Dive Brief:
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Nordstrom on Monday launched “The Nordy Pod,” a podcast hosted by Chief Brand Officer Pete Nordstrom. His first guests are retail impresario Mickey Drexler, who once led Gap and J. Crew and is now CEO of Alex Mill; a shopper grateful for above-and-beyond customer service; and a personal stylist at the flagship Seattle store.
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The production is “a new way for Nordstrom-obsessed customers to peek behind the curtain and learn more about the people behind our business,” according to a company press release.
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Upcoming interviews will feature Nordstrom’s brother Erik, Nordstrom CEO; their cousin Jamie, the company’s president of stores; and other longtime Nordstrom employees who work on the sales floor, in the stockroom and at the corporate offices, among others, per the release.
Dive Insight:
Nordstrom has taken a surprising approach to its new podcast. Rather than focusing on fashion — an area that is a forte of the retailer and an interest of its customers — Pete Nordstrom as host is pointing the mic toward the company’s own executives, workers and customers, along with retail bigwigs like Drexler.
The show so far takes a casual, irreverent approach, even allowing some mild profanity. In the blog post introducing it, Pete Nordstrom said he’s aiming for a level of honesty, in order to connect with people.
“What we’ve learned over the past couple of years is that you have to stand for something, or you end up standing for nothing,” he said in a statement. “I want to give people insight into the company and the things we stand for, and hopefully, they’ll learn more about the Nordstrom story along the way.”
In order to be successful, the podcast will have to carry that off, without interfering with Nordstrom’s brand, according to Thomai Serdari, professor of luxury marketing and branding at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
“Ideally, the podcast projects an authentic portrait of the people responsible for creating the department store’s magic without taking away the magic. This will be a metric of success for me,” she said by email. “Is this done to rehash ideas about business? Or is it really done to show the soul of the people who put up the daily performance that takes place at a department store? If the latter, I will be listening.”
Nordstrom’s customers are primed for the angle that Pete Nordstrom is taking, according to Barbara Kahn, professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
“If they had done one just on fashion, showing a ‘typical’ customer angle, it would have been similar to tons of fashion bloggers, Insta accounts etc. But since they are insiders, they know stuff we don’t know,” Kahn said by email. “It’s cool that they are sharing that. Customers today are way more sophisticated than in the past, so they may be curious about this kind of information – and there is evidence that people want these kinds of podcasts by the popularity of shows like [NPR’s] ‘How I Built This.'”
In the first episode, Nordstrom allows some straight talk from Drexler, who advises Nordstrom to create more exciting private apparel labels and fire people if he has to (the latter Nordstrom declines to commit to). After Drexler, a customer is on to express gratitude for a high level of customer service following a toddler’s potty training snafu. Finally, a longtime Nordstrom personal stylist recounts what it’s been like, as a Seattle native who visited Nordstrom as a child, moving up from the stockroom to a successful career on the sales floor.
These are the stories that “contribute to the magnetism that department stores still apply to our commercial meanderings in a contemporary world, filled with choices but lacking in depth,” Serdari said. “If the Nordy Pod can do away with the flatness that e-commerce has introduced to our daily lives and reconstruct some of the unexpected drama that retailers and customers experience each day it will differentiate itself from other business podcasts.”
