Margaret Milan about customer centricity and scaling

Margaret Milan is a customer champion

She is the founder of Eveil & Jeux (Oxybul), one of France’s first e-commerce sites in 1998 (same year as Amazon in France) and tackled early-on the challenges of omni-channel retail, with 50% of sales in store, 50% on-line.

Her other lives?

• a girl guide/scout, waitress, oil company hostess in Aberdeen, Scotland
• an engineering student in England, spending time in the metal shop
• a marketer of Pampers and Always, while learning French
• the co-founder of an online/offline platform for business women (PWN Global) before Facebook set foot in France
• and of course, an enthusiastic daphnipolitan

She has spent her career, even pre-digital, building customer bases and strong brands.

As a self-confessed Excel fan (the guy who invented spread-sheets was in her class at HBS), Margaret Milan got hooked early on direct/digital marketing/e-commerce for its instant reactivity and the way it lets you test, learn and understand what your customer really wants/likes/needs.

We asked Margaret Milan what she thought about trends in the consumer arena

“According to the latest EY barometer of European Venture Capital, roughly half the funds raised in 2015 are in consumer facing services.

As more and more e-commerce sites, communities and apps are launched (France alone has close to 200 000 e-commerce sites), entrepreneurs are challenged to get a share of the customers ear — or finger tips.

This means inventing new ways to build a loyal, enthusiastic customer base, and requires creative thinking, strong branding… and major investment.

But without the means to build a strong customer base and loyalty, no consumer business can scale.

Too many entrepreneurs still seem to think that having a great product and buying Google ads will do the job. But without the means to build a strong customer base and loyalty, no consumer business can scale. I recently screened over 30 pitches for an entrepreneurship prize. Very few identified the means to recruit and retain customers as one of the fundamental pillars of their business model.

Customer centricity in the day-to-day

A founder in a BtoC business (and probably in a BtoB one too) needs to live and breathe every minute in his/her customer’s shoes.
Our approach at Eveil & Jeux was to measure every step of the customer journey in terms of simplicity and pleasure.
Jeff Bezos is the one who does this best, but look carefully and the founders of the most loved brands and you’ll probably find the same customer obsession.

Scaling from France

Another table in the EY barometer highlights the difficulty of French start-ups to scale: on average, French venture investments are half the size of those in Germany and the UK.

Why is this the case? As a Brit in France, Margaret Milan wonders if it’s the flip side of France’s amazing ability to produce smart digital minds through its renowned “grandes écoles”, but its slight “mépris” of the marketing and commercial side of things.
Many teams are “engineer strong, customer light”. Engineering “ninjas” don’t often mingle with marketing “wizards” .

Founder teams are frequently homogenous.

Founder teams are frequently homogenous. They commonly have a CEO, a CTO and a CFO, but I often search for the CCO (chief customer officer), and the CMO is usually a stagiaire…
Scaling a consumer business in Europe is tough too, with fragmented markets and multiple languages and cultures. So a “one size fits all” approach seldom works.
And I am tired of seeing all male (or for that matter, all female) founder teams. A bit more gender balance in founder teams in the consumer area is inescapable.
Just listen when the founder of Salesforce, Marc Benioff, is quoted as saying “I wish honestly that I could rewind time and go back and put that (…) issue into the culture from the beginning.”

So what does it take to build a unicorn in the consumer arena?

Probably a French techie, a British marketer, a German product manager and a Spanish customer champion, all shaken up with a healthy gender balance. Multiple studies show diverse teams are more creative. Time to launch a Meetic for start-up teams?