The “Unboxing Moment” Podcast © 2021 Target Brands, Inc
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The “Unboxing Moment” podcast © 2021 Target Brands, Inc. Roundel, Target and the Bullseye Design are trademarks of Target Brands, Inc. KELLY LEONARD: Hi, I am Kelly Leonard. I am the host of the Second City Work’s podcast, Getting to Yes And. But today I’m hosting Roundel’s first podcast, so welcome everyone. Here with me is Greg Koerner, who is the head of enterprise partnerships and global agency relations at Roundel, Target’s reimagined media company. Greg, how are you doing? GREG KOERNER: I’m great, Kelly. Thanks for having me. It’s like the longest title known to man, reading there. KELLY LEONARD: Yeah, I’ve got a pretty long—yeah, your title’s longer than mine. So one of the things I love about doing my podcast is finding the often like surprising connections between different industries in my world of improvisational comedy and theater. So I’m not an expert in the digital media space at all, but I’ve been learning a bit over our last couple of conversations, so let’s start by having you tell us a little bit about Roundel. GREG KOERNER: Usually the first question I get is what is a roundel? It’s a very simple answer. I don’t think a lot of people do know. The roundel is the actual shape of the Target logo. A circle within a circle. And so it’s very appropriate for our business because we are very much a part of the Target Corporation but we do have our own brand. Roundel is Target’s media company reimagined. KELLY LEONARD: That’s cool. I work with a lot of academics, and they talk about the importance of connection, right, that human beings crave connection, and that sounds like that’s a business you’re in. GREG KOERNER: Well, that’s interesting. We believe that when you walk into a place, whether it’s a bar or a retailer and they tend to know what you like, that is an experience that you tend to return to, and you tend to enjoy and like. And that’s precisely what the mission is here is to create a media company where when the media works in everybody’s best interest is when it really is a home run, and it sounds like such a tagline or such a, you know, a marketing piece, and it is, but, at the same time, it’s truthful. It really is centered around everyone’s best interest. Everybody is A, the guest, that are at the core of everything we decide to do or not. But it also puts into focus the brands and those brands that hire agencies, ad agencies. So when it works in those three circles, so to speak, it’s a really powerful engine that we have at Roundel. KELLY LEONARD: Okay, you and I were talking a couple days ago about this idea around surprise. And I mentioned to you that I’m actually—I’ve worked in comedy my whole life. I’m married to a tenured comedy professor, so my wife is working on her second book, which is about her comedy theory, and surprise is a huge part of humor, and we even know this scientifically, because there was an FMRI study out of China just 1 a couple years ago that discovered that the same part of the brain that processes an insight is the part that processes a joke. And I talked to you about this because you mentioned this thing called an unboxing moment, so can you tell us what that is and what that has to do with this elegant idea around surprise? GREG KOERNER: You know, of course. It’s interesting. We love this term, the unboxing moment, and it dates back to the dawn of time, really. I mean, back to when you and I were kids, probably. (LAUGHTS) The unboxing moments back when you and I were kids were probably twice a year. It was when you had a birthday and when you maybe had a holiday celebration with your family. That was it. You didn’t have any other unboxing moments, right. Well, today that’s quite different in today’s e-commerce environment. And so we’ve taken a very thoughtful approach to what the unboxing moment is and that sort of joy and delight of delayed gratification, where you order and whether it’s days or hours later, you open that box, knowing what’s in it, but still have that gratification of the unveiling, so to speak. And Target takes that very seriously. There’s others that do as well, our partners at Apple, etcetera. That unboxing moment is a very important part of the experience. I would tell you that the Roundel aspect of this is going all the way back to the start of that unboxing moment in our mind starts literally with a search on Target.com. And the results that show up there being relevant for Kelly or relevant for Greg, not just relevant in general. And so that unboxing moment starts when Kelly goes in, searches an item or searches a group of items or whatever the category is. What shows up for you is likely to be different than what shows up for me because of our different habits of buying and/or behavior, and so that unboxing moment becomes very personal through Roundel. Our ability to customize and segment down to your interests for Kelly, all the way through that process of ordering the notifications that come to you in between the order and the shipping and what the shipping date’s going to be, and I’m checking the trucks in Albuquerque, and it’s going to be here on Thursday, a very exciting moment. The box shows up. It’s got the branding on it. You open it, that unboxing moment becomes an experience at Target that’s an extension of the experience that you have with our brand. KELLY LEONARD: Honestly, I had never considered the idea of search tying to being seen. You know how human beings crave being seen? And I mean, that’s like, oh, search can do that? GREG KOERNER: We call it a hand-raising moment. Search in particular is a hand- raising moment. I’m in search of detergent or I’m in search of, I don’t know, fishing waders or whatever the thing is that you’re in search of, raises your hand and a brand like Target immediately responds. We have a product called Target Product Ads that is part of our native—we call native advertisements. It’s part of our environment on Target.com that fits. It fits with Target.com. It’s not on the side. It’s not blinking or flashing or swirling around it. It fits into Target.com in a way where, because we know our guests so well, that we can personalize those to become just for Kelly. And you think about that unboxing moment starting all the way upstream, literally at the source of 2 the stream, all the way through. It’s by design, if you will, and Roundel plays a big part in that at the beginning. KELLY LEONARD: So here’s a weird, cool connection. So one of the initiatives that I oversee is a thing called the Second Science Project, which started at the University of Chicago, and we study behavioral science through the lens of improvisation and vice versa. So one of the studies that was given to us and was like can you create an improve exercise around this was the idea that people are reluctant to share details about themselves, but actually that’s a great way to connect with people and be seen. And so the exercise is called Universal Unique, and what we’ve set up is take a minute and tell your partner how people shop, like when they go to Target. And then we say, okay, you do that for about a minute, now stop, now think about how you shop, and inevitably, when they do that—the unique part—it’s funny, they find connection, they all have these weird things about whether they bring their bags or they forget their bags, right, it’s completely unique. And it’s grounded in the science of the thing we’re talking about, which is what people really crave. I had no idea that this conversation was going to end up tying to that stuff. GREG KOERNER: It’s interesting that you say that, because I think if you don’t give it a conscious thought, you know, a retailer’s a retailer, a retailer. I will tell you from personal experience, when I became a Target team member, that’s what we call ourselves, because we are, and it’s roughly five years ago for me, and I’ve been at other places prior. You know, you go to a cocktail party, someone says what do you do for a living, I say, well, I work at Target, we’re in the marketing department. And at a cocktail party you don’t need to go down the whole rabbit hole of whatever specifically you do. And it doesn’t take more than that for somebody—it’s happened multiple, multiple times to me—for somebody to come back to me and say this is my experience with Target, like they have a relationship with the brand. This is my relationship with Target.com or whatever it is, and I would tell you 99.9% of the time, I don’t even say a word back, because it’s them just extolling this is my relationship with the brand.