The MTNG Experience Group groups Con ensigns as Mustang and Hannibal Laguna At the forefront, Grupo MTNG Experience has been able to adapt to the reality of eCommerce to try to take its sales to a new level. Taking advantage of our presence in the , we have spoken with Manuel Vieira, Digital Manager and Ecommerce Manager of the MTNG Group, to know its current situation and its future plans.
Interview with Manuel Vieira, Digital Manager and Ecommerce Manager of the MTNG Experience group
What is the MTNG Experience Group?
We are a holding company that is the distributor and manufacturer of several brands. mustang is the most important of them but then we have others like Mariamare, Sixtyseven, Hannibal Laguna… we make shoes for different types of segments. Our value as a brand is that we are innovators in putting the product that is fashionable in the street. We’re kind of like fast fashion but footwear: we are agile and very good at the product issue and getting it to market as quickly as possible.
Can you define a little what type of customers you address? That is, what is your typical client?
Obviously, depending on the brand it is different. In the case of Mustang it is a young client who is passionate about fashion, looking for comfort and design, and mainly urban.
We cover a fairly wide range of products: we have shoes for girls aged 15 or 14 and we also have women’s shoes, but always with a young personality. Really is a transgressive brand from the point of view of personality, but very trendy From a product point of view, then I think those two values merge quite well so that you can wear a product that is fashionable with personality.
What goals have you set for 2017?
Evidently, grow at the pace of the market. Our goal as Digital Commerce is to achieve excellence in customer service, because apart from selling digitally to the end customer, we also provide customer service as a brand on all channels.
In case of returns, we help the customer to manage the incident, but we also help them find a product available in a physical store, etc. We give the client all kinds of brand information: where it is present, which store they can go to, what type of models can be found in one store or another, if they have it available in ecommerce, etc. it really is a comprehensive customer service, That is one of the objectives that we have set for ourselves this year, because before we worked more like a traditional customer service. Really that has been the main objective for this year
In addition to having your B2B circuit, brands are starting to take center stage in B2C
Yeah sure, this really is a response to the . The client does not talk about B2C or B2B, he talks about Mustang shoes in a store or Mustang shoes in ecommerce or Mustang shoes in a Marketplace. The client does not really differentiate this, what he wants is to have information, access and know the brand regardless of the channel and then you will decide where to make the final purchase. But we help and advise you a little in the entire purchase decision and encourage you to finish where the purchase is most comfortable for you.
What you say is super interesting: you are really verbalizing the authentic omnichannel philosophy
Right, that’s the challenge, trying to make the issue of channels as transparent as possible for customers so that they see the brand, not the channel. That is what we want, both in look and feel and in customer service as well as in the presence of our products at the right time in each of the channels: It is the challenge that we have set for ourselves. We have started this year, but I think that this is going to be the focus in which we are going to move in the coming years.
What is the roadmap for your international expansion?
It is one of the priorities of the strategic map that we have marked for the next 3 years. In Spain we are very well positioned and the challenge is to achieve that position in the rest of Europe. As far as my part is concerned, which is the digital part, we are gaining a lot of relevance with digital players like Zalando and Amazon.
I support all of the B2B sales for these clients and they are really becoming key clients for the company because they are growing at a fairly good rate and they are also a spectacular showcase for our brand. From the point of view of broad presence in these markets, especially Germany is a market where we are growing a lot thanks to Zalando and the rest of Europe with Amazon and this type of marketplaces.
In We also have quite a presence in the international channel. We have a long list of multi-brand clients where we sell not only Mustang but also the rest of the brands and little by little we have been growing.
focus is deploy an internationalization strategy in these countries and accompany the rest of the channels to carry out a robust internationalization. In yes we have clients, but it is the one that has cost us the most to win clients, to find to have clients. France, Italy and Germany those from Western Europe are the strongest for us.
How do you see the Chinese market?
We are evaluating from all perspectives, both from the B2B side and from the B2C side. from the part B2B apart from all the brands that we have mentioned, we also give a client trading service who suddenly want to make their own brand like White brand.
We see it as an opportunity, especially the B2B part, digital marketplaces for this business model. Not so much for our flagship consolidated brand, and the B2C part is a challenge. We have it on the roadmap to see how to enter because it is true that it makes it appetizing, but there are some barriers to entry that must be resolved.
A bit of futurology… Manuel, how do you see this sector in 3 years?
I think it will change, and not so much because the customer’s habit changes as such, but because Customer purchasing formats change. I really believe that eCommerce will continue to grow, especially based and leveraged on the issue of convenience: ecommerce is becoming easier, they have fewer barriers when buying and above all what has been the great asset of this is the accessibility that there is to the entire offer “sitting on the sofa at home”.
I think that the consumer’s habit is going to change: I don’t think that eCommerce is going to replace physical retail, but I think that physical retail will be based on shopping experiences and eCommerce more on convenience, which is what is seen to be happening in the United States, which are always 2 years ahead of us.
Companies have to integrate solutions and technologies to try to facilitate this path for the customer in any of the channels, and generate with the brand. I don’t see it as a disruptive change from the point of view of the customer, but rather one of adaptation from the point of view of us, the companies, facilitating this route from the customer to the purchase.
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