Deckers Brands is a global leader in footwear, apparel and accessories. Founded in 1973, the brand grew rapidly over the years, but eventually growth began to slow. Its channel-oriented strategy – which featured separate marketing teams for search, display, video and other channels – created silos. Deckers Brands knew it needed to become more customer-centric and to connect customer data across multiple touch points.
By using its first party data together with Google Marketing Platform and Google Cloud, the brand uncovered consumer insights that helped it decide which creative to serve, and which consumers were most likely to purchase. This strategy paid off and led to lower cost per acquisition and increased conversation rates.
Video Transcription
Russell: Each of our brands was started by an innovator who was passionate about something in their lives, whether it's surfing, or ultra-marathons, or whether it’s river rafting.
Russell: The Deckers Brands were all born from entrepreneurial spirit, people with passion, and understanding what their consumers needed. And that still lives with Deckers today.
Russell: Deckers had had amazing growth for almost a decade and then about 10 years ago, the growth slowed. We realized that the problem was we lacked connectivity with our consumers.
Russell: We had to re-focus our people, our process, and our technology to be consumer-oriented. So we combined Google Marketing Platform and Google Cloud, the two tools together gave us great consumer insights on what creative to serve, and which consumers were most likely to purchase.
Hernandez: 2020 was unlike anything we've ever seen. Having that clear view of first party data really allowed us to see trends take off in the past year. When the pandemic first started, we saw that people were looking for at home comfort. We were able to speak to them with our UGG brand.
Hernandez: Then as people started to exercise at home, Hoka was really a great brand. As we moved further and further to a new normal, Teva and Sanuk really helped people who are ready to get outdoors.
Hernandez: We were prepared for this moment in time, and were able to really adapt quickly.
Bradley: One of the things we saw with the pandemic was a huge increase in our site traffic, so that's where we turned to Google Cloud technology, including BigQuery, to develop a machine learning model to predict whether these new customers coming to the site were likely to purchase or not.
Bradley: The model turned out to be very successful. We were able to accurately predict purchasers. When we deployed the model and the rest of the Google marketing stack, we saw lower cost per acquisition and increased conversation rates.
Russell: What I'm really excited about is, in a world where everything changes all the time, we are still in a great place to leverage the first party data.
Russell: To continue reaching our consumers, having conversations with them instead of just shouting marketing messages at them and keep building our business and keep putting more people in these products that they'll love.
