How Puma Measures Success Across New Tech

Hitting all of those ultimately ladders up to driving sales, said John Aghayan, founder and CEO.

“If you are culturally relevant, the sales will come,” said Aghayan. “Go for the why and everything then [flows to] sales.”

Over the past two years, platforms like Facebook and Instagram have rolled back social commerce efforts, while TikTok Shop is receiving plenty of interest from buyers, but success is still nascent and sporadic. Partly, that skepticism comes from platforms trying to retrofit commerce into a platform not initially designed for it. And, as marketers know all too well, changing user behavior can be a difficult and lengthy process.

“Big Tech has a lot of walled gardens, that’s a big learning,” said Aghayan. “We are on a mission to slowly bring them down one by one. It’s difficult and challenging to work within those closed ecosystems.”

For Puma, that challenge can be alleviated by choosing the right, trusted partners to work with, said Dashkov.

Another challenge in embracing new tech, he added, is getting buy-in from the wider organization. For Puma, it faced issues working on NFTs in getting the finance department to accept the brand taking cryptocurrency.

“But our slogan is, ‘Forever Faster,’ so I always go back to that,” he said. “We have to keep pushing the envelope to be an innovative brand.”