How Target’s consumer-first strategy drives success

Episode transcript, edited for clarity

[00:00:28] Bill Thorne: Welcome to Retail Gets Real, where we hear from retail's most fascinating leaders about the industry that impacts everyone, everywhere, every day. I'm Bill Thorne from the National Retail Federation, coming to you from NRF 2025: Retail's Big Show in the heart of New York City.

And on today's episode, we're talking to Rick Gomez. He's the executive vice president and chief commercial officer of Target. We're going to talk to Rick about his role, favorite consumer trends and Target's biggest hits from 2024. Rick Gomez, welcome to Retail Gets Real.

[00:01:02] Rick Gomez: Thank you, Bill. It's great to be here.

[00:01:03] Bill Thorne: Very glad to have you here. And you have been to the Big Show before, so when we say it's a big show, it's a big show.

[00:01:10] Rick Gomez: It's a really big show. There are a lot of people here.

[00:01:14] Bill Thorne: Thank God it's only once a year. That's all I can say. I want to know a little bit about your career journey and basically how you landed where you are today in Minneapolis, cold Minneapolis at Target.

[00:01:26] Rick Gomez: Frigid. Yes. Yeah. First of all, I've been working, 30-some odd years, always in consumer-driven businesses, consumer-oriented brands. I started the first part of my career working in the CPG, consumer packaged goods, industry. Worked for PepsiCo for many, many years, and learned the power of brands, learned the importance of understanding the consumer and consumer insights. Understood all the levers of driving growth from a brand-building perspective.

And then eventually made the jump to retail. And 11 years ago joined Target in marketing, became the chief marketing officer, and then it grew to include ecommerce and strategy. And then, gosh, it must have been now about four years ago, I made the jump from marketing into merchandising, into running the P&L.

Took a job running the food and beverage business for Target's $20 billion business. The assignment was to run the business end to end. And what that means is I had supply chain reporting to me, some stores, field resources, merchandising, planning, own brand innovation. Basically everything for our food and beverage business, except for the marketing, which is what I knew how to do. And when I had the opportunity, it was one of those moments of like, two things. I don't know if I'm going to be very good at this, and I don't know if I'm going to like it.

[00:03:01] Bill Thorne: Yes, yeah, yeah.

[00:03:01] Rick Gomez: But it worked out. I've enjoyed it. And then I've since expanded my responsibilities to be chief commercial officer. So oversee merchandising for all of our categories at Target, as well as the planning organization as well as our global sourcing, our product design team, as well as our own brand businesses.

[00:03:19] Bill Thorne: Dear Lord, that's a lot.

[00:03:21] Rick Gomez: It keeps me busy.

[00:03:25] Bill Thorne: So you get the call, we're going to take you out of marketing. We're going to put you into merchandising. You get into merchandising, and they start adding to that. That's a risk. Do you like taking risks?

[00:03:35] Rick Gomez: Here's what I like. I don't say it's about risks. It's about learning. I enjoy learning. I enjoy being challenged. I enjoy being a little bit outside my comfort zone. And that's when I perform my best.

And I've always said, as I look at career opportunities, there are two things I think about. One, is it going to provide learning? Am I going to be challenged? And then two, do I think I can have positive impact? And if I can do both of those, then it's really an opportunity worth looking at.

And I felt like the move to run the food and beverage business at Target was one of those assignments. It was, I was going to learn a lot, and given my background in marketing and at PepsiCo and the food and beverage business, I had a little bit to bring to the table. So I made a go for it.

[00:04:21] Bill Thorne: Yeah, that's pretty awesome. I was just talking to somebody yesterday, and we were talking about the fact that some people would be intimidated by that, to the extent that, “I don't know anything about that. And I'm not sure that I'm right for that job. Maybe you need to find somebody else,” as opposed to the learners and opposed to the risk takers that say, "Bring it on. Let's make this work."

[00:04:41] Rick Gomez: Yeah. To be honest, I had those voices in my head. I had those self-doubts. I think we all do. But you stuff that down and you say, "All right. What's the worst thing that can happen?" I decide that I don't like doing this, and then I go do something.

[00:04:57] Bill Thorne: Right, right, right, right. That's what I tell people all the time. It's like, if you think it's what you want to do, if you believe it's what you want to do, and yet you're intimidated by it, look, at the end of the day, they're not handcuffing you to a radiator. You can do it. You can determine whether or not that's what you want to do and the trajectory that you want to go. And if it's not, then do something else.

[00:05:18] Rick Gomez: 100%. Half the battle is figuring out what you don't want to do.

[00:05:22] Bill Thorne: Isn't that the truth?

[00:05:23] Rick Gomez: And it worked out well for me. I took a little bit of a risk, and I've enjoyed it. And for me, I didn't envision it. People always say, "Do you miss marketing? You've been in marketing for so long." And I miss the people that I worked with, but I don't miss marketing. I feel like I did that for so long. It was time to do something different.

[00:05:45] Bill Thorne: That's awesome. And you've got great leadership. You have Brian Cornell, and Brian's always going to support you. He's a great leader. He's somebody that I think you can always count on to help you as you learn, as you grow.

[00:05:57] Rick Gomez: He's a terrific leader, and he's there to support, but he's also the one that asked me to make the move out of marketing. And so I give him a lot of credit and a lot of gratitude for taking a risk on me.

[00:06:09] Bill Thorne: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:06:10] Rick Gomez: And being able to say, I think you can do this, Rick. Let's give it a try.

[00:06:14] Bill Thorne: Yeah. That's pretty awesome. So what's the most challenging and rewarding project that you've worked on at Target over the years, and what did you learn on it?

[00:06:22] Rick Gomez: The one that comes to mind quickly is launching our loyalty program Circle. And when I first became the chief marketing officer, I was told to be successful, we need a loyalty program. Target did not have one. Our competitors did. This was a number one priority. But I had inherited a loyalty program that was in test market.

And I sat down with the team to understand it, how it was doing, and what we quickly realized as a group was, it wasn't delivering what we needed it to do. And so we had that kind of tough challenge of having to go to senior management and say, “We need to scrap this. It's not delivering what we thought it would deliver.”

As much as I would've loved to have launched that nationally and check delivered what I was expected to deliver, it wasn't the right thing to do for the consumer. It wasn't the right thing to do for the brand, and so we had to take a time-out, and we had to go back and clean sheet our approach to loyalty.

And we created what is today our Circle program. And Circle now has over 100 million members. We continue to innovate on it and continue to look at new ways to deliver personalization and to deliver new services and to drive differentiation and growth with the program. But it was a journey. And I think a couple things that I learned was, you have to be really honest.

You have to be intellectually honest about how things are performing. If you try to sugarcoat it and you try to position it, you try to sell it, it's going to eventually catch up to you. You have to listen to the consumer, and the consumer will tell you if it's working or not. And so it was a challenging time.

But I'm really glad that we took a time-out, and I'm glad that we did the right thing for the long term and didn't go for the short-term win. And it's a lesson that I think I've learned throughout my career, is just at the end of the day, you have to listen to the consumer.

[00:08:20] Bill Thorne: Right. Yeah. The interesting thing is not only did you create something that worked, you created a little bit of a legacy too. Circle is going to be around for a long time, and you can always point back to it and say, "I was there at the beginning." And that's fun.

[00:08:34] Rick Gomez: It's fun, but hopefully Circle will look better and better and better and better as different teams come and take it and innovate in their Circle 2.0 and 3.0 and 4.0. And so if you've created a legacy that doesn't evolve and doesn't change, it's probably not that relevant.

[00:08:52] Bill Thorne: Amen to that, brother. So here at Big Show, you didn't just happen to get out of a cab and stumble into the Javits Center, I don't believe. I think that you have been participating. And so in your session that you did here today, you were talking about how Target delivers value to shoppers through merchandising, on-trend assortment and more. Tell us about this “Tar-zhay” magic.

[00:09:18] Rick Gomez: The “Tar-zhay” magic. Yes. Well, we're a retailer, and so we sell stuff. And so I would argue that one of the most important decisions that we make as an organization is, what do we want to sell. And what we sell better be compelling, it better be on trend, stylish, quality, at an affordable price point.

If we can't do that, we won't be successful. It doesn't matter how quickly you can have products shipped to your door. If the product isn't compelling, it doesn't matter. And so we spend a lot of time thinking about, how do we curate what we want to sell at Target? And we very much think about our assortment as a three-legged stool.

One leg of that stool is our own brands. And we refer to them as our own brands, not private label, because we think of them as brands. They have a unique point of view. They're differentiated in the marketplace, and we manage them like a brand. They're important because they differentiate Target from other retailers. They also drive traffic to our stores and to our site. So that's an important leg to our assortment strategy.

The second leg to the strategy is our national brands. These are the big national brands that you and many of your listeners have grown up with for generations. And our guests tell us they want to be able to get Tide, Oreos, Coke, Levi's, big national brands at Target. So we offer that.

Now, the opportunity there is for us to partner with these national brands to bring things to Target that are unique and exclusive. I'll give you an example. This past summer we partnered with PepsiCo. They have a brand,  Bubly, and it does very well at Target, and we partner with them to create a new flavor, melted ice pop, exclusive only at Target for the summertime. It did incredibly well.

And so that's the opportunity for us, is to partner with these national brands to come up with innovative ideas, to do things that are exclusive to Target. That's a really important leg to the stool. Then the third leg is about small, emerging brands that we've discovered or that we see potential in that we think our consumer is going to love.

And right now, health and wellness is top of mind for many people. And as an example, we see a lot of new brands coming to the marketplace in that space. So whether it's a Bloom or Chava, we're take taking those brands, curating them and bringing them to Target so that consumers can discover them.

If you step back, and you think about the decisions of what we sell at Target, it's really our own brands, our big national brands, and then those small, emerging brands that we think our guests will love.

[00:12:10] Bill Thorne: Yeah. It's interesting, as you're describing that, I'm actually in my brain walking your store. I know where the national brands are, and I know where the Target brands are. And I think that it's pretty phenomenal. The Bubly example is absolutely fantastic because I drink Bubly all the time. And I always call it “Bublé,” thank you, PepsiCo, for their commercials. That got me into that. It was unbelievable.

Who thought of that? That was actually brilliant. But I can see where that actually does bring people. And they go to another store and they're like, "It's not there. Why don't they have it?" Brings them back.

[00:12:46] Rick Gomez: Absolutely.

[00:12:47] Bill Thorne: That's pretty awesome. You have to look at consumer trends all the time because they're always changing. That's the thing about retail. If you don't like change, you don't want to work in retail. So what are some of the trends that you're seeing currently that y'all are trying to be responsive to?

[00:13:01] Rick Gomez: Yeah. First of all, I agree with you that retail is dynamic and it's fast-paced. I spent the first half of my career, we talked about working in the consumer packaged goods industry, and I thought that was fast-paced until I came to retail. And I realized that was just training me to get ready for retail, which is so crazy, crazy fast.

And so there are constant trends. There are constant trends in apparel and entertainment. Right now, one of the things that is top of mind for me and top of mind for a lot of our consumers is this idea of self-care, health and wellness. It used to be considered a luxury. And now taking care of yourself is considered a necessity.

And people think about self-care, not just vitamins and eating better. They think about it as hair care, skincare. They think about it through electronics and LED to help with the skin. They think about it through apparel and performance wear. They think about self-care in a lot of different ways, and it's evolving really fast.

And they're looking for new, emerging brands, that are high in protein, that address gut health. And so that's a really dynamic space right now, and it's a space that, for the consumer that shops at Target, they're very interested in.

[00:14:23] Bill Thorne: Is it something that's generational, or is it just an overall trend? You see it at every level.

[00:14:29] Rick Gomez: I don't think it's generational. I think we see it across demographics. Now, how you define self-care might look different for a 20-something versus a 60-something, but it's still something that's top of mind for everybody.

[00:14:44] Bill Thorne: Right.

[00:14:45] Rick Gomez: Coming out of the pandemic and dealing with inflation and the challenges and national disasters that are going on, right now people are looking for ways to make sure that they're taking care of themselves, and that, I think, crosses all ages.

[00:14:59] Bill Thorne: So have there been any really significant major shifts in recent years about how people are shopping at Target?

[00:15:08] Rick Gomez: Yeah. Shopping is constantly evolving, and it's constantly changing. And if you think about how you shop, just this holiday season, it probably looks different than it did just a couple years ago. Obviously, during the pandemic, there was this push to everything digital, and our ecommerce business saw explosive growth.

And then coming out of the pandemic, what we saw was people were looking at digital during the pandemic for safety reasons, but then they realized how convenient it was. And so we had things like Drive Up where you can drive up and we'll put groceries in your trunk within four minutes for free.

That became an issue of safety during the pandemic. Afterwards, it's now become an opportunity for convenience and ease. So we continue to see the consumer looking for easy, seamless ways to shop. I would tell you the expectations for consumers are not going down. They're just getting higher and higher.

So if they're going to come into the store, they want an experience. They expect to see things in stock. They expect to be surprised and delighted. And then when they're looking at things digitally, they want to have the ease and convenience that comes with that, and they expect it to be seamless.

So I think we're going to continue to see consumer expectations getting higher and higher and higher, and the retailers that can innovate and continue to bring new services are the ones that will be successful. And I can give you an example of that. I talked about Drive Up, and we did that during the pandemic because people were looking for contactless shopping.

Well, what we've done now since then is we've added now a Starbucks service. So when you Drive Up, you can order your Starbucks, and we'll bring it to you hot to your car. So it's gone from what was safety to now inspiration and joy.

[00:16:57] Bill Thorne: Yeah. That's awesome. I like that. I like that a lot. I know we're running short on time, but I need to ask you, because you've had an extraordinary career, and you do an extraordinary job. What is the best piece of advice that you've received from a mentor or a boss?

[00:17:15] Rick Gomez: I would say I've been very, very fortunate to have a lot of mentors, a lot of friends, a lot of supporters, a lot of people giving me advice. But I'll go a little bit vulnerable for a minute here. It was a boss that I had, oh gosh, 20 years ago. I had been working in corporate America for about 10 years.

And her advice to me was, you be you and be unapologetically you. And what I mean by that is I came out of undergrad, I was thrown into the corporate world, I had only been a lifeguard prior to that, so I had no idea how to show up in corporate America. So I spent my time trying to fit this cookie-cutter mold of what does an executive dress like, look like, talk like.

And I lost sight of who I am, and I lost sight of my voice. And what she did, which I am so grateful for, is she gave me the space to be me and to show up the way I wanted to be. And I think that's so important because people want leaders who are genuine, authentic. They don't want to work for a robot. They don't want to work for someone who's a cookie-cutter perfectionist. They want to work for somebody who's real. And so my advice would be, just be yourself. And when you do that, I think not only will you be a more effective leader, you'll be a happier leader.

[00:18:39] Bill Thorne: And I think too, Rick, the world has changed so much in just the short time during my professional life, where to your point, you had to act a certain way, dress a certain way, react a certain way. And today it is an expectation that you will be yourself. Because if you're not, it's inauthentic. And if you're inauthentic about who you are, then how can anybody trust you or believe you?

[00:19:04] Rick Gomez: Yes. That takes confidence to be able to show up that way, and I think especially in early part of your career, you're still figuring out who you are.

[00:19:13] Bill Thorne: Right. And who you want to be.

[00:19:15] Rick Gomez: Yes, yeah.

[00:19:15] Bill Thorne: Rick Gomez, it has been such an incredible pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much for being part of Retail Gets Real.

[00:19:22] Rick Gomez: Yeah. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

[00:19:24] Bill Thorne: And thank you all for listening to another episode of Retail Gets Real. You can find more information about this episode at retail gets real dot com. I'm Bill Thorne, and this is Retail Gets Real from Big Show 2025 in the heart of New York City. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.