Through The Lens: Peter Semple Long Read

Peter Semple is the chief brand officer of Depop, having previously led product and marketing innovation projects at Google’s Creative Lab in New York and London. He has also spent time in creative agencies working on big consumer brands from Converse and Nike to O2 and Coca-Cola. Sharing a passion for innovative branding and learning from communities, Rankin and Semple sat down to talk about Semple’s career trajectory, marketing to Gen Z and other “random sets of connected nodes”.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

RANKIN: Tell us who you are and what you do.

PS: Sure. So my name is Peter Semple. I'm the chief brand officer at Depop, which is a peer-to-peer fashion marketplace: people buying and selling secondhand fashion. It's where a primarily younger generation – Gen Z, millennial kids and interesting people – buy and sell second hand clothing. 

My role as Chief Brand Officer is to ask: how do we show up in the world? How do we talk to people? What do they think of us? How do they understand what we're trying to do and how we're trying to help them? And that spans everything from marketing, advertising, the language we use in product, to the shape of the product experience. The digital experience is ultimately where people spend the most time with us, so how do we make sure that leaves people with the same view of who we are as a brand as well? 

RANKIN: So your background is advertising? 

PS: Yeah. I began my career in agencies, was a copywriter for about four and a half seconds and then moved into the strategy and business side of agencies here in London and New York. I worked for Google for a long time in a creative role between marketing and product. And then the last four years at Depop. 

RANKIN: When you left Google were you looking for something in the new media space? 

PS: It was an interesting culmination. Across my career I've done big advertising stuff, plus a bunch of cultural projects like music, programming, fashion and various things. I've had a number of side projects in fashion too, then at Google I got to play with lots of interesting technology and realised you don't have to market as much if you just make better products. What we were doing at Google was taking that kind of insight and understanding of the user and then helping make better products; injecting creativity into product development. All that strangely culminates in me getting to a place called Depop where the experience of buying and selling and imbuing value into secondhand clothing is the better alternative to new fashion.

RANKIN: Everything’s serendipitous these days, isn't it? If you're doing side hustles, they always end up informing what you do…

PS: Yeah! And I love the idea of Gen Z reshaping everything; cultural values, social identity, all that sort of stuff. Nothing's really definitive anymore, everything is nuanced. So you're right, the side hustle could become the main thing or trip you into another activity that sustains you or makes you who you are. It’s all a random set of connected nodes. 

RANKIN: Do you think you can understand and market to Gen Z in a ‘normal’ way?

PS: You can market to Gen Z in a number of different ways. I mean, they're so savvy and have obviously grown up with marketing and advertising and digital experience all around them so advertising that masquerades as anything else will fall flat. The companies that resonate with them are those that have a purpose or a particular point of view or value that they can add to their lives. If you can show those things or how a business can ultimately help them, they're interested and receptive. One of the best things I've learned along the way is, hey, ultimately I'm not Gen Z; I'm not all of the audiences I'm trying to serve! So I try to surround myself with people who are, and help or ask them to validate or generate ideas. They might come to me with stuff that I don’t always understand, but as long as they can articulate why they think it will mean something to the generation we’re trying to serve, it's probably a good idea. It's a lot easier to market to a generation that is interested in purpose and value if you actually have authentic purpose and value. 

RANKIN: What’s so special about Depop?

PS: It's existed for ten or eleven years, and the founder set it up to be community-driven. That was a really smart thing to do. He believed in people, in shared creativity. He believed that if you interact with interesting people, that will bring other interesting people to the party. The community became the thing that sustained us…and actually what's helped drive us and separates us from, you know, eBay and other places – they're not as driven by people and the connection to people. But then that's kind of why I joined. There are other businesses that don't have that human reality at the centre of them. 

RANKIN: How do you market to that community? What's the secret sauce? 

PS: I think the secret sauce is some combination that’s consistently evolving. When I started out, a brand was a really sacrosanct thing you couldn't mess with. Today, everything is driven by a digital experience that's consistently reiterating, so a brand has to think like that too. We have to be very aware of what our users want, think and need and then assume that will continue to move and evolve. We have to market and merchandise what is going to be compelling to them, but some of those things happen so quickly with TikTok and other platforms. You know, a Michael Jordan documentary comes out and Jordans explode again. So, if cultural influences are driving inspiration and fashion choices day in, day out, we look at it as our job to ask: how do we keep track as best we can on what's happening in the outside world? If you're doing interesting stuff, people will be interested in you. 

RANKIN: The thing that I'm really picking up on is the culture thing. A lot of marketers and brands still don't understand that culture is driving things more than ever before.

PS: Culture is driving consciously or unconsciously, almost all our choices on a daily basis. We're all inspired by a person or a thing we saw; a movement, a book, a film. The difficulty of trying to drive cultural conversation, inject yourself into it or provoke further conversation and drive things forward is that it's not a perfect science. You have to really listen and participate in the things that are being talked about in order to have something useful to contribute. You have to try stuff and it doesn't always work. And even if it does, it's not always measurable. The impact you have because of your influencing someone or lodging yourself in their brain, doesn't mean they're going to come to the product today and start buying. It probably means that you're in their consideration set and they'll need a few more of those prompts to think, “Oh, well, next time I'm looking for fashion, I'll try this place”. Culture is at the heart of everything, so I still find myself and my team having lots of conversations about how we do it, how we know if we're doing it right, what's the right measure of that and all of those sorts of things. 

RANKIN: How do you work with creative people? 

PS: Someone from my Google days taught me that there's always an answer to the brief that does the job you've been asked to do…but there's also this other thing that could also be super interesting. I feel like that's a really good way for agencies to work with an internal creative team where they're like, “Hey, Peter, here's the thing you asked for, but did you think about this?” I love that. Our creative director worked with magazines for nine years, so he worked with tons of different brands who want to express themselves in very different ways and became pretty talented at just trying a whole bunch of different stuff and never getting stuck in one lane, which is awesome to see. 

RANKIN: In a way, communities like yours have become like magazines, right? 

PS: Yeah, there is a whole swathe of people modelling the clothes, expressing themselves, styling them. They're creating a brand for themselves, and that's helping them sell secondhand clothing. Beyond that, you have a bunch of really interesting creators who are either developing their own brands or upcycling and remixing clothing or really doing interesting things from a styling perspective, it is like magazine content. That incredible storytelling gives context to why you might buy a secondhand thing versus all the glitz and glamour and shiny stuff thrown at you when you go into a store or buy e-commerce on a regular basis. There's a million stories. We've told some of them, but we're kind of constantly looking for new ways to tell others and use that. 

RANKIN: Do you feel comfortable using traditional forms of advertising?

PS: You kind of just need to be out in people's lives. And I think specifically for our young audience, sure, they're on their phones a lot, but they're also out doing interesting stuff and you need to show up where they're going to be. If they're going shopping, I'd kind of like them to see a pop up and go, “Oh, maybe I should look on Depop before I go into ‘X high street retail store’”. I'm a big believer in doing some really interesting stuff and then using traditional media channels to get it in front of lots of people. 

RANKIN: What’s your definition of a brand?

PS: I think the brand thing is ultimately the connection of the story parts and the narrative. And it's a culmination of the visual artefacts and the things you understand about what a particular business is and hopefully what makes it different from other people. So the brand at its best, is a sort of useful shorthand for the ways in which you want to connect with people. 

RANKIN: I think people have become more like brands, and I think brands have become more like people, what do you think?

PS: I think it sort of comes back to the thing we were talking about earlier, where the brand is not this fixed object anymore. It always has to be evolving. Tastes change often and the brands that succeed with us understand that and will therefore show us a different dimension of themselves so that we remain engaged with them and don't find something else to do. I have a strong conviction that those are the brands that will succeed in the future, because as new generations shake up all the things we know, believe and trust in, then brands that can actually speak to people on a human level are the ones that will succeed.

RANKIN: Last one. Why do you love your job? 

PS: Why do I love my job? I mean, I get to play with cool stuff. Ultimately we're in fashion and that's really exciting. You see the creativity of really interesting people and primarily young people and new ideas all the time. If we do our job really well, lots of people will be able to sell their clothing online, which is an economic empowerment opportunity and also drives cultural change. So if lots of people adopt circularity, they will have less of a negative impact on the world through their fashion choices. So it's kind of fun, but it also makes money and it's net good for the world. That's a pretty cool job to have.