Kmart Has Designs on Changing Perceptions Online

Kmart has a team of 250 hotshot apparel and decor designers who’ve worked with Ralph Lauren, Isaac Mizrahi, and Oscar de la Renta, among other big names. To spread the word, it launched a dedicated Website, Kmartdesign.com, last year and a Kmart Design Facebook page two months ago.

The mass retailer is well aware that when consumers think “design,” they don’t think Kmart. The Kmart Design initiative is meant to “get people to rethink the apparel and home businesses,” says Jeff Fagel, Kmart’s director of brand management. “We built everything around an area of what we call curious disbelief.”

Kmartdesign.com has a much more upscale, cutting-edge look and feel than the core Kmart Website—or indeed, than most other retail sites. One reason is that retail, as in closing the sale, isn’t the site’s main purpose. The focus of Kmart Design’s Web presence is information and education, Fagel says. So most of the Kmartdesign.com is devoted to bios of the company’s in-house designers and videos in which the designers show the sources of their inspiration. The Facebook page offers similar content, plus behind-the-scenes photos from ad campaigns, style advice, and conversations with, and among, shoppers. “It’s an opportunity for us to have direct communication between our design team and customers,” Fagel says.

The Website does include a link to Kmart.com, and both the site and the Facebook page feature several videos on which you can click on an item and be presented with a product page; if you like what you see, you can put the product in an online shopping cart then and there. Kmart Design opted for the shop-by-video functionality from software provider Allurent because it “keeps customers and viewers within the experience itself,” Fagel says, by enabling them to “interact with the product in a unique and dynamic way.” On the Facebook page alone, Kmart Design is seeing three to four times the level of engagement in terms of the time visitors spend viewing products than it had expected based on previous benchmarks.

But while Fagel and his team are certainly measuring how long people stay on the Kmart Design pages and how many shopping carts they send to Kmart.com, “realistically the first goal here is not about driving sales,” he says, especially regarding the Facebook presence. That, he adds, is about “understanding, listening, and being able to test and look beyond an ROI sales perspective. It really is a long-term, relationship-building activity.”