It’s a new and exciting startup within a corporate behemoth - but with so many potential audiences and stakeholders - how do you define who needs to hear the story and which version of it is most relevant?
Founded in early 2017, Store No 8 is the incubation arm of Walmart, charged with developing companies that are aiming to transform the future of retail. With stakeholders throughout the Walmart family and fields of technology and retail more broadly, the audiences who are interested in Store No 8 are complex and varied. Though the team had a visual identity and creative brand strategy in place, they didn’t have the strategies in place to bring that foundational work to market.
We were engaged to establish goals and objectives for brand marketing, identify audiences and prioritize messaging, develop the brand communications plan, and implement the strategy by working across the broad Walmart universe with diverse in-house and agency partners.
Impact Areas
Audience Definition
Brand Communications Strategy
Content & Thought Leadership Development
Implementation & Execution Oversight
Discovery
Before beginning our strategy work, we needed to understand the core of the Store No 8 brand and work with creative teams to finalize the brand’s positioning and point of view.
Key Activities
Stakeholder Interviews (internal, external, and portfolio companies)
Guardrail alignment with corporate team
Review of existing press and communications, and coordination with retained PR firm
Research into best industry practice
Validated audience definitions within client and parent teams
Communication Strategy
In order to develop a strong executional strategy, we first needed to define the story we wanted to share. With multiple projects still in stealth and no portfolio companies public at the time we were initially engaged, we needed to decide what we wanted to say about Store No 8 and how. For example: Why does SN8 exist? Who cares? What’s the end goal? From there, we developed a clear strategy for how the messages should be disseminated and to whom.
Key Activities
Definition of Unique Value Proposition (UVPs)
Development of channel strategy incl. events and timing
Thought leadership strategy & content
Outline of budgets and required team resources
Process planning with key leadership
Implementation
The implementation of our communication strategy was a complex and highly coordinated effort. Retained to lead the internal and external teams for the first six-months of execution, we established the teams, designed the workflow amongst them, and trafficked all work and approvals from in-house, parent company, and portfolio company stakeholders.
Key Activities
Developed job descriptions and RFPs, then led vendor selection and onboarding for diverse in-house, permalance and external partners
Defined processes for developing and approving creative work and key events
Managed KPIs to ensure communications drove to macro business goals
Coordinated activation strategies amongst Store No 8 and its affiliated companies
Adjusted and iterated on the strategy based on data, learnings, and reception
