4. Sam’s Club Promotes Wines for an Exclusive Time
Pain Point: The main task given to us for this project by Sam’s Club was to create innovative ideas that would put Sam’s Club above all its competitors.
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“This semester, your Group will be assigned an innovation challenge for one of 2 merchandise categories of Sam's Club: 1) Wine or 2) Pet Goods and Supplies.” - Dr. Purtell, our professor/stakeholder for this project
Insights: How Might We increase both customer engagement and members’ wine palettes?
Solution: Placing a Self-checkout box in the wine section with facial recognition.
Sam’s club could showcase a new set of wines each week and advertise that they will only be sold for a an exclusive time. In fear that they will miss an opportunity, Members would be encouraged to try the new wines. Based on the popularity of each wine bottle, Sam’s Club could consider selling them in their store full time. With an increase in customer engagement and sales, Sam’s Club would be able to gather local market data and either sell it or use it for new potential inventory items.
Who, What, Wow:
Sam’s Club could promote specific wines available for only an exclusive time to increase customer engagement and sales by 9%. source
Crumbl Cookies promoted their business to incredible success by selling a new set of cookie flavors for only a week. It had a 93% year-over-year growth. source
Results:
My team and I passed this idea through the 6 thinking hats and concluded that this idea would not be presented to the Director of Innovation for further innovation because we had other ideas that were more innovative.
Quick Overview
Yellow Hat: Creating urgency in the sale of products increases sales and customer engagement.
Black Hat: Having an inventory for new wines each week could not be cost or space effective. There could also be wines leftover, creating unnecessary waste.
Green Hat: To reduce waste, we could increase the time frame that the wines are sold (instead of weekly, do bi-weekly or monthly). ​