Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Deren Baker, CEO of Jumpshot (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are the emerging trends in the space and where do you see open problems?

Deren Baker: The biggest problem that we see out there is basically the one that we’re trying to solve. Most e-commerce companies or anyone who wants to understand their consumers’ online behavior have a very myopic field. They don’t have that larger lens to take a step back and say, “It’s great that I know what my consumer is doing on my own website.”

I’ve created this very complicated customer journey map with 500 interactions that you can have. But I don’t know what my consumers are doing 99% of the time they’re not on my website.” That’s the big challenge out there. What we see is more and more of the prospects trying to understand their entire customer life, but in a way that they can draw specific actionable decisions from.

Sramana Mitra: How do you get that data? As long as on you’re on mobile or on some sort of web environment, there are all these trails to track. If you’re not, how do you even track which person is going where? If somebody is reading a magazine in a doctor’s office and looking at Dove’s advertisements, there’s no way of you knowing.

Deren Baker: This is purely digital behavior. There’s still a primary focus on my own website’s digital behavior. There is this implicit understanding that the more I mine my own first-party data, the better I’ll understand my customers. However, the reality is that you have to look up and look out at your customers. Sending a thousand of them a survey and asking them what brands they like is not nearly as predictive as looking at their actual behavior.

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely. There’s no question that there’s a gold mine in tracking people’s online behavior. The part that makes me queasy is where is the privacy in all this.

Deren Baker: It’s all aggregated and anonymized. The goal of this is NOT to figure out who a particular person is. That’s not really the goal of most e-commerce companies. They want to understand segment-level trends. What are millennials doing online? How do my loyal customers shop externally? It’s those kinds of trends that we help customers understand.

The nice part of it is that we’ve invested a lot in the prediction side of our business so that we cannot just look at our data and say that this is what’s happening, but we can say, “Based on the behaviors that we’ve see in the past, these are the five indications that a consumer is shopping for a vacation to Las Vegas.” The next time these five things happen to a thousand sample in our dataset, that’s a very predictive set of behaviors for that segment that we can help our customers understand.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting conversation. Is there anything else that you want to add in closing?

Deren Baker: No, I don’t think so.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Deren Baker, CEO of Jumpshot
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