Diane Keng of Breinify On The Future Of Retail In The Post Pandemic World

An Interview With Orlando Zayas

Activate hyper-relevant content and product recommendations.

We take existing layouts and components across marketing channels (such as email, web, applications, SMS, and others) and transform static pieces of content into fully personalized suggestions. We approach returning, first-time, and known customers individually.

As part of our series about the future of retail, I had the pleasure of interviewing Diane Keng, CEO of Breinify.

Diane Keng is the CEO and co-founder of Breinify, an artificial intelligence and contextual marketing platform for predicting and acting on customers’ highly dynamic interests. Diane ran three successful businesses before she was 18 and is a noted software innovator who frequently speaks on the intersection of AI, personal data, privacy, and the future of smarter products. She has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, HuffPost, TechCrunch, OZY, and Inc. Magazine. Breinify works with retailers and consumer packaged goods brands to enable data science in marketing campaigns to drive 51% year-over-year online sales, 20 times the click rate, and six times the reaction rate.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I’ve always been interested in entrepreneurship and innovation. When I was in high school, I was part of a marketing organization where I was elected to be state president. During this time, I’ve had the opportunity to grow my business skills and learn the ins and outs of successful businesses. I then applied these insights and started my own businesses, which was exciting! This moment sparked my interest in making a difference in the world.

After that, I had the opportunity to study computer engineering, which meant I could build out software ideas. After graduation, my experiences at Apple and Symantec helped me learn the importance of team and products. My love of building my ideas never went away, and I knew I had to start my own business again. Once I had experienced the market pain points, I knew Breinify was the next big thing for me.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?

Since the beginning of my career, one of my goals was to passionately build technology that will impact the world and be recognized in Forbes 30 under 30. 2021 was the year I achieved this goal by being in Forbes’ 30 under 30 for enterprise technology. And I could not be more ecstatic that this title came with Breinify.

Since I began my career at Apple and then Symantec, I constantly worked on self-improvement and regularly took time to reflect on living an “always be learning” lifestyle. This mindset encourages me to put myself out there and put in the work to achieve my goals — both personally and professionally.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson or takeaway you learned from that?

At Breinify, we have a culture of embracing failure; we’re expected to make mistakes, and we keep pushing ourselves to do better. This philosophy was born when we started and I made my funniest mistake, which didn’t seem funny back then. Instead of being vulnerable from the beginning, I tried to fix this without much knowledge into the how.

I had gone out for our company’s first angel funding round, and I had drastically oversimplified the cost of operations — aka all those company insurance policies. After funding, to try and stay as close to the budget I had made, I ended up wasting more than three weeks finding the cheapest policies to save a groundbreaking $10,000 (at the time, this was huge considering our angel round). This still put me at $2,000 over budget.

In the grand scheme of things, the time I spent on this was worth more than the savings and headaches. I can still remember the trembling feeling I had before sharing this mistake with our new investor, who didn’t even bat an eye. Because he had gone through these mistakes with other founders in the past, he helped me to refocus on the big picture. (I also learned that asking for help is not a sign of weakness, but rather an accelerant.)

Are you working on any new exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?

Currently, we are working on a new podcast at Breinify. I’m excited for our team to help uncover the complexities of personalization and how marketers assess vendors. The podcast will also discuss how to apply data science to industries without technical marketers.

Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?

First, embrace vulnerability. Be open to learning about things that are hard to change. The speeches with the most positive feedback I’ve given at Breinify are ones where I have been vulnerable. For example, I had loosened our rigorous recruiting process (that mostly served us well) to fill head count and hired individuals that didn’t reflect our values. I eventually had to explain in front of all Breiniacs that this was a mistake.

Second, make sure you allocate time for reflection each day. Taking time to reflect is a technique I have found to be incredibly helpful as Breinify grew over the last few years. It helps me focus on the big-picture things versus digging too deep into the details.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person to whom you are grateful, who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

As a CEO, I think it is critical to seek mentors continuously. I am a product of many different styles of mentors. I thank my parents for my core emotional fundamentals, morality, and positive outlook on life.

From a business leader perspective, I’ve had amazing mentors, but one particular individual — Ullas Naik, founder and general partner at Streamlined Ventures — has helped me grow this past year. Breinify has been growing at an incredible rate, and he’s been a solid rock. Recently, I’ve learned a ton from Ullas during our fundraising process, which led us to raise a $6 million round in record time (fewer than three days for three term sheets).

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

I leverage my success to bring goodness to this planet by encouraging people of diverse backgrounds to recognize equality. I’m continuously working hard to be as educated as possible in respecting people and being accepting.

As a minority founder with an upbringing between Taiwan and America, I can help bring a new perspective to what a successful tech founder should look and act like.

Ok super. Now let’s jump to the main questions of our interview. The Pandemic has changed many aspects of all of our lives. One of them is the fact that so many of us have gotten used to shopping almost exclusively online. Can you share a few examples of different ideas that large retail outlets are implementing to adapt to the new realities created by the Pandemic?

Personalization in the digital space is more important than ever due to the pandemic.

Some examples of newly implemented ideas include becoming more mobile-friendly, which means swipe-ability. Bringing a curated in-store feel to digital experiences (such as virtual tastings) is also important. Lastly, implementing buy online, pick up in store or curbside pickup is critical, as those options have also surged.

In your opinion, will retail stores or malls continue to exist? How would you articulate the role of physical retail spaces at a time when online commerce platforms like Amazon Prime or Instacart can deliver the same day or the next day?

I believe retail stores and malls will continue to exist, but with a different purpose than what we know today. We will use physical spaces primarily for entertainment or in-person deals to reduce inventory. Online commerce with same-day or next-day shipping is extremely convenient, but there will still be some consumers that crave in-person physical interactions.

The so-called “Retail Apocalypse“ has been going on for about a decade. While many retailers are struggling, some retailers, like Lululemon, Kroger, and Costco are quite profitable. Can you share a few lessons that other retailers can learn from the success of profitable retailers?

Be adaptable to change. Listen to your consumers about their needs, and don’t dillydally on tests and iterations that can gain insights into needed pivots. Invest in digital and zone in on strategies that encourage loyalty, such as personalization.

Amazon is going to exert pressure on all of retail for the foreseeable future. New Direct-To-Consumer companies based in China are emerging that offer prices that are much cheaper than US and European brands. What would you advise to retail companies and e-commerce companies, for them to be successful in the face of such strong competition?

Consumers depend on a multitude of factors to determine when they feel a connection to a brand:

• Discounts: Merkle found in a new survey that discounts are the most popular loyalty reward, with 70% of consumers preferring these offers over free products (65%), free samples (51%), free services (48%), and a chance to win prizes (28%).
• Convenience: Help make the consumer’s life more frictionless.
• Relevant content: Whether these are product offers, educational content, or even insights into market trends, the closer it is regarding what the consumer is looking for or needs to discover, the more likely they are to feel a connection.
• Appreciative gestures: Little things such as thanking consumers after a purchase can go further than you can imagine.

Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a fantastic retail experience that keeps bringing customers back for more? Please share a story or an example for each.

Here’s how we’ve helped BevMo!, a leading specialty retailer in the western United States offering competitively priced alcoholic beverages, provide a welcoming and friendly environment:

1. Empower smart data collection.

Breinify identifies actionable insights by collecting and tagging first-party data from multiple sources, engineering-free.

2. Optimize the consumer journey and testing.

We focus on growing the CRM with upcoming preference segmentation and apply these as dynamic experiences. We also convert as many first-time visitors as we can into reachable users.

3. Activate hyper-relevant content and product recommendations.

We take existing layouts and components across marketing channels (such as email, web, applications, SMS, and others) and transform static pieces of content into fully personalized suggestions. We approach returning, first-time, and known customers individually.

4. Offer predictive personalization.

We use strong technologies to proactively deliver experiences unique to each visitor in real time. Time is of the essence when it comes to capturing all sales opportunities. Leverage data science and algorithms to adapt to your customers’ needs.

5. Include end-to-end, impactful analytics and reporting.

Click-throughs are just one part of the answer. To understand campaign successes, it helps to be able to track the full consumer journey sequence. Continuous analytics also enable the identification of new opportunities.

Thank you for all of that. We are nearly done. Here is our final ‘meaty’ question. You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I grew up with a heavy emphasis on education and how important it was always to be learning. I was privileged to have access to education — and I’d hope that everyone can be empowered with it, too.

How can our readers further follow your work?

You can check out Breinify’s blog and podcast on our site, and you can reach me on LinkedIn and Twitter.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!