No, it’s not a new promotion, but it is the latest excuse for J.C. Penney’s holiday losses. OK, sure, the market hasn't’ been at its best, but shares of J.C Penney tumbled last week after the ever-struggling, emotional engagement-deficient retailer posted a loss for the holiday quarter, despite improving category sales trends.
We can’t quite figure out why people were surprised about
the results, which was the way it was spun in the press. But we weren’t. Surprised,
we mean. J.C. Penney had been at the bottom of our Customer Loyalty Engagement Index for a while now. A long while and rankings on our Index correlate very
highly with how consumers are going to behave toward a brand, so being at the
bottom of the list meant that it wasn’t likely that consumers were going to
swarm to the store in the coming months. And they didn’t, a kind of retail
version of the old Yogi Berra observation, “if the shoppers don’t want to come
to the store, you can’t stop’em!” Well, actually, you can stop them. Just
continue to market and brand just the way J.C. Penney has been doing for a
while now!
You can also blame someone else! That’s always easier than
actually coming up with an authentic and emotionally engaging strategy for the
brand. Despite the improving sales trends seen by other retailers, CEO Mike
Ullman noted in a conference call last week that the company is “still trying
to recover from the self-inflicted wounds of the previous strategy.” The wounds
Mr. Ullman was referencing were those of ex-Apple VP Ron Johnson, who, to be
sure, made a muck of things when he was JCP CEO, and was a real nuisance of himself.
We blamed him for the JCP debacle back then too. But to be fair, that was more
than two years ago, and in a marketplace that moves at the speed of the
consumer, Mr. Ullman et. al. haven’t exactly made many inroads. Maybe a tiny
in-path, but not much more than that.
According to this year’s Customer Loyalty Engagement Index,
J.C. Penney, –perennially ranked last in the Department Store category – has
moved up to – wait for it. . .
next-to-last. Just ahead of Sears whose same-store sales were down
nearly 10%, so a dubious achievement at best. But look, any increased level of
emotional engagement isn’t something to be discounted, no pun intended, and our
January 2015 category rankings look like this:
- Marshall’s / TJ Maxx
- Macy’s
- Kohl’s
- Dillard’s
- J.C. Penney
- Sears
But as writer and social commentator Havelock Ellis noted,
“What we call ‘progress’ may just be the exchange of one nuisance for another
nuisance.”
And when your brand is wracked with nuisances like consumer disengagement,
problematic product mix, confusing pricing strategies, and undistinguished and
indistinguishable brand positionings and promotions, we’re thinking odds are 6
to 5 that light at the end of a tunnel really is an oncoming train.
Smart marketers never bet against emotional engagement
metrics.
Find out more about what makes customer loyalty happen and how Brand Keys metrics is able to predict future consumer behavior: brandkeys.com. Visit our YouTube channel to learn more about Brand Keys methodology, applications and case studies.
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