Is JC Penney’s Makeover the Future of Retailing? Essay

Is JC Penneys Makeover the Future of sell? Kim Girard, Harvard Business Week, March 2012 The over a century honest-to-god retail merchant JC Penney (JCP) has been losing business and customers for a long time. Though it once had a undischarged reputation for mensurate and loyal customers the competition of high volume, low value salt aways such as Wal-Mart or the higher end stores such as Macys have completely over taken it and threatens to force them emerge of the market. What can be through with(p) to revive the 110 year old retailer, who is the right person for that caper and how forget they do it?These questions were addressed in this article. In the article Is JC Penneys Makeover the Future of Retailing, the author (K. Girard) focuses on Ron Johnson, the newly CEO of J.C. Penney and his innovations and plans to transform the store. Mr. Johnson comes to JC Penney with an impressive record of success transforming businesses and their retail outline. He is credited with the transformation of the Target arrange and for leading apples retail effort with such innovations as the Genius bar.The occupation faced at JCP is a huge one, the company has been experiencing lagging gross sales and financial losses of $87 million in the final withdraw of last year and a 4.9% overall loss of revenue for the year. Mr. Johnson took the point of the company in November of 2011. His main task in to reinvent the chain and focus on an all new client base that admits everyone as his target market. Of the innovations that he instituted immediately, he foc utilise on pricing and making them what he termed as fair and square.To do this, he introductory eliminated sales (he called them insulting to the customer), he in like manner eliminated coupons a move a competitor had attempted unsuccessfully about 5 years earlier. some other innovation in pricing was to end all prices in 00 instead of 99 and take away the suggested retail price tag. All of these changes we re done to change the perception of the customer, from waiting until an item goes on sale to believe they are paying a fair price all the time.Mr. Johnson also has a vision of overhauling the entire shopping experience by adding new brand shops inside the store so that the customer can intimately find the item they are looking for in what is called a principal(prenominal) Street approach. The plan is to reinvent the displays (letting the designer decide how their product is displayed deep down the store) and have new brands that speak to different clients. Some of the new brands include Martha Stewart and a budget friendly teen line called Nanette Lepore. Johnson has also changed the store logoand named a new contemporary spokeswoman (Ellen Degeneres) in an effort to fashion a buzz.There are also plans to create a townspeople square inside each store that could potentially be used to provide customers with complimentary services. The transition began in February and he states th at his plan will be fully implemented by 2015. In the article, Rajiv Lal, the Stanley Roth, Sr. professor of Retailing at Harvard Business School comments on the probability of Johnsons new idea succeeding. He calls this a very tough task and says that it will not be easy notwithstanding that the marketing strategy could work. He agrees with Johnsons 3 to 4 year timeline for implementation and feels that should be enough time to decide if the plan is working.After reading this article, I took a completely random poll of 5 women in my military position ages 26 mid 50s, who all said they had shopped at JCP within the past 6 months. Of the 5 only 1 said she did not like the changes but she also stated that she went to the store for certain brands and eccentric person of items that she could no longer find on her last trip but that she would give the store another try based on the picture of the other 4 women. This article is a perfect example of the guinea pig of strategic appro ach to gaining consumers that this course talks about. It contained examples of concepts like market strategies and targeting contingent customers.Girard, Kim, (2012, 05 March) Is JC Penneys Makeover the Future of Retailing, Harvard Business Week Retrieved from http//hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6944.html