I had a good talk with our “promo” team last night during our afterparty to celebrate Andrew Daniels’ IxDA talk. They are the ones who make the promos that appear on the home page of Sears.com and Kmart.com. We were discussing what they do and I would argue that they have one of the most important job of the lot of us. I don’t think most people think promos as so important and I’d like to explain my thinking.

Promos should be called Promotion. Promotions are the key reason people buy. People see a discount or reduction or clearance price and they consider it to be a better buy than something without a discount. The promotions team should be looking at the product pages and seeing how we showcase “promotions” there too. It should be about explaining or showcasing thrift, the savings, the value. The promotions team should be thinking about social because people like to talk about and share their “saving savvy.” How could promotions support that. If you look at the twitter traffic, most of the Sears traffic is around promotions that are going on. So how can the promotions team make that easier?

Yanti, the promo manager got excited about this and so next week she asked if we could I could come talk to the promo team. I said yes, but on the condition that we take a field trip. The promotions team and I are going to go for a walk down State Street past the “window displays” of our State Street Sears store and the various competitiors. I think there are alot of learnings and inspirations we might be able to get from the window displays.

A simple example from which we might find inspiration could be storefront displays and how we create home page promos. While the guidelines of good interior displays might relate more to product page promotions. The basic rules of good visual merchandising should apply across the different media.

Dynamic Displays (Good checklists & basics of good design)

Cheese Window of Engagement (I analyze what I consider the best example of window display, it it the perfect mix of product and social. I still wonder if we can approach this perfection in the online world.)