The first major Whole Foods marketing effort was to build out a new website that could integrate national and local efforts, simultaneously, enable social media inclusion, content strategies and a variety of utilities. It has gone through many iterations since then, but it continues to drive huge numbers of visitors and function at the center of a highly matrixed organization that depends on it still.
Honestly, bringing WFM into the era of social media was the easiest thing ever. People wanted it. In three years time we launched with Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram and ended up on top of them all. WFM was the number 2 retailer behind Apple on twitter, the first corporate partner for Pinterest and operated the most sophisticated multi-site, hyper-localized programs and campaigns across all social media. The creative was reflective of the overall content strategy and fully integrated across the enterprise digital properties.
While they never made a public appearance, these ecommerce concepts had distinctive styles that held promise for extending the stores to a digital marketplace. But...Amazon. The design on these was undertaken by two outside agencies, under my direction, concept and build was by my team.
This app was amongst the first by a retailer to garner 2 million iOS downloads. It was featured in the iTunes store multiple times. It continues to be a very successful part of the digital offering by providing users access to a huge selection of healthier and alternative diet recipes, promoting product discovery, enabling meal planning and sharing seasonally/ingredient-specific food ideas and promotions, with a very engaged user base.
