Rocky Return To The Roots At Wal-Mart

It was the kind of bold advertising campaign that Wal-Mart executives agreed was needed to attract style-hungry consumers: a series of commercials featuring two sisters — one a regular Wal-Mart shopper, the other not — trying to redecorate their homes.

In commercials set to run throughout this holiday season, the sisters were to discover that Wal-Mart offers a lot more than low prices.

But in July, as gasoline prices spiked, senior executives abruptly scrapped plans for the so-called sisters campaign, sending a marketing team led by Julie Roehm scrambling to create a replacement, according to people involved in the process. The reason was that the ads did not focus enough on low prices.

Wal-Mart ousted Ms. Roehm — and abandoned her choice for new ad agencies — this week after determining that she violated company policy by accepting gifts from potential vendors and maintaining a personal relationship with a subordinate, according to people briefed on the matter. She has denied any wrongdoing.

But Ms. Roehm’s near-operatic downfall exposes deeper tensions within the Wal-Mart empire, as a company that has been identified for four decades with working-class consumers tries to appeal to more affluent Americans.

A year ago, the company surprised the marketing world by hiring brash outside executives like Ms. Roehm and introducing ads that emphasized style and played down price. Then, in a sudden reversal, the company began trumpeting price-slashing for the 2006 holiday season.

In an interview, John Fleming, the chief marketing officer at Wal-Mart, said the company had indeed begun to backtrack from sleeker advertising that emphasized style over price. Customer research, he said, showed that, rich or poor, Wal-Mart customers “care about unbeatable prices.”

“I don’t think Wal-Mart advertising is ever going to be edgy,” he said last night. “ I do not think that fits our brand. Our brand is about saving people money.”

But Ms. Roehm was the very essence of edgy — and her hiring was widely viewed as a signal that Wal-Mart wanted to shake up its marketing.

As an executive at DaimlerChrysler, Ms. Roehm approved a commercial for Chrysler in which a mother explained to her daughter that her brother was conceived in the car, spurring customer complaints that led to the spot’s being dropped.

And after arriving at Wal-Mart, she referred to herself as a “change agent,” and set about turning the company’s annual shareholder meeting — a traditionally PowerPoint and numbers-heavy affair — into a three-hour musical.

Ms. Roehm, in an interview, said she believed that her job at Wal-Mart was to buck convention. “I had to assume they felt I brought the right skill set in this quest for transformation,” Ms. Roehm said.

But Ms. Roehm said it was clear from the start that she did not fit in. “Culturally, I clearly was an anomaly,” she said, likening her personality to a vacuum that can, at times, suck all the oxygen out of the room. “I come in, and I am extremely high energy, and it can be overwhelming.”

And, she said, her background at Chrysler — where her specialty was eye-popping, sexually charged commercials to sell trucks — may have alienated her colleagues.

“My ideas were viewed with greater skepticism,” she said. “People understood my background and where I came from and they were probably more concerned about the kinds of ideas I might bring. It caused a greater level of pause when I suggested something.”

In several cases, Wal-Mart approved her ideas, only to reverse course later.

After a handful of consumers complained about a holiday commercial that was overseen by Ms. Roehm and focused on lingerie, the company stopped running it.

Mr. Fleming said that Wal-Mart changed the holiday ads every week and decided, after receiving negative feedback, “to move on” with new commercials.

He also replaced the holiday campaign focused on the two style-conscious sisters with commercials built around a family whose curmudgeonly father is obsessed with low prices.

Mr. Fleming said the family in the new campaign “provided a broader reach” than the sisters — with each family member representing a different gift idea available at Wal-Mart.

In all of its advertising, he said, “we are looking for the right balance between price and products.”

Advertising executives who have worked with Ms. Roehm at Wal-Mart said she never seemed at home there.

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