Does "Anytime, Anywhere" Sound Like Walmart?" Someday It Might

From "Everyday low prices" to "Anytime, anywhere."

That appears to be what's in store for the evolution of Walmart's brand-defining slogan. Soon, the latter motto will be the marketing tagline for Walmart.com, unit President Joel Anderson told Bloomberg. And so maybe, given the rising importance of e-commerce to the giant of bricks and mortar, it could stand for the whole brand someday.

The mega-retailer is plumb in the middle of a huge transition in e-tailing, just as it has spent the last few years tacking back and forth between its traditional everyday-low-prices positioning and the attraction of providing less clutter and more "sophistication" for upscale consumers. In the case of Walmart.com, the spur — of course — is Amazon.com.

Amazon's fast rise as a lure for Walmart's customer base is challenging Walmart to (finally) fight back by improving its own presence online, where it admittedly hasn't fared well so far.

"The affluent shopper is trading back out of Walmart and Amazon is a bigger part of their life than before," Bryan Gildenberg, analyst for the research firm Kantar Retail, told Bloomberg.

Walmart.com still amounts to only 2 percent of the brand's revenues. But lately, it has been doubling down on e-commerce, spending more than $300 million acquiring web-related companies to build its talent and expertise at @WalmartLabs. Among Walmart's inherent advantages in battling incursions by Amazon is same-day, in-store pickup for online orders.

But meanwhile, Amazon is peeling off both the "new," upscale Walmart customer as well as more of Walmart's traditional low- and middle-income base as all segments become more enamored of e-tailing.

"We're starting from scratch," said @WalmartLabs chief technology officer Jeremy King, "to build a foundation."