Target’s Got A Secret (Its Codename Is Goldfish)

Secrecy is a funny thing for brands.

A little mystery has often turned out to be a good idea. It keeps consumers interested, because a consumer that is always guessing about the next product release is, by necessity, always thinking about the brand.

It is a delicate balance, of course. Being too successful at flying under the radar, at best, confuses the target market or audience and, at worst, just misses them entirely. If the secret-keeping is too flashy, consumers usually complain the brand is too cute or playing too coy; they might reject it (though, both Apple and J.J. Abrams have made this tactic work, despite those complaints for over two decades).

The trick for “secretive-ish” marketing is to be just public enough to draw attention to whatever the big effort is but private enough so onlookers don’t feel like you’re trying to get their attention, are not exactly sure what it is they’re looking at and are desperately curious to learn more.

And, by those standards, Target has us exactly where it wants us with Project Goldfish.

What Is Project Goldfish?

“We are ambitious and bent on disrupting the way people shop.”

So reads a job posting for Target’s new Silicon Valley-based startup project that is currently hiring for 20 positions, according to reports that first appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

The Goldfish team will work out of Target’s tech office in Sunnyvale, California, under West Stringfellow — one of three entrepreneurs in residence who joined up with Target last year to help drive the firm’s latter-day efforts at innovation and out-of-the-box retail thinking. Stringfellow was promoted to the permanent position of VP of internal innovation and operations.

That pretty much covers all the hard data on the project, other than the fact that Stringfellow did confirm for the Star Tribune, shortly after taking the job, that the codenames for his projects — Goldfish being one and Bling the other — do have a logic behind them other than pure randomness.

“It will make sense in the future,” he said then. “I’m being cryptic because I can’t talk about it yet.”

And, it seems, Target can’t really talk about it all that much right now, other than to offer a confirmation that it is, in fact, hiring for the project.

“At this point, the project and what it is is still confidential,” said Jenna Reck, a Target spokeswoman.

An Interesting Battle Taking Shape 

The incoming Goldfish team will join a team of 60 already at work in Target’s Silicon Valley outpost. Open since 2014, it is one of two northern California hubs — the other being located about an hour up the road in San Francisco. Target also has tech operations set up in Boston, though the focus there is more on food with the Food + Future coLAB the Minnesota-based retailer opened in partnership with MIT’s Media Lab and design firm Ideo.

The new, super-secret but definitely revolutionary project is the latest expansion of Target’s very aggressive and rapid push into the digital retail reinvention space in the last 12–18 months. The long game involves spending as much as $2.5 billion a year on technology and supply chain initiatives by 2017, up from up $1.9 billion spent last year alone. How exactly Goldfish plays into that plan is unknown, but given the job posting, it seems to be in some kind of fundamental way.

“As a Goldfish team member, you’ll have a direct impact on the innovation of cutting-edge technologies,” noted the posting for head of engineering.

ECommerce was big business for Target in 2015. Digital transactions were up 30 percent over the last year, and while many physical retailers have offered earnings reports of late that have been disappointing, Target’s holiday quarter earnings report was, by comparison, a love note to its investors.

Target may have missed analysts’ expectations, but its fourth quarter earnings nonetheless saw a small sales growth of 1.9 percent for comparable store sales. Digital channel sales were the big difference maker and increased 34 percent, which accounted for 1.3 percentage points of comparable sales growth.

However, Target is not the only retailer in its segment that is taking such a strong, heavily invested swing at digital. Most notably is Target’s (and everyone else’s) biggest competitor, Walmart, which has already invested billions and is planning to put in at least another $1.5 billion in digital upgrades of its own — upgrades that have drawn some strongly positive reviews.

“Walmart is morphing into a multichannel retailer and taking an upfront financial hit in the process,” said Moody’s Vice President Charlie O’Shea. “These investments are crucial for any brick-and-mortar retailer that wants to remain competitive and will position Walmart for long-term growth.”

Right now, Target is hoping that it can perhaps nimbly position itself better against Walmart — and digital commerce’s ranking master class teacher, Amazon — with its more holistic approach to reinvention that ties reimagined tech to a revitalized store experience.

It is an ambitious swing in a retail marketplace with little margin for error, particularly for physical retailers who are increasingly seeing their share of consumer spend falling, as more and more customers are giving into the siren song of digital commerce.

But Target has proved itself both adept and flexible. It was a little over two years ago that Target was synonymous with “data breach.” These days, it’s known for how quickly the brand has regrown public trust in a short time.

And that effort has been helped, in no small part, by Target’s canny marketing efforts and ability to tap into giving consumers just enough to keep them interested but not enough to get nitpicked to death on the details.

So, what is Project Goldfish? We don’t know yet, but Target has sure got us interested enough to want to get a peek into the bowl.