Kmart, Sears Holding Explore Digital Media

Kmart has tried ethnic initiatives before but what is interesting about a new campaign for Black History Month is that the Sears Holding division is making online a major part of the effort.

Kmart has been exploring how to promote itself using digital media as it struggles to reconnect with consumers after its bankruptcy, store closings and acquisition by Sears Holding. To this day, consumers will sometimes act with surprise if asked about Kmart, convinced that the company’s bankruptcy spelled its demise.

Kmart believes that technology can help raise its profile. Last spring, it launched a promotion to support a roll out of merchandise linked to the Incredible Hulk movie. The effort featured a text messaging campaign, a micro Web site and a deal that offered two free movie tickets with the purchase of a $50 gift card in a take-dad-to-the-movies-for-Father’s-Day pitch.

Just weeks later, Kmart launched a YouTube channel linked to the ABC television program High School Musical: Get in the Picture. The channel was the basis for a contest promotion aimed at teens that also tied into a web site where consumer-generated videos could be viewed or shared: www.kmart.com/youtube.

The Black History Month promotion is designed to inform consumers about how they can use Kmart’s services such as layaway and its convenient shopping locations to make smart choices and ensure their money is well spent.

The promotional site — http://www.kmart.com/sharetheword — features financial tips and guides designed for, as the categories are designated, the Budding Entrepreneur, Fashionista, Frugalista, Household Engineer and College Student. The site also features a quiz that allows visitors test their knowledge of black history and win prizes.

Kmart has focused on ethnic audiences before. An initiative dedicated to the Latino community Kmart ran for a couple of years featured the singer Thalia. Before that, a store-opening program, coming at the end of the 1990s specifically targeted ethnic urban communities at a time when Wal-Mart remained concentrated in rural enclaves and Target in the suburbs. Yet, Kmart never managed to execute a comprehensive ethnic strategy or to find a niche outside the influence of its two more dynamic rivals.

Kmart still has a lot of urban stores, though, including the launching point for its inner-city initiative, a location in the South Bronx. Indeed, all its remaining stores in New York are in densely packed Manhattan neighborhoods or serve poor and working class communities in the boroughs. Kmart can’t possibly outspend Wal-Mart and Target on conventional media as it reaches out to ethnic or holiday shoppers. So, developing digital media marketing is one way it can grab the attention of specific audiences and make unique statements, including we’re still open for business.

Sears Holding is exploring how it can use new technology in its namesake division as well. In November, it launched Sears2go, a mobile commerce web site that enables shoppers to purchase a limited range of Sears.com merchandise from their cell phones and to pick up what they buy at stores.

Sears and Kmart have suffered declining sales and face more successful competitors, which has sparked a little new thinking at the long-established companies.