December 5/12, 2016; Volume 31, Number 13
By Steven Feldman
Mohawk is gearing up for 2017 by arming its aligned dealers with a bevy of tools to help them effectively battle in an increasingly competitive retail landscape. Aside from a plethora of new product innovations across its soft and hard surface platforms, Mohawk is unveiling a new marketing innovation that will enable aligned dealers to easily integrate their in-store experience with Mohawk’s product innovation and campaigns to create a significantly enhanced online presence.
Dubbed Omnify, the new initiative is designed to help dealers integrate many of the important social search, reputation management, website, lead management and retailer locator applications that are critical to creating quality leads and driving traffic to local retailers.
“This is a reflection of what we are seeing in today’s market,” said Karen Mendelsohn, senior vice president of marketing, who is now charged with optimizing the aligned dealer program. “Consumers are doing much of their decision making online prior to purchasing in-store. We feel it’s our responsibility to ensure that our aligned retailers are able to differentiate themselves in the market and create stickiness early in the decision-making process with consumers.”
The main idea, according to Mendelsohn, is to provide a seamless purchase journey that makes it easy for consumers to learn, compare, trust and decide to purchase its products from aligned retailers. The key to the program, she stressed, is local marketing. “One of the lessons we’ve all learned from this past election is that decisions, whether political or purchase-related, are made locally, and with that in mind we are going to ensure everything we do—product, design, service, merchandising online—recognizes and enables our retailers to do what they do best in their local communities.”
Through various components, Omnify:
- Improves retailers’ social reach with enhanced content syndication and automation to capture and converse with new audiences while building brand recognition and loyalty.
- Employs the best practices to convert potential customers into qualified leads across the consumer-purchase journey.
- Tailors the retailer’s digital storefront to engage consumers, promote enhanced content and offer an elevated online retail experience.
- Proactively builds and strengthens the local reputation of retailers through ratings and reviews to gain consumer loyalty and improve search rankings.
- Attracts new customers and simplifies the purchasing decision by offering convenient product catalogs to browse through multiple channels engaging consumers.
- Increases store visibility and improves search rankings with managed local listing services to guarantee consumers can find Mohawk’s aligned retailers.
- Builds trust and confidence with consumers by connecting the online journey with an elevated in-store experience.
At your service
Mohawk not only helps aligned retailers provide excellent service for their customers, but it also seeks to enhance the ease with which its retailers do business with the company and “provide them with the speed and excellence in execution they desire,” Mendelsohn explained. To that end, Mohawk is upgrading a number of its systems, including ordering, order tracking, inventory status, shipment scheduling and customer relationship management to accomplish this goal. “Additionally, we are putting a great deal of emphasis on the robustness of the support we provide them when we launch new products, inclusive of campaigns, sampling, in-store merchandising, online support and online promotions.”
Ease of doing business with Mohawk is also illustrated in its recent restructuring of the soft and hard businesses with unified functional support in marketing, manufacturing, sales, etc. “Unlike when we started our aligned program, our retailers are not just carpet retailers any longer,” Mendelsohn said. “They provide the local product, local support and local service across all surfaces and price points because that’s what the consumer demands. We will be the retailer’s preferred supplier.”