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>> There's another key component for me in terms of successful and
real, and that is empathy.
How do we empathize with women?
How do we understand them better than anybody else and how do we create
a culture here that understands women, and can share the feelings that women have?
>> And it starts with who you hire.
Hiring people who have empathy for others and you could tell right away,
then we consistently bring our customers into our conversation here.
We've got letters all around.
We have our sales meetings open with a letter from our customers.
>> And I'm not kidding you.
You looks around that table in the sales and it was like 50 people on that,
half of them are crying.
By the time we finished reading that first letter, because they can see
the connection that they are making, the impact they're having as an individual.
I can stand up here and
talk about our purpose is to make a difference in women's lives.
But when they can see that they as an individual are making a difference and
they can connect the dots, that's when it works.
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>> One of the most important ways of cultivating empathy within your
organization is having physical representations of the customer within
your office space.
This is a great example.
This particular customer wall here at Bare Escentuals.
So I wanted to ask you, Leslie.
Can you tell me a little bit about what this wall is and why do you do it?
>> Yeah. Since the beginning of
time here at Bare Escentuals, we've always had some version of the customer wall.
So that the people who work here, really understand that these aren't just numbers.
These are actual people like them.
Their mother, their sister, their daughter that use our products with names,
with real stories.
>> We recently, it was our 20th anniversary and we decided to develop
a special color eye shadow and we wanted to give it to our best customers.
Now typically, you would think, okay, let's go into our data and
let's look at who spent the most last year.
And all of a sudden we're like, but is that really who we are?
Why don't we send one of these limited edition special eye shadows to
every single person who works in that boutique?
So that's like 200 boutiques, that's like 2,000, 3,000 people.
And the only instructions that we gave them were you can give this to
who you think your best customer is, but there is a requirement and
the requirement is that you have fill out a card and
send it back to us to tell us why you chose that customer.
We now have, I kid you not, 2,500 plus cards that came back
from all of these people who work in our stores telling us why they
selected these customers to give this special eye shadow to.
So, the beauty of that is they were empowered.
They weren't just empowered to give out an eye shadow, they were empowered to think.
Think about why you would give this product and
then what defines best customer for you?
My God, when you read those stories, I mean, they are a life changing moment and
that's what makes people feel connected to our purpose and
that's what makes our purpose come to life.
>> For instance, we have Christina who works for us.
Helped a customer named Kelly.
Kelly found out that she had a brain tumor and she was taking medication, and
she wasn't feeling well.
So there was a lot of pressure on Christina, but she did her makeup,
she looked in the mirror.
She cried, they both cried.
There was an emotional moment.
She felt so strongly about it that she wanted to share that story with the rest
of the company, so we put it up here.
We pass it around to all of our global offices, so
we only know that we care deeply about the women that use our product.
>> And what's so important about this, again is not just the effectiveness of it,
making you feel close to the customer,
but this idea of being able to have customer-driven innovation.
A lot of the ideas might even be sparked by stories that are shared here on
the wall.
What's also really interesting about this is the internal communication that you
have that goes on to kind of echo some of these stories.
Can you kind of talk about that?
>> Yeah, so we have this internal intranet site where we're constantly adding
personal stories from people who work here what they do outside of the office and
in our field teams.
So we're constantly adding new stories and making sure that we send them out, so
everyone can read them and then talk about it around coffee.
>> So one thing that's also important to do at your organization is think about
what is the relationship between your employer and
employee within the organization, the customer as well as the brand.
So each of these stories wrap around the employee as well as the customer and
the brand, and this matters even more potentially in a B2B context.
There's organizations that do this in really interesting ways.
For example, Salesforce actually has a very similar type of process where sales
people are actually nominate stories that are really inspired them.
These are all users and those stories are then fed into Salesforce, and
the best ones are selected and
then given an amount of money to go turn those stories into actual videos.
So the question is how are you taking empathy and cultivating within your
organization, getting closer to your customer and then letting those insights,
really understanding the customer drive innovation and growth.
>> So in terms of kids, kind of what Vicki said,
like they are tired of all the options.
It's overwhelming to them.
So, that's one huge finding.
>> Bring her into the room.
Bring her into the conversation constantly dig deep and understand her better, so
that we can use those insights to help drive our innovation.
>> For those people that just haven't tried us,
how do we get those people who haven't tried us in?
>> Or know why they haven't.
Do you know why they haven't tried it?
And I'm hearing it all over online is because they think it's too complicated.
Because they think the brush and the jar and the swirl and the tap and the buff,
it's a lot for people to take in.
>> We don't just roll out innovation.
We understand that there's a trend and that there's a new category and
we decide whether we should play in that category,
whether does that make sense for our brand, but then what we do is we try and
speak to as many women as we can to find out what's working for her?
What's she love about it?
What does she not love?
That for me is how you use empathy to drive innovation.
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