Six years ago, Sam’s Club consolidated 20-plus private label brands into a single, existing brand called Member’s Mark, which was mainly focused on winning on price.
“It was a good brand,” Megan Crozier, Sam’s Club chief merchant, told Retail Brew. “But it really stood more for price and making sure that we had a price leadership position in the categories it played in.”
That philosophy shifted during the height of the pandemic, when Sam’s Club started to take a broader view of what a private-label brand could mean to its customers. This process culminated in the creation of a Member’s Mark Community, a group of 50,000 members who actively provide feedback and input on products before they reach shelves.
For a closer look at how the program works, Crozier provided Retail Brew with an exclusive look at how the group is shaping product development.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Where do you think this pressure to focus more on quality and a little less on price when it comes to your private label brands is coming from?
During Covid-19, we couldn’t travel. We couldn’t go to trade shows. We couldn’t go talk to members. We couldn’t be at our clubs because we were just trapped at home. So we had to find different mechanisms to get the members’ sentiment, and so our data became very intense. We were mailing samples to members to get them to use it and give us feedback. We were looking at ratings and reviews. We actually started to listen more because we were trapped inside, and you can’t help but make different choices. When you’re listening and hearing feedback—good, bad and ugly—from your members, it causes you to make different choices.
So who are these customers who are offering feedback?
We invite lots of different kinds of members across the spectrum of what they purchase, where they live, and how long they’ve been members. We like that, because when we’re thinking about who we are building this item for, we can then get a very good statistical sample size.
How does their feedback translate into changes at the level of production?
When it started off, we just wanted final choices or validation that we were onto something good. That alone was really good feedback, but we started to notice that we were getting such rich feedback that we thought we could open this up and have them interact with us even deeper into the product life cycle, even to the ideation of what product we should create next for our members. I’ll give you an example of that. We sat down with a bunch of members and said, “Talk to us about what your morning routine looks like”...and one of the things that a member said during this focus group was that “Getting my child dressed is such a process in the morning because they don't know how to match their clothes”...So the team went back and said, “Okay, getting a kid dressed in the morning is hard. What can we do to solve that?” I think in the past we would have just made great clothes. But because of this insight…we created a set that was mix and match. So no matter what a kid chose, they were going to be set up for success.
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How about when it comes to refining an existing product?
I think grills are a great example. We’ve always had Member’s Mark grills. It’s been a part of our portfolio for several years, but we decided last year to incorporate heavy grill users. And we went to Dallas, and we found a group of members that are part of this community, and they actually helped us ideate features. They gave us feedback on design. We sent them parts and pieces and grills to use. They used them. They were able to give us feedback on whether it was easy to use, did it meet their expectations, and if they were happy with the final product.
What are some of your goal posts for expanding this network?
Our ambition is that every member can join our community. It will take some time to scale it, but I think part of the benefit of joining Sam’s Club is that you have the awesome privilege of designing and providing feedback on all the products that are available.