C&C Pod: Rob Garf, Head of Strategy, Cordial

About this episode

Rob Garf joins the hosts to discuss marketing technology and customer experience while mixing an Espresso Martini.

Bill and I have been looking forward to this one. Rob Garf joins us to mix up a great riff on his beloved Espresso Martini and dig into the transformation happening at the intersection of marketing technology, agentic systems, and customer experience. Rob is Head of Strategy at Cordial , a cross-channel marketing platform that sits at the convergence of data, AI, and the activation layer. Cordial works with leading brands and retailers — Levi’s, Abercrombie, L.L.Bean, Boot Barn, and others — to orchestrate personalized customer experiences across marketing channels, and now sits squarely in the middle of what AI and agentic systems mean for the marketer’s day-to-day. Prior to Cordial, many of you will know Rob from his time at Salesforce and Demandware — including his role driving the Salesforce Shopping Index, one of the most-cited benchmarks in retail eCommerce. He has also done stints as an industry analyst, as an long-time advisor to NRF, and as a merchant in the early days of omnichannel at Lids, where he implemented one of the first buy-online-pickup-in-store programs. He has been at the center of this industry for a long time, and it shows. And yes — a good number of you…

People in this episode

Hosts: Brian Walker, Bill Friend

Guest: Rob Garf

Topics covered

• marketing technology
• customer experience
• AI
• agentic systems
• personalized marketing

Keywords

• Cordial
• Espresso Martini
• marketing
• AI
• customer experience
• Rob Garf
• Salesforce
• omnichannel

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Cordial, Salesforce, Demandware, NRF, Lids, Levi’s, Abercrombie, L.L.Bean, Boot Barn

More episodes of Cocktails & Commerce Podcast

• C&C Pod: Tomasz Pindel, Founder & CEO of Voucherify · May 8, 2026 · 1h 18m
• C&C Pod: Steve Papa, Commerce OG - Endeca, Toast, and Parallel Wireless · April 23, 2026 · 1h 4m
• C&C Pod: Steve Kramer, Founder & CEO of Workjam - and Commerce OG · April 14, 2026 · 1h 3m
• C&C Pod: Nitin Mangtani, EVP of Agentforce Commerce & Retail Cloud at Salesforce · March 27, 2026 · 59 min
• C&C Pod: John Williams, Founder, Co-CEO & CTO of Amplience · March 19, 2026 · 56 min
• C&C Pod - Bjarke Sejersen, Founder & CEO of Go Autonomous · December 30, 2025 · 1h 7m