Voices of CX: Caroline Buck - Bringing Customer Centricity to Pet Food - S8E10

On this week's episode, we talked to Caroline Buck about her unlikely journey from the world of UX and brand marketing to direct-to-consumer pet food.

🟠About Caroline Buck
Caroline is the co-founder and chief marketing officer at Petaluma, a sustainable dog nutrition company. Caroline’s background is predominantly in product marketing, business development, and growth marketing. Most recently, Caroline was VP of Marketing at Mexico-based software services company Wizeline, which she helped scale from 200 people to over 1,200 people in three years. Prior to Wizeline, Caroline was a Product Marketer at Yahoo! in the advertising technology product team. Caroline’s background of leading and building teams, creating differentiated brand positioning, and sales/business development, provides a broad set of tools for growing Petaluma. Caroline graduated from Dartmouth College.

🟠Connect with Caroline Buck
Follow Caroline Buck on LinkedIn:   / carolinebuck1  
Follow Caroline Buck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/carolinebuck_sf?l...

Follow Petaluma on LinkedIn:   / petaluma  
Follow Petaluma on Twitter:   / feedpetaluma  

🎙Episode Highlight:
Caroline: [...] early on, we were really interested in compostable packaging, for example. And it's really hard to do with heavy bags.

There's a limit currently, five pounds is the threshold. When you go above five pounds you need to introduce some kind of plastic to reinforce that. Maybe we'll do, if someone wants to order a larger order, five 5lb bags. That way we don't have to use any plastic.

It turns out that wasn't a critical thing for some of our customers. They wanted the larger bag. It's more convenient, it's cheaper to ship. There were lots of reasons why you might want a larger bag and we really waffled back and forth on that; will we be isolating our customer or not?

Customers were not as interested in that as we had thought that they were. We didn't have a solution anyways, for a compostable larger bag.

I think sustainability is becoming less of a throwaway item for people, that we're seeing folks ask about that now. So the survey at that time, when we were creating it, it wasn't a make-or-break. It was a nice-to-have. So we made that decision in the interest of the customers. I think that's something that it's not a frozen-in-time situation.

We need to stay on top of it because preferences are always shifting. But that's one small thing that we definitely spent a lot of time thinking about, but ultimately wanted to side with what customers would prefer.

🟠Would you like to read the full interview? Access the transcript on our blog at https://blog.worthix.com/caroline-buc...

🟠Check out the other seasons of Worthix's Voices of CX Podcast
🟧Voices of Cx Podcast 1: https://bit.ly/VoCXs1
🟧Voices of Cx Podcast 2: https://bit.ly/VoCXs2
🟧Voices of Cx Podcast 3: https://bit.ly/VoCXs3
🟧Voices of Cx Podcast 4: https://bit.ly/VoCXs4
🟧Voices of Cx Podcast 5: https://bit.ly/VoCXs5
🟧Voices of Cx Podcast 6: https://bit.ly/VoCXs6
🟧Voices of Cx Podcast 7: https://bit.ly/VoCXs7

🟠Connect with the Voices of CX
Follow Worthix on LinkedIn   / worthix  
And Follow Worthix on Twitter: @worthix
Follow Mary Drumond on LinkedIn   / marydrumond  
And Follow Mary Drumond on Twitter: @drumondmary

🟠About Voices of CX Podcast
The Voices of CX Podcast is a podcast that covers all things business strategies, customer decision insight, empathetic leadership practices, and tips for sustainable profitability. With a little bit of geeking out on behavioral science, A.I. and other innovation sprinkled in here and there. The guests span multiple industries, but all of them have years of experience to bring to the table.

📩Got something to say about CX or want to be featured on the show? Let us know! Email the Producer ([email protected]).

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