Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch at NRF 2011

By Blake Landau (@blakelandau) Jan 17, 2011

What if the key to your brand strategy was right under your nose?

Crowd-sourcing your employees might be every brand’s hot ticket according to Michael Mendenhall, SVP and CMO of HP. At least that’s what he told the attendees of the National Retail Federation panel “The Crowdsourcing Game Changer” at the 100th annual conference in New York City.

The crowdsourcing panel — the only one of its kind at the event — was moderated by Brian O’Malley, Partner at Battery Ventures and featured a dynamic all-star cast including Alexis Maybank: Founder and Chief Strategy Officer for the Gilt Groupe, Michael Mendenhall, SVP and CMO of HP and Hamilton South Founding Partner of the HL Group.

What was possibly one of the most important panels of the event had lighter attendance than expected.

Crowdsource Your Employee Base

Of the many mantras at the NRF expo — possibly the most notable was “don’t be so product-focused.” Retailers are starting to realize their employees represent the face of their brand.

Mendenhall’s case study was the most relevant to the topic among all the stories referenced.

Mendenhall, a resident of HP since 2007 and (formerly with Disney for 17 years) encouraged the attendees in the crowd to start tapping into their employee base to create brand ambassadors.

He said “One of the top five channels that consumers listen to are your employees and what they are saying online.” Mendhenhall said, “if 300,000 HP Employees do not believe in what we are saying, we will fail at the marketplace.” At HP labs Mendenhall and his team started crowdsourcing the HP employees — with videos eventually becoming the one of the highest ranked channels on YouTube.

HP doubled its positive sentiment. These programs work.

“Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch” [CEO Panel Day Four]

Perhaps HP is an obvious candidate for an employee crowdsourcing program.

They are a company that embraces social technologies; it’s in their culture. HP recently conducted a study looking at Twitter for predictability on box office success. Mendenhall’s team took 12 feature films to test their hypotheses around predicting first and second weekend numbers based on Twitter.

What they found was consumer sentiment on Twitter provided a 97.3 accurate percentage on every single film. Meaning HP Labs predicted the success of the box office via Twitter.

At the panel, Mendenhall told the audience of about 50, “the scale of twitter becomes immensely popular for behavioral brands.” He believes Twitter is a more accurate predictor of behavioral trends than any other statistical tool.

Gilt Group Flashes Appreciative Consumers

Alexis Maybank is co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Gilt Group — a provider of access to men’s and women’s fashion brands at 70 percent off the retail price.

Gilt is the leading provider of online flash sales w/over 3 million members in the U.S. moving around half a billion products. Gilt gives consumers a feeling of exclusivity and access — members have to be invited to join.

Maybank was a highlight of the speaker faculty not just because she is a she — but rather because she represents a new wave in thinking about retail.