Aditi Jain is a digital and product strategy leader. She most recently served as a Head of US Digital/GM at Blue Bottle Coffee, where she drove digital transformation and growth across all digital businesses. Previously at Levi’s, she architected and executed the international digital expansion strategy across key markets.
Her career began in engineering consulting before transitioning to digital commerce at Zovi.com, India’s first DTC fashion brand, during the pivotal ecommerce boom. Aditi brings deep expertise in digital strategy, product and go-to-market planning, omnichannel, and transformative commerce solutions.
In our conversation, Aditi talks about listening to your consumers’ emotional needs and using that to create an experience that goes beyond just transactional. She shares how she worked to emulate a café-style, in-person coffee experience through the online Blue Bottle experience. Aditi also discusses her mantra that “it’s not about what you do, but how you do it.”
Customers expect more than just a transactional experience with brands. Throughout my career, we went back to the customer or consumer to evaluate what their needs were. There is always a universal, emotional need. As we learned more about our consumers, who we call guests, at Blue Bottle, one clear thing was that having coffee in the morning, either at home or in a café, is about more than just having some fuel to sustain them — it’s a time where they slow down and have a quiet moment to themselves. Now, we can take that insight and map it across all the touch points of our consumer journey.
The technical term for this is jobs-to-be-done — what job is the customer really trying to do? That’s the key. Every brand’s customers have specific emotional needs, so listen to what your customers are saying at an emotional level and use that to create an experience that goes beyond transactional.
It’s not just about what you are doing, it’s also about how you are doing it. For example, personalization feels like a buzzword every company is chasing, and it can be very gimmicky if it’s not authentic to your brand. To me, personalization means you genuinely get to know customers like you would a friend or an acquaintance.
Nowadays, you see a lot of brands doing personal quizzes where, for example, you check some boxes and they give you a product recommendation. That’s awesome, but it can come across as putting the customer in a box or as another way to gather data. It’s about how you execute that quiz to make it feel authentic and genuine, and this depends on the types of questions you ask, the way you ask them, the type of insight you’re trying to gather from the customer, and the way that you show the results.
In terms of education, at Blue Bottle, we spent a lot of time building detailed product pages and educational content. Our goal was to establish ourselves as an authority on coffee. Also, if somebody walks into a café, a barista will always help them figure out their coffee, so we tried to create an online experience that’s as close to that as possible. How do you think of the online experience as more than a transaction? Educational content plays a big role; personalization too if done right. Storytelling also helps a lot.
Data says that one in three Gen Z’s value brand ethos more than the product itself, so it’s not about the bottom of the funnel anymore — it’s about the top of the funnel, how you engage those customers with your brand ethos from the get-go, and how you weave that across the customer journey.
During my time at Blue Bottle, we relaunched our ecommerce website and rebuilt it from the ground up. Since we had insight into how it’s not just about the cup of coffee itself but the table and experience, we thought hard about how to emulate that experience online. It started with what colors to choose for the website — since we’re emulating a cozy café experience, we went with neutral warmer coffee tones. In terms of messaging, there was a lot of conversation around “slowing down” and “taking a moment to pause.” When exploring different CTAs, we were thinking more along the lines of “explore” instead of “shop now.”
From a feature perspective, this was harder. Coffee is a very sensorial experience and it’s difficult to translate that to online. We spent a lot of time thinking about how we would bring that experience to the consumer in a digestible manner. For example, on product pages, we had a flavor profile, quick recipes, and ways and tools to brew your coffee at home. This was to help the customer get the full experience in an offline setting.
Last but not least, we had a lot of customers who subscribed to have coffee delivered to their homes. So, we took a step back and rethought that subscription journey. We didn’t want it to be an average delivery service, but more of a Blue Bottle coffee program. Once you’re a subscriber, we want to help you build your coffee ritual at home. People often forget about post-transaction experiences like this. It’s not just about buying the product online but also how the product is delivered to you, your first interaction with a customer representative, and so on.
For me, omnichannel means meeting the customers wherever they are, however they want, and whenever they want. It’s really hard to be a true omnichannel brand. I’ve worked at small and big companies, and they’re equally challenging. It’s a multi-year, multi-investment plan, but it’s table stakes — you’ve got to do it, and you’ve got to get it right.
Omnichannel is like table stakes for a brand — customers shop from everywhere. Five years ago, we said, “Why should we enable Facebook or TikTok checkout?” We didn’t want to give our data to a third party. But I think customers are past that. Right now, it’s table stakes. So, at Blue Bottle, we launched on TikTok Commerce last year. We were one of the first coffee brands there. Two out of three Gen-Zers in the US are on TikTok, and they spend an average of 76 minutes a day there.
Another table stakes is thoughtful communication, especially as a small brand early in the omnichannel journey. Think about how you can connect with customers and use that data to craft thoughtful communication. For example, finding out if a customer is near a retail store. If a customer is in Ohio and we say, “Come to our café in San Francisco,” that would really miss the mark.
Last is interconnectivity — how do you connect online to offline? For example, how can you shop online and then pick up in-store, or how can you shop in-store and then get that purchase shipped to you? At Levi’s, we saw huge success with this, but it takes effort and time.
In my mind, I think about progress over perfection. Customer needs are changing all the time, and if you’re aiming for perfection, you can’t be flexible to customer needs. Early in my career, we had to maintain a best-in-class experience. That was the motto, so we delivered what was the best experience at that moment and adapted it over time.
Second, UX is both an art and a science. One of my earliest mentors told me that if you’re designing a landing page or an experience, there’s a 30/60/90 seconds rule. If somebody has 30 seconds, what information do you want to communicate to them? What if they have 60 seconds? Or 90 seconds? With 90 seconds, the customer has a lot of time and they want to engage with you, so tell them more stories. If you have any insights from online surveys, user testing, or any qualitative insights on friction points, those should be resolved. For any brand, big or small, A/B testing is a must — it’s amazing what you can learn.
While we were A/B testing at Blue Bottle, we realized that because customers are so used to shopping online, they don’t even read the homepage anymore. Instead, they just go straight to the navigation. We spent a lot of time and work on the homepage because it’s a prime asset, but we then shifted our focus to spending a lot of time optimizing the navigation. That’s something we wouldn’t have found out if we hadn’t A/B tested.
In general, another piece of advice I’d give is to make sure you have clear insight into your funnel metrics. Why is there dropoff? Is checkout an issue? Is it a top-of-funnel issue? Are customers dropping from the homepage to your PDPs or from PDPs to check out? Become laser-focused on what aspect of the funnel you’re trying to optimize.
We had a customer insight team when I first joined Blue Bottle, but I was brand new to the coffee space. In my first 30 days, I made a point to speak to 10 subscribers. They gave me so much information about who they are and why they bought coffee from us. I learned that if you send a personal note to customers, they often reply. I spoke to customers from Idaho, Ohio, Washington State, California, and more. I find that sometimes, you tend to be in your own bubble, but it’s amazing to see that there are people who live in the middle of the country, love our brand, but have never been to our café. That was one of those “aha!” moments.
Also, technology is so advanced now that it’s easy to write surveys using tools like SurveyMonkey. As a part of our email strategy, we had automated surveys that we designed once but could reuse whenever we launched something new. We included these surveys throughout the customer journey and used the data to inform future launches and marketing campaigns.
At Levi’s, we used to visit retail stores and talk to the customers there. We’d ask questions like, “Why are you here? Why do you like our brand? What other brands do you shop from?” It’s quite scrappy, but those quick conversations can at least help you develop a hypothesis. With that, you can build a survey and send it to a broader audience to get more holistic data.
Internal data is also key. That’s the beauty of ecommerce — there are so many customer data platforms that can stitch together data from cafés, online, and social. You can take that information, build customer cohorts, and use them to start a campaign. Last but not least, see what the competition is doing. At BlueBottle, we always subscribed to competitors to see what’s out there.
It’s not about what you do, it’s about how you do it. 10 years ago, we didn’t have Shopify or Demandware platforms that could help us spin up ecommerce sites within a few hours. Now, I can go on Shopify and create a store in two hours, and even sell and ship something. The challenge today is that we have this mobile device, but we are super distracted and have short attention spans. As a brand, how do you get attention from a customer and make their time worthwhile?
Every brand has an ecommerce website. Every brand is trying to do a loyalty program. Every brand has email programs. Those are table stakes. What it comes down to is, for example, are you sending three emails a day to a customer or are you sending one very thoughtful email a week? Are you sending customers vacation reminders to pause their subscriptions because they might be away from home? How thoughtful are you and how are you anticipating customers’ needs?
To me, the shift is that customers now expect you to go that extra mile. For example, at Blue Bottle, we launched an initiative where customers could opt out of Mother and Father’s Day messaging because they could be sensitive to that, especially if they’ve recently lost a parent. It went a long way. To me, it’s about building a genuine authentic connection where you really want to know them.
At Blue Bottle, we were lucky to have such an amazing customer support team who were all ex-baristas and coffee aficionados. If a customer was unable to set the grinder that they got from us, they would call them and stay on the line until the customer got it working. The extra things matter more than a pretty website, loyalty program, or discount. The value has to be beyond transactional — it has to be a genuine personal connection.
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