Internet Innovation: Pass or Fail? (COMMENTARY)

At 30-something, Adam Miller is partial to golf, college football and reading histories and biographies. But he spends days interacting with millions of women who love cowgirl boots.

Miller is a search engine optimization, customer-experience expert for Acumen Holdings, which operates Country Outfitter, surely the undisputed king of social media innovation in Arkansas.

Country Outfitter is simultaneously a lifestyle brand, e-commerce company, publisher and manufacturer of western boots. With tens of millions of followers on social media and email, I don’t know of another Arkansas company devoting more resources to glean what its customers like and want.

Cowgirl boots may not inherently interest Miller, but here’s his mission: Get into customers’ heads. Know trends and what people are intentionally looking for. Dig around to see what people are saying.

So he does. Miller can recite the number of comments received when customers were recently asked, “Love ‘em or Leave ‘em?” about a pair of camo boots on Instagram (150); how many customer reviews are on the company’s website (17,000); and monthly Google searches for “women’s cowboy boots” (27,000) versus “cowgirl boots” (90,000).

The data can be overwhelming, but Country Outfitter staff focuses on: “What’s most important out of everything that’s important?” Miller said.

Each season, an in-house designer creates several dozen boot prototypes, which are featured via social media, and customers vote for favorites. Those favorites are then built and sold, remarkably, at a rate that closely matches the voting, says Acumen co-founder John James.

“We’re a new breed of retail — as much of a publisher as a retailer,” James said. “We push content daily to millions of subscribers. I love the idea of eliminating the middleman. With our three boot brands we go straight to the consumer.”

This direct manufacturer-customer relationship (aka B2C, business to consumer) may explain why Country Outfitter succeeds where other product companies don’t dare venture. It has a built-in framework for soliciting and harnessing customer feedback.

Domino’s tried using the Internet to innovate via consumer feedback; so did Procter & Gamble, Sears and Starbucks. Many large consumer product companies say they still rely on focus groups to solicit customer feedback on new products — then they brace themselves for customer reviews and comments online.

“Customers are great at identifying problems, not so much solutions,” said Dave Fish, a shopper-mindset guru in Bentonville.

A couple of years back, Dillard’s Inc. successfully used social media to innovate. The department store chain noticed that Millennials used the housewares department for wedding registries, but otherwise shopped only for apparel. How to draw young women across the store?

Dillard’s sought the help of Red Clay Design, which was founded in Bentonville by Abby Kiefer, though she later relocated to the Bay Area. Her platform provides curated designers and software to manage designs from concept to prototype in mere weeks.

Red Clay asked its vetted designers to submit 150 housewares concepts to entice 20-something women. The resulting designs were showcased via social media and email, and generated 5,000 customer votes.

The full process, including design and voting, took less than two months. And the 12 new SKUs sold out five times faster than Dillard’s other collections.

Traditional product companies were initially interested in using social media to innovate, but many are lagging in follow-through.

For companies feeling overwhelmed or disjointed, John James reassures that the methodology seems new, but it’s really the same transformation we witnessed last century.

“Yes, we’ve leveraged a couple of unique technologies in new innovative ways. But it’s no different from what P&G did in the ’30s on the radio, and in the ’50s on TV. You take a new media and use it to talk to people in a different way.” 

Robin Mero is content director for Bentonville-based Selling to the Masses, which serves as a destination for resources to help early-stage, consumer-product companies get and stay on the shelves of the country’s top retailers. She can be reached at [email protected].