Another friend of mine then suggested that the campaign was truly oriented at Wall Street to make the analysts think more positively about JCPenney. That theory has a lot of merit, and early on in my career, I was part of the Dow lets you do great things campaign that seemed like a recruitment campaign but was really designed to get analysts to forget that Dow made napalm. It doesnt work. Analysts are pretty smart, and they only care about the numbers. So, no.
Bottom Line
There was no apology needed, for one. No one felt slighted, insulted or harmed.
From a business-owner perspective, the whole apology noise and expense should have also been avoided. The key message in that spot was irrelevant to the target consumer, and the spot was really one cliché after another.
The JCPenney shopper is very focused on price and valuevalue being the perceived quality of the products carried at JCP compared with the price, of course.
The entire spot vanished into the background.
Again, from a business-owner perspective, a more effective relaunch campaign would have been Coupons are back and a Black Friday special for which, for example, all shoppers receive a 50 percent discount on everything in the store from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., or something like that. That would accomplish three objectives:
Get shoppers to revisit the store
Communicate, in a definitive manner, that coupons and special prices are back
Create a lot of positive buzz and social media conversations
But while hindsight is 20/20, forwardsight is 20/20 also. Well have to wait and see the results of the newly breaking discount, discount, discount campaign that JCP just launched. I really wish them the best.
Other articles by Marcelo:
In Marketing There are no Pros in Reaction
Guerrilla Marketing, Promotion and Social Media
Three Essential Marketing Campaign Components
Create A Unified Strategic, Media and Creative Plan
Engage Customers With An Aligned Media Strategy
How to Use Product Targeting to Determine the Right Channel Mix
Thinking Physics to Increase Your ROI (part 1)
Using Consumer Clusters To Ramp Up ROI
Marcelo Salups 30-plus-year career in advertising covers a wide range of everything. A wide range of roleshe began his career on the creative side, won two Addies, changed to media, included strategic planning and consumer insight and has been an agency owner several times. A wide range of venues: Spain, Latin America, international and the U.S. A wide range of clients that range from automotive to banking to electronics to fast food to soft drinks and much more. But can be summed up in four words Only Performance is Real. His website can be found at www.marcelosalup.com.
