Jonny Longden

Boohoo Group PLC

Leading the group eCommerce platform strategy and product roadmaps to drive revenue and digital experience optimisation. Product development, platform strategy, user experience and digital experience, digital analytics and research, experimentation, digital strategy.

Group Digital Director

Journey Further

I built from scratch a team of over 20 digital experience and experimentation professionals delivering over £1.6m ARR. 

I built a multi-functional team covering User research and analytics, UX design and creative, front end development, strategy and consulting and programme management.

We have delivered pioneering experimentation programmes and management consultancy for the likes of GHD, Quickbooks, O2, Sky Bet, ECCO, Zalora, AllSaints, Liberty London and many more.

Digital Experience Director

Principal Hotel Company

I created an experimentation culture and function which drove 100% of all eCommerce and digital marketing activities and was responsible fo a 60% increase in revenue in 2 years. Responsible for overall strategy, digital platform development and conversion optimisation and digital marketing including organic and paid search, paid social and display campaigns & meta-search/OTA ad spend. Also responsible for data analytics feeding several areas of the business.

Head of Ecommerce & Digital

I built from scratch and ran the experimentation capability within Sky Technology Leeds, covering Sky.com, Sky Sports, Sky News, Digital Capabilities, and all associated mobile apps. My team were embedded within the agile squads and delivered end-to-end insight, analytics and testing/experimentation for continuous improvement and KPI performance. Built a world-class platform of tools and technology to support this, as well as innovative processes, structure and team-development focus to allow data-driven insight to thrive in a truly agile environment.

Head of Digital Experience Optimisation

Visa Europe

Built and lead the product analytics and optimisation function for Visa Checkout (then called V.me), serving product managers and development resources across 22 European markets. My team are responsible for analysing and optimising the digital consumer journeys and feeding work into the development roadmap. I have developed a mult-disciplined team capable of delivering: web analytics and conversion rate optimisation; business case analysis and forecasting; database analytics and insight; and stakeholder and change management.

Head of Digital Analytics & Experimentation (Visa Checkout)

R/GA

R/GA is a global digital innovation and business transformation consultancy. I built the digital analytics and conversion optimisation function from scratch to offer both a strategic consulting service and an operational team for the London office. My team ran analytics and continuous optimisation programmes for retained clients as well as delivering strategic consulting capabilities for build projects. I also developed digital marketing and SEO capabilities.

Group Director - Strategy, Analytics & Optimisation

Syzygy

Syzygy is a full-service digital agency and web-design company. I built and grew the analytics and optimisation capability, offering a range of services to all agency clients. My team were responsible for: measurement strategy and consulting; customer and behavioural insights feeding into development work; measurement and analysis of delivered work; A/B testing and continuous optimisation of live content; digital marketing and SEO.

Web Analytics & Optimisation Director

Marketing Metrix

Lead analytics consultant and data planner for both Marketing Metrix Ltd (data analysis consultancy) and sister company WPN (direct marketing agency). Responsible for all DM forecasting, testing and performance analytics as well as customer segmentation; propensity modelling; and database development. Key clients include Direct Wines, Which?, NCH, Direct Line Insurance

Senior Analytics Consultant & Data Planner

CACI Ltd

Consulting both new and existing financial services clients in data and analytics. Project management and delivery of large projects covering customer insight analysis & profiling; propensity modelling; data tagging; cluster analysis; prospect pool building; and spatial analysis.

Senior Analytics Consultant, Financial Services

RAPP UK

Head of HLB list management, UK market leaders in consumer list broking. Working with end clients, agencies and list brokers to develop successful campaign targeting methodologies and maximise performance of email, direct mail and telemarketing campaigns.

Data Manager

Digital Experience Director | Helping you put experimentation at the heart of your business | Top Experimentation Influencer

I am currently Group Digital Director at Boohoo Group PLC where I run the technology function responsible for the websites and apps. 

I am committed to fostering critical thinking and evidence-based decision-making at the highest levels of the business world, and have over 16 years experience driving data- and experimentation-based strategies for digital experience excellence

Director, Digital Experience Services

90% of all changes made to websites are based on opinion and are a waste of time and money because…

It is impossible to know 1000s of customers
Your opinion is deeply biased
You can’t rationalise the irrational

Regardless of the size of your business, the answer is to put data and experimentation at the heart of your development operations. 

We help you do that. 

We take the guesswork out of decision making and provide consultancy and training, systems and frameworks, and experimentation agency services to help you reach your full growth potential.

Email me to learn how to put experimentation at the heart of your business: jonny@journeyfurther.com
Subscribe to my newsletter: jonnylongden.com/newsletter

"Our conversion rate is down, what's wrong with the website?"

This almost universal assumption highlights how our human brains are programmed to seek simplicity:

Media sends traffic to the website = volume of users
Website makes people buy = conversion rate
Therefore, conversion rate = website

Conversion rate, whilst useful for making comparisons is, in and of itself, almost meaningless. It is simply the number of users who order divided by the number of users. It's the two most utterly general numbers you have about your business, made into a very simple equation.

Literally ANYTHING in your entire business, competitive market, economic environment and more can and will have an impact on either of those numbers and, therefore, in turn, the conversion rate. Even if you drill down into 'add to bag' or something like that, it makes absolutely no difference to this concept.

The UX of your website probably has a (relatively) tiny impact on this metric in the grand scheme of all these other things, and yet it is the primary thing everyone focuses on when they want to solve problems with conversion, rather than product, price, brand, media, proposition, customer experience, etc.

#ecommerce #retail #digitalexperience #conversion #product

Let's assume that you could find the best of all best practices; a list of changes you could make to your ecommerce business that would definitely increase your conversion rate - (I don't personally believe this is even possible but we'll go with it for now)

Yes you should absolutely do those things because they represent optimization of your customer experience.

You are bringing your site into a degree of conformity with other sites and the way in which users expect any ecommerce retailer to work. 

Great, but know that what you are doing is the equivalent of making sure a physical retail store has a door that works properly and an escalator that is easy to get on; maybe that the till works and doesn't take too long to process scans. 

These things are important BUT fundamentally irrelevant to whether people are going to buy the products from the shop. 

And there are thousands of shops!

Best practices are the lowest common denominator. They have absolutely nothing to do with your growth and development as a brand. 

Of course your site should be optimized like this, but if this is all you do then you are not going very far!

#retail #ecommerce #digitalexperience #product #strategy

There are two different meanings to the word 'experimentation' in business today. 

1. The basic and broad concept of testing and learning to drive innovation
2. The industry & discipline that has grown up around the practice of A/B testing

These two things are not the same. Sometimes, the implementation of the latter is so warped that it does not even try to achieve the former. 

I have spent over 15 years observing these practices from within. I wrote this some time ago to bring together all these observations and thoughts. 

Some key take-outs:

> The problem with 'metrics' - Metrics are a myopic snapshot of a complex system of customer behaviour. We need to embrace systems thinking to understand how actions impact the right outcomes. Data and experimentation cannot always help here.

> Demotion of controlled experimentation - Experimentation (meaning A/B testing) isn't the 'infallible proof' that people think it is. Instead, it should be seen as merely one important part of a broad set of evidence and research, all with relative limitations.

> Human decision-making - At the end of the day, decisions are made by people, not experiments. Understanding effective decision-making and critical-thinking processes and empowering teams for failure is crucial for success. Existing 'experimentation' disciplines should pivot to building human decision-making processes.

#retail #ecommerce #digitalexperience #experimentation #product

Jonny Longden on LinkedIn • 21 min read

A manifesto for overhauling digital ‘experimentation’

The fashion retail industry has toyed with augmented reality try-on apps for several years now.

But generative AI has the potential to make this obsolete very quickly. If you can simply generate a photorealistic image or even video of yourself wearing different outfits and in different situations, why bother with AR?

However, this throws up some very interesting ethical considerations.

If I ask generative AI to produce a picture of me, it does so in a slightly idealised way where I look better than I do in real life. This must be because people train the models on the most favourable images of themselves.

If you make someone look amazing and aspirational in your clothes, then surely they are more likely to buy them?

But is that the right thing to do? What happens when even a household mirror is not really an accurate reflection?

Food for thought.

#retail #ecommerce #fashion #ai

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