Wayfair: Marketing Strategy & Brand Building Challenges

This is a snippet of the transcript, sign up to read more.

How do you make sense of that? Did they overhire at the beginning, or are they now cutting into the bone out of desperation? This is a question we've had for a while. Were they really as top-heavy as it seemed at some point, or are they now cutting into the bone?

They definitely overhired. In certain areas, it was absolutely ridiculous. For example, there was a team managing their credit card business from a marketing standpoint—how to acquire more people to sign up for Wayfair credit cards. I'm not talking about the tech or finance teams ensuring the program's profitability. I'm just talking about marketing—how to get more sign-ups and retain them. Before the layoffs, there was a CMO, under whom there was a senior director, then another director, and so on, down to an analyst.

This is a snippet of the transcript, sign up to read more.

Let's talk about the technology used. One thing we've heard is that Wayfair's internally built marketing and advertising technology was quite advanced. Does that give them a big advantage today? Did it ever?

The level of personalization and the sophistication of measuring campaign effectiveness were second to none. There were many examples of how Wayfair could identify which people were in the market. However, over the last five or six years, maybe a bit less, especially around Covid and post-Covid, the SaaS market has advanced significantly. For everything Wayfair built, there is now a better alternative.

This is a snippet of the transcript, sign up to read more.