jcpenney marketing mistake Archives

by Gail Oliver, Marketing Consultant

When I was working for a software company, way back when, we hired a new CEO. The new CEO decided he wanted to make his mark on the company so he came to me, the Marketing Director, and said his first order of business was that he wanted to change the company logo. The company had a zillion other problems, but somehow he felt that changing the logo would make a huge difference. I convinced him it wouldn’t, because it was just change for the sake of change.

marketing mistakes

Change Only What is Not Working

This is how you know the difference between a true marketing professional and someone who really doesn’t know what they are doing. Changing a logo is bad for so many reasons not to mention the expense involved in discarding every document that has it on it and replacing it all with the new logo, but I won’t go into all that. My point is, you want to change ONLY what is NOT working. Just because you are not having the success you would like, does not mean everything you are doing is wrong.

If It is Not Broken, Don’t Fix It

I had a client the other day and normally I advise on SEO, but she was actually turning up on the first page of Google. She was getting a lot of traffic, just not converting the traffic into sales. So I did not advise on anything that would affect her SEO, but instead advised her on other changes I felt she needed to make that were likely causing the lack of sales. My point again, only fix what is broken. Change for the sake of change is not marketing and you risk actually making things worse.

JC Penney’s Marketing Change Mistake

A good recent example is retailer, JCPenney. When new executives took over they changed the store’s pricing structure, moving away from their weekly coupons and time-limited discounts to instead just offering lower prices all the time. It turns out the coupons and special offers was the one thing customers liked and sales took a nose-dive even further. The executives just assumed that because the company wasn’t successful anymore that everything needed to be changed, but that was wrong. Just change the things customers don’t like, it’s that simple.

Hope you liked today’s post! Feel free to let me know in comments.

Thanks for reading,

Gail

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