A retailer’s on-site search box is where shoppers are communicating exactly what they want. And that is a powerful and underutilized tool, said Michelle Goad, Chief Digital Officer at Athleta, at the Shoptalk Fall conference this September in Chicago.
“I think about search as our marketing team’s brief,” Goad said. “She’s coming in, she’s telling us what she wants. So we make sure to serve that up to our marketing team when we’re making content, when we’re making leaderboards. We’re doing all these amazing creative exercises, because the more connected you can be, it feels like you’re reading my mind as a consumer. It’s really powerful.”
Highly Relevant Personalization
Often this translates to highly relevant personalization. Once a shopper indicates what she is looking for within the search box, Athleta can show these results, plus display other items that shoppers with similar search queries were looking for.
“The more niche (the search), the more engagement,” Goad said.
While marketing campaigns can take a long time to develop, retailers still have to pump out day-to-day content. Now with artificial intelligence, Athleta produces personalized content based on metadata tags in its ads. Its teams can focus on creativity and storytelling, while the backend technology works on matching it to the correct consumers.
“It’s a pretty cool, very new place that we’re playing in but that’s huge manpower savings in terms of what our teams were doing,” she said.
And it doesn’t take huge loads of personal data to achieve this, as it can just use search terms or page views to personalize content.
“TikTok taught us all of that; you don’t need people to say yes and no,” Goad said. “It’s either they viewed it or they didn’t. And that implicit signal tells you, okay, this is something she’s going to be interested or move on.”
Athleta also uses on-site search data to inform its merchandising and buying decisions. Linen is a good example, she said. While the material is common for summertime apparel, consumers search for linen on Athleta’s site year-round. Using this data, the apparel brand can confidently purchase more linen products to meet this demand.
‘Moving at the Speed of Culture’
Athleta had a prime opportunity to put these practices to the test when Kendrick Lamar stepped out onto the stage in flare jeans for his Super Bowl halftime show in February 2025. Many apparel brands scrambled to make the most of the moment, including Athleta.
“So we see consumers starting to search for flares, obviously, in our site, and the whole world is talking about it,” Goad said. “Historically, for a brand to stand up a promotion, there is so much that goes into that, but you have to be able to move at the speed of culture within your teams.”
Athleta has better connected its marketing and digital teams so they can share insights about what consumers are talking about on social media, like Kendrick Lamar wearing flare jeans, and pounce on the moment. Athleta used the open space it has to shoot content quickly and put together a trigger email with flare jeans to send to shoppers looking for that content.
The brand is working to make this process even faster by rebuilding its content management system.
“Instead of huge lifts to build these things on site and [in] app, now we’ve cut the time in half and we’ll be under an hour within the next year to get content live,” she said.
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