Today’s RetailWire discussion is about Sears Holding’s hiring of David Friedman, most recently president-Americas at Razorfish, to run marketing at the company's Kmart and Sears units. While I don’t usually comment on breaking news here, the saga of Sears & Kmart is a significant American business story. Here’s a link to the original piece http://bit.ly/a64YvI.
Mr Friedman has a significant opportunity for innovation here. He needs to send clear and authentic signals that he's doing something compelling; "cleaning up the subways" from "The Tipping Point http://amzn.to/bPFcRz by Malcolm Gladwell.
He has heritage (which SH unfortunately ignores) established platforms (in line and online)and lot's of experiments & failures in recent years he can leverage.
While SH has a track record of rapid prototyping, it has shown little evidence of learning from and leveraging their innovation process (if you can call it a process-see above).
By now, we should have seen significant and relevant reasons to believe from MyGopher and Layaway or the multitude of store format, in-store web kiosk, or web experiments.
At the end of the day, it's about moving the merchandise. Have you shopped their stores or websites lately? Yikes. Have you bought anything? At all?
My advice: spend the first year shopping the stores (in line and online), getting to know the customers and staff and explore what has worked and what hasn't. Then throw it all away and develop fresh new reasons for us to pay attention again.
Mr Friedman has a significant opportunity for innovation here. He needs to send clear and authentic signals that he's doing something compelling; "cleaning up the subways" from "The Tipping Point http://amzn.to/bPFcRz by Malcolm Gladwell.
He has heritage (which SH unfortunately ignores) established platforms (in line and online)and lot's of experiments & failures in recent years he can leverage.
While SH has a track record of rapid prototyping, it has shown little evidence of learning from and leveraging their innovation process (if you can call it a process-see above).
By now, we should have seen significant and relevant reasons to believe from MyGopher and Layaway or the multitude of store format, in-store web kiosk, or web experiments.
At the end of the day, it's about moving the merchandise. Have you shopped their stores or websites lately? Yikes. Have you bought anything? At all?
My advice: spend the first year shopping the stores (in line and online), getting to know the customers and staff and explore what has worked and what hasn't. Then throw it all away and develop fresh new reasons for us to pay attention again.
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