Target Omnichannel Strategy

In 2008, the massively popular US retailer Target had what seemed like a difficult choice: to continue using Amazon as its eCommerce and omnichannel platform provider, or face the prospect of rebuilding it's entire $1.2B annual digital business from the ground up. Leading both the the proposal to win Sapient’s relationship with Target, and acting as strategist and engagement lead for the first three phases to achieve this feat was the hardest, most complex work in my life to that point. Ultimately, I led the crafting of the customer experience and digital product vision, the benefits case which went to the board (a request of over $150M), the roadmap to build out an omnichannel customer experience platform, and the successful scaling of the program and hundreds of people across nearly 20 global partners to deliver successfully by August 2011.

While obvious in retrospect, the decision to move off Amazon for Target’s leadership and board was anything but obvious. We needed to present a customer experience vision to Target that make all of their collected interactions more valuable, and we needed to introduce a logical construct for their choice that would enable them to make it.

To that point, no major retailer who had leveraged Amazon as their primary eCommerce platform had successfully moved off the platform. Toys R Us fumbled their shit off Amazon and went bankrupt. Borders missed their launch date and subsequently left the world forever. We successfully led Target to own their own experience, rebuilt their end-to-end digital capability, and worked as a partner for a decade, enabling a platform and culture that could achieve over $10B in revenue in 2020.