Kmart’s new groove: How the retailer rebuilt its brand engine for a culture-driven era

In 2022 Kmart hit a moment of truth. Retail was getting samey, customers were restless and the brand’s cultural pull had softened after years of Covid churn.

So Australia’s biggest value retailer did something unusual for a business of its scale – it rewired its entire marketing operating system around culture, music, data and one deceptively simple idea: follow the customer rhythm, not the business rhythm.

The shift wasn’t cosmetic. It reshaped how Kmart plans, buys, creates and responds. It set the tone for a new era where Avicii’s Levels – the infectious and instantly recognisable banger – became its brand anthem, trend-jacking became a daily muscle and the Kmart Hacks community (entirely unpaid) became one of the most influential earned engines in Australian retail.

Three years on, the reset has turned into a masterclass in how to run a modern brand at scale. And according to general manager marketing Rennie Freer, who took on the role just as the reset was taking shape, it changed everything from product cycles to media decisions to who “owns” the brand inside the company.

A reset moment

Low Prices For Life, Kmart’s August 2022 repositioning didn’t come out of a crisis, it came from clarity.

“We’d gotten a little bit lost and become a little bit same, a little bit convergent with our competitors,” Freer says. “We’d gone through huge internal change and years of Covid lockdowns. It was the right moment to recalibrate around what we wanted to be famous for.”

The team rebuilt the brand from a simple but potent truth: Kmart plays an emotional and practical role in the lives of millions of Australians. It’s not just about the $9 dinner set or the $25 lamp – it’s the idea that everyone deserves good things at prices they can genuinely afford.

And the kicker: the brand had drifted away from the cultural freshness that once made it fun.

Freer, former head of marketing at MECCA and an agency executive with The Campaign Palace and JWT, says music became the first signal of the new groove.

“It was one of those moments where we knew music had always been a huge part of our history,” she says. “We’d walked away from that simplicity – the joy of finding something you love at a price you almost can’t believe. We heard the Avicii track and it was like it had been written for us.”

The track stuck and has become a form of shorthand for new-era Kmart: modern, fast, optimistic, culturally plugged-in.

Customer rhythm vs business rhythm

If the soundtrack made the brand feel new again, the underlying shift was much bigger. Adam Russell, general manager at UM – Kmart’s media agency of 25 years – sums it up plainly.

“Back then we were inconsistent in our presence in the market. We weren’t always on. We were showing up based on our business rhythm, not the customer rhythm.”

It’s the kind of line every marketer nods at, but few genuinely put into practice. Kmart did. The team rebuilt its model around the idea that customers are in market 365 days a year, not just during seasonal tentpoles or promotional cycles. The change sounds simple; but operationally, it’s huge.

“We know customers need certain things all year – coat hangers, socks, a brilliant white mug – but they also love things,” Freer says. “It’s not for us to decide when that moment happens. It’s our job to be there.”

This shift pushed Kmart and UM to overhaul their entire planning model.

Russell explains it in aviation terms. “We stopped building the plane while flying it. Now the plane is built, we work on optimising it.”

In practice, that meant moving from episodic campaigns to an annual plan with a clear spine: be present, be relevant, be useful. Then layer agility on top.

It’s how Kmart manages to trend-jack Taylor Swift one week, go hard on winter bedding the next and shift screen investment based on live audience behaviour – all without losing strategic coherence.

The feedback loop that never stops

Kmart’s greatest advantage isn’t its price point or its reach – it’s the audience engine sitting around it. The brand has one of the largest, most active earned communities in Australia and Freer treats it as a strategic asset rather than a nice-to-have.

“The value of our social community is where so much of the magic comes to life,” she says. “We’ve got a continuous feedback loop. We know what they’re reacting to, what they love, why they’re using a product – and they want to share it.”

The feedback loop informs everything: what to amplify, how to sequence products, what trends to lean into, when to expect demand spikes, even what to green-light internally.

But the most unusual part? Kmart does not pay influencers. Not a cent. Freer is upfront about it.

“I’m not aware of any other major brand in Australia that doesn’t pay influencers,” she says. “But for us, the authenticity is everything. By not having a transactional relationship, we don’t control the message, which is exactly why people trust it.”

It’s a rare model in a market where “authenticity” is often a paid performance. And yet the results are undeniable: the Kmart Hacks ecosystem sells out products faster than most paid campaigns in this country.

“We really value that they will share their perspective on a media moment, on an event, on a product,” Freer says. “If they love it, they love it. It’s as authentic as it comes.”

Around that sits K Krew, an internal content series featuring Kmart team members, and the sprawling Kmart Buzz community on Facebook. Taken together, it’s one of the most potent organic brand ecosystems in Australian retail.

Despite the noise around AI, automation and retail media, Russell says Kmart’s digital philosophy is basic: go where the fish are.

“Digital transformation matters because customers are transforming,” he says. “People want to transact when and how they want. We just follow that behaviour.”

The brand’s screen strategy has become a standout in the market and Russell pushes back hard on the idea that any channel is “dead.”

“You hear ‘TV is dead’ all the time. It’s nonsense. People are watching more TV than ever, they’re just watching it differently. Kmart has one of the most advanced screen strategies I’ve seen. It's completely data-led. We don’t make up numbers, we don’t assume percentages – we simply go where the audience is. If we see a shift toward a channel, we move with it and optimise on the fly.”

TikTok is one such channel that has gone from non-factor to major input.

“A few years ago TikTok wasn’t even in the conversation. Now it’s a big part of the plan,” Russell says. “But we’re sensible. Not everyone on TikTok is our customer. Some are emerging customers. So we tailor.”

This data-driven approach sits alongside a cultural instinct: show up where people are talking, watching, creating and sharing, without forcing the brand into moments that don’t belong to it.

Freedom in the framework

Inside Kmart, the reset also changed how the internal teams function. Brand ownership is no longer hierarchical, it’s collective.

“We have a chief customer officer, a chief marketing officer, a chief merchant marketing officer, and a GM of marketing online,” Freer says. “No one role is valued over another. Everyone has a unique part to play.”

And the line everyone remembers: “No one owns the Kmart brand, not me, not the chief customer officer, not the chief merchant marketing officer. We all own this brand.”

It’s a democratic model where the store teams, design teams, international sourcing teams and customer care teams all have a direct impact on how the brand lives in a customer’s day.

There’s freedom, but it sits inside a clear strategic framework. The alignment is what keeps the whole machine coherent.

“When it works, it works,” Freer says. “If we’re all clear on the strategy and we’re all playing our part, it’s unstoppable.”

Anko: the value engine

No story about Kmart’s reinvention works without Anko.

“It’s absolutely the engine that allows us to deliver our value promise,” Freer says. “It’s roughly 85% of our product portfolio. And it gives us control over design, quality and price.”

She frames Anko not as a private-label convenience, but a strategic differentiator.

“It gives customers on-trend, modern designs at prices they won’t find elsewhere. It reinforces the value of the whole Kmart proposition.”

On TikTok, younger customers treat Anko almost like a cult brand. For Freer, that cultural traction is proof the model is working.

“It’s becoming a symbol of our brand promise,” she says. “And its success is critical to how we continue extending our low-price leadership.”

A partnership built for pressure

There aren’t many 25-year agency partnerships left in Australia. Kmart–UM is one of them.

“When my team walk the halls of Kmart on a Wednesday, we’re treated like staff,” Russell says. “We’ve got desks, monitors, keyboards, we're in the middle of the team. We even have a car park. I don’t get that at my own office.”

But underneath the humour sits real commentary about the state of the industry.

“The pressure on CMOs is enormous,” he says. “Efficiency, AI, innovation – it’s huge. And a lot of that pressure gets pushed downstream to agencies. But Kmart doesn’t do that to us. We solve problems together.”

Freer echoes it strongly. “It breaks my heart to see how agencies are treated these days. It’s a demanding business,” she says. “With Kmart and UM, we’re tough on each other, but it’s a relationship built on respect and shared values.”

For UM, that partnership also now spans Target, a relationship that expanded last year and now brings the broader Kmart Group rhythm into the mix.

Culture as the new reach

If there is one through-line in the new Kmart operating system, it’s this: you can’t win on media spend alone anymore.

“The media landscape is more fragmented than it’s ever been,” Freer says. “You can’t be everywhere all the time. The only way to stay top of mind is to be culturally relevant.

“If you turn up tone-deaf to what people are thinking about, you’re wallpaper,” she says. “You’ll be cast aside.”

Kmart’s goal is to stay close to its community and to feel modern, optimistic, useful and in tune with what Australians care about right now. And that’s what excites Freer most about the future.

“Marketing has moved away from one-way broadcast messages,” she says. “It’s now about facilitating genuine connection. Allowing customers to co-own the brand. Showing up in ways that delight them. And removing friction so they can engage how they want, when they want.”

For Russell, the thrill is in the breadth of the customer base.

“Kmart appeals to everyone,” he says. “It gives us permission to try new things, follow new trends and evolve as Australia evolves.”

The reset wasn’t a campaign, not even a logo refresh. It was a rebuild of how one of Australia’s biggest brands thinks, plans, listens and responds. A new groove and one that shows what retail marketing looks like when you treat culture as oxygen, data as fuel and community as the engine room.