Visualizing the message: Kmart is making a major investment to translate its merchandising strategy into power presentations - It's Now or Never

Discount Store News, Dec 9, 1996 by James Mammarella

Faced with a critical need to better communicate its value and style message to shoppers, Kmart has placed a well-versed communicator in the role. As vice president of merchandise presentation and communication Cecil Kearse has a very clear grasp of his mission and how his department must carry it forward.

"We are the guys who work with the merchant on their dreams," he said "and work with the operators on how to make them come true."

If Kmart Corp. chairman, president and ceo Floyd Hall and U.S. Kmart Stores president and coo Warren Flick have enunciated in detail the scope and range of their vision for Kmart, Kearse is charged with translating it onto 2,100 selling floors.

"We have to make sure it makes sense to the customer," Kearse remarked noting that the priority was to serve "not the merchant, not the operator, but the customer."

While his team has already made a major difference in the look and fee of Kmart's 180 high frequency stores, and in chainwide makeovers of specific departments from denim jeans to photo finishing, Kearse is far from finished - indeed he knows the mission has barely begun. On the other hand, he believes that the general idea of where Kmart is taking itself is getting through to the front-line troops in the stores.

"It's certainly got room for improvement," he said. "We've still got a lot more preaching to do, and a lot of training to do, and a lot more discussion - but it's there. The process of the vision is there."

That process is in part eased by the regular delivery to the field staff of Kmart's newly simplified "MAP," or merchandise and presentation bulletin. Each month, store managers receive both video communications and printouts that detail the week-by-week flow of key merchandise categories tied to promotional events, as well a specific, fixture-by-fixture resets.

With MAP, store managers under the direction of vice president of operations Paul Huber can quickly raise the sales productivity of crucial seasonal goods, and Kmart can more reliably make a unified presentation of vital merchandise across the chain. All the midway aisles in the chain, for instance, will display short-window licensed goods in the correct adjacency, and all endcaps will provide the visual impact to support Kmart's efforts to create specific merchandise destinations for the shopper.

At the same time, with in the central plan there is flexibility. Store managers can respond to local differences in product sell-through rates to accentuate gains in some areas, while remaining true to the chain's overall display direction.

While the clearer instructions of KM are vital, there are more tools at Kearse's disposal. Kmart has never before posted a senior executive to create synergy between the merchants and the store operations structure. Since spring 1996, Kearse's new staff has swung through store after store for up-close and-personal sessions with the field associates, seeing to it that execution goals are understood.

This new emphasis on executing visual merchandising can bring positive effects, whether it concerns the adjustment of a single endcap display or the deployment of sizable capital expenditure projects like the recently completed installation of 100,000 new four-way fixtures in men's and women's apparel. That initiative raises the number of product facings that meet shoppers, eyes giving Kmart the, ability to tell more powerful color and pattern stories in fashion goods.

Kmart is also testing elements of a new signing program, designed to deliver "more bang for our buck. The sign package," explained Kearse, must transmit. price [and we will intensify this message], promotions, policy, the image of our brands and private labels, and lifestyle emphasis. And we will add on hot things as needed."

Providing multiple layers of information with out surrendering to clutter is the challenge here. The new price signs are certainly clear-cut and bold and have been used pervasively without being overdone in stores such as the new Penn Plaza Kmart in Manhattan. There too, lifestyle photography was used for impact - but not to excess-in providing centerpiece statements for lines such as Kmart's Kathy Ireland, Jaclyn Smith and Route 66 private labels.

Kmart is still testing parts of the package, including a pennant element on basic departmental ceiling-hung signs and "wobblers," which jut out from shelves mid aisle to call attention to special promotions.

Beyond a redesign of the day-to-day value and fashion signage statements, Kearses crew is also working much further ahead with vendors to provide "theatrical" impact to special events. Kmart is determined to inject as much customization as possible in signage that supports such pervasive licenses as Toy Story and Space Jam, for example.

Signs, fixtures, end-caps, product packaging and the merchandise assortments themselves must, in the new Kmart, all Support key Power presentation goals: "balloon the department, drive multiple sales, key the customer into the assortment and don't look choppy," said Kearse. "We will continue to experiment until January or February" on the overall sign and fixture mix, he said, "and then make decisions and execute."