Crate & Barrel’s Megan Bernstein is on a mission to bring joy and beauty into the world so that memories can be made.
Under her marketing leadership, the retailer is focused on storytelling that connects with consumers on an emotional level in their most personal places: their homes.
“We have an upcoming Crate & Kids campaign called Home is Their Whole World talking about the growth of our products throughout a consumer’s life,” she explains. “Our crib turns into a toddler bed and then we can service you when you’re ready for bunk beds and when your room needs a desk because your child’s gotten older. It is not just telling you that we’re Crate & Kids and we have the things you’re looking for, but showing you that growth and that journey in a really beautiful way to capture the journey you can be on as our customer.”
For Bernstein, there is an opportunity to reach consumers at different moments throughout the customer lifecycle, whether it is through social media or TV, out-of-home or email. “The thing I’m most trying to do is leverage data with purpose and really storytelling through data,” she says.
Prior to joining Crate & Barrel, Bernstein held senior marketing roles at Nordstrom, Tiffany’s and eBay. Brand Innovators caught up with Bernstein from her office in Chicago to talk customer journey, loyalty and holiday marketing. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you talk about who your customers are?
We really take a psychographic approach to our customers. It’s more about the mindset of our customer versus specific demographics. There’s a lot of our customers or people for whom our product is relevant at different cycles of their journeys.
We have a really large wedding registry business, for example, and that’s a way that we have a lot of customers that experience our brand either as registrants or as gift buyers because you’re going to weddings and experiencing us but via the gift registry. That folds from a lifecycle standpoint into our baby registry. It folds into a moving moment. It folds into your first anniversary, your Thanksgiving together, all of these moments that people want to be purposeful and modern in their homes.
Can you talk about your approach to the holiday season?
We’re balancing Thanksgiving, Christmas and Hanukkah all at once given that we’re in a season when relevant moments matter. We’re launching our Thanksgiving to Every Day campaign with this idea that it isn’t this one time thing that you pull out and entertain with once. There’s this everyday living around entertaining that we are a part of and that we have the products to support.
If we all think of when our parents might have entertained as we were growing up, it was pulling out the fine China and a different mentality to what entertaining and hosting takes on for our consumer. We believe there’s a really important insight in that, which is that entertaining doesn’t have to be precious. You want to open your home and open your things and bring that joy through using our products in your every day, as well as when you entertain. Personalization and loyalty continues to evolve. For each brand, people are on unique journeys. We look at what that means from product categories. We’re certainly on that journey and continue to leverage our data in order to tell those most important stories at those important impactful junctures in your customer journey with us.
How do you define storytelling through data?
It is really leveraging the data we have about our extensive customer base and their life cycles with us to tell the stories that are most relevant to them and to really help bring our brand to life. We are a brand that values the blend of storytelling with the art of analytics. We are creating more purposeful content to really speak to consumers across their life stages and the relevant moments with our brand in a more humanity-filled, emotionally rich territory.
For the past few years, we’ve had a free interior design service called The Design Desk. It’s a fantastic service. People stumble upon it in our stores but we really wanted to bring it more to life via digital campaign. So we launched a new campaign called “Just Imagine” at the beginning of this year where we brought this free service to life by showing you how your vision becomes reality. You live in this home, the experiences of playing with your child, rolling on the carpet, using our storage bins, and having that lazy Sunday morning in a beautiful and organized home in a place that allows you to make the memories you want to make with those you love. That is the thread that I’m trying to bring to the brand. We’re not just selling products to you. We’re leveraging customer insights and painting the picture. We’re selling things that create beauty and joy in your day-to-day life.
You recently did a partnership with Jeremiah Brent. Can you talk about the importance of partnerships and showing up in culture?
Partnerships are critical, especially as a way to grow awareness and relevancy for our Crate & Kids brand. Part of modernized design is that we all value having differentiation within our homes. We don’t want to walk into a home that looks the same across all aspects, but having different partnerships with designers helps us to bring newness and freshness to our core assortment, which is a beautiful product that is a great base and beauty in your home. We were really excited by that partnership with Jeremiah. It’s a kids’ collection so it opens up new audiences for our brand. We continue to look to have really strong partnerships going forward.
Can you talk about how you’re using data and AI to deliver more personalized experiences?
AI is certainly a hot topic in marketing and we are increasingly looking to leverage it as we evolve to more personalized experiences. We have been on a journey to deliver a much more personalized experience than we have in the past. What’s interesting about AI is the ability to curate. We have a really large swath of products in our brand from a $4 price point to a $10,000 price point and AI can help us curate products to match the mindset you’re in when you’re coming to our site or our store and help you find what’s most of interest to you.
Like any technology, it’s not for the sake of using but it’s for the sake of really driving to the most personalized, relevant experience that we can.
Can you talk about how you’re cultivating loyalty?
We are all loyal to the brands that most meet our needs. We don’t have a formal loyalty program today. We do have a Crate & Barrel credit card, which has wonderful rewards, including different double rewards periods. We see many of our best customers adopting that. As an aspirational brand, we see loyalty and the touch points in the care and service you receive across your customer journey. Whether that’s working with or designed as professionals, whether that’s getting a more personalized email relevant to the things you’re looking for, the things we think would complement your Jeremiah Brent purchase and what would go great in your next purchase with us. When you call on the phone and you have a customer service issue, it is so important how we treat you and just the feelings you get about our brand based on your brand experience with us or delivery at your home.
Unlike a lot of brands, where either you walk out of the store with a package or a package shows up at your door, we are often bringing furniture to your home. We’ve all gone through that experience and that is a very personal one. You’re holding your breath, is my wall going to get banged? Is the product going to get dinged? Are people entering my home with booties on? We show up very thoughtfully in that last mile delivery to engender loyalty with our customers.
Can you talk about how your past experiences at brands like Nordstrom, Tiffany’s and eBay have helped in your current role?
I’ve had the great privilege of working on many incredible brands in my career. At eBay, I really realized the power of data. They were a pure play e-commerce retailer. In the digital age, being able to track as a marketer, what were we serving you? What were you converting on? What were you engaging with in terms of content and marketing? Digital marketing was really compelling and we’re really starting to understand the power of how the different marketing channels work together.
Being able to see that from a pure play retail standpoint was very valuable. My time at Tiffany’s was particularly impactful. It was the longest tenure of my career. I joined at a time in the company’s history where they were really blending storytelling with data and digital innovation to modernize and mature marketing best practices. As a result, I had a number of different experiences and I left wearing a lot of different hats. I learned a ton there. One of the most important things was what it was like to work for a luxury brand with an unwavering commitment to that exceptional customer experience. The best loyalty comes from the best customer experiences and feeling like the brand has the products you want and treats you in the way you’d expect to be treated at these price points that you’re shopping for. That’s part of the value proposition.
My time at Nordstrom really taught me about the importance of focusing on what truly matters in the marketing mix to shift marketing’s contribution to sales and understanding the impact of different channels across the customer journey. sales and understanding the impact of different channels across the customer journey.
