Patrick Stewart joined Sears Holdings in 2014 as Chief Marketing Officer of the Footwear divisions of Sears and Kmart (1,300 stores in the United States and abroad) and had immediate success in repositioning, transforming and growing the footwear businesses. He was promoted to lead change in many more large businesses at Kmart. In under 12 months, he changed the sales trajectory of this $10-billion company by delivering a clear brand promise, leveraging data, acting decisively on insights, using disruptive marketing techniques and leading teams across all marketing channels.

Prior to joining Sears Holdings, Stewart was the Vice President of Marketing for Crazy Shirts, a lifestyle apparel retailer based in Hawaii. He led their transition from a traditional brick and mortar retailer into omni-channel organization, driving rapid growth and profitability in the direct-to-consumer division, where he established a culture of passion for a seamless brand experience across all touchpoints—driving loyalty, service, product development, analytics, social insights and a deep understanding of the customer.

Prior to Crazy Shirts, Stewart was Vice President of Marketing and Creative at The Walking Company Holdings, a specialty retailer. He was part of the core team that built the company into the world’s No. 1 retailer of comfort footwear in less than six years, with more than 200 stores nationwide.

Prior to The Walking Company, he held senior level marketing positions at various retailers of apparel, home furnishings and jewelry.

Stewart holds an MBA from Webster University and bachelor’s degrees in public relations and fine arts from William Jewell College.

Please provide some information about your background and your role and responsibilities for Sears Holdings.

My background has always been in omni-channel retail, and as CMO for Sears Holdings, my responsibilities are ultimately to drive sales, create demand, develop a unified brand strategy and go-to-market plan, and to craft and nurture a unified experience for the customer, regardless of channel. For us in particular, that means creating a cohesive experience in our stores, online, mobile and everywhere else customers choose to shop.

Given that data and customer experience are such great areas of focus for organizations today, how well do you feel that Sears Holdings is doing when it comes to getting a 360-degree view of the customer across channels, and what are some of the biggest challenges you're facing in that area?

We're doing a good job, but we are not where we want to be. For example, if we don't have accurate in-store measuring devices to see who exactly is shopping to recognize a person who comes in to browse, then that's an obvious shortcoming. Beyond that, if you have an entire family that comes in to shop, regardless of the size, only one person is checking out, and it is very likely that you are not capturing that the whole family shopped. You likely only recognized a single shopper in the end.

Another failure that can happen is the inability to recognize a member or shopper if the person pays with cash or even someone who pays with a credit card if they do not give you their member ID number, phone number, email, etc. If the bulk of a company’s sales happen in the store, then that becomes a large gap. You may think you have good information if you're capturing 75 percent of your overall transactions with a member ID, but the remaining 25 percent is a gaping hole that is likely very meaningful.

How are you working to consistently deliver on your brand promise across all touchpoints?

First, we had to develop a brand promise, and we did that fairly recently at Kmart, for example. Then, we had to create a strategy for how to deliver, and the key is to first recognize where the bulk of your transactions come from. If 90 percent of your sales come from your stores, for example, then the best place to focus on delivering on your promise is in your stores. That may extend from the type of fixtures and lighting that you have in the stores to the products you carry.

You can also take the “people matter most” approach. Home Depot, for example, de-emphasized how many people they would have on their floor, so sales have stalled as a result. To address that, we decided to focus first on our people, so to nurture our brand promise, we changed our hiring principles to only hire people that are very outgoing and friendly because that was part of the brand promise that we planned to deliver. From there, it comes down to executing it within all other channels and creating one cohesive message across digital, traditional, in-store experience, etc.

How important is personalization for your organization? Are you able to deliver personalized engagements in real time to your customers?

It's very important, and the bigger and the more diverse your product assortment is, the more important it becomes because your brand identity can become lost. For example, companies like Kmart sell everything from diapers to snow blowers, and it probably isn't the same person who buys both of those things. Consider how it would be to have a totally personalized and relevant experience when you visit a website. If my last purchase or the last items I looked at happened to be baby strollers, formula and diapers, it would be fantastic if that was the type of brand experience I would see if I landed on the website a week later. Compare that to how it would be if it happened to be snowing outside and I started seeing snow blowers on the site instead. That might have been timed in a fantastic way, and it might be right for many people, but it's not right for me. I told you what I like, so it’s important to me that the company delivers on that.

Personalization in real time is a challenge because a website may not recognize me until I sign in, but not all customers want to sign in—they may view that as intrusive. The better experience is to allow technology to solve that. It could be cookie-based so that it ties together multiple devices so that they are synched to recognize each other. It also could be that the only way to solve it is through thumbprint recognition, which allows the experience to be personalized. However you go about it, personalization is important because those experiences are so much richer.

What are some of the big goals, transformations and challenges that you will be facing when it comes to formulating your customer strategies for the remainder of 2017 and beyond?

One of our goals around achieving top-line and bottom-line revenue is to focus on our best areas, such as our top stores. If, for example, the top 20 percent of your stores deliver 50 percent of your margin, then it makes sense to focus on those stores to drive a particular number or percentage in margin per shopper to help achieve that goal. Focusing on that smaller level will help you to see results faster, measure them, make adjustments and then be able to spread them across the entire organization much faster to achieve your overall goals.

Another goal, from a marketing investment standpoint, is multi-touch attribution. We aren’t fully there yet and have had to remove a lot of our older legacy systems and install new ones. Having multi-touch attribution is very important for optimizing our marketing investment, and many other companies are having to do similar things—looking at their marketing spend, wondering why it's not performing at the level that it did last year etc. Multi-touch will be a big help for not only optimizing our ROI and return on ad spend, but also by allowing us to deliver more personalized and relevant content, which nurtures the both short-term ROI and the lifetime value of our customers.

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