Well that didn’t take long. The current push to turn around and reinvent J.C. Penney is fast proving to be one whopper of a fiasco. JCP, as it’s now referred to, released its first quarter financial results this week.
The numbers were bad on two fronts: The company lost $163 million in the quarter. But more troubling, sales also plunged to $3.2 billion from $3.9 billion in the same quarter a year ago.
These numbers, mind you, were notched when almost the entire country was blessed with remarkably pleasant winter weather — a turn of events that should have precipitated more shopping at Penney’s. Not less.
Surprised? We weren’t. It is rapidly becoming apparent that Ron Johnson and Michael Francis — the two new emperors entrusted with rejuvenating the ailing iconic American department store chain — clearly initiated the wrong marketing game plan for the company they now run.
Johnson is a former Apple retail honcho, and Francis is the marketing guru who famously helped transform Target into a hip discount chain. Both executives apparently believed their considerable success at other companies would somehow guarantee a similar outcome in their new roles.
It hasn’t happened.
Blind to Penney’s customer base
Why? From where we stand, it’s painfully obvious the duo had no real sense of exactly what kind of company they were trying to transform. That huge blind spot made it too easy for them to buy into a grandiose marketing strategy for a JCP turnaround that has — with each evolution of that strategy — only made the situation worse.
What Francis and Johnson most egregiously failed to realize is that Penney’s wasn’t primed to be transformed with a few marketing sleights of hand into something akin to a trendy Target or cutting-edge Apple.
If Penney’s is still anything, it is a middle-of-the-road, middle-class retail presence in hundreds of small and medium-sized American towns. Places where the populations simply weren’t ready to immediately embrace the ill-conceived and radically progressive marketing strategy Johnson and Francis have thrust at longtime Penney’s shoppers.
We know whereof we speak because we grew up in — and return quite frequently to — one of those small southern towns where J.C. Penney was an important fixture. But JCP really isn’t what it was, thanks to the arrival in many of these towns of Walmart superstores that have in relatively short order stolen much of the customer base JCP once had.
DeGeneres wrong spokeswoman for conservative consumers
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efore doing anything else, Johnson and Francis needed desperately to reconnect with those tenuous Penney’s customers who now have other options. That, however, is a cardinal requirement Johnson and Francis seem to have been ignorant of — or purposely oblivious to — as they went about devising the overblown new marketing strategy for J.C. Penney.
It was obvious (to us anyway) from the moment they anointed the prominent lesbian entertainer and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres as the new lead spokeswoman for the chain that this was going to be a marketing fiasco of massive proportions.
Don’t get us wrong. We have nothing against DeGeneres. She’s a nice woman and a good comedian. But she’s at a vastly different place in her stance on a lot of things, including same-sex marriage issues, than are the vast number of Americans who frequent JCP in small-town America.
Perhaps Johnson and Francis thought that just making DeGeneres a symbol of this new JCP would immediately make everyone buy into the strategy. But we suspect, if anything, that move has soured many on the department store for making such a radical marketing decision (at least in the minds of many hardcore Penney’s customers) so quickly and so unilaterally.
Catalogue’s lesbian couple also ill-conceived
If the DeGeneres blunder wasn’t bad enough, Penney’s then proceeded to run an image of a real-life lesbian couple and their children in its just-released May catalogue. Did the two Penney’s honchos even stop for a second to consider whether this might be too much too soon for Penney’s core audience?
Of course, a large number of business journalists who also appear to have no genuine understanding of the Penney’s customer base have fully bought into the transparently bogus spin put out by the company in the wake of the poor first quarter financial results.
Namely, that people just don’t yet understand the new marketing and pricing strategy at JCP.
Customer core not ready for Penney’s new image
Come on! Does anyone truly believe the public is that stupid? People got that much of it, we’re certain. It’s just that no one in the core Penney’s customer base was ready or willing to embrace and support this new image of Penney’s that Johnson and Francis conjured up almost overnight.
If they’re smart, and we’re not so sure that is the case, Johnson and Francis will back off of the DeGeneres spokesperson push, and maybe wait a while before going further with the same-sex couple marketing gambit in the catalogue.
We know President Barack Obama has already done his evolving on this matter. But if Johnson and Francis really know as much about marketing as they seem to think they do, they will slow down and find a less polarizing way of evolving Penney’s too.
Contact Lewis Lazare at LewisL3@aol.com
