Kevin Hillstrom: MineThatData

Disruption

Consultants can take a path favored by hyperbole. DISRUPT OR DIE! REAP THE REWARDS OF AI!

A few retail gents come to mind on this front. The rhetoric is exhausting.

It's one thing to point out that a business needs to change. It is quite another thing to get a hundred or a thousand or fifty-thousand employees to move in concert in a direction that results in change, much less change that is appropriate. Ask a consultant to work for a company and make change actually happen and you'll quickly see that there is an enormous difference between a Thought Leader and a Leader.

Thought Leaders are plentiful.

Leaders are likely plentiful as well, but aren't always given opportunities to lead.

Thought Leaders want you to take big swings. Of course they do! They're not accountable, are they? If the idea doesn't work, it's your fault, you are an idiot who cannot be agile enough to thrive at the "speed of disruption".

If the idea works it's because they are brilliant.

Who have you met that had success transforming how multiple brands executed marketing? The individual must demonstrate significant sales growth and even better profit growth ... not be a transformation expert on a strategy team at JCP or Kohl's. Who have you met? What was it about that person that led to transformative results?

January

January can be a "blah" month from a marketing standpoint. The thrill of achieving an order at 60% off is replaced by the tepid response of a customer getting 70% off liquidations products.

Why not use January as your "experimentation month"? Try many different ideas, see what works and doesn't work.

We need more experimentation in ecommerce. Anything something gets "optimized", as ecommerce unfortunately is, there is an opportunity to experiment, to try new ideas. Use January as a month to experiment and learn.

Speaking of Creativity

Here - here's an "omnichannel brand" as the pundits like to say, doing something risky. Go ahead, click here! More here.

You could send eleven (11) Cyber Monday messages on Cyber Monday and the day after as one popular brand did, offering 80% off sale (think about that one).

Or, you could do something creative.

Do something creative.

Tis The Season

The best businesses I work with balance merchandise, marketing, and creative.

Cyber Monday obviously skews strongly to pricing ... no need for marketing / creative brilliance. That's how Thought Leaders like things ... they either make everything so complicated you couldn't possibly execute properly (#omnichannel) or they pick a corner of the triangle above and tell you that excellence in one area equates to excellence in all areas.

With Christmas a few weeks away, large businesses are applying their version of the "triangle" above to coax customers into orders. Tis the season for the image they believe will convert a customer to an incremental order. Any similarities?

When the largest "brands" all choose one direction, you have an opportunity to choose another direction. Kohl's / Macy's / Target / Walmart all clearly view the world through the eyes of a specific type of female aligned with the color "red".

Ecommerce is begging for somebody to be creative. It's one thing to optimize boring/sterile Facebook Ads paired with 60% off on Cyber Monday. It's another thing for agencies to recommend one type of woman as your "idealized consumer". It's difficult to walk away from that world and chart your own course via creative strategies. But it's necessary as we move into 2026.

Now We're Counting Grocery Purchases For Black Friday - Cyber Monday? Oh, I Guess We Are

He bought canned pineapples, it's part of the record!

"... consumers shopping mainly at supermarkets".

Look around, because we are constantly being reminded what happens when we put non-smart people in charge of things, or worse, give them access to a megaphone.