Bothra Honored as Executive of the Year

Swati Bothra joined BJ’s Wholesale Club in late 2020, charged with driving performance marketing for its e-commerce business as senior director of digital marketing. A short time into her tenure, she set her sights on another goal: building the company’s first retail media program. 

She had come from EOS Products, where she managed the company’s Amazon business and saw first-hand how powerful Amazon ads could be for a business.

Bothra — named the Executive of the Year on Nov. 13 at the Path to Purchase Institute’s Women of Excellence awards ceremony — had never built a retail media program from the ground up. She says that her first year was spent sizing up the opportunity, understanding what the competition was doing, acknowledging the club’s late entry into this very cluttered space, and getting executive buy-in. 

But, for her, that was also part of the appeal, along with the myriad opportunities for growth in this dynamic landscape.

Two factors were very apparent from the start: “We needed to lean on the right technology and build a suite of products that would differentiate us but also be compatible with what the rest of the industry was doing,” Bothra says, adding that equally important was building the right team.

From there, she led the go-to-market strategy, working with stakeholders and merchants, marketing and technology teams to create a program brand, which “was supremely important to me as a marketer,” she says. “I wanted to reinforce that we had something recognizable in this market. In launching this, we were doing a lot of education, both with our suppliers as well as our merchants.”

Bothra also instituted a new operating model, initially hiring product technology experts who could help build the program and then leaning into retail media provider Microsoft to do everything from sales to account management to media activation. Recognizing the importance of building relationships both internally with the merchants as well as with brands, she brought sales and account management in-house in her second year. 

And within three months, she saw triple-digit growth in the number of brands that were participating in the program. “Not only were we driving business volumes, but the campaign performances improved,” she says. “We were seeing better engagement rates, optimizing campaigns, and driving better returns for our suppliers and growth for our merchants.” 

The 10-person team is now focused on providing club members with a full-funnel, omnichannel experience, driving strategies across onsite, offsite, social and in-store, which is currently in build.

Innovation has been critical from the start, Bothra notes, not only in building a foundation fairly quickly but, perhaps even more importantly, as a way to differentiate in the marketplace. BJ’s was the first retailer to try Microsoft’s omnichannel solution. 

“Other retailers were predominantly using them for onsite; we started using them for full funnel — on-site and off-site — and were the first ones to try AI capabilities when they launched it,” she notes, adding that BJ’s was also the first within the club space to try the digital circular with Meta. 

The team at BJ’s has the capabilities in place to more effectively measure member behavior to the impact of media in a very privacy compounded way, Bothra says. It also launched in-club attribution, which she believes marks the first grocery program that ties in-club impact to media.

In an effort to attract brands and demonstrate the value of BJ’s retail media program, Bothra organized a “Supplier Summit,” which presented the club’s advertising offerings and innovations in a way that allowed brands to interact with not only the retail media team, but also merchant teams and relationship managers. With support from her chief merchandising officer and chief digital officer, as well as BJ’s top 200 suppliers, she laid out the team’s vision and how it would move forward in a collaborative partnership with each of the suppliers. “It was very successful and got some of our top suppliers, even some of the most established brands, very excited,” she says.

Further, her team has worked to increase engagement among vendors that were not currently participating in the program through a comprehensive marketing plan that has included email outreach, webinars, office hour sessions and other collateral to help brands invest and find value in the program. As a result, the program grew vendor engagement by 47% in just a few months.

Today, Bothra leads both the performance media and retail media organizations, working with BJ’s cross-functional partners, driving enterprise-wide media synergies and identifying new opportunities that are tied to its three-year, high-level objectives. Simply put: where the team wants to be and what steps will help get it there. 

The continued explosion of omnichannel retail media, especially in-store, will be front and center. “In-store digital is really poised to become the next frontier of retail media,” she says. 

Standardization of metrics for measurement is something her team is hyper focused on, as well as artificial intelligence in driving efficiency, effectiveness and scale and, last but not least, the relationship between retailers and CPGs. “There is a massive opportunity to really use retail media to not only drive growth and build stronger relationships, but also get us very aligned in terms of strategic growth levers for BJ’s and our partners.”