Getting Her Start: From Fashion to Ghirardelli
David Feinleib: My guest on today’s show is Pam Perino, eCommerce Content Operations and Development Manager at Ghirardelli Chocolate. Pam joined Ghirardelli after a career in the fashion space with Claiborne, DKNY Jeans, and Perry Ellis.
We discussed Pam’s journey to Ghirardelli, her innovative eCommerce content marketing strategies, including a discussion of a unique micro seasons approach, and how Pam engages all stakeholders, both internal and external, to develop buy-in and build momentum for marketing success across the entire organization.
Pam, great to see you.
Pam Perino: Nice to see you too. Thanks for having me, Dave.
David Feinleib: Thanks for taking the time out of your schedule to chat with me. I’d love to start with your background. I know we’re going to talk about digital commerce in a bit, but take us back to the early days. Where did you start, and how did you land at Ghirardelli?
Pam Perino: I can go back a long way, Dave, but I’ll take you back a bit. Most of my career has actually been in the fashion industry. I started working for Macy’s out of college, went into their executive training program, and was in the buying offices and management with them for a while. Then I moved to the wholesale side and worked for several large fashion companies: Claiborne on the menswear side, DKNY Jeans, and more recently Perry Ellis International.
The majority of my background with those companies was managing field teams and merchandising teams that go out to stores, make sure products are set up and merchandised correctly, educate the stores, work with consumers, make sure the right assortments were there, and keep communication flowing between stores and the buying offices.
How I got into the e-commerce side was in my last couple of years at Perry Ellis. We’d started working with a PIM, Salsify, and we were trying to figure out how to leverage our team’s visual training and expertise for a website — how you look at a sales floor, a department, how it’s being merchandised, what we’re presenting to customers, what information we’re providing. I was leading a team looking at our retailer websites, evaluating them, and finding opportunities to better present our products. When I started working with Salsify, it was to help support the information we were providing to retailers — images, marketing copy, that kind of thing.
Then an opportunity opened up with Ghirardelli, the chocolate company, which I’ve been with for a little over three and a half years. I think they’d seen my experience with Salsify, and that’s what led them to me. This is my first experience with CPG, and I absolutely love it. It’s been wonderful. And of course, who doesn’t love chocolate? Chocolate makes everybody happy.
David Feinleib: Exactly! Who doesn’t love the product? I know we do.
Pam Perino: Exactly, absolutely. So that’s kind of how it started. I was hired as their first E-commerce Content Manager, managing content development for our e-commerce and retail partners, as well as managing the syndication piece and working with Salsify to get the content out to retailers. So it’s a two-sided position, I work on both sides.
David Feinleib: I love it. So connecting with the consumer is a big part of it, and it sounds like connecting these various teams internally too.
Pam Perino: Yes. Very much so. It’s an extremely cross-functional role, and that’s probably some of the experience and background I brought from my previous companies, managing field teams across the country, working cross-functionally with design, sales, and merchandising teams. It’s the same way here. I work very closely with our brand marketing team, creative, customer marketing, sales, regulatory; all the different parts of the organization and more. It’s very much a cross-functional role, and you need to be excellent at communication and follow-through. It’s a detail-oriented position with a lot of moving parts at any one time. I think that’s a skill set I brought into the role and have continued to hone over the last few years.
A Cross-Functional Role Within a Family-Feel Global Brand
David Feinleib: I was watching a video where you touched on this. Different teams sharing their voice, folks at Ghirardelli talking about how the company very much feels like a family organization. We know it as this huge global chocolate brand, it seems like you’re everywhere, but tell us a bit about that. You have all these different teams, and yet you still have this family feel that’s very unique.
Pam Perino: That comes a lot from management, to be honest. From the top down, from our CEO to the leadership team and beyond. That’s something I felt from the very beginning. People are very welcoming, and that’s part of our company culture, what we try to get across even in our marketing: welcoming and vibrant. We’re a large company, but within a big, multinational corporation. We’re part of Lindt & Sprüngli, which everybody’s very familiar with, but Ghirardelli is part of that family. It’s definitely very much a company culture, and it really starts at the top, as far as I can tell. That’s how I feel and still feel to this day. It’s a really great culture, probably the best I’ve ever experienced.
David Feinleib: The other piece you touched on in your intro was this shift from fashion to chocolate. As we talk about who doesn’t love chocolate, I imagine there are some similarities and differences in how you connect with the consumer, structure content, and think about strategy. What are some of the learnings you brought with you from those other roles?
Bringing a Fashion Merchandiser’s Eye to Chocolate
Pam Perino: I think it’s about putting yourself in the consumer’s shoes when they’re looking at a product online, or even in store. What information is going to entice the customer? What do they want to learn? What’s the baseline, practical information? What’s in the product, how is it presented? Of course you want something visually appealing, and since we make chocolate, something that sounds like it’s going to taste wonderful too. So how do we get that across in our marketing copy, as well as in images. Whether on the actual package or images we provide online, in a carousel or below the fold, showing customers enjoying the product, how to use it, the occasion, that kind of thing.
It’s a little different than the fashion industry, but it’s still about how people are going to use the product and why they’re shopping for it today. Those are the things you think about when you’re putting together content and figuring out what’s relevant. Right now, a lot of what’s top of mind for people is products that are better for you, maybe less calories or reduced sugar. We’ve had some newer products in the last year or two, specifically in our baking line, with less sugar, and that’s definitely appealing to a lot of consumers.
David Feinleib: Staying in touch with consumer needs and trends. And the other thing I’ve noticed is you’ve really pioneered some of the content, the packaging you mentioned, but also the different formats for communicating with the shopper.
Evolving Content: Mobile Hero Images, Video, and AI
Pam Perino: Yes, absolutely. It’s an ever-evolving journey. You can’t set it and forget it, as I like to say. You finish one thing and you’re probably going to start back at the beginning of that same project. We’re always looking at ways to keep evolving and do things better. Right now we’re working on improving our mobile-optimized hero images. How do we provide clearer, faster information for the consumer? So many people are shopping on their phones. People still shop in stores, on computers or tablets, but at some point almost everyone is on their phone, whether they’re in the store comparison-shopping, or picking up or buying directly from their phone. So how do we create content that’s accessible, easy to use, easy to read, and communicates everything important about the product?
We’ve incorporated more video, which we’re working with your company on, being able to provide more video for our products online. And the whole AI thing has really exploded, as everyone’s aware. It’s been everywhere over the last year or so. We’re definitely exploring ways to use AI in our content development, to help us produce images and marketing copy faster and better, and to keep elevating our content.
David Feinleib: So, video, lots of images, different types of content, AI — extremely relevant topic right now. Another thing you shared with me was this idea of seasonality and micro-seasons. I thought that was a really unique concept. Tell us about that, and how it ties into some of these content initiatives.
SEO and the Power of Micro-Seasons
Pam Perino: A lot of it started when we were developing our marketing copy and moving from pretty basic, evergreen copy to really looking at SEO and how to build search engine optimization into our marketing copy. Making sure we’re surfacing the words that are specific to retailers or our category, so that when a customer is shopping on a retailer’s site, or just searching on Google, and they type in something like “chocolate” or “baking chips,” those words are in our copy. Hopefully that helps Ghirardelli products rise to the top and the customer sees us as a great option.
The seasonality piece came in after that. We wanted to make sure that as customers were thinking about different times of year — gifting, holiday baking — we were updating our marketing copy with SEO words relevant to that season. We started with optimized copy for our core assortment around Christmas, then Valentine’s Day and Easter, and this year we’re continuing to evolve that, looking at more of those micro-seasons — Mother’s Day, which is a big gifting opportunity and one of the top chocolate gift occasions; Halloween, thinking about how people buy chocolate and candy for parties or trick-or-treating; and summer and s’mores. Ghirardelli chocolate squares are perfect for making a s’more. If you’ve never made one with a Ghirardelli square, you’re missing out. They’re perfectly shaped and sized for graham crackers, and we have flavors that let you get pretty creative. So we’re really trying to help the customer along their journey, giving them creative, fun ideas, not just for gift-giving, but for baking, or for summer activities like barbecuing, cookouts, or camping, where s’mores are part of a lot of people’s routine.
David Feinleib: So much so. Definitely part of our family’s summertime activities, we’ve got some big fans over here. You mentioned Ghirardelli has a fun feel to the brand. How have you been able to keep that fun, in-touch feel while having such a wide assortment of products and being a global brand? How do you maintain that approachability, and how do you communicate it to the consumer?
Keeping the Brand Fun and Approachable at Scale
Pam Perino: That goes back to our brand marketing team, and working closely with them. We have an extremely talented brand marketing team, always looking ahead at how to do things better and faster, making sure we’re incorporating our brand guidelines and brand tonality and how we want our chocolate to appear to the customer online. I work very closely with them, making sure I follow their guidelines: the words we use to describe our caramel, or our dark, beautifully intense dark chocolate, our flavors. Brand marketing also works closely with R&D and regulatory, to make sure we’re coloring within the lines while still describing our flavors in the most appealing way we can.
David Feinleib: I love the product and I love working on your creative, I have to say. With all these different parts of the organization working together, I’m sure a lot of folks at other organizations would love to see their teams collaborating this closely. What are some learnings or tips, especially when it comes to visual content and digital commerce, for folks looking to do this better?
Breaking Down Silos: Lessons in Cross-Functional Collaboration
Pam Perino: A lot of it comes down to breaking down silos. Those develop in every organization, big and small, for all kinds of reasons. It’s really important to find commonalities and ways to support one another. That’s one of the things we do so well at Ghirardelli. The teams really do help support each other on projects, and we work hard to support one another cross-functionally. That makes a big difference. When I first started, I tried hard to connect with key stakeholders across the parts of the organization I’d be working with, to start building that relationship, communication, and support. A lot of it is also understanding and compassion; realizing that my timeline isn’t necessarily somebody else’s timeline. It’s about compromise and support back and forth, and I think that’s something we do extremely well as an organization. It really helps.
David Feinleib: I’ve seen it firsthand. We really respect the way you’re able to work across these different groups. One other question we often hear: when you’re starting out on new visual creative, or SEO, or mobile, whatever it’s going to be, how do you build awareness and buy-in? Is it the same process each time, step by step, or does the approach vary?
From Photo Shoot to Launch: Building Buy-In for New Content
Pam Perino: When we launch a new product — we’ve launched some new baking items in the last couple of months — my work usually begins with brand marketing and creative, discussing when the product’s launching. Once packaging designs are finalized, I talk to my creative team about the photo shoot: what do we need to include? They’re doing photography for a lot of different needs, not just e-commerce. One thing we’ve started incorporating into our photo shoots, again, building those cross-functional bridges, is making sure we’re capturing elements we could use in video. Things we might not have thought about before.
The number of teams needing creative assets for different reasons has expanded quite a bit over the last several years, so internally we’re thinking about that differently. Making sure that when we do a creative brief, we’re hitting all the points: our eShop, and all the other places creative gets used or needed. With marketing copy, we work with an agency, which has been a great support, people who are experts in the field, along with our brand team and regulatory, to make sure our copy is enticing, interesting, and as SEO-optimized as we can make it. So it’s a well-rounded approach, but we tackle it in parts like that. That’s really how we work.
David Feinleib: This insight of starting from the photo shoot, right when the product is introduced, that’s a great way of thinking about it. Starting early in the process.
Pam Perino: Yes, starting as early as we can. Sometimes we’re running behind, but we do our best to start early. Sometimes things aren’t quite ready and we have to wait for certain pieces to be finalized before moving to the next step, but we have a pretty good system, and it’s working well. We can always do better and move faster, and a lot of the tools we’ve brought in over the last year or two have helped us accelerate that, and be more nimble and quick to react to changes. Retailers are always changing their requirements, and that’s something we have to account for as we develop content.
Looking Ahead: Retail Media, PDPs, and Constant Change
David Feinleib: Retailers are always changing requirements, and we work closely with many of them, as you know but we do see a lot of change, both on the PDP and now in retail media and other areas. How are you thinking about the next couple of years? You’ve got top of funnel, retail media, the PDP, social, as you mentioned. How do you prioritize and strategize across these areas?
Pam Perino: It’s tough, it’s a moving target all the time. I’m responsible for above and below the fold, as far as my area of responsibility, but I work closely with co-workers on retail media and social. We try to share information and support each other when we find out a retailer’s changing their requirements. Sometimes you find out things after they’ve already happened; sometimes you hear about them ahead of time. A lot of times the partners we use to support our content, PIMs or an agency, are where we’ll find that information too. There’s not really one perfect way to find out about the changes, because they happen so quickly, and that’s part of the challenge. You have to be ready all the time. Every time I go to send content out, I’m thinking, okay, is it ready, is it going to be ready, am I going to get the green light? I’m always happy when it’s there, but sometimes there’s a “wait a second, we’re missing something” moment, and then you have to regroup and figure out what’s missing.
David Feinleib: It keeps you on your toes.
Pam Perino: Absolutely, 100%. It’s never a dull moment, and everything moves quickly all the time. There never seems to be any downtime either. In some industries there are peaks and valleys but I don’t feel that at all here. There’s always constant movement and change.
What’s Next: AI, Video, and the Next Generation of Hero Images
David Feinleib: Constant movement and change, that brings me to my next question. We’ve got summer with s’mores, back to school, Halloween coming up. What’s on deck for you and for Ghirardelli?
Pam Perino: A lot of it right now is around AI, and how we’re using it in our content work. looking at and evaluating images, and video work with your team at It’sRapid, making sure we have videos for all of our items and PDPs to provide to retailers. And of course continuing to evolve our marketing copy. As we head into the last part of the year, those are some of the key things. I mentioned earlier that we also have new guidance on our hero images and looking at the next evolution. I’m not sure if we’re on 3.0 or 4.0 at this point, but the goal is to make them even more mobile-ready, making sure we’re getting across everything the consumer needs to quickly pick up on when they’re shopping online.
Beyond Work: Travel, Family, and Sources of Inspiration
David Feinleib: Mobile, that’s it. Well, before we wrap up, I’d like to ask a few non-work questions. Outside of work, hobbies, favorite activities?
Pam Perino: First thing, I love to travel, especially international travel. I love spending time with family and friends. The last few years have been challenging with the pandemic, but we seem to be in a better place now, so I’m looking forward to more travel, and just enjoying the summer with family and friends. I love to read. Sometimes it’s just the simpler things, honestly, if there’s a silver lining in all the craziness of the last few years, maybe that’s it: appreciating the simpler things.
David Feinleib: Well said, that really resonates with me. My other question: if you had to choose: two people who’ve inspired you the most, or who you’ve learned the most from.
Pam Perino: That’s very difficult. Probably, in relation to work I’d say my manager when I worked at Claiborne, years back. She was such an inspiring person, and she really taught me a lot about leadership, management, and developing relationships.How to work with people, whether they’re reporting to you, at the same level as you, or above you. That was one of the most important things I learned from her.
The other person would probably be my dad. He’s such a strong person in every way, really the heart and soul of our family and extended family. I’ve always looked at him with such admiration and love. I’m a little jaded, but he’s such a good, honorable man, and has lived his life with such integrity. It’s something I’d really aspire to, hopefully to have a legacy like that.
David Feinleib: Wonderful! That’s inspiring, for me as a dad too, something to aspire to. Thank you for sharing that.
Pam Perino: For sure. You’re welcome. Absolutely.
David Feinleib: Well, Pam, thank you so much again for taking the time. Really appreciate it.
Pam Perino: Absolutely, Dave. Thank you for having me. It was great to be with you today.