love this question. It can lead to some really interesting answers. Is there an insight? Maybe it's like a customer behavior or campaign data, market signals that maybe changed the way that you approach marketing or growth.

0:30:30.0 Michelle Suzuki: I think for me, one of the most interesting changes that I've seen in my career has been what's happened over about the last six months, which is the answer engines really starting to have huge traction in lieu of this very traditional SEO motion. It's so interesting to me to see how quickly it's being adopted and how different generations are using it in different ways. So the answer engines are used by Generation X in one way, by Gen Z in another way, by millennials, in a very different way. And I think that it's important for us to understand who are informing decision making, who is influencing decision making, who is actually decision making. The way they're using answer engines versus traditional search, really understanding how do they show up to our front door, regardless of if it's at our front door on our website or if it's inside of an answer engine. And then how do we really provide kind of the best context for what it is that they're looking for and satisfy what their need is? To me, that's been an epic change in the way we do marketing and probably the most significant change, I would say, over the last 30 years.

0:31:53.7 Kailey Raymond: Any examples of, like, how Gen Z versus a boomer is using Gen A?

0:31:58.6 Michelle Suzuki: Yeah, I mean, I think that I will speak for my Gen X people. I think a lot of us use it like you would a search engine. So what is the best company for purple shampoo, for silver hair? And then you look it up and then you find it, and then you go onto Amazon.com and you look for it. I think that's really different from the way other generations are using it as kind of a personal assistant of sorts. So generational differences are always really interesting to kind of see that data. And I have an amazing spread on my team of people with different kinds of experience, years of experience, different kinds of interactions with social media and the answer engines. So it's always really good to get interesting, cool new perspectives.

0:32:52.0 Kailey Raymond: I love it. One of the things that I think is kind of underrated too, with the way that we kind of operate within marketing teams, is like the structure can actually change the outcomes and sometimes. So I'm wondering, you know, as a marketing leader, if there's a structural or an operational change that you've made that actually has helped your team build more effectively or scale faster.

0:33:18.5 Michelle Suzuki: So I've been at SaaS companies for about the last 15 years, and I've tried a lot of different organizational designs and structures on my team, trying to build for speed and trying to build for efficacy. And I think that depending on the size of the company, I think the Structure that fits best for SaaS at least is functional expertise. So all the content marketers kind of sit underneath a content marketing leader so they have the opportunity to really upskill and level up their careers and learn and grow. I've also tried it kind of in a pod structure where you have cross functional people sitting inside of a pod. So you have like one content marketing, one demand marketing, one product marketing, one graphic designer, and they're all sitting inside of a pod. And the hope is always for agility. And I've seen it work in some places. I've also seen it not work in some places. So I think that kind of expertise inside of a distinct function always works best, I think for the employee and for their career aspirations and growth. Maybe not necessarily for the company at large, but for me it works for the employees and that works for me.

0:34:45.4 Kailey Raymond: Heard. Yeah, there's always this trade off of like planning in silos and then you're going to have all these meetings that are really cross functional, which is great. And then maybe also you're like, wow, my calendar is so full because now I have all these cross functional. There's no perfect model. But I agree with you. I've. I think that functional has been the one that I've seen most commonly and the one that works the most at SaaS and tech.

0:35:11.6 Michelle Suzuki: Agreed.

0:35:13.1 Kailey Raymond: All right, Michelle, I have some quick, fun questions for you to round out the conversation today. What is one trend in commerce or marketing that you're watching closely?

0:35:23.7 Michelle Suzuki: Ooh, I would say agentic commerce. Again, it's just, just so foundationally disruptive and so cool. The prospects for what's going to be possible. I think I can't even really fully wrap my head around what that's going to be like. Like, am I going to employ an AI agent to go and like do all of my shopping for me, handle the payments, just handle delivery and just stuff start showing up at my doorstep because it knows that I need laundry detergent and I need socks and I need. I think there's so much possibility there and it's so interesting to be kind of on the consumer side of that as well as on the commerce industry side of that. I think that there's so much possibility and so much exciting stuff to come. I'm really excited about that.

0:36:12.9 Kailey Raymond: What's a company or a brand that you admire for how they grow with purpose and customer focus?

0:36:19.3 Michelle Suzuki: I work out of Salt Lake City and there's a company called Monaire and they do anemia testing through an application on your iPhone. And I think that it is like the coolest invention ever. And I have an appointment set to chat with their co founder in a couple weeks just because I think the technology is so cool and what Monera is doing is really changing the future of healthcare in a very positive way for underserved populations. And I think just I love that we're using technology for good and not evil. And I'm behind it. I support it's a female founder. I mean it's Utah. I just love everything about that business.

0:37:03.7 Kailey Raymond: Yeah, we love it. What's one thing that every modern marketer in commerce should stop doing and something that they should start doing?

0:37:12.4 Michelle Suzuki: I think they should stop going with their gut. I think the days of going with your gut are behind us and you really have to focus on the data and there is now availability of data in everything that you do. I'm sitting in this beautiful studio right now. There is so much data available around videos like it used to be. Like how many people watched your video on YouTube? You have a flat number and that's it. Now you can see which parts people go back and listen to again and again. You can see how long of a duration are they paying attention for. At what point do they drop off? At what point did it become boring? There's a lot of really interesting and relevant data for stuff that is really even super creative like video. So I think everybody in marketing has an opportunity to utilize data to improve what it is that they're doing for their job.

0:38:05.1 Kailey Raymond: Michelle, last question for you today. What's your advice for builders that are trying to grow commerce oriented businesses or marketing organizations?

0:38:14.8 Michelle Suzuki: I've got different thinking around each of those, but I'll go with my homies. The marketers love it. I think that it's important as we've detailed with a number of questions kind of in our running commentary today, it's important to be grounded in the data and to really understand your end user customer and what their wants and needs are, what it is that you're trying to solve for them and not make assumptions about who they are and what they need, but really utilize data, do your research, do all of the fundamental motions that are probably kind of boring but are super important to helping you build the most accuracy and the most conversion that you're possibly going to be able to have.

0:39:04.3 Kailey Raymond: I love it. It's simple, it's elegant and it's a good reminder that like going back to the basics is sometimes the thing that we always need to remind ourselves of. Michelle, thank you so much. This has been really fun.

0:39:16.1 Michelle Suzuki: Thank you.

0:39:17.2 Kailey Raymond: Yeah, this has been great. Learning about agentic commerce in particular is a very exciting new future.

0:39:24.3 Michelle Suzuki: It's very cool. I can't wait for it.

0:39:27.2 Kailey Raymond: Should be fun. All right. Thanks again. 

0:39:29.2 Michelle Suzuki: Thanks.