June 20, 2012
Penney CEO Taking Over Chain’s Advertising
Two days ago when J.C. Penney announced that the company’s president, former Target exec Michael Francis, was leaving the department store chain it offered no explanation. Speculation swirled that Mr. Francis was being made the scapegoat for what some believe is a flawed strategy. Others supported the strategy, but said the advertising created under Mr. Francis failed to communicate Penney’s pricing advantage to consumers.
In an interview with Women’s Wear Daily, Mr. Francis’ now ex-boss Ron Johnson set the record straight: he’s taking over the chain’s advertising and merchandising because he thinks he can do a better job in communicating Penney’s pricing to consumers.
"I think the strategy is working well," he told WWD. "I’m quick to learn and quick to act, but we will not waver."
An Associated Press piece highlighted the type of advertising created under Mr. Francis. It included a spot where a dog continuously jumps through a hula hoop held by a young girl. Viewers hear a voice-over: "No more jumping through hoops. No coupon clipping. No door busting. Just great prices from the start."
Brian Sozzi, an NBG Productions analyst, offered this insight on Mr. Francis’ departure: "Since Ron Johnson was unlikely to fire himself due to early turnaround missteps, he appears to have decided to swing the axe over the head of the person he hand-picked as president."
![[Image: jumping through hoops]](data:image/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciIHZpZXdCb3g9IjAgMCAxIDEiIHdpZHRoPSIxIiBoZWlnaHQ9IjEiIGRhdGEtdT0iJTJGcHVibGljJTJGaW1hZ2VzJTJGZGlzY3Vzc2lvbnMlMkYxNjA5MyUyRnBlbm5leS1ob29wcy1zdGlsbC5qcGciIGRhdGEtdz0iMSIgZGF0YS1oPSIxIiBkYXRhLWJpcD0iIj48L3N2Zz4=)
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Discussion Questions
Discussion Questions: What is your reaction to Michael Francis’ abrupt departure from J.C. Penney? Is the company’s problem its pricing strategy or how it has communicated the strategy to consumers?
Poll
The best way to communicate low pricing to consumers is to actually have low prices. I haven’t been to a J.C. Penney store in 30 years and probably will never go. Why? When I went back in 1981 their prices were sky high. If J.C. Penney says they have low prices, I have no reason to believe them. However if my friends tell me they have low prices then I might give them a shot. Many of their locations are in shopping malls that are surrounded by high priced “mall” stores. They can say they have low prices all they want, but we have been trained over the years to think otherwise. And being surrounded by high-priced stores gives a confusing message to consumers.
It’s premature to write off the JCP pricing strategy only five months after its introduction. But it was an obvious tactical error to focus most of JCP’s national advertising on Target-style “image building” instead of pushing the “Fair & Square” pricing concept more clearly. Even the ads intended to explain the policy were too cute by half, with none of the “call to action” needed to drive traffic to the store.
Mr. Francis’s departure raises some deeper questions:
1. Is there a serious dysfunction inside the JCP team that has been masked by Ron Johnson’s upbeat presentations at investor meetings?
2. Can the company CEO successfully turn around JCP’s merchandising and marketing by himself, at the same time that he is focused on reinvention of the store experience?
3. For that matter, doesn’t JCP need a separate head of merchandising and head of marketing given the magnitude of the company’s challenges?
This looks like two classic marketing mistakes: First, focusing on re-branding the company image instead of “selling” the pricing policy. And, second, running those image ads before completing the task of reinventing the merchandise content and store experience.
Each new CEO brings a frame of reference (this works, this doesn’t) that is informed by their experiences. Typically, the more successful the experiences, the more confident the CEO that the frame of reference travels to all formats. Ron Johnson arrives with an astonishing success at Apple Stores. That success, however, was in something that didn’t exist before he and Steve Jobs created it.
JCP is over a century old. It has developed its own culture, not only with its customers, but with its organization; both groups ultimately critical to the success (or lack thereof) of any changes to the culture, particularly one as dramatic as pricing.
Changing a culture in a company as big and established as JCP is like turning an ocean liner. Try to turn it too quickly and there are casualties. Home Depot comes to mind.
He’s lucky to get out. IMHO, the advertising is some of the worst, creepiest ads I’ve ever seen for a department store, so I’d say it was a communication issue.
The elephant in the room here is that any way you cut it, if Penney is to transform as Johnson says he wants it to, they’re going to lose customers. It takes courage to wait the strategy out long enough for new and higher potential customers to come over to the brand. Unfortunately Wall Street doesn’t put much of a price on courage. It’s tough to be strategic in a 90 day window.
Francis was just a scapegoat — the sacrifice to keep shareholders happy for at least one more quarter.
Wow. Talk about doubling down.
I thought the EDLP strategy would work, and I still do, if JCP can move beyond the goofy ads (Remember the early days of Old Navy?) and emphasize value for the price. Also waiting to see the new store format….
A question all retailers ask is what happens if I drop my insert/circular program? The impact of this decision shouldn’t be underestimated, especially as it pertains to their core shopper base.
The problem is the strategy, not the execution. What is unique about the promise, however communicated? Penney risks becoming the next “big middle” retailer that fails to provide a positive point of difference that convinces customers to shop their stores.
Consider the analogy of Sears, where America used to shop. Unless Penney develops a strategy based on a sustainable and defensible point of differentiation, more heads will roll.
Michael Francis was the proverbial sacrificial lamb. Someone had to pay for the failure of the new pricing strategy and as the article pointed out, Mr. Johnson was not likely to fire himself.
Time will tell if the new pricing strategy will work, but certainly concentrating advertising on brand image during a turnaround rather than its new pricing strategy was tactical error.
This is akin to the General Manager firing the Coach of a sports team and taking over the job himself. It’s because the team is in trouble and it virtually never works out. In this case the JCP “team” consists of the the stores, products, prices, etc.
The fundamental issue here is the difficulty of trying to turn an old-line discount retailer into a new age, fashionable boutique. You can advertise to gain attention, but you must support the advertising with real changes in the customer experience.
In this case, it sounds like the advertising created more confusion than clarity and perhaps offered to solve a problem the shoppers did not have — JCP sales promotions. The execution of the advertising can certainly be improved, but it won’t make a difference if the strategy is wrong.
I don’t know Ron Johnson well enough to predict the outcome of the advertising. I hope he won’t try to take the Lee Iacocca approach in talking directly to consumers to explain the pricing strategy because I don’t think that approach will work for JCP. The battle that JCP has on its hands is that the pricing strategy isn’t resonating with the retailer’s consumers because it’s so “not” what JCP has always represented in its long past. The ads are slick but they are not very alluring and certainly not very compelling.
There have to be some major personality issues underlying this whole decision process. As I understand it, there was a $12,000,000 signing bonus. For the Board and Johnson to decide after only a few months that they had made a bad hire seems to indicate big problems.
Having said that, I don’t think the new strategy really fits with a product line like Penney’s. With a much more seasonal product line such as Penney’s, you need to drive sales. You need to get rid of the previous season’s merchandise to make room for the new. The concept of inventory management and shelf life is completely different than you would find in the Apple product cycle environment.
My reaction to Michael Francis leaving JCP — he was duped when joining JCP and then sacrificed, but he still has that $12 million signing bonus. So we say to Mike Francis, “Good bye, Mr. Chips.”
For many years JCP was a high-priced merchant. Then they adopted an endless everyday sales strategy and over the years cultivated a new communication paradigm that caused their customers to breathlessly ask, “What’s on sale today?”
EDLP, as a strategy is excellent providing you take time and maintain consistency in creating it. To change a daily-sales strategy to EDLP over night with a following of mesmerized “sales junkies” is worse than shooting yourself in the foot, which JCP did.
Brian Sozzi probably has it right. As is often the case, a CMO becomes the sacrificial lamb that enables the CEO to keep his job a little longer. JCP’s problems are probably more the result of their product (stores and merchandise) and image than their pricing strategy and advertising.
I said it before and I’ll say it again. Worst. Business Makeover. Ever.
This shows a serious division within JCP that this one scapegoat is only a harbinger of. This shows that Apple’s great success story was much more than Mr. Johnson. This shows that taking a brand too far, too fast without clear strategy for what could happen leaves it much weaker.
With today’s quote in NRF SmartBrief, “The drop in sales associated with J.C. Penney’s new everyday low pricing strategy doesn’t mean the retailer needs to change course — it just needs to do a better job of getting the message across in its marketing efforts, said CEO Ron Johnson.”
Personally, I don’t think Mr. Johnson can survive much longer saying customers just don’t “get it.” The silos at JCP don’t get it.
I’m with Cathy. My thinking was that the wow would be in the ‘Town Square’ concept. I’d like to see that new format with a great ad campaign that will intrigue shoppers to take a look.
I would assume that Mr. Francis hired the agency that did the TV spots. Reason why is that they were Target’s TV creative shop. Reason why the campaign failed to meet expectations by even coming close to prior year performance is that the spots looked like Target spots. As CMO, your responsibility is to ensure that communications do connect rationally and emotionally with your customer base. It is a failure in communications effectiveness of the grandest scale. Sorry, but Mr. Francis isn’t a lamb sacrificed — he got booted because the decisions were just plain bad ones and the heat got too much for him and likely others on the team will follow.
Now, how about the new positioning of value, low/no reliance on couponing and the new in-store merchandising/pricing approach? Do consumers get it? No, that is plainly and painfully clear in the numbers reported to date to the Wall Street. So what happens next? My guess if we believe what Mr. Johnson has to say is a new round of communications that is not so “cute” and colorful, but rather direct and idiot proof. By that I mean as straightforward as Mr. Johnson himself talking to the camera to explain to his still loyal customers (me included) as to what the new JCP is all about, that they made a mistake up to this point in what they have communicated and to PLEASE shop us again as we do have great value — price/product/selection.
Lastly, fix the rewards program. Sorry, it is awful. There is zero motivation to participate, it’s a bad design too heavily weighted on credit and needs a complete re-stage — registering your credit cards and getting a $10 reward each month is not enough to cause a loyalist to spend more, visit more often and have more in their basket. To date, I was offered the chance to win a watch as a loyal rewards member — really, this is the best they can do?
Everyone here has harped on what didn’t work, so let’s look at what did: <
At the time — only a year ago — Mr. Johnson was hailed as a spectacularly good choice, with credentials from not just one but two leading retailers; but in retrospect, he may have been a spectacularly bad choice, with both of the precedents really being one-and-the-same: trendy companies with their own cult followings. Suffice it to say, that wasn’t JCP, however much they may have wanted to be — and wishing it to happen. Putting the dog before the hoop, as it were, doesn’t make it happen.
Poor Michael Lamb, he is the sacrificial goat. Lucky Michael Lamb, he is no longer there. Penney’s has a long road ahead; and probably one to two more CEOs until it returns to wherever it will be. They keep stepping on their toes no matter who is in charge. Anyone surprised about this chain of events? The ad program was/is horrible.
First Walgreen and now Penney’s. Is the chief marketing officer role expendable as retail organizations get flatter?
The only store-level evidence of a transformation-in-progress at J.C. Penney is a colored square hanging from the ceiling, a new logo on the door and price signage tweaks. Physical retail is a visual experience. Penney should have rolled out the brand boutiques THEN made the pricing strategy changes. A simple, but deadly, sequencing error.
Things must be going pretty well at JCP if the CEO has time on a day-to-day basis to run advertising and merchandising!
The announced removal and repositioning of responsibilities at this level of management will not help the cash flow issues J.C. Penney has, to any extent. The market will report soon if the sales and market share setbacks are caused by the company’s message or the removed messenger.
Ron Johnson was the worst selection a Board of Directors made when they appointed him as the CEO of the J.C. Penney Co. With 1100 stores located in as many trade areas, with many different demographics and as many different psychographics, it is too big of a challenge for anyone with his background. It is not an Apple store that has a narrow assortment of merchandise, that has above average demand and has an extremely high average unit retail priced inventory that results in high sales per square foot. You can not use this as a basis for turning the company around.
His casual approach to the business as demonstrated by his personal presentations also reduces his credibility. Would you want to buy any merchandise from him if you were face to face with him in a store dressed the way he dresses? Is he the model you would pick of a well dressed merchant?
Had he utilized the fundamental strategical planning processes he would have come to the conclusion that the dramatic change we are witnessing would have been pure folly. How much consumer input was used in the development of the strategy he is trying to implement, as just one example?
He and the Board did not do the very fundamental step of analyzing why the company reached the performance levels it had before deciding on how to fix it. Charges of poor management should make them targets for legal charges of defamation of character by those they have identified as bad managers. This was just a simple assumption on their part.
How can you support his logic when it ends up eliminating the dividend? How do you serve the consumer when you walk into a J.C. Penney store and can not find the the garment you want to buy in the size and color you have been able to purchase before?
The list could go on. This will be a future case study in any Business School when the end is reached.
The problem is not just in the marketing. He has more unsuccessful planned moves to make that will become merchandising and personnel issues.
Simply said, he is not big enough to handle the job! That is where the change should be made. The Board has a chance to redeem itself if they make the right decision in this case and bring someone in that knows what they are doing.
Very Surprising … thought ads did too closely mimic Target and those of us who ‘recognized’ Michael’s work, while missing his genius in the fourth quarter at Target, often commented that the stores and culture would be far behind in portraying what was being touted. Too bad. Michael is brilliant and should have achieved the position he desired without having to leave.
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The best way to communicate low pricing to consumers is to actually have low prices. I haven’t been to a J.C. Penney store in 30 years and probably will never go. Why? When I went back in 1981 their prices were sky high. If J.C. Penney says they have low prices, I have no reason to believe them. However if my friends tell me they have low prices then I might give them a shot. Many of their locations are in shopping malls that are surrounded by high priced “mall” stores. They can say they have low prices all they want, but we have been trained over the years to think otherwise. And being surrounded by high-priced stores gives a confusing message to consumers.
It’s premature to write off the JCP pricing strategy only five months after its introduction. But it was an obvious tactical error to focus most of JCP’s national advertising on Target-style “image building” instead of pushing the “Fair & Square” pricing concept more clearly. Even the ads intended to explain the policy were too cute by half, with none of the “call to action” needed to drive traffic to the store.
Mr. Francis’s departure raises some deeper questions:
1. Is there a serious dysfunction inside the JCP team that has been masked by Ron Johnson’s upbeat presentations at investor meetings?
2. Can the company CEO successfully turn around JCP’s merchandising and marketing by himself, at the same time that he is focused on reinvention of the store experience?
3. For that matter, doesn’t JCP need a separate head of merchandising and head of marketing given the magnitude of the company’s challenges?
This looks like two classic marketing mistakes: First, focusing on re-branding the company image instead of “selling” the pricing policy. And, second, running those image ads before completing the task of reinventing the merchandise content and store experience.
Each new CEO brings a frame of reference (this works, this doesn’t) that is informed by their experiences. Typically, the more successful the experiences, the more confident the CEO that the frame of reference travels to all formats. Ron Johnson arrives with an astonishing success at Apple Stores. That success, however, was in something that didn’t exist before he and Steve Jobs created it.
JCP is over a century old. It has developed its own culture, not only with its customers, but with its organization; both groups ultimately critical to the success (or lack thereof) of any changes to the culture, particularly one as dramatic as pricing.
Changing a culture in a company as big and established as JCP is like turning an ocean liner. Try to turn it too quickly and there are casualties. Home Depot comes to mind.
He’s lucky to get out. IMHO, the advertising is some of the worst, creepiest ads I’ve ever seen for a department store, so I’d say it was a communication issue.
The elephant in the room here is that any way you cut it, if Penney is to transform as Johnson says he wants it to, they’re going to lose customers. It takes courage to wait the strategy out long enough for new and higher potential customers to come over to the brand. Unfortunately Wall Street doesn’t put much of a price on courage. It’s tough to be strategic in a 90 day window.
Francis was just a scapegoat — the sacrifice to keep shareholders happy for at least one more quarter.
Wow. Talk about doubling down.
I thought the EDLP strategy would work, and I still do, if JCP can move beyond the goofy ads (Remember the early days of Old Navy?) and emphasize value for the price. Also waiting to see the new store format….
A question all retailers ask is what happens if I drop my insert/circular program? The impact of this decision shouldn’t be underestimated, especially as it pertains to their core shopper base.
The problem is the strategy, not the execution. What is unique about the promise, however communicated? Penney risks becoming the next “big middle” retailer that fails to provide a positive point of difference that convinces customers to shop their stores.
Consider the analogy of Sears, where America used to shop. Unless Penney develops a strategy based on a sustainable and defensible point of differentiation, more heads will roll.
Michael Francis was the proverbial sacrificial lamb. Someone had to pay for the failure of the new pricing strategy and as the article pointed out, Mr. Johnson was not likely to fire himself.
Time will tell if the new pricing strategy will work, but certainly concentrating advertising on brand image during a turnaround rather than its new pricing strategy was tactical error.
This is akin to the General Manager firing the Coach of a sports team and taking over the job himself. It’s because the team is in trouble and it virtually never works out. In this case the JCP “team” consists of the the stores, products, prices, etc.
The fundamental issue here is the difficulty of trying to turn an old-line discount retailer into a new age, fashionable boutique. You can advertise to gain attention, but you must support the advertising with real changes in the customer experience.
In this case, it sounds like the advertising created more confusion than clarity and perhaps offered to solve a problem the shoppers did not have — JCP sales promotions. The execution of the advertising can certainly be improved, but it won’t make a difference if the strategy is wrong.
I don’t know Ron Johnson well enough to predict the outcome of the advertising. I hope he won’t try to take the Lee Iacocca approach in talking directly to consumers to explain the pricing strategy because I don’t think that approach will work for JCP. The battle that JCP has on its hands is that the pricing strategy isn’t resonating with the retailer’s consumers because it’s so “not” what JCP has always represented in its long past. The ads are slick but they are not very alluring and certainly not very compelling.
There have to be some major personality issues underlying this whole decision process. As I understand it, there was a $12,000,000 signing bonus. For the Board and Johnson to decide after only a few months that they had made a bad hire seems to indicate big problems.
Having said that, I don’t think the new strategy really fits with a product line like Penney’s. With a much more seasonal product line such as Penney’s, you need to drive sales. You need to get rid of the previous season’s merchandise to make room for the new. The concept of inventory management and shelf life is completely different than you would find in the Apple product cycle environment.
My reaction to Michael Francis leaving JCP — he was duped when joining JCP and then sacrificed, but he still has that $12 million signing bonus. So we say to Mike Francis, “Good bye, Mr. Chips.”
For many years JCP was a high-priced merchant. Then they adopted an endless everyday sales strategy and over the years cultivated a new communication paradigm that caused their customers to breathlessly ask, “What’s on sale today?”
EDLP, as a strategy is excellent providing you take time and maintain consistency in creating it. To change a daily-sales strategy to EDLP over night with a following of mesmerized “sales junkies” is worse than shooting yourself in the foot, which JCP did.
Brian Sozzi probably has it right. As is often the case, a CMO becomes the sacrificial lamb that enables the CEO to keep his job a little longer. JCP’s problems are probably more the result of their product (stores and merchandise) and image than their pricing strategy and advertising.
I said it before and I’ll say it again. Worst. Business Makeover. Ever.
This shows a serious division within JCP that this one scapegoat is only a harbinger of. This shows that Apple’s great success story was much more than Mr. Johnson. This shows that taking a brand too far, too fast without clear strategy for what could happen leaves it much weaker.
With today’s quote in NRF SmartBrief, “The drop in sales associated with J.C. Penney’s new everyday low pricing strategy doesn’t mean the retailer needs to change course — it just needs to do a better job of getting the message across in its marketing efforts, said CEO Ron Johnson.”
Personally, I don’t think Mr. Johnson can survive much longer saying customers just don’t “get it.” The silos at JCP don’t get it.
I’m with Cathy. My thinking was that the wow would be in the ‘Town Square’ concept. I’d like to see that new format with a great ad campaign that will intrigue shoppers to take a look.
I would assume that Mr. Francis hired the agency that did the TV spots. Reason why is that they were Target’s TV creative shop. Reason why the campaign failed to meet expectations by even coming close to prior year performance is that the spots looked like Target spots. As CMO, your responsibility is to ensure that communications do connect rationally and emotionally with your customer base. It is a failure in communications effectiveness of the grandest scale. Sorry, but Mr. Francis isn’t a lamb sacrificed — he got booted because the decisions were just plain bad ones and the heat got too much for him and likely others on the team will follow.
Now, how about the new positioning of value, low/no reliance on couponing and the new in-store merchandising/pricing approach? Do consumers get it? No, that is plainly and painfully clear in the numbers reported to date to the Wall Street. So what happens next? My guess if we believe what Mr. Johnson has to say is a new round of communications that is not so “cute” and colorful, but rather direct and idiot proof. By that I mean as straightforward as Mr. Johnson himself talking to the camera to explain to his still loyal customers (me included) as to what the new JCP is all about, that they made a mistake up to this point in what they have communicated and to PLEASE shop us again as we do have great value — price/product/selection.
Lastly, fix the rewards program. Sorry, it is awful. There is zero motivation to participate, it’s a bad design too heavily weighted on credit and needs a complete re-stage — registering your credit cards and getting a $10 reward each month is not enough to cause a loyalist to spend more, visit more often and have more in their basket. To date, I was offered the chance to win a watch as a loyal rewards member — really, this is the best they can do?
Everyone here has harped on what didn’t work, so let’s look at what did: <>
At the time — only a year ago — Mr. Johnson was hailed as a spectacularly good choice, with credentials from not just one but two leading retailers; but in retrospect, he may have been a spectacularly bad choice, with both of the precedents really being one-and-the-same: trendy companies with their own cult followings. Suffice it to say, that wasn’t JCP, however much they may have wanted to be — and wishing it to happen. Putting the dog before the hoop, as it were, doesn’t make it happen.
Poor Michael Lamb, he is the sacrificial goat. Lucky Michael Lamb, he is no longer there. Penney’s has a long road ahead; and probably one to two more CEOs until it returns to wherever it will be. They keep stepping on their toes no matter who is in charge. Anyone surprised about this chain of events? The ad program was/is horrible.
First Walgreen and now Penney’s. Is the chief marketing officer role expendable as retail organizations get flatter?
The only store-level evidence of a transformation-in-progress at J.C. Penney is a colored square hanging from the ceiling, a new logo on the door and price signage tweaks. Physical retail is a visual experience. Penney should have rolled out the brand boutiques THEN made the pricing strategy changes. A simple, but deadly, sequencing error.
Things must be going pretty well at JCP if the CEO has time on a day-to-day basis to run advertising and merchandising!
The announced removal and repositioning of responsibilities at this level of management will not help the cash flow issues J.C. Penney has, to any extent. The market will report soon if the sales and market share setbacks are caused by the company’s message or the removed messenger.
Ron Johnson was the worst selection a Board of Directors made when they appointed him as the CEO of the J.C. Penney Co. With 1100 stores located in as many trade areas, with many different demographics and as many different psychographics, it is too big of a challenge for anyone with his background. It is not an Apple store that has a narrow assortment of merchandise, that has above average demand and has an extremely high average unit retail priced inventory that results in high sales per square foot. You can not use this as a basis for turning the company around.
His casual approach to the business as demonstrated by his personal presentations also reduces his credibility. Would you want to buy any merchandise from him if you were face to face with him in a store dressed the way he dresses? Is he the model you would pick of a well dressed merchant?
Had he utilized the fundamental strategical planning processes he would have come to the conclusion that the dramatic change we are witnessing would have been pure folly. How much consumer input was used in the development of the strategy he is trying to implement, as just one example?
He and the Board did not do the very fundamental step of analyzing why the company reached the performance levels it had before deciding on how to fix it. Charges of poor management should make them targets for legal charges of defamation of character by those they have identified as bad managers. This was just a simple assumption on their part.
How can you support his logic when it ends up eliminating the dividend? How do you serve the consumer when you walk into a J.C. Penney store and can not find the the garment you want to buy in the size and color you have been able to purchase before?
The list could go on. This will be a future case study in any Business School when the end is reached.
The problem is not just in the marketing. He has more unsuccessful planned moves to make that will become merchandising and personnel issues.
Simply said, he is not big enough to handle the job! That is where the change should be made. The Board has a chance to redeem itself if they make the right decision in this case and bring someone in that knows what they are doing.
Very Surprising … thought ads did too closely mimic Target and those of us who ‘recognized’ Michael’s work, while missing his genius in the fourth quarter at Target, often commented that the stores and culture would be far behind in portraying what was being touted. Too bad. Michael is brilliant and should have achieved the position he desired without having to leave.