Human-Driven Experience

2The Human Touch: Customer, Employee, Client, Shareholder … Just People

Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.

—David Augsburger

When I first got into social media—before it was called “social media,” somewhere between Friendster and Myspace—I had an epiphany about the impact digital might eventually have on our world. In 2007, I made the move from comScore to Sears Holdings, and I was tasked with building a loyalty community for Sears at a time when they had just started doing e-commerce right. They were in full turnaround mode and were running fast to catch up in ecommerce.

By all accounts, Sears could have been—should have been—as successful as Amazon, perhaps even more so. In 2000, Amazon's total revenue was about $2.8 billion.¹ That same year, Sears's revenue was $40.9 billion.² What ultimately turned the tide in Amazon's favor was that Sears's leadership at the time was justifiably concerned that pushing the company into online sales would hurt its 3,000 bricks-and-mortar stores scattered across the United States. So, while Sears had an online presence (Sears.com), it was not a top priority for the company. The top priority was defending the status quo. Thus, they missed boat in e-commerce as Amazon continued to grow—and grow.

Soon after I arrived at Sears, I started thinking about what we could do to improve our digital initiatives. My first order of business was to build a little community of some of ...