BJ's Wholesale Club: Learning to Hand the Reins Over to Customers

Last night I had a craving for gelato after dinner, and decided to go to BJ's to pick up my personal favorite Talenti Peanut Butter Cup Gelato. As I was heading towards the register I heard an announcement over the loud speaker that BJ's has a new blog that customers can read for the latest information on deals. I consider myself a bargain shopper and love checking out deals, so naturally I went home and tried to look up said blog...

To my surprise and disappointment, it was not a blog at all! The BJ's Journal is a page with various posts about holiday savings and game day prep coupons. While I found these posts to be helpful and interesting (they all and with a link to more coupons, and who doesn't love that?!), there is no place for customers to leave a comment or engage with the posts. The closest opportunity the site gives customers to leave comments or feedback is located at the very bottom corner of the page in this very small box:

:( Customers need more than this to communicate how much they love your brand!

BJ's is dealing with the challenges common to any company that is learning how to connect with the groundswell. For a company that was founded in 1984, it can be hard to give up commercial/marketing power and hand it over to your customers. But for companies like BJ's whose target customers are families, it would certainly be beneficial to allow the stay at home parents to do some of the heavy lifting for BJ's when it comes to marketing and sharing information with other customers. 

So if the change would be so beneficial, why not just into the groundswell head first? The key to this challenge is time. As Li and Bernoff explain in their case study on Unilever, "leaders built Unilever's confidence in the groundswell bit by bit, each time loosening the control reins a little more." In this case, the company would try dipping a toe into the groundswell (ie allowing their product to be advertised on The Apprentice) and let that sink in for a bit before diving further into the groundswell. 

So back to BJ's... I decided to check out BJ's Facebook page to see if any more conversation was encouraged between BJ's and its customers. I was impressed with what I found. BJ's responded to most posts. I would get nit-picky and say that they should be responding to all posts, but for now they are at least responding too all complaints and questions. For a company that is not that large and most likely does not have the bandwidth to hire a person to solely watch over their social media, this is still a great start.

Here are two posts that I thought you all would appreciate. 

The Complaint:

The Appreciation:

I do want to point out that some customers have demanded control from BJ's by creating their own blogs about the company. Take Tasia's blog for example. This young mom keeps her blog up to date with best practices for using coupons at BJ's. Sadly, her site also does not allow for visitor comments. What is it with BJ's and it's customers not wanting to engage in conversation?! 

A sneak peak at Tasia's blog.

All in all, BJ's is following Li and Bernoff's suggestions to "take small steps that have a big impact." However, I would love to have the opportunity to look under the hood and be able to ask BJ's if they "have a vision and a plan", and what that might look like. I also have to wonder how much of upper management is on board to join the groundswell. I couldn't find any information regarding this on their website, but based on Unilever's experience we know that the people at the top need to play a major part in joining the groundswell. 

Li and Bernoff say it best when they explain that companies need to "embrace emerging media and give the consumer a voice in the brand." There are definitely BJ's customers that want a voice in the brand- isn't it time for BJ's to give it to them?