Episode 366: How to Sell Merch as High Impact with Kara Parkinson

[00:00:00] [Intro music]

[00:00:07] Bobby: What are your clients looking to buy when they buy merch from you? They're looking to buy a moment of attention, and if you can't name that moment, you don't really have a campaign. And the stakes are high, because as every other digital channel gets noisier, gets more expensive, and gets less important, merch is quietly getting more effective.

[00:00:27] Bobby: Well, on today's show — even with the cold that I have, I'm so sorry — we're exploring how a buyer thinks and what that means for you and your work with your clients. Welcome to the skucast, the podcast for innovators and maverick thinkers in the promotional product space. My name is Bobby Lehew. I'm glad you're here.

[00:00:46] Bobby: Kara Parkinson is our amazing Senior Vice President of Marketing at commonsku, and she came to us from senior marketing roles at Apple, Intuit, Nestlé, and PepsiCo. She ran teams across North America and Europe, and spent years kind of treating merch like an afterthought. Then she dropped into the promotional products industry through her role here at commonsku.

[00:01:04] Bobby: And as she worked with more of our distributor customers like you, and with our own team and how we view merch, she rearranged her thinking entirely, and is now putting together a creative brief designed to push marketers past "we just need some pins for the conference" and toward campaigns that earn their keep.

[00:01:21] Bobby: Join us as we talk with Kara about why merch is media, the creative brief she's drafting, plus some pro tips for your own marketing, such as how AI search just rewrote the demand funnel and the one thing you should do about it now. Today's episode is brought to you courtesy of us at commonsku. Over 950 distributors powering $1.8 billion in network volume rely on commonsku's connected workflow.

[00:01:46] Bobby: Process more orders, connect your team, and dramatically grow your sales. To learn how, visit commonsku.com. Again, forgive my cold, but here's a healthier Bobby talking with Kara.

[00:01:58] Bobby: Welcome to the skucast. It's about time we had you on.

[00:02:00] Kara: Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.

[00:02:03] Bobby: So you came to commonsku from senior marketing roles at Apple, Intuit, Nestlé, PepsiCo. These are big brands.

[00:02:09] Kara: Yeah.

[00:02:10] Bobby: What was your perception of the industry walking into it, and how did that change since you've been here?

[00:02:15] Kara: I think I had a blind spot that most marketers have. I knew it was a category that I had bought in the past, but I had channels, I had partners that I treated as strategic ones versus something that was transactional, and I think merch was really in that transactional bucket for me.

[00:02:32] Kara: I think it's something that many marketers at a lot of these big organizations — at any organization — they inherit it. They don't really examine it. I hear that a lot, and I've had a lot of those conversations since I've come over here. Every campaign starts with a brief, and we brief our digital agencies or ad agencies with incredible detail.

[00:02:52] Kara: But you call your distributor and say, "I need something fun for the conference." You don't budget for it. And I think since I've been here, it's really been — I'd call it a series of eye-opening moments. So the commonsku marketing team — I feel like I'm new enough that I can praise them at arm's length.

[00:03:09] Kara: The stuff they've done with merch I just think is so incredible. They create such outstanding collections. And seeing how they do it — the first time they were putting together merch for Expo, I'm like, "Why? I've been doing this for thirty years. Why did I never think of doing something like that?"

[00:03:27] Bobby: Yeah.

[00:03:28] Kara: Having that moment from them, walking around Expo, seeing all the options, seeing the strategies, talking to the distributors that we have. We had the commonsku CEO Summit a few weeks ago. I had this epiphany moment with my emotional support pickle that I had gotten years ago from an agency, and it was this real moment of, "Oh, this branded merch works, and it's worked on me."

[00:03:50] Kara: I think really the biggest operators, they aren't selling product. They're running businesses with a point of view, with operating principles and margins and relationships. And that's been the eye-opener for me — realizing that merch doesn't belong in that transactional drawer.

[00:04:09] Kara: It's a media channel, and it's one that's getting more effective right now, when a lot of those other channels that we rely on as marketers are getting less effective and digital is getting noisier.

[00:04:19] Bobby: Absolutely. We're gonna unpack that more in just a second. As I mentioned in the intro, what's really cool about having your perspective here on the skucast and on our team is that you're coming in as one of our buyers — one of our customers' customers, a distributor's customer. What did you learn about distributors and their role in the merch world? You hinted at it there, that there's this entire business ecosystem built around this.

[00:04:38] Kara: Yeah. What I learned is that distributors are the creative brain of the channel, and I think most marketers don't know that because they've never given them a real brief, and they've gotten really generic output because they've given really generic input. And the best distributors are like the best creative agencies.

[00:04:58] Kara: They're a sourcing house, they're a partner, they're a strategist, and they have this leverage and this insight. I'm only seven, eight months in with the industry, but to me right now it's looking like the industry is underselling that, and that marketers — those end user buyers — are under-leveraging it.

[00:05:14] Bobby: Yeah.

[00:05:14] Kara: And they sit really close to that end user, more than a lot of marketers do, and they know what gets kept, and they know what gets thrown out. And I think that's research that CMOs and marketing leaders would love to have.

[00:05:27] Bobby: Yeah.

[00:05:28] Kara: It's a relationship business — that's so clear, just seeing how people interact with each other at these events.

[00:05:33] Bobby: Yep.

[00:05:34] Kara: And the fact that these distributors can say, "A client called me from the airport at 9:00, and I still made it work" — that's the moat that they offer around this industry against any direct competitor. It's their protection. It's what's gonna help them continue to grow.

[00:05:48] Bobby: You built this — it's in draft mode, but I loved the concept of it — a creative merch brief. Because this industry, like you said, some of us are not approaching our customers from that perspective. And one of the things that you said was, merch isn't stuff, it's media. What flipped that framing for you?

[00:06:05] Kara: Data. I always go back to data, but what I'll tell you right now...

[00:06:09] Bobby: By the way, for those of us that know Kara, we knew data was gonna come up in this conversation.

[00:06:14] Kara: I love it. I think two things. I'm gonna put it in two buckets for you.

[00:06:18] Bobby: Okay.

[00:06:18] Kara: Zero-click search is almost 60% of Google queries right now. AI Overviews — they're answering questions; the traffic's not going to the website anymore.

[00:06:28] Kara: The cost on paid search is climbing. The cost on paid social is climbing. So all these channels that marketers relied on are becoming less reliable. At the same time, my husband has a drawer with insanely neatly folded dozens and dozens of concert T-shirts that he still wears all the time.

[00:06:49] Kara: Right here on my wall beside me, I have a poster that I bought at my favorite concert — a fundraising concert I go to every year. My emotional support pickle is sitting right on my desk beside me. Those paid media channels are getting more expensive, less effective —

[00:07:06] Bobby: Yeah.

[00:07:06] Kara: — and at the same time, we have this channel that people are volunteering to wear, to use, to carry.

[00:07:14] Bobby: Yeah.

[00:07:15] Kara: If a distributor goes into this end user marketer and says, "I have this media channel that has a 100% impression rate, infinite dwell time, and people choose to wear it daily" — it's an ad impression that people thank you for. That is so powerful. There's that real flip where it's not about cost per unit — you measure it in cost per moment, or per day of attention that you're grabbing from your prospects, and that changes the math for the marketer.

[00:07:47] Bobby: Yeah. As I mentioned, you've been drafting this creative brief. Question one calls brand awareness a shrug. Why did you say brand awareness can cause this shrug?

[00:08:00] Kara: Yeah. I think brand awareness is something that marketers say when they haven't necessarily done the work to define the outcome.

[00:08:06] Bobby: Oh, good.

[00:08:07] Kara: It's a category of marketing execution. It's not an objective. And it can be really difficult to measure accurately, especially for smaller organizations that don't have massive budgets, and that's why it can be dangerous.

[00:08:19] Kara: So if the goal is awareness, then anything counts as success, when it may not actually be that. And a distributor can't optimize for it, and the marketer can't be held accountable for it, and that's a really easy budget to cut. But if you're forcing a behavior — if you're saying, "What do you want this person to do?"

[00:08:41] Kara: Open the box and post it? Do you want them to bring it to a meeting? Do you want them to mention it to a colleague? Reorder it again for their team? Behaviors are measurable. It's just one signal, and I get that — it's not the only thing you're gonna wanna measure. But if, say, three people reference it in the next sales call, that's more useful than just saying it delivered impressions.

[00:09:02] Kara: Brand awareness lets marketers off the hook for not actually knowing their audience.

[00:09:06] Bobby: Yeah.

[00:09:06] Kara: If you have to define the behavior, you've defined the person.

[00:09:09] Bobby: That's really good. Really good. One of the things you said in the brief was, your real competition isn't other brands, it's the recipient's own clutter. What changes when a distributor understands that framework?

[00:09:20] Kara: I think it really changes the conversation. It points it in a different direction. I think merch conversations are competitive: what is the competitor giving away? What's trendy? What's in the booth next door? I think the real competitive set is what is sitting in the recipient's drawer, or on their kitchen counter, or what's on their desk.

[00:09:41] Kara: My bottle from Catalyst, that I went to a few weeks ago — what are the things that they are going to choose to keep? And reframing it that way forces this quality conversation. So if we are not as well designed or offering as much value as the AirPods sitting beside them — my AirPods case sitting in front of me — then regardless of how good your logo placement is, we're gonna lose, 'cause they're not gonna keep it.

[00:10:09] Kara: It forces utility. Something that's gonna stay in that drawer has gotta earn that square inch. So that really great water bottle, or a notebook that someone actually wants to write in, or a tote that they're not embarrassed to carry.

[00:10:26] Kara: I think for distributors, that can really unlock a sale, unlock a conversation. It's not just, "Hey, look at this thing in the catalog. This is cool and new." It's, "This is what people are keeping on their desk right now. The way you've described your client to me, this is what they'll keep on their desk." And I think that makes for great merch.

[00:10:47] Bobby: One of my favorite parts of your brief was the category thinking versus context thinking. And I wanna encourage distributors, as they're listening, to think about your next pitch with your client and your prospect, because we often fall to category thinking because, first of all, it's pretty easy. It's like an easy door handle to open — we understand the category. But what I mean by this is, category thinking is, as you said, "we want apparel." Context thinking is, "we want something they'll use at 7:00 a.m." Why does that distinction matter?

[00:11:16] Kara: I think category thinking is a sourcing conversation, and context thinking is a marketing conversation.

[00:11:22] Bobby: That's so good.

[00:11:22] Kara: And I think they're completely different jobs. Category is gonna narrow you to a catalog, but context is about the moment. If it's, "I wanna be something that they interact with at 7:00 a.m.,"

[00:11:34] Kara: it could be a coffee tumbler, or a really great backpack that they wanna use for commuting, or a stainless steel water bottle that's gonna be next to their gym bag. It's not starting with that category then.

[00:11:45] Bobby: Yeah.

[00:11:46] Kara: And that context is gonna force you to be honest about whether that moment exists. Something they're gonna use during a four-hour conference panel is a real moment. Something they're gonna use at their desk — the desk probably has everything. But I think ultimately that kind of conversation is where the distributor's expertise is really gonna shine, and it's gonna compound.

[00:12:04] Kara: 'Cause they've seen what gets used at 7:00 a.m. across hundreds of clients, and I think that's worth a lot more than any category search.

[00:12:13] Bobby: Yeah.

[00:12:14] Kara: Marketers don't buy products. They are looking to buy a moment of attention. Something that's going to shine that light on their brand, on their business, in that moment. If you can't name what that moment is, you don't have a campaign — you just have a purchase order.

[00:12:28] Bobby: Oh, it's so good. Oh, that's quote-worthy. Okay, so two other things I wanna unpack here: return on emotion and return on impact. How do you as a marketer think about that in terms of merch?

[00:12:38] Kara: I think there's a real behavioral signal around this proxy. Emotion is the cause, do you know what I mean? The behavioral signal is something you can audit — did they post it? Did they mention it? But all of those things are driven by the emotion.

[00:12:56] Kara: The return on emotion is what you're buying: the warmth, the memory, the mention to a peer. It's like any good brand campaign. You can't measure brand love. You can measure unaided recall, and net promoter score, and branded search lift, or share of branded search — but those things only happen if the emotion landed.

[00:13:14] Kara: So I think you're picking a behavioral signal per program. If you're trying to measure too many, you're not gonna get it. Pick that one that's closest to the emotion that you're trying to create, and let that be the truth.

[00:13:26] Bobby: If a distributor walked into your office tomorrow — let's put you back in one of your marketing roles again — with a pitch built around your brief, what makes you lean in the most, and what makes you tune out?

[00:13:36] Kara: If they come in and they ask me about my audience before they show me products. They wanna know who it is, when, where, what's the behavior I'm trying to trigger. Product is on slide eight, not on slide one. They bring a point of view. They talk about what people are keeping on their desks and where you can be better.

[00:13:53] Kara: They suggest something I didn't ask for. We all know — I've heard this conversation with the distributors at things like CEO Summit — people can Google that catalog. I'm looking to pay for something that I couldn't have found myself or wouldn't have thought of myself.

[00:14:07] Bobby: Yeah.

[00:14:08] Kara: Where I think I would lean out, or where I tune out, is if they lead with what they can source, not what I can buy. So if they say, "We do apparel, we do drinkware and tech," that's a vendor pitch, not a marketing partnership.

[00:14:23] Kara: Don't tell me what you sell — tell me how you solve my problem. And I think that's the core of any good marketing.

[00:14:30] Bobby: Yeah.

[00:14:30] Kara: Or if they come in with impressions math without any kind of outcome — "you get 4,000 impressions." But what should I think is gonna happen because of those impressions? Give me ideas of what behavior can come from that. And also, if they don't have a creative point of view — if three different distributors brought me the exact same product at just a slightly different price, you're not really differentiating from each other.

[00:14:54] Bobby: Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna leave the landscape of the creative brief and merch for a moment. We're gonna tap into your expertise as a marketer, because this is so important, and I've learned so much from you, you being here. I'm not just saying that. I've watched you build an amazing team. I've watched you come in and really force us to look at data — hard data — change some things. But let's lean into your expertise as a marketer and help our audience market better. Because even just this week, Google changed their homepage for the first time in 25 years to completely AI mode. It'll still have some link search on it, as I looked at it, but for the most part, things are changing. You mentioned zero-click search now accounts for almost 60% of Google queries, and for those that don't know, that means you're basically not clicking on a link once you look in Google. You're actually getting the answer through AI mode. This is a major shift that you are dealing with on a daily basis. What's shifting in how customers find things, and how are you resolving that at commonsku — without giving away all our secret sauce?

[00:15:53] Kara: I'm happy to share anything that I've learned. I would say, just from so many articles that I've read, the announcement that Google put out this week, it's really the most important repositioning that they've done in 25 years. I read an article, and the way they put it was: Google has moved from being a librarian to a concierge.

[00:16:12] Kara: So it's not, "This is where you can find it," to, "I've already done it for you." Search isn't trying to send you anywhere. It is trying now to be the destination. And you're seeing that in the numbers. AI search has something like 2.5 billion monthly users, and AI Mode was a billion. And I think 58% is the exact number right now of Google searches that end with zero clicks to a third-party site.

[00:16:36] Kara: So as marketers — especially B2B marketers, where we've depended on our website to carry that — they're not coming to our site anymore.

[00:16:44] Bobby: Yeah.

[00:16:46] Kara: The position-one click-through rate — so if you're the first search result that shows up — that click has dropped from 7.3% to 1.6%.

[00:16:55] Bobby: Wow.

[00:16:56] Kara: It's not a trend. It's just completely rearchitected the entire demand funnel. And there's a really important data point for marketers, and for these small businesspeople that we deal with, buried in this: branded queries are performing really well in AI search.

[00:17:13] Bobby: What do you mean by branded queries?

[00:17:14] Kara: Searching for "commonsku" instead of searching for "merch CRM" or "merch automation software."

[00:17:20] Bobby: Okay.

[00:17:21] Kara: And cited brands get more clicks — more organic clicks and more paid clicks. So brands that are known by name get amplified. The brands that aren't known get buried.

[00:17:34] Kara: So that goes back to the value of growing your brand and growing your brand awareness. If people know your name, AI search is gonna help you. If they don't, it buries you. This whole brand building — it's moved from a soft, long-term play to a hard, measurable defense

[00:17:53] Bobby: Yeah.

[00:17:53] Kara: that protects you against these disruptions when the algorithms change. And what we're doing at commonsku — we really spend a great deal of our marketing dollars toward our customers and our brand,

[00:18:06] Kara: continuing to ensure that people have a really great experience with our business, and less so on demand specifically. Our category — connected workflow platforms for promotional product distributors — is small enough that brand recognition really compounds.

[00:18:22] Kara: And when a distributor types "commonsku" instead of "promo software," we win. We get cited, and we get that amazing click-through rate. And that's really why AEO — answer engine optimization, optimizing for AI search — has become a huge piece of what we do.

[00:18:40] Kara: And there's a brilliant woman on my team named Ritz, and she's really taken control of how we show up in search and put a ton of energy into that. And that's why the value of the editorial voice and these types of things we do — it's going to future-proof us, and I think it's something that all of our customers should be thinking about if they're not right now. How do you make sure you also show up in search — in AI search?

[00:19:05] Bobby: It's really become a trust game — really about the brands you trust and love. And you and I have seen these — you more, you know more than me — but we've seen these leads come in. I remember one distinctly that said somebody was searching for software, and it said, "Why are you trying to build software when there's commonsku?"

[00:19:19] Bobby: They were a promotional products distributor, right? That was one interesting one.

[00:19:22] Kara: Yeah, they were trying to use AI to build it.

[00:19:24] Bobby: Yeah. And the AI responded, "Why are you doing that? This already exists." And then the other one was just today — we had a Claude lead come through where someone had looked us up. So it's changing quickly. What is one thing a distributor should be doing about AI search right now — practically, tactically speaking — in order to show up in those engines?

[00:19:44] Kara: Yeah. I would say get one real ICP — so your ideal client profile — and get one real, specific answer to one question on your website. So not a category page, not a service list, but a really sharp, expert answer to a real question that a buyer would ask the AI about your business. "What's the best promotional product for a financial services conference?"

[00:20:08] Kara: beats "We sell branded merchandise." That question-and-answer format works incredibly well for it.

[00:20:15] Bobby: That's great. Easy to do.

[00:20:18] Kara: Yeah. And that's something else I've learned — the distributors, you know this better than I do, but they have that ICP. They have areas they specialize in. So make sure you're focusing there.

[00:20:27] Kara: And having third-party sites referencing you also helps boost your visibility in AI search, more than what you do on your own website.

[00:20:37] Bobby: Yeah.

[00:20:37] Kara: Some of the conversations I've had with distributors are, "I can't compete with these massive national or global distributor organizations." But you can have a Google rating in local search for your business — "distributors near me," "distributors in..." — I live in Burlington, Ontario — "distributors in Burlington, Ontario" — and have those reviews, and have that voice of the customer talking about what you offer.

[00:21:04] Kara: Those third-party reviews are another really great channel to help you show up more in AI search.

[00:21:10] Bobby: Okay, Kara, final question I have for you. Coming into commonsku, one of the most impressive things I've witnessed is that you reorganized the marketing team, and it was not only aligned to people's strengths, but it really created a flywheel effect. Distributors traditionally under-invest in marketing. They'll invest in self-promo, they'll invest in campaigns, but they under-invest in marketing roles and resources. What's the biggest lesson you've learned in running a small business and a small marketing team? When I say small — our marketing team is larger than our distributors' marketing teams, as an example, but we're smaller than where you came from, Nestlé and Pepsi, right? That's a different world. Share with us a little bit how you would encourage distributor owners to rethink their marketing strategy through their team.

[00:21:51] Kara: Yeah. What we really did here was think about, what are the jobs to be done? What do we need to accomplish as a team? And we created three sub-teams. I think of it like a Venn diagram, not like a hierarchy. So we have brand and demand, we have customer and product, and we have content and design.

[00:22:08] Kara: And the center of that Venn diagram is the customer and the voice of the customer. That's how they overlap, and that's really how the work compounds.

[00:22:18] Bobby: Yeah.

[00:22:19] Kara: I think a lesson from these bigger-company roles is, you have to get the operating system right before you can get the campaigns right. I don't know how I said it like that, but —

[00:22:29] Bobby: Oh, that's good.

[00:22:30] Kara: Intuit, Nestlé, Pepsi — none of those organizations ever produce great work because of one person.

[00:22:36] Bobby: Yeah.

[00:22:36] Kara: They produce it because the system is set up so the work can compound against itself, and the work that each team is doing is pointed toward a single goal. Things that we did specifically: we set up job charters, we set up what is a definition of done.

[00:22:53] Kara: We set up operating principles, and decisions are pushed to the level of the person closest to the work. That's where you drive the flywheel — and campaigns are the output, not the input. I guess what I've had to unlearn is assuming that I have a big bench of people that I can pull from. At Intuit, I worked on QuickBooks in Canada, and there were 10 people on that team — just for one product, just for customer marketing, just for Canada.

[00:23:22] Kara: But at commonsku, we have this team of really brilliant generalists who are wearing multiple hats, so you can't look at the playbook in the same way. But every single person on the team knows what we're trying to accomplish

[00:23:36] Bobby: Yeah.

[00:23:37] Kara: and what our desired outcomes are. We're working under shared operating principles, and they're just brilliant — I'm gonna say brilliant women, 'cause they're all women — but brilliant women who care deeply about our customers and making sure they have a great experience.

[00:23:53] Kara: That trumps everything. And having those decision frameworks around what we're gonna do — one of the operating principles we have as a marketing team is that data trumps opinion.

[00:24:02] Kara: In big companies that are really corporate, sometimes that loudest voice in the room wins. One of our principles is no HiPPO — the highest-paid person's opinion doesn't get to choose. The data trumps. The data wins.

[00:24:15] Bobby: Yeah.

[00:24:15] Kara: And I think that's really reset it. Nobody has to wait for me to make a decision; they have the autonomy to do that. But because we all know what we want to achieve — making sure that we are delivering a product that's by distributors, for distributors, that delivers an outstanding customer experience, with the customer at the center of every decision we make — I think that makes it work.

[00:24:41] Bobby: I think that's my favorite principle you brought into the team — and we already leaned this way because we're so community-driven — but keeping the customer at the center of the conversation and bringing their voice forward more than ours was really critical. You've been really pressing down on the pedal for that one, and it's fantastic. Kara, thank you for joining us for the skucast.

[00:24:58] Kara: Pleasure.

[00:24:58] Bobby: I'm sorry it took us eight months to get you on here, but I think it was the perfect time.

[00:25:03] Kara: It's good. I think if it was too much sooner, I wouldn't have had the chance to learn everything I have from the team at commonsku, and from our customers, and from the community. And for anybody who's watching that I've had a chance to meet — thank you so much to all the people who've invested in me and given me the chance to learn, and continue to learn, about this industry. There's a lot, but I'm really enjoying it.

[00:25:23] Bobby: I wanna say, we have always been a resource for our customers, so people have reached out to me for advice — reach out to Kara. If you're building a marketing team, if you need some advice, reach out to her.

[00:25:31] Kara: Yep.

[00:25:32] Bobby: Take her advice. She would love to help.

[00:25:33] Kara: Absolutely.

[00:25:34] Bobby: Kara, thanks again.

[00:25:35] Kara: Thank you.