Sears Orchestrates Comeback Via The Internet

In recent years, Sears and its corporate sibling Kmart have been the ailing cousins to the virile Target and Wal-Mart, but some aggressive marketing and Web 2.0 thinking might keep those brands from joining A&S and Kaufmann’s in department store heaven.

Sears and Kmart are operated by Sears Holding Corporation, whose chairman is the billionaire Edward S. Lampert. The mercurial Lampert tends to run Sears the way George Steinbrenner ran the Yankees (constant executive turnover, pound-foolish penny-pinching), but just like “The Boss,” Lampert has opened his wallet for the players on the field, in this case apps and websites in the league of online retail, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Sears lacks Target’s hip factor and doesn’t have Wal-Mart’s reputation for cheap prices, so one of its biggest challenges is to convince shoppers that it’s actually a viable retail option. To that end, the brand’s launched a number of different online initiatives, such as partnering with AOL on the Good News Network, a think-positive news site, and releasing a couple of nifty iPhone apps. One such app, Sears Personal Shopper, allows a user to send a photo of an item – even if the photo was taken at, say, Target – to Sears staff, who’ll try to find the product or the next best thing in their inventory.

If you’re neither painfully hip nor unashamedly cheap, you might not be surprised to learn that Sears Holdings’ brands are slowly on the rise, thanks to the myriad online campaigns – from traditional sites to Facebook pages – and old-school techniques like a shopper’s card valid at both Sears and Kmart as well as a popular layaway program. The 2008 online sales revenues for Sears exceeded Wal-Mart’s by 60%, while Kmart enjoyed a quarterly sales increase for the first time in seven years.

Even Martha Stewart, whose partnership with Kmart ended this month, might call this news the start of a “good thing.”