Seventy-six-year-old H&M is one of the largest global apparel retailers. Still, Linda Li Steiner, its head of customer activation and marketing, has managed to make like a startup leader by bringing back-to-back innovative concepts to market. In the last year alone, the 9-year H&M veteran led the launch of a small-footprint, rotating-concept store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Plus, she drove the brand’s entry into virtual worlds: The Looptopia by H&M game debuted on Roblox in January.
“In a large organization, it’s not the easiest to do and try new things,” Li Steiner said. “But it makes it easier that everyone is aligned around one clear vision. Our teams have come together to put out new experiences, activations, events and marketing campaigns that are truly innovative and different from anything we’ve done. And that’s needed to stay relevant and exciting for our customer.”
It also helps that Li Steiner has been able to experience “so many parts of the organization” and “how everything works together,” having previously worked on the company’s merchandising, expansion and e-commerce teams. She said her approach to her current role is to “rely on the strong leaders” on her team, while ensuring their efforts are working together to drive objectives in “the most customer-centric way.” Among those leaders are experts on data and insights, digital and e-commerce, and media and content.
The experimental H&M Williamsburg is one of their more recent projects, having launched in November and set to remain open through the remainder of the year. Along with penetrating a “unique and eclectic community” of Brooklynites, the intention of the store is to offer customers an unexpected H&M experience and shine a light on its competitive products. Every 6-8 weeks, the featured product assortment and theme are overhauled. Thus far, holiday party, sport and spring fashion concepts have played out. “We’re seeing that it’s driving loyalty, with[customers] coming back more often,” Li Steiner said, regarding the learnings to date from the rotating activation.
As for Looptopia, it’s offered H&M an opportunity to learn about what resonates with younger customers on a platform with big brand potential. “It had become very clear in the last couple of years that embracing some type of virtual space would make sense for us,” Li Steiner said. “All customers are starting to partake in [these worlds], in one way or another.” The game is centered on creating and recycling fashion, with different rewards opening up as players progress to different levels. Over time, Looptopia’s user engagement and satisfaction ratings have increased. User-generated content around the game has worked to drive traffic.
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But Li Steiner is hesitant to take the credit, noting the team effort that goes into these projects – especially considering the changing role of the marketer.
“Today, marketing is everything,” she said. “If you think about it as something that touches and triggers and activates a customer, then it touches every single function within a retail organization. And that means, to get something activated in the right way, every single team has to get involved.”
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