Karen Mendelsohn is senior vice president of marketing for Mohawk Industries. She spent 27 years with Masco, a building products manufacturer and has been with Mohawk for about one year.
When asked who Ms. Mendelsohn is, she said, “First and foremost, I am a mom, a wife, a daughter and a sister. This is the foundation upon which everything else is built.” She did leave out, what Mohawk executives clearly knew, is that she is a super smart and canny marketer. We don’t mean MBA smart (she has an MBA from Columbia) but an in-the-trenches, tough and smart businesswoman. If you have been working with Milgard Windows and Doors, Delta Faucet and Behr paints to name a few, you understand distribution and marketing — all facets of marketing from manufacturer to consumer marketing.
It turns out one of the values of hiring Ms. Mendelsohn was the fact that she knew nothing about flooring. Any flooring. And as she tried to learn she would ask (if you were already in the industry you would know the answer and not ask) why? The folks at Mohawk knew they weren’t going to get away with, “because,” or “we have always done it that way” or “that’s how the industry works.” By asking “why” all were forced to consider the answer and not just pawn it off on tradition or whatever. The more Ms. Mendelsohn asked “why” the more people started to look at what they were doing differently and wondering if there was a better way.
Karen Mendelsohn’s coming out party at Mohawk was at the Mohawk aligned dealer convention in December 2016. She presented Mohawk’s signature digital and in-store marketing program, Omnify. Omnify is an attempt to harness and discipline social media for retailers and to integrate that story on social media into the store. Ms. Mendelsohn said Mohawk wanted to create a “stickiness” with consumers. (We are not sure what that means but presume it to be a good thing.)
In Karen Mendelsohn’s mind, the flooring retailer must be wherever, whenever and however the customer chooses to access the market. With the internet, and especially social media, that task is infinitely more difficult than the good old days of newspaper, Yellow Pages and a spot of TV.
Karen Mendelsohn talks grown-up marketing not industry jargon. She knows that brands are assets and that the best marketing starts with customers, not the retailer or manufacturer. We will see how the Mendelsohn — Mohawk marriage works. In our view Mohawk married up. And that is a good thing.
Jonathan Trivers, a regular contributor to Floor Covering Weekly, is also the author of the marketWise section of FCW’s Statistical Report. He can be reached by email at jonathantrivers@gmail.com.