Sam's Club Boosts Membership Engagement
Sam’s Club has unveiled a new initiative to further enhance engagement with shoppers and seek their input to shape future product development with its Member’s Mark private label.
The Member’s Mark Community, an opt-in network, allows Sam’s Club members to offer input on products before they hit the shelves. This includes voting on exclusive flavors to testing and trialing new items. Company officials said the continuous flow of feedback is the cornerstone for guiding the large-scale development of products to ensure new items align with members’ needs and preferences.
“At Sam’s Club, we have a long history of listening to feedback from our members and putting their needs at the center of everything we do,” said Megan Crozier, chief merchant for Sam’s Club. “It’s an integral part of how we develop our Member’s Mark products, and in today’s ‘experience economy,’ our approach sets us apart from other retailers in ways that deliver real value to our members.”
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She noted the approach utilized by Sam’s Club goes beyond traditional focus groups and surveys, with engagement that will create more personalized experiences for its members. This collaboration is already happening at scale, with input flowing from 50,000 active members, with the opportunity to include all members in the future.
An example of product development using feedback from its members is the retailer’s current Member’s Mark grill. The product development team identified avid grillers through a questionnaire verifying a wealth of experience and a genuine passion for grilling. Twenty product prototypes were delivered to members in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metro Area.
Members tested the grills – cooking, filming, and reviewing their experiences. Their feedback led to the development of a grill that included adjusted features to ensure it was tailor-made to resonate with members' needs and preferences.
“The future of customer engagement is participatory as retailers and customers collaborate in commerce to create win-win experiences,” said R “Ray” Wang, CEO of Constellation Research, a Silicon Valley-based research and advisory firm. “Sam’s Club is pushing the boundaries of retail in today’s experience economy with customer engagement strategies designed to get to the promises of collaborative commerce.”
The next phase of Sam’s Club’s efforts will offer all members the opportunity to become collaborators and partners with the brand.
