On Second Thought - JCPenney Brings Back Sales

Attention shoppers, a JCPenney sale will be coming to a store near you soon! 

That's right, nearly one year after announcing it was phasing out its traditional sales promotion strategy, JCPenney has done an about-face and will now significantly increase its pricing discounting strategy.  This step is aimed at increasing traffic by making the chain appear more price competitive to its peer set.

By killing traditional promotions, JCP severely damaged its value perception.  In an effort to further battle negative consumer value perceptions, JCP will also introducing price tags that include also show what competitors are charging for the same merchandise.  The big question is it too little, too late given JCP same store sales declined over 25% in 2012?

JCP's major mistake was thinking they could retrain consumer behavior - that is train consumers to move from shopping a high/low strategy to an everyday low price mindset - consumers love a value treasure hunt. Needless to say this would be an extremely difficult task for even the strongest brand to take on (e.g., Apple), but it proved to be an impossible for a merely average brand with limited equity and loyalty.  Sorry CEO Ron Johnson, you cannot turn a JCP into Apple overnight.

The sad thing is that much of Ron Johnson's transformation turnaround plan is right on - building a portfolio of exclusive brands, dramatically revolutionizing the JCP shopping experience and re-staging the brand image.  If he had only been more patient and executed these strategic elements prior to changing the promotion strategy as opposed to trying to move simultaneously, he may have successfully increased consumer traction, loyalty and advocacy.  This would have then given him more permission to then cut back the level of promotion.